“We’re doing everything by policy,” she explained, citing Chapter 320 of the Public Aid statutes, which outlines how the department may verify proof of residence. “We have found a substantial amount of information that your husband has claimed your residence as his home. Do you have anything to dispute that?”
LaJoe nervously fingered her gold-colored loop earrings. She spoke for the first time since she had been led into the room. “He’s at his mother’s and sister’s. Here, there.” She spoke so softly that the four inquisitors had to lean forward to hear her. LaJoe went on to explain that she gave Paul his mail when he came around.
“Was there a place you could always find him?” the woman asked.
“He was always on the corner of Lake and Woods,” said LaJoe, referring to a local liquor store where men of Paul’s age hung out.
The woman continued to rattle off the proof that the department had compiled, placing Paul at LaJoe’s. It was damning. She cited joint income tax returns for the years 1982, 1983, 1984, and 1985.
“Did you report those to the agency?”
LaJoe shook her head. “No.”
The woman noted that Paul had received unemployment benefits for thirty-eight weeks between July 1984 and March 1985 at LaJoe’s apartment; that Paul’s driver’s license, issued in July 1986, indicated his address as 1920 West Washington; and that Paul had been personally served with a court summons at that address on October 25, 1981. A four-page, single-spaced summary of the investigation outlined the charges. A fifth page listed the benefits LaJoe had received since 1974; they totaled $109,373 in financial assistance and food stamps, the bulk of it after 1980. There was also $97,903 in medical benefits, most of which had gone to care for the triplets, who were born prematurely and had had to spend much of their first year in the hospital.
The woman concluded the fifteen-minute hearing by explaining to LaJoe that “you have to prove to us that our findings are false. We have a substantial amount of evidence placing him in your home.”
“Is that it?” LaJoe asked, referring not to the evidence but to the meeting itself.
“Yes,” the woman replied.
Confused and upset, LaJoe walked silently out of the room, slamming the door behind her. She would later apologize to her inquisitors for her impoliteness, but she wouldn’t offer much defense against the department’s charges. She didn’t deny that Paul occasionally stayed over. She didn’t ask whether she was entitled to legal counsel. She didn’t ask where she would get money to feed her children. She didn’t ask for a caseworker to come out and look at her home. Now, as she made her way through the labyrinth of desks, she wondered how to break the news to the kids.
Lafeyette knew his mother had gone for a hearing and that the department was considering cutting her benefits, so when she came home that afternoon he was by the door to greet her. As she walked into the apartment, his eyes locked with hers. His long fingers cupped her face.
“What’d they say?” he asked.
“Off,” LaJoe replied in a voice that barely approached a whisper. Lafeyette’s shoulders sank. LaJoe hugged him.
She chose not to tell Pharoah, at least not yet; she was protective of him. Because he had lately responded to nearly every instance of violence and family trouble with the same refrain—“I’m too little to understand”—she feared that the problems, when he was at last ready to confront them, would be too deeply buried for him to resolve. Now, though, she was convinced that Pharoah’s attitude gave him some peace of mind and the strength to push on, so she avoided burdening him with stories of hardship.
“The reason I don’t go to Pharoah is because I like Pharoah just being a kid,” she explained. “I better enjoy it now, because I don’t know how long it’s going to last.”
She wished, in fact, that she hadn’t told Lafeyette, but he was the only person she felt she could talk to about it. It was as if he were as much a husband as he was a son. He was her confidant.
Lafeyette believed that the only person he could depend on was his mother, and he would do anything to protect her. A year ago, when two teenagers robbed her and Rochelle, one of the assailants severed the nerves in the middle and ring fingers of LaJoe’s right hand with a butcher knife. The fingers now often swelled and were painful. The assailants stabbed Rochelle seven times. Lafeyette told his mother, “If I was around and I had a gun or something, I’d of shot him in the head or the chest or something. I don’t play that about my mother.”
Later, he said, “Sometimes I be in my bed crying so God can hear me so my mama’s fingers get well. She can’t hardly do nothing with them. If she has to open up a can I’ll help her open it.” He would also help scrub the family’s dirty clothes because he knew the work hurt his mother’s hand.
