Evicted (16 page)

If Sherrena couldn't buy a property outright, she financed the purchase in a number of ways. She took out conventional or even adjustable-rate mortgages. When she saw a deal but didn't have the down payment, Sherrena sought out “OPM” (“other people's money”) or “hard money”: shorthand for rich white guys from Brookfield or Shorewood who offered high-interest loans that didn't require any money down but instead placed a lien on the property. Sherrena put it this way: “Usually the banks say, ‘We want twenty percent down.' Here's this private money guy saying, ‘Hey, I'll give it to you, but your interest rate is going to be twelve percent, and you have to give me this money back within six months or a year.' ” If Sherrena defaulted, she would lose the house to the private lender.

The same thing that made homeownership a bad investment in poor, black neighborhoods—depressed property values—made landlording there a potentially lucrative one. Property values for similar homes were double or triple in white, middle-class sections of the city; but rents in those neighborhoods were not. A landlord might have been able to fetch $750 for a two-bedroom unit in the suburb of Wauwatosa and only $550 for a similar unit in Milwaukee's poverty-stricken 53206 zip code. But the Wauwatosa property would have come with a much higher mortgage payment and tax bill, not to mention higher standards for the condition of the unit. When it came to return on investment, it was hard to beat owning property in the inner city. “You buy on the North Side because they ‘cash flow' nicely,” said one landlord with 114 central-city units. “In Brookfield, I lost money. But if you do low-income, you get a steady monthly income. You don't buy properties for their appreciative value. You're not in it for the future but for now.”

Sherrena looked for properties that would give her a cash flow of at least $500 a month, after expenses. The house Ladona would rent easily cleared that bar. Sherrena owned it free and clear, the repairs only set her back $1,500, and the monthly rent would be $775. If the house inspired Sherrena to dance, it was because she knew she would recoup her total investment in about two years. She was used to this rate of return. Shortly after buying the black-and-white house, she bought a duplex off Keefe Avenue for $8,500, repairing it for $3,000. It would take only eight months to make that money back. After that, “it just cashed out.”

Sherrena estimated her net worth at around $2 million, but equity was icing on the cake. The real money was made in rents. Every month Sherrena collected roughly $20,000 in rent. Her monthly mortgage bills rounded out to $8,500. After paying the water bill, Sherrena—who owned three dozen inner-city units, all filled with tenants around or below the poverty line—figured she netted roughly $10,000 a month, more than what Arleen, Lamar, and many of her other tenants took home in a year. As Sherrena liked to put it: “The 'hood is good. There's a lot of money there.”

Quentin pulled the truck onto a dark and deserted street. There was one more stop to make: Terri on Cherry Street. This was Sherrena's most far-flung property, located on the West Side of Milwaukee, near Washington Park and a fifteen-minute walk to the colossal Miller Brewery. Sherrena pounded on Terri's door, loud the first time and even louder the second. The porch light flicked on and shone down on Sherrena. She was in the fur-lined Coach boots with matching purse she had bought in Jamaica.

“Who's that?” a gruff voice barked.

“It's the landlord.”

“Oh,” the voice said, resigned.

“That's right,” Sherrena whispered to herself as the locks came undone.

Inside, the house was warm and smelled of dinner fried in grease. A single, small lamp was on, stingy with its light and leaving parts of the room veiled in shadow. Sherrena found Terri in the company of some elderly kin and older children. Terri was a plump and pretty woman, with dark skin, long braids, and an empty stare. She was mentally slow and received SSI for her condition. Her boyfriend, who had answered the door—Antoine, a bony man with slicked-back hair—leaned against the wall, just beyond the edge of the light.

“Um, what's going on?” Sherrena asked Terri.

“I ain't got any money with me and—” Terri's voice trailed off.

Sherrena leaned over Terri with her hands on her hips. “Terri,” she began, using her stern-teacher voice.

“I know.”

“Just give me the money….I'll give you a receipt.”

A moment passed, then Terri said, “All right,” and reached into her pocket. Seeing this, several of the older children left the room.

Sherrena accepted a thick roll of cash. “Who did your hair?” she asked, reaching out and spinning one of Terri's braids. “You like her hair, Antoine?”

Antoine was bringing a cigarette to his mouth. The lighter's flame momentarily brought his face out of the darkness. It was a face creased with humiliation.

Lifting herself into the Suburban, Sherrena said to Quentin, “We got fourteen—fourteen hundred….Why I can't get rid of her.” Terri rented a four-bedroom apartment for $725 a month. She still owed $350 plus a late fee but said she'd have the rest of the money tomorrow.

“Well, all right!” Quentin congratulated his wife.

Sherrena felt accomplished if unsurprised. On multiple occasions she had taken a tenant's entire paycheck. Once, a young mother had offered Sherrena her debit card.

