Sometimes Crystal couldn’t help herself, like the time she and Vanetta were eating lunch at McDonald’s, and a boy walked in. He was maybe nine or ten in dirty clothes and with unkempt hair. One side of his face was swollen. The boy didn’t approach the counter. Instead, he wandered slowly through the tables, looking for scraps.
Crystal and Vanetta noticed him. “What you got?” Crystal asked, riffling through her pockets. The women pooled what they had to buy the boy dinner. Staring up at the menu, Crystal wrapped her arm around the boy like she was his big sister. She made sure he was okay, handed him the food, and sent him away with a hug.
“Reminds me of when we was kids,” Vanetta said, shaken.
Crystal watched the boy dash across the street. “I wish I had me a house. I would take him in.”
On Burleigh Street, the wind-pushed rain fell sideways in sheets. In the yellow beam of the streetlight, it looked like an unending school of silvery fish darting through the light before disappearing into the surrounding pool of darkness. Crystal considered her phone. It was almost eleven o’clock at night. She dialed a number. Her cousin who owed her didn’t pick up. She dialed a number. Her foster-care mother said her house was full. She dialed a number. She dialed and dialed and dialed and dialed.
21.
BIGHEADED BOY
Sherrena had Lamar and Kamala’s torched building bulldozed. She used the insurance money to buy two new duplexes, doubling the units she had lost to the fire. When the Hinkstons looked out their back window, all they saw was a vacant lot. The only remaining visible reminder of that night was a makeshift memorial Kamala and her family set up: stuffed animals and photographs tied to a tree with a cotton sash cord. The most prominent photograph showed the baby in an Easter dress, her calm eyes large in her small face. For the animals, they had selected rabbits, bears, a goose, a raccoon, and a hippopotamus. Candles in glass vases and Coke cans circled the base of the tree.
Natasha was sorting through a garbage bag of baby clothes a friend had picked up at a church pantry. She moved her hands tenderly and smiled at each miniature item. The idea of becoming a mother was growing on her.
“I want my baby to have my looks,” Natasha said. “I don’t want my baby lookin’ like Malik. He got some big ol’ buck eyes.”
“You so mean!” Doreen said.
“He all black.”
Overhearing, Patrice came into the dining room, wearing her Cousins Subs uniform. “Your baby gonna come out lookin’ like a whole lotta folks,” she teased.
“No!” Natasha laughed.
Patrice sighed and changed the subject. “We got to do something about this toilet, fam.” The toilet was stopped up again. So was the kitchen sink, brimming with gray water lined with a rust-orange film. Periodically, someone would bucket it out. This made washing difficult, and dirty pots and plates began accumulating on the counter. So did more roaches and other bugs.
Doreen didn’t call Sherrena about the plumbing. She didn’t want a lecture and figured she wouldn’t help anyway, since they were still behind. She didn’t call a plumber either. Even if she could come up with the money, that would feel too much like helping Sherrena, and nobody was interested in doing that, especially after the courthouse letter Patrice had received a few days back. It said she owed $2,494.50—the result of her second and third causes hearing.1
“I live in that house for four months,” Patrice had said. “She said I owe her twenty-four hundred dollars!”
“That means you didn’t pay any rent at all,” Doreen said.
“Nah! Now you just making up stuff.” Patrice stared at the bill. She thought she owed more like $900.
“What are you gonna do?”
“I don’t know what I can do.”
The Hinkstons expected more of their landlord for the money they were paying her. Rent was their biggest expense by far, and they wanted a decent and functional home in return. They wanted things to be fixed when they broke. But if Sherrena wasn’t going to repair her own property, neither were they. The house failed the tenants, and the tenants failed the house.2
The worse the Hinkstons’ house got, the more everyone seemed to become withdrawn and lethargic, which only deepened the problem. Natasha started spending more time at Malik’s. Doreen stopped cooking, and the children ate cereal for dinner. Patrice slept more. The children’s grades dropped, and Mikey’s teacher called saying he might have to repeat, mainly because of so many missed homework assignments. Everyone had stopped cleaning up, and trash spread over the kitchen floor. Substandard housing was a blow to your psychological health: not only because things like dampness, mold, and overcrowding could bring about depression but also because of what living in awful conditions told you about yourself.
It was once said that the poor are “constantly exposed to evidence of their own irrelevance.”3 Especially for poor African American families—who live in neighborhoods with rates of violence and concentrated poverty so extreme that even the worst white neighborhoods bear little resemblance—living in degrading housing in dangerous neighborhoods sent a clear message about where the wider society thought they belonged.4 “Honestly, this place is a shack,” Doreen once said. Not long after that, Ruby came through the door and announced that “a man just got killed right in front of the store.” Growing up in a shack in the ghetto meant learning how to endure such an environment while also learning that some people never had to. People who were repulsed by their home, who felt they had no control over it, and yet had to give most of their income to it—they thought less of themselves.5
The older children found some reprieve from the apartment in the public library on Center Street. C.J., Ruby, and Mikey liked playing on the computer best. Ruby would begin her time there by checking in on “her house,” which she had gradually built up and improved through a free online game called Millsberry, a marketing tool created by General Mills. Her house was located on Bounty Drive in Golden Valley. It had clean, light-reflecting floors, a bed with sheets and pillowcases, and a desk for doing schoolwork. Doreen or Patrice could have walked to the library and searched for new housing on the Internet. But they never did. This was partially because paying Sherrena back meant they didn’t have enough money to move; partially because like most black renters they didn’t search for housing online; and partially because the family had sunk into a hazy depression.
Patrice could feel the house sucking their energy. “We just hit a mud hole with this house,” she said. “No one’s trying to get better. Makes me not want to get better. If you’re around people every day that doesn’t want to do anything, eventually you will feel like doing nothing.” Tennessee was sounding better to her by the day.
—
When it was time, Malik rushed from work to meet Natasha at the hospital: Wheaton Franciscan–St. Joseph Campus, on Chambers and Forty-Ninth Street. She looked ready and scared. She clutched the bed railing with one hand and Malik’s hand with the other. When Malik would try to stand up, Natasha would pull him back down. He would smile and rub her back. She focused on her breathing, just like they had practiced in birthing class. Doreen watched knowingly from the rocking chair, arms folded over her stomach.
The baby came at 11:10 p.m., weighing eight pounds, three ounces. He was round-faced with a full shock of hair, pinkish-brown skin, and a broad Hinkston nose.
As she lay sleeping the next morning, Natasha heard Patrice whisper “Hey, Momma” in her ear. She smiled before opening her eyes.
When the baby stirred, he was passed around, though Natasha had a hard time letting him go. All day long, she lifted him to her and kissed him softly on the nose and forehead. Patrice noticed Malik’s proud face and decided then and there to name the baby Malik Jr.
The next day, Natasha swaddled her tiny, cherished boy and took him back to the rat hole.
22.
IF THEY GIVE MOMMA THE PUNISHMENT