American Dream Read online

  Though I had spent years watching the welfare bill evolve, I realized why I found the subject so compelling as I listened, in the summer of 1996, to the final hours of Senate debate. The senators were talking about welfare the way people talk of it at dinner tables, in terms so ideological as to be virtually religious. They were talking of how their parents and grandparents had made it. (Or hadn’t. Or - couldn’t.) They were talking of how their communities would care for the poor. (Or didn’t. Or wouldn’t.) At times, it seemed that the very idea of America was on trial. We live in a country rich beyond measure, yet one with unconscionable ghettos. We live in a country where anyone can make it; yet generation after generation, some families don’t. To argue about welfare is to argue about why. I’ll be pleased if this story challenges, and informs, the assumptions on both sides as much as it has challenged my own. “Ideas are interesting—people are boring,” a welfare expert once told me. Ideas are interesting. But I proceeded on a broader faith, that what has occurred in the lives of the welfare poor is more interesting than either camp has assumed.

  The story focuses on three women in one extended family, inseparable at the start but launched on differing arcs. Perhaps no three - people can stand for 9 million. But with Angie’s gumption, Jewell’s reticence, and Opal’s manipulative charm, the threesome cover a great deal of ground. A catalog of their collective lives would include everything from crack house to 401(k), with results that roughly reflect the experiences of welfare families nationwide. Two grabbed a toehold on the bottom of the employment ladder. One wound up with a journey through the new welfare system more tragic than I would have guessed possible.

  Since welfare is a subject filled with biases, the reader may welcome a word about mine. At the time the president signed the law—the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996—I had been writing about inner-city life for more than a decade. Inevitably, I had opinions. I thought the harshness of the low-wage economy and the turmoil of poor people’s lives required a federal safety net, not one torn by arbitrary time limits and handed to the states. I also thought the most constructive thing to do as a reporter was to clean my mental slate. With the welfare system starting over, I tried to do the same. To my relief, the first years brought reassurance: more work, less welfare, falling poverty rates. No signs of children “sleeping on grates,” as Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan had famously warned. Surely the vibrant economy helped, and tougher tests awaited. Still, after years on the poverty beat, there was something truly exotic to report: good news.

  At the same time, I felt uneasy with the triumphal claims ringing through public life. The “greatest social policy change in this nation in sixty years,” is how Tommy Thompson put it, after leaving his job as governor of Wisconsin to become the secretary of Health and Human Services. The Wall Street Journal did him one better: “the greatest advance for America’s poor since the rise of capitalism.” The very phrase “welfare-to-work” brims with implication: rising incomes, inspired kids, more hopeful lives. But the successes I witnessed were never so clear. Paradoxically, the closer I got to the welfare story, the less central welfare appeared. “Did it work?” people would ask about the landmark law. “That’s your crazy stuff,” Angie said, insisting the law was no landmark to her. “We don’t be thinking ’bout that!”

  In assembling this account, I have relied on years of discussions with the main characters. With their permission, I have also examined a decade’s worth of welfare and earnings records and talked with others in their lives: relatives, boyfriends, caseworkers, bosses, and friends. Court records, tax returns, school transcripts, and letters have enhanced my understanding, and a trail of genealogical material extends the family history back six generations. In launching the project, I imagined, if only half-consciously, that it would follow a sleek narrative line of underdogs against the world. It is that story, but also a more complicated one—of adversity variously overcome, compounded, or merely endured. In that way, too, it embodies the story of welfare writ large.

  Some readers may wonder why I focused on an African American family when nationally blacks and whites each accounted for about 40 percent of the rolls. I first chose to focus on Milwaukee, the epicenter of the antiwelfare crusade, and, as it happened, nearly 70 percent of the city’s caseload was black. As the drive to end welfare began, the paradigmatic Milwaukee recipient was a black woman from Chicago whose mother or grandmother had started life in a Mississippi cotton field, a description that fits Angie, Opal, and Jewell. At the same time, there are advantages to seeing the rise and fall of welfare through African American eyes. Given their share of the national population, black families were more than six times as likely as whites to receive a welfare check. Among long-term recipients, the racial imbalance was even more pronounced: nearly seven of ten long-term recipients were African American. Considering our national history, that shouldn’t be a surprise; for more than three centuries blacks were barred by violence and law from the full benefits of American life.

