American Dream Page 5
While one revolution was coming to politics, another was coming to the farm. Midway through Hattie Mae’s childhood, the Delta greeted the awkward machine that would alter its way of life, the mechanical cotton picker. Rumbling across the heat-baked horizon, each of the pioneering contraptions could pick as much as fifty field hands. And no one would talk of giving them the vote. Suddenly the demographic logic of the Cotton Kingdom was upended. It no longer needed surplus labor; on the contrary, most whites were happy to see the black majority dwindle. Eastland’s friends at the Citizens Council offered free tickets out. And with the postwar factories of the North humming, workers had places to go; a field hand could take a train to Chicago and quadruple his wages overnight. The black migration, which had started as a trickle, swelled to a flood. From 1940 to 1970, 5 million black southerners moved, filling the northern cities. Because it happened incrementally and seemed mostly to affect poor blacks, the migration never registered in white America as a momentous event, on par with war or depression. But there are few corners of American politics or culture it left unchanged. It gave rise to the modern black middle class, one of the great success stories of the century, and also to fearsome new ghettos whose problems would, for much of the public, become synonymous with welfare.
The Caples family split on Chicago. Most of Pie Eddie’s kids gave it a try, but the older ones found it too fast; a few, like Mack, returned to the familiar rhythms of plantation life. Most stayed gone, and from Florida to California, their descendants now number in the hundreds, showcasing a level of black achievement that James Eastland couldn’t have imagined. They are teachers, preachers, social workers, an air traffic controller, computer technicians, and a career navy man. But scores of others wound up in northern prisons or in long stays on the welfare rolls. As it happened, the family’s biggest success grew on southern soil. Opting for the devil he knew, Pie Eddie’s son Wiley Caples, the stable householder, gave up on Chicago and returned to the Eastland plantation. He got some ribbing from other field-workers by insisting that his daughter stay in school, but she took his faith in education to heart. After graduating from the county’s Jim Crow schools, Virginia Caples went on to earn a PhD and became dean, provost, and acting president of Alabama A&M. Opal, who met her once as a child, boasted that her cousin Ginny was the “dean of Mississippi!” Like her father, Virginia Caples argued the family’s obstacles only mounted with the transition to urban life. “I have always thanked my parents for moving back to Mississippi,” she said. Among relatives who moved north, “You were always hearing about somebody killing and shooting.”
For a long time, Hattie Mae shared the fear of Chicago. It sounded like a “big raggedy place that you could get lost in,” and she felt lost enough. She was twelve years old and living with her aunt Vidalia when a man named Toot came to call. Toot was two decades older, and with Vidalia gone Hattie Mae had no way to stop him. She was nearly halfway through her pregnancy when Vidalia noticed and tried to beat the baby out with a switch. Four decades later, as Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich would move to end welfare by citing “twelve-year-olds having babies” as one of its legacies. Hattie Mae is the rare woman who really did get pregnant at twelve. But she didn’t know anything about welfare.
When the baby came in December 1950, the sharecropping system was falling apart, and the move to Chicago was well under way. Her grandmother died six months later, leaving Hattie Mae even more alone with the little boy she called Squeaky—Jewell’s oldest brother. One of her aunts, Lula Bell, came home for the funeral, and saying, “You ain’t nothing but a baby yourself ,” took the infant back to Chicago. There was a vague plan for Hattie Mae to follow, but she - wouldn’t catch up for nearly twenty years. She lived here and there until 1953; then, homeless, uneducated, alone, and abused, she sought shelter in her first marriage, to a young man named Willie Reed. He was twenty, she was fifteen.
Poor single mothers had plenty of problems, as welfare would later make clear. But so did reluctant teenage wives. Hattie Mae viewed her husband as little more than a housing program. They had the first of their three children when she was sixteen. She lost her next pregnancy a few days after one of Willie’s attacks. She left him, returned, and followed his parents to a plantation in southern Missouri, where after years of Willie’s explosive violence Hattie Mae decided to leave. Twenty-three years old, with two kids in her care and another on the way, she was scraping by as a field hand and domestic when someone told her she could get some help—a monthly welfare check. She had heard something about government checks a few years earlier. But it never occurred to her that a black woman could get one. Nervous, curious, she went to an office in Caruthersville, Missouri, in 1960 and enrolled in a small federal program called Aid to Families with Dependent Children. She became a welfare mother.
