Woo squinted at me, assuming he had misunderstood. It took a few more conversations for Woo to realize that I wanted to live on the North Side, in a neighborhood like his, where the street signs were green, not blue like in the suburb of Wauwatosa. Once he did, Woo invited me to live with him in a rooming house on First and Locust. The rent was $400, utilities included. I accepted and paid the landlords: Sherrena and Quentin.
The rooming house was on the second floor of a duplex, white with green trim. Woo and I shared a living room, bathroom, and kitchen, whose cupboards could be padlocked to keep your roommates from eating your food. My room came with a window, draped with a heavy blanket, and a full-size bed, under which I found an empty can of Classic Ice, Narcotics Anonymous pamphlets, toenail clippers, and a typewriter in a hard plastic case. Behind the rooming house was an alley, tagged in rushed Gangster Disciples graffiti, and a small weedy backyard with a cherry tree that, come May, unveiled soft blossoms that looked like a spray of confetti. I lived in the rooming house until June 2009.
Woo had told Sherrena that I was “working on a book about landlords and tenants.” Sherrena agreed to an interview, at the end of which I made my pitch.
“Sherrena, I would love to be kind of like your apprentice,” I said, explaining that my goal was to “walk in [her] shoes as closely as possible.”
Sherrena was all-in. “I’m committed to this,” she said. “You have your person.” She was in love with her work and proud of it too. She wanted people to know “what landlords had to go through,” to share her world with a wider public that rarely stopped to consider it.
I began shadowing Sherrena and Quentin as they bought property, screened tenants, unclogged sewer pipes, and delivered eviction notices, just as I had done with Tobin and Lenny. I met Arleen, Lamar, and the Hinkston clan through Sherrena. Later, I met Crystal through Arleen, and Vanetta through Crystal. Doreen was lonely and happy to have someone to sit and talk with. Lamar warmed to me after I helped him paint Patrice’s old unit; I later sealed the deal by being decent at spades, which I used to play regularly during my days working as a firefighter in college.
Arleen was a much tougher case. At first, she kept me at a distance and would remain silent when I explained my project to her. When I tried to fill the silence, she would cut me off, saying, “You don’t need to keep talking.” Her biggest worry was that I worked for Child Protective Services. “I feel uncomfortable talking with you,” Arleen told me during one of our early conversations, “not because of how you are, but just because of all this stuff that’s happened to me. I’ve been in the [child welfare] system so long that I just don’t trust people anymore.” I responded by saying that I understood, giving her some of my published work—which I had learned to keep in my car for moments like this—and, later, taking it very slowly, limiting myself to only a handful of questions per meeting.
Other people thought I was a police officer or, in the trailer park, a spy for the alderman. Still others thought I was a drug addict or a john. (For a time, Woo and I lived with sex workers in the rooming house.) Sherrena introduced me as her assistant. To Tobin, I was nobody.
Some tenants suspected I was in cahoots with their landlord, whom they referred to as “your friend.” On several occasions, they tried to get me to admit to their landlord’s wrongdoing, like the time Lamar pressured me to admit Sherrena was “a slumlord.” When I refused, Lamar accused me of being her snoop. Some landlords refused to discuss the details of a tenant’s case or, in the opposite direction, asked me to weigh in on a specific case. My policy was to intervene as little as possible (although, as I describe below, I abandoned that policy on two occasions), but landlords often forced my hand. To my knowledge, the only time I had any real effect on a case was the time Sherrena asked me repeatedly if she should call the sheriff on Arleen. I finally said no, and she didn’t. Sherrena later told me, “Had you not been involved, honestly, truly, I would have done the writ and been waiting on the sheriff….If you didn’t intervene, she would have been dead meat.” So instead of Eagle Moving taking her things, Arleen got to store them in Public Storage until they were trashed for missed payments.
After a while, both tenants and landlords began to accept me and get on with their lives. They had more important things to worry about. I sat beside tenants at eviction court, helped them move, followed them into shelters and abandoned houses, watched their children, fought with them, and slept at their houses. I attended church with them, as well as counseling sessions, AA meetings, funerals, and births. I followed one family to Texas. I visited Iowa with Scott. As I spent more time with people, something like trust emerged, even if it remained a fragile, heavily qualified trust.2 Years after meeting, Arleen would still ask me, during a quiet moment, if I worked for Child Protective Services.
—
If moving to the North Side initially confused Woo, it deeply disturbed my neighbors in the trailer park. When I told Larraine, she nearly cried, “No, Matt. You don’t know how dangerous it is.” Beaker chimed in: “They don’t cotton to white folks over there.”
But the truth is that white people are afforded special privileges in the ghetto. For one, my interactions with the police were nonintrusive and quick, even after a pair of separate shootings happened outside my front door. Once, I watched a police officer pull his patrol car up to Ger-Ger, Arleen’s eldest son, and say, “Man, you’re fucked up!” (Ger-Ger had a learning disability that caused him to move and talk slowly.) When I came out of the apartment for a closer look, the officer looked at me and drove away. He might have acted differently had I not been a white man with a notepad.
There were other moments like this. Take Crystal and Vanetta’s exchange with the discriminating landlord on Fifteenth Street. When that went down, I was outside in the car, watching Vanetta’s kids. The women told me about it when they returned, immediately afterward. I copied down the landlord’s number from the rent sign and called him up the next day. Meeting him in the same unit Vanetta and Crystal had been shown, I told him I took home about $1,400 a month (Vanetta and Crystal’s combined income), that I had three kids (like Vanetta), and that I’d really like a unit with a bathtub. The landlord told me that he had another unit available. He even drove me to it in his Saab. I reported him to the Fair Housing Council. They took down my report and never called me back.
Inner-city residents took care to protect me and make sure I wasn’t taken advantage of, as when Lamar would snap at his boys—“Cut that shit out!”—when they asked me for a dollar. One day at the rooming house, C.C., one of my downstairs neighbors, asked to borrow a few dollars so she could buy trash bags. I obliged and went back to writing. But Keisha, Woo’s young niece who was living with us at the time, kept an eye on C.C. as she left and claimed to see her call her dope man. Oblivious to this, I soon headed out for the store. When Woo got home, Keisha told him about the exchange, and he called me, angry. “Matt, you don’t ever give her nothing!” he said. “They think because you not like us, because you not from around here, that they can just come at you like that….I’m about to go down there and tell them to give you your fucking money back.”
“Well, Woo, look—”
“Uh-uh, Matt.”
Woo hung up. I don’t know exactly what he said to C.C., but when I got home, she met me outside, wearing a wig, cut-off shorts, a revealing halter top, and strappy heels. C.C. handed me the money. I didn’t ask how she got it.
It felt terrible. “You’re too protective of me,” I told Woo when I got upstairs.