On Eighteenth and Wright, Mikey was trying to do his homework at the kitchen table. Math. He wasn't confused, just distracted. There was so much noise. Ruby, who could fly through her homework before the bus pulled up to their stop, was practicing the Stanky Legg in front of the television. Patrice's middle child, Jada, was banging on different things with an empty Mountain Dew bottle. And Natasha was trying to comb Kayla Mae's hair, typically a three-hour war.

Natasha's belly was growing. The ultrasound had revealed only one baby, a bigheaded boy, just as Doreen had guessed.

Doreen and Patrice sat around the table, opposite from Mikey, and debated what to do about Sherrena's eviction notice. Doreen had had no luck finding another apartment. When she called one number listed in the
RedBook
, she heard a recorded message that listed prequalifications: “No evictions in the last three years. No money owing to a landlord. No criminal arrests in the last three years.” Even though Doreen had withheld her rent after the incident with the plumber, they didn't expect Sherrena to start the court process so quickly. Patrice thought it was Social Worker Tabatha's fault. When Doreen told Patrice the reason Sherrena had given for the plumbing being neglected—Quentin had lent someone his truck for a month—Patrice rolled her eyes. “You're in Jamaica,” she said, “and we can't even take baths….All that money they got, she sound dumb. If I believe that, then slap me dead.” Her hand fell hard on the kitchen table, and Mikey's head snapped up from his math problems.

Mikey took his papers to Jada and Kayla Mae's mattress. Before he got back to work, he pulled out a small American flag from its special hiding spot. His teacher had handed the flags out the day Obama was inaugurated. Before that, the North Side had been covered in political posters, those dark-blue signs planted firmly in lawns, taped to cracked windows, tacked up in people's bedrooms, and lining littered sidewalks. Wright Street had erupted in cheers the night Obama won. Neighbors had unbolted their doors and stepped out on their porches just to look at one another. Mikey stretched out on the mattress, holding the flag at attention and staring at the ceiling.

On the day of her eviction court hearing, January 27, Doreen limped out of her house and found the bus stop. She had wrapped her head and put on white Velcro sneakers. The shoes felt like they belonged to someone else. Doreen went barefoot when she was inside, which was almost always. She had become as much of a permanent fixture in the apartment as the floorboards and doorframes. She hated the idea of taking a bus downtown to eviction court. Plus her foot was throbbing. The night before, the back door had fallen on it. It first fell on Ruby when she had attempted to prop it back up, pinning her to the ground. When Doreen tried to free her daughter, she slipped and the heavy door came down on her foot. It had swollen up plump and watery. The doctor on the phone had advised going to the ER; but Doreen refused. “I'm just gonna end up waiting all night in that room,” she said. Doreen didn't trust doctors any more than her father had.
14

Doreen watched the icy city roll past her bus window. She didn't know how eviction court would go, so she allowed the new baby to occupy her mind. The thought of Natasha as a mother—fickle, youthful Natasha—made Doreen laugh. Doreen remembered when Patrice was born. They delivered her through a cesarean section because she was so big. Doreen had had to trade her baby clothes for bigger sizes. Natasha was big and C.J. too. So when Ruby came out weighing only six pounds, Doreen didn't know how to handle her. “She made me mad. I couldn't hold her.” Natasha had recently applied for W-2, and Doreen worried that it would affect her benefits and cut into the family's food stamps. It would balance out if Natasha stayed in the house and helped pay the bills, but lately Malik had been asking Natasha if she wanted to move into his mother's place in Brown Deer. Natasha swore there was no way she would, but Doreen sensed that she was seriously considering it.

Sherrena left later, answering her phone as she drove downtown. A woman on the other end was saying that, during her break, she had walked out of her ten-dollar-an-hour temp job at Landmark Credit Union. “Chelsea!” Sherrena yelled, her voice thick with disappointment. “I don't think that was a good idea….I'm gonna talk with you about it when I come out of eviction court, but you know I'm gonna fuss at you, right?”

“I know,” Chelsea said.

“I'm on you. I'm
killing
you, Chelsea!”

Sherrena was trying to help Chelsea “get her credit together.” For $150, Sherrena offered to examine her credit report and use a technique called “rapid rescore” to improve her score. Clients like Chelsea got their money's worth. Sherrena was a hard coach who worked for real results. She knew the value of a good credit score, especially when it came to selling her properties to her clients.

Sherrena had been dabbling in rent-to-own ventures. She would rent one of her more stable tenants a house for six months. During that time, Sherrena would attempt to rapid rescore the tenant's credit. If successful, she would then help that tenant secure a loan for the price Sherrena was asking for the property. The Federal Housing Administration often required only a 3.5 percent down payment, which most working tenants could cover with their tax refund. Sherrena had seen some of her properties double in value during the housing bubble, and she knew the inflated assessments wouldn't last forever. She was trying to sell a rent-to-own tenant one property for $90,000, a property she owned free and clear, having purchased it at a far lower price. Sherrena would reinvest the cash in more properties, and the new homeowner would inherit a massive debt. Sherrena would say that was better than not owning a house at all.