The night of the hearing, after the other children had gone to sleep, Lafeyette got out of bed and joined his mother on the living room couch. Shirtless—he wore only his dark blue jogging pants—he propped his bare feet on the scratched and sticky coffee table. A late night movie on the television went unwatched. The steadily running bathtub water could be heard even through the closed bathroom door.
“What you worrying about?” Lafeyette asked.
“I ain’t worried,” LaJoe lied.
“Yes, you is. Don’t worry ’bout nothing. I be worrying for you. I’m gonna help you.” Lafeyette drew closer to his mother, placing his arm awkwardly around her shoulders.
“Lafie, I’m not worried about nothing. We’re gonna be all right.” LaJoe then explained to Lafeyette that the reason she had gotten into trouble with the Public Aid Department was that she had let Paul use their address.
“Why don’t you just say that he didn’t?” Lafeyette demanded.
“If I told them that I didn’t know he was using the address, it would be a lie in my face. I knew he was using the address.”
“You ought to put them out, all of them,” Lafeyette said of his father and his older sister.
“If I put them in the street—they live their lives in the street—they’ll look like the street. I can’t put them out.”
“If they ain’t helping me the way you helped us, I wouldn’t help them. I wouldn’t care ’bout them.”
“It ain’t them. They not even theyself,” she said referring to their drug problems.
“You should stop being so weak-hearted.” Lafeyette could see his mother’s pained expression. That remark hurt LaJoe because she knew there to be some truth in it. She was “weak-hearted.” She didn’t have the resolve to kick her older children out of the apartment or, for that matter, to put her foot down and not allow Paul to stay over on occasion. She sometimes seemed passive, unable to act on what she knew was right. But her strength was also her weakness. She gave and gave and gave—and then didn’t get it back. The problem was that she didn’t know when to stop giving.
“No, I don’t mean weak-hearted,” Lafeyette corrected himself. “You strong-hearted too, but you should stop being weak-hearted too. You don’t like it here. You don’t like nothing that be going on at this time. I would leave. If we weren’t here, Terence wouldn’t of gone to jail. They wouldn’t of handcuffed him, took him out like a dog. One day I might just walk up and find a whole bag of money and bring it home, Mama, and then we can move out of the projects. When I grow up, I don’t know where I be headed, but I’m gonna have a white house. It’d be made of wood, and Pharoah and all them, they’re gonna be my kids. I won’t need to have kids.”
Lafeyette talked frequently of getting out of Horner, and sometimes would feel such urgency about it that he would get angry at his mother for not trying harder. He once demanded that she wait on line to apply for one of 285 rehabilitated apartments that were federally subsidized. She did, but there were over a thousand people on line ahead of her, some of whom had been camped out since the previous morning. Another time, Lafeyette insisted that she inquire about some new rental units in one of the few restored brownstones in the neighborhood. She did that too, but they
cost far too much. It turned out later that they were owned by a couple who were allegedly among the west side’s biggest drug suppliers, so the property was confiscated by the federal government.
Lafeyette suggested that he quit school and find work to help feed and clothe the family. LaJoe told him that was nonsense; they would manage, and he should stay in school. The two talked until about two in the morning. Now and then they fell silent, and Lafeyette rested his head on his mother’s shoulder. During their talk, he confessed, “Mama, one time I had said to myself I wasn’t gonna talk no more. I got tired of peoples talking to me and I wasn’t answering them. What I try to say ain’t worth saying to nobody anyways. Nothing happens.”
Lafeyette had become more and more reticent, keeping to himself. He relied on as few people as possible: his mother, maybe his brother Pharoah, and himself. These were the only ones he knew for certain wouldn’t cross him, who wouldn’t desert him.