One thing to notice about Hattie Mae and welfare is that the check gave new powers. Rather than promote “dependency,” which was later seen as a major failing, its effect was the opposite: it gave her a degree of independence she had never known. To begin with, it reduced her reliance on men, so it decreased the predatory violence in her life. It also bolstered her leverage in a rigged labor market designed for exploitation. Now she had options besides chopping cotton and washing white people’s clothes. She said she didn’t agree with friends who argued “the money is due you—your grandparents, they worked as slaves.” But she certainly felt no qualms about getting paid for doing nothing. White folks had been doing it for years.
Another thing to notice is that Hattie Mae couldn’t live on welfare alone. It reduced her dependence on her twin forms of grief, white folks and black men, but it eliminated neither. From the start, she juggled three sources of cash—welfare, boyfriends, and jobs—just as Jewell, Angie, and Opal would do. No single strategy assured a living, but you could survive by mixing all three. The problem was that to keep the welfare you had to hide the men and the jobs: you had to cheat. Fending off her caseworkers’ questions made Hattie Mae feel that welfare was a seamy affair—impractical to avoid but a lot of work for a small piece of change. She doubted it had much of a future. Someday, she warned her daughters, the white folks would bring it to an end.
About the time she went on welfare, Hattie Mae met the first man she loved—Jewell’s father, Isaac Johnson. He was tall, tough, and handsome, twenty years her senior, and considerably more prosperous than any black man she had known. He had a plumbing business and a corner store that he ran with a lady friend. When Hattie Mae stopped in to buy some pop, he made a point of driving her home. After they started going together, she ran into an old boyfriend, who slapped her outside the store; Isaac cut him from head to toe. That was but one of the protections he wrapped her in. He built her a comfortable house in the hamlet of Hayti, where she lived for seven years. In addition to the four children she had already had, she and Isaac had four more. Greg, her sixth, came in 1966 and grew up to father Angie’s kids. Jewell, her seventh, followed in 1968.
Isaac could support the family, but Hattie Mae was in no rush to surrender the added security of her welfare check. Loving Isaac was one thing, but counting on him was another. She knew he had other women, and she never knew when he might leave. This was the age of the midnight raid, when caseworkers arrived unannounced to shine flashlights under the bed. Men and TVs were both forbidden, and Isaac had bought her a big one. When her caseworker knocked, she hid the television under a sheet and stuffed Isaac in a box. The caseworker wasn’t fooled. “I know you can’t make it on public aid alone,” he said afterward. “You know how it is,” she answered. That is, she admitted nothing. But when the caseworker didn’t turn her in, she came to think of him as her first white friend. In time, he confided the reason for the raids. One of Isaac’s other girlfriends kept calling the office to complain he was spending the night.
Hattie Mae never stopped loving Isaac. She just tired of his fooling around. She warned him she would leave, and she did in 1970, a few months before Jewell’s second bir
thday. Thirty-three years old, pregnant with her eighth child, she waited for Isaac to go to work. Then she raced to the bus station, kids in tow, for the five-hundred-mile ride to Chicago. In arriving pregnant by bus in a new city after a problem with a man, Hattie Mae was writing the script that Jewell would follow with uncanny precision two decades later, when she stepped off a bus in Milwaukee. Hattie Mae never saw Isaac again, but he called every now and then. He said if any man raised a hand to her, he would walk to Chicago just to whip him. When the news arrived many years later that Isaac had died, Jewell, then a teenager, didn’t care. She had never had any interest in meeting her father. But Hattie Mae felt like a piece of her heart had stopped beating.
THREE
The Crossroads: Chicago, 1966-1991
Much as Hattie Mae had feared, Chicago proved a “big raggedy place that you could get lost in,” and countless people did. In the three decades before she arrived, Chicago’s black population grew by eight hundred thousand. A city-within-a-city sprang up in its midst, and while it fostered a proud black middle class it also bred a destructive new street life, spreading havoc in the ghettos and fears far beyond. Just how it happened is still not fully understood. There had always been chaos in black southern life. But the stabilizing forces of the rural world—church, school, communal networks—carried less weight in the anonymous city, where someone looking to live the wild life - could do it on a grander scale. Economics played a role. While the work paid better than picking cotton, many of the best jobs remained off-limits, and by the time Hattie Mae arrived in 1970, the blue-collar economy was dying. In two decades, Chicago would lose 60 percent of its manufacturing jobs, and with them the promise of a decent living on muscle alone. Plus, Chicago had its own segregationist passions, especially in housing and schools. Most tragically, it piled the poorest black migrants into monstrous public-housing towers, whose names would become synonymous with government folly: Henry Horner Homes (1957), Stateway Gardens (1958), Cabrini-Green (1958), the Robert Taylor Homes (1962).