  The story that follows is rooted in the racial past, a past much less distant than I first supposed. In understanding where it began, I got help from a regal woman named Hattie Mae Crenshaw. She is Jewell’s mother, grandmother to Angie’s kids, and an elder cousin whom Opal regards as an aunt. She was born beside a Mississippi bayou in 1937, in a shack without electricity or running water. By the time she reached late middle age, a job as a private nursing aide had carried her by Concorde to Paris. In between, she had lived much of the country’s welfare history. Barely sixty when I met her, Hattie Mae - wasn’t old. But she was old enough to remember chopping cotton to pay the plantation store. She settled into her story from a white-tiger love seat in Jewell’s living room. Family history bores Jewell; she left the room to do her nails. Hattie Mae smiled as she began: “I growed up on Senator Jim Eastland’s plantation in Doddsville, Mississippi. That’s when black peoples was just beginning to come out of slavery.” Patient with my puzzled looks, Hattie Mae talked on, pointing me - toward welfare’s forgotten prequel.

  TWO

  The Plantation: Mississippi, 1840-1960

  It may sound strange to hear Hattie Mae say that at her birth in 1937 black people were “just beginning to come out of slavery.” But her argument wasn’t much different from those most modern historians make. And it was no different from what an improbable visitor found in the same fields a few years before she was born. Hortense Powdermaker must have caused quite a stir when she pulled into Sunflower County in 1932, explaining she had come in the depths of the Great Depression to conduct a scientific study of Negro life. She was a thirty-one-year-old Jewish academic, educated in London and just back from Melanesia—not a familiar figure in the cotton patch. It took the state’s leading aristocrat, the poet and planter William Alexander Percy, to keep her from being run out of town. But soon she was traipsing through sharecropper shacks and sweating at church revivals, immersing herself in black life as no white Mississippian would dream. Though she struggled to get her study into print in 1939, After Freedom attained the status of a minor classic, praised by W. E. B. DuBois and reissued with each generation. The title is both chronological and ironic: it wasn’t so long after slavery, and there wasn’t much freedom. In a county where seven of ten residents were black, Powdermaker summarized white attitudes on the eve of Hattie Mae’s birth:

  Negroes are innately inferior to white people, mentally and morally. Their place is in manual work.

  Any attempt at any kind of social equality would result in some disaster so overwhelming that it is dangerous even to talk about it. . . .

  Because the Whites are so seriously outnumbered, special means must be taken to keep the Negro in his place. . . .

  There may be good “niggers,” and bad “niggers,” but a “nigger” is a “nigger” and cannot escape the taint.

  Powdermaker wrote as an optimist. While she didn’t foresee anything like the northern migration or the civil rights revolution,
two movements that would change the world of Hattie Mae, she did sense an impatience among younger blacks and presciently called it a force “capable of being mobilized.” At the same time, she was attuned to an aspect of sharecropper life that would prove cause for less optimism: the widespread social chaos, in particular the fluid family structure. Outside a tiny black elite, formal marriages were rare. Most sharecroppers lived in unsteady common-law arrangements, “easily entered and easily dissolved.” Nonmarital births prevailed: “Even if there is a man in the household, he is often not the child’s father.” Since women had broader access to jobs—they could work as field hands or domestics—black men were doubly marginalized. Domestic violence was epidemic (“It is something for a woman to boast about if her husband does not beat her”), and so were other forms of black-on-black violence, much of it ignored by the law. Among poor blacks, “it is more or less assumed that some member of any family will get into jail.” Put differently, Powdermaker was describing many of the conditions later associated with a welfare underclass: single mothers, peripatetic men, an undertow of crime and violence. But welfare—that is, Aid to Families with Dependent Children—could scarcely be blamed. It didn’t yet exist.