James Howard, one of Lafeyette’s closest “associates,” had moved out of Horner in April. For ten years, his mother had been on a waiting list for Section 8 Housing, a program in which the government subsidizes rents in private housing. Their name had finally reached the top of the list and they found a two-bedroom apartment about a mile south of Horner. Their apartment complex had a twenty-four-hour-a-day security guard, a swimming pool, and a basketball court. At first, James visited Horner on weekends, but then he spent more of his time with his new friends at the apartment complex. In those first few months, he knelt at his bedside before he went to sleep and prayed that God would not make him move back to Horner.
So many friends and acquaintances passed through Lafeyette’s life that he didn’t seem to give James’s absence much thought. He would occasionally spend a night over at the Howards’, but as the months passed the two boys were together less and less.*
Lafeyette was used to being disappointed. No one else, it seemed, ever held up his end of a bargain. Lafeyette was certain that a neighbor or friend had called the Public Aid Department and told of Paul’s occasional presence in the apartment.
“The things I should of been talking to Paul about I was talking to Lafie,” LaJoe said. “I put him in a bad place. But I didn’t have anyone to talk to. Lafie,” she said, regretfully, “became a twelve-year-old man that day.”
LaJoe had to figure out what to do, how to put food on the table and pay the rent. She had five children to worry about. Terence was now in jail, and Weasel had moved in with friends for a few months.
The next day after school, Lafeyette brought home seven loaves of bread he received as giveaways at a local church. LaJoe thanked him, though she had to throw them out because all seven were moldy, Pharoah didn’t find out about Public Aid’s decision until a couple of weeks later, when LaJoe didn’t go to do her usual monthly shopping. Pharoah loved to help his mother carry in the groceries and then organize them in the cabinets and refrigerator, but when it became apparent that his mother wouldn’t be shopping on the usual day of the month, Pharoah asked what had happened. His mother explained their situation.
“Old girl, we’re really poor now,” Pharoah said.
LaJoe laughed and thought to herself, As if we weren’t poor already.
Pharoah surprised her. He seemed to take it all in stride. One afternoon, he asked her for a quarter but, before she could refuse him, covered his mouth in embarrassment. “Oops, I forgot,” he apologized, and went on about his business. Timothy, one of the triplets, had watched Lafeyette comfort LaJoe. He told his mother, “Your head be hurting all the time. Lemme worry for you.”
LaJoe leaned on friends and family. One of her sisters gave her $65 worth of food stamps. Rochelle supplied her with some food. But her family and neighbors, who for the most part were not much better off than she, were limited in what they could give her. So LaJoe played cards for money.
Both of LaJoe’s parents had loved to gamble. Her father played poker and blackjack and occasionally shot dice. Her mother would drink Pepsi and take aspirins to stay up all night, playing cards with lady friends. LaJoe, in fact, was named after an uncle who was a riverboat gambler. It seemed to be in the family’s blood.
Like housecleaning, it got her mind off her problems. A friend’s mother ran an all-night card game for women, and LaJoe had occasionally joined in. The game was pitty-pat; players won by accumulating pairs. Now, she played almost nightly, winning $35 one night, $20 another. She rarely played in the same game as Rochelle; the two didn’t want to win money from each other. Many weekends and some weekdays, LaJoe spent her nights away from home playing cards. She’d leave after putting the children to sleep and not come home until morning, usually early enough to help prepare the kids for school. On occasion, though, the children had to ready themselves. Lafeyette would take charge. If Timothy needed a new hole to tighten his belt, he’d punch it through with a nail. If Tiffany or Tammie needed a blouse pressed, he’d iron it. Though there was always an adult in the house with the children, either Paul or Weasel or, in later months, Weasel’s girlfriend, who was in her late twenties and seemed wise beyond her years, the children worried about their mother. It was while she’d been away one night that she’d been mugged and her fingers sliced.
In addition to relying on the generosity of friends and her luck at pitty-pat, LaJoe looked for work. She applied for jobs at three local hospitals but couldn’t get interviewed at any of them. They had no openings for someone with her limited clerking experience. She spent a day in the Loop, checking with stores for a job as a clerk, but could find nothing. Part of LaJoe’s difficulty in finding a job was her timidity. It sometimes made her seem unusually tense or, worse yet, aloof. Also, she had not held a job in seven years, and even then it had been at only one place, the Miles Square Health Center. She lacked the ability to combine her self-assuredness and humility—two powerful traits that alternately dominated her personality—in her job interviews. After staying home with her children for the past seven years, she was unprepared to re-enter the job market. She had no skills to offer. And there were few jobs to be had.