In the early days, the ghetto was an eclectic place, with lawyers and preachers sandwiched beside porters and prostitutes. Fair-housing laws let much of the middle class escape, and those left behind grew not only poorer but socially set apart. Welfare rules loosened in the mid-1960s, and within a generation the nation’s rolls quadrupled. From 1964 to 1976, the share of black children born to single mothers doubled to 50 percent. Crime, drugs—likewise up in startling fashion, especially after the mid-1980s onslaught of crack. In Chicago, a vicious gang culture appeared, filling the vacuum left by absent fathers. By the late 1980s, even left-of-center experts had broadened their concerns from poverty per se to self-defeating behaviors—to what William Julius Wilson, the country’s preeminent black sociologist, called the “social pathologies of the inner city.” That all this was happening after the triumphs in civil rights only lent the tableaux a more tragic cast. When Angie, Opal, and Jewell were born in the mid- 1960s, the word underclass was obscure and distrusted; its suggestion of intransigence collided with the national faith in class mobility. By the time they reached high school, the word was widely used, however imprecisely, to describe people much like them.
Hattie Mae settled in more easily than she expected; she knew - people everywhere. From the bus station, she took a taxi to the south-side projects where Aunt Lula Bell had a place. Hattie Mae’s grown son, Squeaky, whom Lula Bell had raised, was in and out of the Stateway Gardens apartment, so among the reunions Hattie Mae enjoyed was that of mother and son. Her cousin from the Eastland plantation, Ruthie Mae Caples, lived in Stateway, too, with five kids and a factory job at Zenith. Ruthie’s daughter Opal was a mischievous girl of four, two years older than Jewell, and both generations bonded. For all the hard living condensed in her years, Hattie was only thirty-three and still ready for some fun. Three decades later, a Polaroid of her and Ruthie in white go-go boots still crackled with danger. “We thought we was Miss Fine!” Hattie Mae said. Soon she had her own Stateway apartment and a version of her old survival plan: an unreported job, a boyfriend, and a monthly welfare check. The job, at a linens factory, - didn’t last. The boyfriend, Wesley, did, much to her children’s chagrin.
The high-rise was tolerable for the first few years. But as Opal and Jewell were starting school, it was spinning out of control. The gangs frightened even Hattie Mae, who had witnessed more than her share of roughness. Coming home late from work one night, she barely out-raced some teenage boys intent, she presumed, on rape. Ruthie moved out first. Hattie Mae stayed, and a year later her son Squeaky was murdered—done in, she was told, by friends in a drug gang who suspected him of stealing their money. Hattie Mae was devastated, maybe all the more so because, as a thirteen-year-old mother, she had given him away. After two of her other sons were assaulted—Willie was shot at, and Greg was hit by a brick from a balcony—Hattie worried the whole family had become a target of gang reprisal. Vowing to salvage something from Squeaky’s death, she promised she would get the rest of the kids out, and she found a job waiting tables at a bar.
The job, at the Marcellus Lounge, was a big break. The lounge drew a high-rolling crowd, including the drug baron Flukey Stokes, who would seal his place in Chicago lore (and a song by Stevie Ray Vaughn) by throwing himself a $200,000 anniversary party and burying his son, “Willie the Wimp,” in a casket shaped like a Cadillac. Having traveled from Big Jim Eastland’s plantation to Flukey Stokes’s pool hall, Hattie Mae was living a kind of pulp fiction version of the underclass formation story. Flukey and his sidekicks liked Hattie. They called her “sister,” bought clothes for her kids, and put out the word that she wasn’t to be hurt. With $100 tips, she could net as much in a night at the lounge as she could in a month on welfare. As for where her friends got their money, she said, “I didn’t get into their business, and they didn’t get into mine.” Hattie Mae kept the job (and since she didn’t report it, her welfare check) well into Jewell’s teens. She fled the projects when Jewell was eight. By then, the black belt had burst out of its historic confines and spread fifteen miles to the city’s southern edge. Hattie Mae and the kids went with it, eventually landing in the far southeastern corner of the city, in a rough-and-tumble place called Jeffrey Manor.