  Charting the rise of the northern ghettos, Nicholas Lemann became the first contemporary writer to stress the ties to sharecropper life. “Every aspect of the underclass culture in the ghettos is directly traceable to roots in the South,” he wrote in The Atlantic in 1986, “and not the South of slavery but . . . the nascent underclass of the sharecropper South.” In the exchanges that followed, critics noted the many positive aspects of sharecropper society: the safety-net functions of the extended family, the vibrancy of the church, the yearning for education on display in the one-room schoolhouse. All true: countless black sharecroppers moved north and prospered, including some of Hattie Mae’s kin. But the point as it pertains to welfare is simpler. Many of the problems blamed on “the liberal, welfare plantation” were flourishing decades before, on the not-so-liberal one.

  To picture Hattie Mae’s childhood, you have to picture the Mississippi Delta—endless, empty, mud-puddle flat, and stretching to the earth’s very edge. The Eastland property runs about three miles west from the Sunflower River and three north and south. In other words, it is vast. To cross it on foot, as Hattie Mae used to do, is to be reminded daily of one’s humble place in the scheme of things. The Eastlands lived on the eastern border, by the bridge to the wider world, in a house that spoke more of suburban comfort than antebellum grandeur. Across the river sat the crossroads “town” of Doddsville (1940 pop. 262), but with its own gin, shop, and store, the plantation was a town in itself. The commercial buildings clustered toward the front, near the Eastlands’ home, while several hundred tenants spread out behind in places marked by informal names like “Spark-man” and “Sandy Ridge.” Hattie Mae lived about two miles in, along a bayou behind Bob McLean Curve.

  Even in the early 1940s, the plantation had a nineteenth-century feel. There were mules in the fields. Tenants did without electricity or running water. Some shacks barely had walls. “You could set on the inside and look at the outside,” Hattie Mae said. With medical care rudimentary at best, anything from a mule kick to childbirth could prove life threatening. In the basic bargain of sharecropper life, the planter provided land, seed, tools, housing, and living expenses, often in the form of credit at an overpriced plantation store; think of it as a proto-welfare system. The tenant provided labor in exchange for half the profits. But since the accounting stayed in the planter’s hands, so did the money. As a little girl, Hattie Mae would watch her uncles line up for the annual “settle.” “Some would come out crying,” she said. “Some would break even. If you came out with two hundred dollars, you were rich.” James Eastland took over the plantation from his father, Woods, in 1934, and he ran it with unchecked power; the police were barred from crossing the bridge onto the property. “These are my niggers,” Hattie Mae quoted him as saying. “If they keep themselves outta the grave, I’ll keep ’em out of jail.”

  Hattie Mae’s grandfather, Pie Eddie Caples, arrived on the plantation in 1927 with the kind of family tree that Hortense Powdermaker would have recognized. The wife he brought to the plantation was at least his fourth, and he had children with all of them. (The law firm handling the divorce was Eastland & Nichols.) One of the children he brought along was a six-year-old girl named Mayola, and a decade later she went into labor in the shack by the bayou and gave birth to Hattie Mae. The following year Mayola Caples got pregnant again, but this time the labor killed her. Not yet two, Hattie Mae was orphaned and not for the last time.

  “My grandfather was a slave,” Hattie Mae said, passing along the family legend as Jewell tended her nails. Family legend wasn’t off by much. A bit of historical probing revealed that Pie Eddie Caples was a slave’s son, whose father was first sent to the fields at the start of King Cotton’s reign. With the expulsion of the Choctaw from central Mississippi in the early 1830s, 10 million acres of prime cotton land opened up, and a tide of white men rushed in to claim it. Squatters, settlers, gamblers, and thieves, they arrived hatching frontier schemes and dreaming of dollar signs. Among them in about 1843 was an aging Alabama saloonkeeper with a young wife and seven black slaves, including a boy about eight years old. The saloonkeeper’s name was Samuel Caples. The boy’s name was Frank. He was Pie Eddie’s father, Hattie Mae’s great-grandfather, and the person with whom the Caples story begins.