Frustrated and bitter, and worried about each coming day, LaJoe slept little except for occasional catnaps in the afternoons while the children were still at school. She drank tea and Pepsi to keep going, but the chronic fatigue worked on her. She unleashed her temper on her children, shouting at them to sweep the floor or take out the garbage. But usually, after one of these outbursts, LaJoe sought out Lafeyette or Pharoah or one of the triplets to hug and make up to. In apology, she braided Tammie’s and Tiffany’s hair or, if she had the money, gave Pharoah a couple of quarters to play the video games at the corner store.
During this period, LaJoe found solace in the realization that there were those yet worse off. On a frigid spring night, two homeless people, an unshaven man in an oversize trench coat and a young woman dressed in a white T-shirt and ragged denim jacket, wandered into her building. They were hoping to find a vacant apartment. Instead, LaJoe insisted they use her couch; fully clothed, the man and woman stretched out feet to feet like bookends. LaJoe couldn’t sleep anyway. “I’m just tired from worrying; you’re just tired from being out,” she told the woman.
LaJoe still had an appeal hearing in which an administrative law judge would hear first Public Aid’s case against LaJoe and then her response. It didn’t go well.
LaJoe had become resigned to losing her benefits. She knew that technically, on paper, Public Aid had a strong argument. Yes, Paul used her address. Yes, she conceded later, they had filed joint income tax returns—though she never saw any of the money. And, yes, Paul lived at her home off and on, depending on whether he could find shelter with other friends or family. But despite all that, Paul spent much of his paycheck for drugs. He felt guilty and responsible for the family’s predicament, so he visited a caseworker before the appeal to tell of his history with drugs and his separation from his wife. He asked that the conversation be kept confidential from his employer. The caseworker, Ms. Rogers, unders
tood that to mean confidential from everyone. She didn’t mention his visit at the appeal hearing.
But what upset LaJoe was knowing that any caseworker who visited her apartment would have realized that she could not be double-dipping. Lafeyette and Pharoah slept on lumpy and torn mattresses older than either of the two boys. The triplets and LaShawn’s daughter Tyisha were so crowded in their one bed that they often woke up tangled with one another, their arms and legs aching from a night fighting for a comfortable position. Many of the children’s clothes were secondhand. The parishes from suburban churches donated used clothing, so the area’s children wore T-shirts promoting suburban sports teams from such foreign places as Berwyn and Oak Park. Also, LaJoe and other residents relied on two volunteers from a northern suburb, a housewife and an airline pilot, who drove a van through Horner twice a week, distributing free clothing and food. One company had donated five thousand pounds of meat, another contributed two hundred pairs of gloves, all to be distributed in the Horner neighborhood.
LaJoe’s living room couch had cost $45 at the local Goodwill; the matching black-cushioned chairs, $20. The olive-green curtains still showed the two bullet holes from the gang battle outside the apartment. The family had no kitchen table; the children ate their meals seated in the living room. Besides, LaJoe thought, if she had had the benefit of Paul’s full income, they would have long ago moved from Henry Horner.
Also, and this LaJoe failed to make clear to Public Aid, Paul had been suspended from his job in January, four months earlier, for drinking. The transit authority sent him to a rehabilitation center, but Paul had started drinking and taking drugs again. In effect, he had been permanently suspended. He now had no income.
LaJoe felt so defeated that she barely put up a fight with Public Aid. At the appeal hearing, she mentioned only in passing that Paul had been suspended from his job. She didn’t refer to his drug problem, perhaps to protect him. And she hadn’t known he’d been interviewed by the caseworker. Not surprisingly, the administrative law judge, Edward A. Disch, who LaJoe felt had been courteous and understanding, nonetheless ruled against her. Public Aid would strip her and the children of their benefits. If she wanted, however, she could reapply.