Angie’s mother had found her way to Jeffrey Manor, too—with her marriage dead and the neighborhood dying, Charity Jobe was trying to get out as Hattie Mae moved in. It was their children’s lives that would converge in the Manor, much to Charity’s dismay. Like Hattie Mae, Charity once picked Mississippi cotton. But while Hattie grew up orphaned and abused, Charity’s roots were against-the-odds middle class, with her grandfather the rare sharecropper who made it. A son of emancipated slaves, Levi Gillespie was already an old man of sixty-eight in 1941, two years before Charity’s birth, when he took out a contract to buy 110 acres in Egypt, Mississippi. He made the payments past the age of eighty, then transferred the mostly paid-for land to Charity’s father. Henderson Gillespie retained his father’s acreage and will. One family story celebrates the time a white store clerk called him a “nigger.” “That’ll be Mister Nigger,” he said, and grabbed him in the groin until he said it. In contrast to Hattie Mae’s childhood of violence and dislocation, Charity’s was a model of order. She spent mornings in school and afternoons in the field. Meals didn’t start without a blessing, and church on Sunday was an all-day affair. Her parents’ marriage lasted nearly sixty years. When suitors called on his daughters, Henderson warned that if he saw them with a drink or a cigarette he would knock it down their throat. Walking four miles to the Jim Crow school, six of his eight kids earned high school degrees.
Charity hated the drudgery of fieldwork, and when she graduated in 1961, there was nothing else to do. One brother worked construction in Chicago and another parked cars at O’Hare; a sister ran a South Side bar. Charity followed them north and got an office job at a commercial laundry, where she met Angie’s father. Roosevelt Jobe also came from northeastern Mississippi, but from a poorer, mo
re troubled family; he told Charity his father had left when Roosevelt was still a boy and was never heard from again. “My daddy’s family is really sometimey,” Angie would say. “Sometime they like you, sometime they don’t.” At five foot three, Roosevelt compensated for size with flash; he talked smooth, dressed well, and courted Charity with candy and flowers. After two years, she went as far as applying for a marriage license, before deciding that a marriage wouldn’t work. Then she found out she was pregnant. She couldn’t face her father like that. She married Roosevelt on her lunch break in her pastor’s living room.
Angie was born in 1966; her brother, Terrance, arrived the next year. Charity got a job as a hospital receptionist. Roosevelt moved to the Handy Button Company, where he made good money on the factory floor. Charity wanted to buy a house, and Jeffrey Manor, a ring of duplex townhomes with modest yards, was a place they could afford; they settled at 9807 South Clyde. Although Angie started first grade in the public system, Charity found the teachers indifferent—one said that she called in sick a lot because she didn’t like the kids—and Charity transferred Angie to parochial school. When Charity wasn’t at work, she was running to Scouts and Holy Cross Church, where, despite the family’s Baptist roots, Angie was baptized as a Catholic and Terrance served as an altar boy. With Roosevelt scarcely around, her life was her kids.
Charity’s brand of mothering was devoted but intense, at times overbearing. Loving and lecturing, caring and carping, combined with the force of a pressure hose. “Angela! The Lord don’t play!” went one frequent refrain. A portrait of innocence in her plaid jumper, Angie had the kind of sweet streak that mothers prize in daughters, trusting Charity with confidences that others save for best friends. “My mother is the nicest person in my life,” Angie wrote in grade school. “My mother’s the best, if you ask me.” But she also made an early practice of tugging against Charity’s leash. While her younger brother feigned obedience and excelled in class, “I was the bad one,” Angie said, “ ’cause I couldn’t keep my mouth shut.” An indifferent student, she did her homework with a knee in the chair and a foot out the door, convinced a freer, faster world beckoned just beyond. Few of the neighbors shared Charity’s strictures, and Angie could look outside at midnight and see kids crowding the stoop. Charity’s great fear was that Angie would somehow wind up with them; Angie’s great fear was that she wouldn’t. Mocking Charity’s curfews, the neighborhood kids dubbed her “Mean Mama Lulu,” and Mean Mama didn’t spare the rod. Once, when some kids chased Angie home, Charity threatened to whip her if she didn’t defend herself, a move she came to regret, as Angie found that despite her skinny schoolgirl frame fighting came naturally. A running routine of Angie’s childhood involved Angie starting to say something smart, Charity warning her not to, and Angie saying it anyway—feeling empowered early on by her ability to take a blow. “I got slapped in the mouth a whole lot,” Angie said. “The slap, sometime it felt good, ’cause I said what I wanted to say.”