  When the slaveholder Samuel Caples was young—he was born about 1785—black slaves had labored in American fields for more than 150 years, and it seemed the awful practice might die a natural death. Economically, it threw off shrinking rewards, since the soils of the upper South were spent. Philosophically, it posed discomfiting problems for a generation of Revolutionary leaders demanding their own freedom; they recognized, even though they didn’t rectify, their hypocrisy at home. The slaveholder Thomas Jefferson called slavery a “detestable” institution. But by the time Samuel Caples arrived in Mississippi, no white southerner would say such a thing. Tantalized by cotton profits, a new generation embraced slavery not as a necessary evil but an outright social good, the burden a superior race endured to care for a lesser caste. Since the faith in white supremacy would outlive slavery itself, it was a development of some note.

  Samuel Caples’s life unfolded in eerie sync with the national tragedy. Born in Maryland around the time of the Constitutional Convention, he grew up with the new republic, impatiently pushing west in search of land and human property. By the 1830s, he had abandoned his life in middle Tennessee and settled in northwestern Alabama, where he seems to have prospered. He ran a tavern in the Fayette County courthouse; increased his slaveholdings to seven, from five; and had a son who served as constable. Then he packed up and lit out again. What dislodged a comfortable townsman isn’t clear, but when he arrived in Scott County, Mississippi, in the early 1840s, he was a man approaching sixty and toting an eighteen-year-old bride. As a small slaveholder (one with fewer than twenty slaves), Caples was by far the most prevalent kind, though not one easily conjured by modern minds. His life was nothing like those of the grand planters along the Mississippi River, with hundreds of slaves, thousands of acres, and European books and clothes. Caples would have lived in frontier housing, probably a log cabin, and worked in the fields alongside his bondsmen. With virtually no savings—his wealth was tied up in his slaves—he was acutely vulnerable to market busts, a risk for the people he owned, since selling them was his easiest way to get cash. For Frank, bondage to a small slaveholder had some potential advantages; it spared him the mythic overseer, famed for his quick cruelty, and it may have brought a more varied workday. But it also deprived him of the communal life a large plantation afforded, like a broader potential choice in mates and the safety of numbers. What it - really did was bind his fate to the whims of Samuel Caples, whose authority over his human possessions was all but absolute. The distance to free soil made escape nea
rly impossible.

  There were two aspects of slavery its defenders preferred not to discuss: the sale and the lash. Whether Caples was quick with the lash is unknown, but he wasn’t above the sale. In 1849, with prices for slaves and cotton rising, Caples disposed of “my Negro boy Hyram about fifteen years old” for $818.50, about $20,000 in contemporary terms. Hyram was about Frank’s age, possibly his brother, perhaps even a twin. Though able to buy and sell men, Caples couldn’t write his name, and he consummated the deal with an X. On the move again within a few years, Caples headed east into Newton County, where he had more kids, bought more land, and needed more cash. On April 16, 1855, he took out a loan of $833, offering as collateral one of the most valuable things he owned: Hattie Mae’s great-grandfather. “Caples has this day executed his note,” he acknowledged with his X,

  and . . . to secure full and punctual payment of said note . . . doth bargain, sell, and convey a certain negro boy slave for life named Frank in color black aged about twenty years to have and to hold the same unto himself, his heirs and assigns forever.

  Amid the reverent “untos” and “doths,” the note let Caples keep working his “slave for life” until the debt came due nine months later. But if he failed to repay, the lender was then free to take possession of Frank and sell him to the highest bidder. Whatever terrors he experienced in bondage, Frank Caples was spared that one. Cotton prices ticked up that year, and Samuel Caples repaid the debt.