Not long after Larry walked out, Child Protective Services removed Ger-Ger, Boosie, and Arleen’s three other children from her care. “I just gave up responsibility,” Arleen remembered. “That really, really hurted me when he did that. I wish I was stronger.” In the years that followed, Arleen’s children grew up in and out of foster care. “But Boosie never wanted to come back home,” Arleen said. She remembered Boosie calling CPS when he was fifteen, telling a caseworker that the children had been left alone. “So they came to take my kids again.” She had Jafaris by then. He was two at the time, and Jori was ten. Both boys would later rejoin Arleen, but Boosie and Arleen’s other two children from Larry remained in the system. Arleen didn’t know why. She did know that their foster families had more money than she did. They could buy her children new clothes, feed them every night, and provide them with their own beds to sleep in. But unlike his younger brother and sister, Boosie didn’t stay in the system for long. When he was seventeen, he left his foster family, dropped out of high school, and started selling crack.
A dark stairwell opened into the bright apartment. The house was warm and smelled of eggs and sausage. Boosie was on the couch, skinny with a backwards cap. After noticing Arleen and the boys, he grabbed a pellet gun made to look like a .45 and charged toward Jafaris. Boosie stuck the gun in Jafaris’s back and tackled him onto a mattress in an adjoining bedroom, causing someone’s copy of Bastard Out of Carolina, folded down to keep a place, to flop on the floor. Jafaris wiggled and laughed but couldn’t escape.
“Man, have you ever seen a six-year-old more gangsta?” Boosie laughed, releasing Jafaris and handing him the gun.
Jafaris smiled and inspected the piece.
“A’ight little nigga, gimme back my gun.”
Arleen shook her head, and Boosie nodded back at his mother.
Arleen asked J.P. to call his landlord, and he did. The landlord said that the downstairs unit was available. Before leaving, Arleen made an appointment to see it the next day.
“Boosie bogus!” she vented to Jori when they got outside. “As skinny as he is! He either tweakin’ or they ain’t feeding him.” Her face was heavy with a mother’s concern. She shook it off. “I can’t worry about that now.”
“You gonna take it?” Jori asked, hopeful.
Arleen considered the lower unit. “I don’t know. There’s too much drama over here,” she said, thinking about cops and drugs.
Arleen pushed on, staying on the North Side. She passed the simple blue house where her mother had died and the apartments on Atkinson she called “Crackhead City.” She stopped by her old condemned house, on Nineteenth and Hampton, squat, quiet, and still half-painted. On the front door a sign was posted: THIS BUILDING IS ILLEGALLY OCCUPIED OR UNFIT FOR HUMAN HABITATION AND SHALL BE VACATED.
“God, I miss living at this house,” Arleen said. Jafaris volunteered to check the mail, and Arleen smiled at him. “We ain’t got no mail, boo.” What forced her to finally call the city was not the water problem. When it didn’t work they made do, fetching gallons from a nearby store. But when the landlord finally came over with his toolbox, he sawed holes all over the bathroom walls and did something to the pipes that caused water to leak in. When Arleen called to complain, she remembered him saying, “Well, I’ve got over fifty properties. If you can’t wait, move.” That’s when Arleen called the building inspector. “Stupid of me.”
—
Ned spent all day on the transmission, and Pam spent all day looking for housing. She called so many numbers that she lost track and phoned landlords who had already told her no. In the fuzz of the afternoon, she dialed the number of the West Allis landlord again. “We don’t want your kids, ma’am,” he said, annoyed.
Pam decided to try an apartment complex her friend told her was full of “crack and hookers,” figuring the landlord didn’t do background checks. But the landlord wanted $895 for a three-bedroom unit. Pam couldn’t believe it: “To live in this shithole?” It was then that she began looking on the Hispanic South Side. She sighed, “Well, I guess I don’t have a choice.”
After calling on thirty-eight apartments, Pam had only two appointments to show for it: one in Cudahy, a working-class white suburb whose western border ended at the airport, and another on the South Side. The Cudahy apartment was a two-bedroom place on Packard Avenue. The rent was $640 with heat. Early on in her housing search, Pam had fantasized about finding something for only $500, “in case me and Ned, I mean, who knows what’ll happen.” But that was close to impossible.9 Pam would rather have given a landlord everything she had than live on a block where most of her neighbors weren’t white.
Ned and Pam waited anxiously outside the Packard Avenue apartment. Ned told Pam to keep her mouth shut and let him do the talking. That was fine with Pam, who was due any day and just wanted to crawl into bed.
“Pray and pray and pray,” Pam whispered.
“There ain’t no need to pray because there ain’t no God up there anyway,” Ned said, spitting.
When the landlord arrived, Ned started jawing with him. “I’ve been in construction for damn near twenty years….You need work doing around here?” The apartment was clean and new, with a huge bedroom in which all the girls could fit. Things seemed to be going well until the landlord asked them to fill out an application. Ned offered cash, but the landlord insisted Ned fill out the form.
“Is it hard to get in?” Ned asked.
“We do a credit check and stuff,” the landlord said.
“Well, our credit ain’t the greatest.”
“That’s okay as long as you don’t have any con-victions or e-victions.”
The second appointment was on Thirty-Fifth and Becher, on a quiet street in a predominantly Hispanic neighborhood. The landlord was asking $630 for a three-bedroom unit.
“That’s okay,” Ned said, looking up and down the block. “I can live with the Mexicans. But not with the niggers. They’re pigs.” He grinned, remembering. “Eh, Pam, what’s a name you never want to call a black person? I’ll give you a hint, it starts with an n and ends with an r….Neighbor!”10
Ned cackled, and Pam forced a smile. She sometimes bristled at Ned, especially when he said things like this in front of Bliss and Sandra or told them that their curly black hair looked ugly. But it wasn’t like Pam felt differently, at least as far as neighborhoods were concerned. “I would rather live in a motel room than live in the ghetto,” she said. “At least at the trailer park everybody there was pretty much white. They were trashy white, but still.” There were no variations in the ghetto as far as she was concerned. It was one big “black village.”
The landlord arrived—a silver-haired man with a large belt buckle—and showed Pam and Ned in. The apartment was gorgeous with polished wood floors, new windows, fresh paint, and spacious bedrooms. Pam looked out the back window to see white children playing in a well-kept backyard. The landlord even offered to “throw in some appliances.”
Ned and Pam laughed at Belt Buckle’s jokes and started ingratiating themselves to him. “I see you need some concrete work done,” Ned said. “I do good work at reasonable prices.” Pam joined in, saying she’d be ready in a couple weeks if he was in the market for a cleaning lady.
When it was time to fill out the application, Ned took a different approach. “What’s this, credit references?” he asked.
“Just leave them blank,” the landlord responded.
“What if we don’t have a bank here. We just moved from Green Bay.”
“Just leave it blank, then.”
After waving goodbye, Pam turned to Ned. “Even if the area’s a shithole, at least it’s nice, a nice place. We’d be living in an upgrade of a ghetto.”
“Maybe I’ll get a concrete job outta it?” Ned wondered.
“Maybe I’ll get a cleaning job outta it?”
Ned lit a Marlboro Red.
“It really looks like something we could get into,” Pam added.
Ned felt the same way. He told Pam to stop copying numbers off rent signs. “Don’t worry about it, Pam. We’ve got a place.”