Fuck Salon
It’s articles like the one that Gilliard quotes that guarantee I won’t be renewing my subscription… ever.
After the poor kids next door took advantage of me, I felt sympathy for the people of Houston, who’ve suffered crime and violence because of struggling Katrina exiles.
Houston is now experiencing a crime wave and a surge in murder, allegedly presided over by lawless, rampaging “Katricians.” Katrina evacuees were either suspects or victims in 59 killings in the first eight months of 2006, or one in five Houston homicides. They have become the poster people for fear-mongering Houston gun dealers and the subject of much public debate. Kinky Friedman, erstwhile Texas gubernatorial candidate and supposed political maverick, dismissed them as “thugs and crackheads.” I am surprised and chagrined to say that I can relate to the people of Houston.
As much as racism created and sustains this situation, the fact is, poor folks can seem like unreachable creatures, ever needy, inscrutable and impervious to uplift, from another planet. I know because I come from the inner city, because I am very involved in community work, but also because, until recently, the equivalent of Katrina evacuees lived next door to me. Much as I didn’t want to admit it that first year, they were a blight on our middle-class neighborhood and simply did not belong there. I’m glad (and unsurprised) that they were evicted. Relieved. And sadly sure that, absent concerted and sustained intervention, they are doomed to go on living as they always have — like perpetual evacuees, dependent on the largesse of others, defeated by America’s cutthroat capitalism and blind to its well-disguised avenues of escape.
Neighborhood gossip, to which I was necessarily not privy until it was too late, was that the “Smiths” were living in the house via Catholic Charities. Maybe it was Catholic Charities, maybe it was Section 8 — who knows and what’s the difference? In any event, and given the blur of any move, it took me a few days to notice that black people lived next door (we were the only two black families) and that a never-ending stream of children ebbed and flowed from their house at all hours of the day and night. After two weeks or so, I calculated that there were seven kids (plus one mom and four surnames) next door. Their house, like mine, has three bedrooms, one bath. It was, of course, the male teenagers that most caught my eye.
As a single mom of two tots, the young men worried me, mostly because they were so idle, sauntering aimlessly down the center of our busy street, lolling on their tiny porch, riding seatless bicycles in languorous, unpredictable, traffic-snarling circles. They were going nowhere very slowly. The yard overgrown, untended and strewn with litter in a neighborhood where the men often came home for lunch to tend already manicured lawns and plant new shrubbery. Why no team uniforms on these kids, no backpacks, no school projects carted home in cardboard boxes?
Unsmiling, they watched me, never crossing the driveway to help with my packages like the other families did, hip me to the garbage schedule, introduce themselves. Growing up, I learned the primary lesson of inner-city survival: Never show fear. Grown, I also knew that ghetto toughness is a necessary mask its purveyors are all too ready to shed; I made eye contact and was proactively nice from Day One. If I didn’t give them the benefit of the doubt, who would?
…
I took them with us to the park, to baseball games, and to most of the cultural events my family attended. Their mother always said yes before I could even finish the offer and never wrote down my offered cellphone number. Before I accepted that Sam’s Club’s offerings were more than my small family could efficiently consume, I took a chance on sharing my extras with “Mary” and she gratefully accepted. So gratefully that, before long, she was sending the kids over with requests: “Mama say we need sugar.” I sent over a 5-pound bag. A week later: “Mama say we need sugar.” “Mama say we need orange juice.” “Mama say, we hungry.” Each request came complete with prolonged, drug-bust-style banging on my window though the doorbell is brightly illuminated. “Mama say we need meat.” “No, she say we need four rolls of toilet paper. And soap.” “You don’t got no sour cream chips?”
They had no tools, no salt for the sidewalks, no batteries for the broken toys that littered their yard and which the kids hopefully offered in exchange for the use of mine’s Toys “R” Us bonanza. When the child I sent home to be bandaged (they played so roughly) came back still bleeding and undisinfected, I left a Megalo-Mart, industrial-size box of bandages and a four-pack of Neosporin on the broken porch chair I used as the drop site for my donations. The next few days, I watched the Smith kids run about festooned head to toe in Winnie the Pooh steri-strips. The next time “Mama said we need Band-Aids” I said I was all out.
It was this summer, though, that I reached my tolerance limit. I learned that they were using my kids to score free snacks at the corner gas station. My kids. Begging. I nearly broke my ankle stepping into a foot-deep hole they’d dug in my front lawn. I found my son playing with a claw hammer lying abandoned in their junkyard of a backyard and my daughter trying to heft a 12-pound bowling ball. But the kicker was the youngest two’s increasing demands that I be their mother. When I rubbed sunscreen on mine, it wasn’t enough that I offered it to them — big-eyed and pleading, they begged me to rub it on them, too. They peremptorily ordered cones when I took mine to meet Mr. Softee. Seeing me strap the kids into their car seats, they flew outside saying, “Mama say we can go, too.”
They insisted on equal access to my kids’ bikes and toys; I’d come home to find them playing on my porch and in my backyard, asking when dinner was. They strew their garbage everywhere like birds molting feathers; Mary would wave at me from her filthy couch when I couldn’t stand the trash in her yard anymore and would pick it up. I offered to pay her teenagers $10 an hour to do yard work but “it’s too hot.” Just as well, because when one finally accepted the offer, he quit after an hour and left my lawn mower and supplies where he dropped them, without a word to me. Last Fourth of July, they were in the backyard blowup pool with my kids from 8 a.m. til 8 p.m. I gave them breakfast, snack, lunch, snack, dinner, snack. When I sent them home for towels, they came back with ragged sheets and grimy curtains to dry off with. Never a sighting of Mom. As I forced them to go home so we could all get some sleep, I decided I’d had enough.
If I’d wanted nine kids, I’d have had nine kids.
…
Most of the Katrina evacuees who remain displaced are the hardcore, long-term, helpless poor, like the Smiths, and God only knows what will become of them when our patience wanes.
And a happy and compassionate holiday season to you too.
Also, Dickerson — you might want to learn about that little correlation-causation problem you’ve got there.
I may not be a psychologist, but when the kids were asking you to rub suntan lotion on them or take them with you, they weren’t asking for handouts… they were asking for a little warmth. A bit of acceptance. A mother’s touch, if even for a moment.
And even that, Dickerson begrudges them. Ho. Ho. Ho.