In years past, Sherrena had marketed her credit-repair-to-home-loan services to physically and mentally disabled people on SSI. “A whole bunch of those people came and bought houses. They ended up losing them, but the thing is they need to be policed a little bit more….Wasn't nobody saying, ‘Johnny, pay your mortgage!' They just may not have been mentally capable.” They say the foreclosure crisis started on Wall Street, with men in power ties trading toxic assets and engineering credit default swaps. But in the ghetto, all you needed was a rapid rescore coach and a low-income tenant hungry for a shot at the American Dream.

When Doreen and Sherrena met in the courthouse, Sherrena was not in the best of moods. The conversation with Chelsea had annoyed her, and on top of that, the day before the city had pulled almost $20,000 in water bills and taxes from her bank account. The deduction was unexpected and left Sherrena with exactly $3.48 in her business account, $108.32 in her personal account, and a couple of un-cashed checks in her pocket. Sherrena was not used to being broke, but the first of the month was a few days away.

In the hallway outside Room 400, Doreen explained that she wasn't trying to scam Sherrena by moving out quickly; she was looking for housing to plan for tomorrow. Sherrena was already savvy to the story. Unbeknownst to Doreen, Tabatha had called Sherrena that morning to plead her client's case. If she got the Hinkstons into this mess, she would try to get them out. When it looked like Sherrena would agree to a stipulation, Tabatha flattered her by saying, “You are a gangster when it comes to your money!” It made Sherrena laugh with pride.

Sherrena drew up a stipulation agreement. If Doreen wanted the eviction dismissed, she would have to pay $400 extra next month and an additional $50 the following three months. Doreen signed the papers. Saving for their move would have to wait.

It was the day before Arleen had to be out, and she still hadn't received her welfare check. The family's caseworker at Wraparound had given the boys Christmas gifts. Arleen and their fathers did not. The boys didn't receive anything from their uncles or aunties either, not that they expected to. Arleen's three brothers and one sister had their own kids to worry about. One brother received SSI; another sold drugs and helped landlords repair properties; the other was out of work. Arleen's sister was trying to raise three kids on what she made as a school bus monitor.

Aunt Merva had money. She had held down steady jobs for as long as Arleen could remember and would bring her and her siblings food and gifts when they were children. “We wouldn't never see it,” Arleen recalled. Her mother and stepfather got first pickings. But Arleen was not going to call her aunt Merva for something as frivolous as Christmas gifts or even rent. Over the years, she had learned to ask her favorite aunt for help only during true emergencies, and evictions didn't qualify. If Arleen asked too often or for too much, she would “hear about it.” Merva might give her a lecture or, worse, stop returning her calls.

Sherrena assumed Arleen had “some sort of family to stay with.” But none of Arleen's family members had gone to court with her. None had offered to help her make rent. None had opened their homes to her and her boys. None had offered to help her find another place to live. “They just funny like that,” Arleen said. “My family don't help. I don't have no one to help me. I search around until I find somebody [who will].”

When Arleen answered the door, she found Sherrena standing on her porch with a woman in a tan winter coat. Sherrena, who had a habit of showing apartments before tenants had moved out, asked to come in.
1
She walked the prospective tenant through the apartment, stepping over Arleen's things. When the tour was over, Sherrena explained that Arleen had been evicted and would be gone by the next day.

The young woman asked where Arleen would go, and Arleen said she didn't know. The young woman took another look around, eyeing the tops of the walls as if judging the soundness of the foundation. She told Sherrena she'd take it. Then she looked at Arleen and told her that she and her boys could stay until they found a place. Arleen looked at Sherrena, who had raised her eyebrows at the woman. Sherrena said it was fine with her.

A hand had been extended, and Arleen needed to act quickly before anyone changed their mind. Arleen looked at the woman. She was well dressed in a full-length skirt and silk headwrap. Her face was warm, with saddle-brown skin that hued darker around her cheekbones. She spoke tenderly and wasn't “nasty,” foul smelling, or in tattered clothes. She did look young, and Arleen had overheard her say this would be her first apartment. But Arleen had also gleaned that the woman had come from a Tuesday Bible study. Maybe she wasn't the wild type. Arleen had so many questions, but it was either this option or a shelter. She only had to say “thank you” and the stress that had been consuming her since Christmas would slide off.

“Thank you,” Arleen said. She smiled, and the stranger smiled. She hugged the stranger, letting out a small cry. This made the stranger cry. Arleen was so relieved and grateful that she hugged Sherrena. Then she asked the stranger her name.
2

Crystal Mayberry moved into Thirteenth Street with only three garbage bags of clothes—no furniture, television, mattress, or microwave. Arleen didn't have much, but she had these things and suspected this was why Crystal had allowed her and the boys to stay. Arleen moved Jori and Jafaris into her bedroom. Crystal stored her things in the other bedroom and used it for privacy, but since she didn't have a bed, she slept on Arleen's love seat in the living room.

Arleen wasn't planning on staying long, so Crystal didn't ask her to split the rent. Instead, when her check arrived Arleen gave Crystal $150 and paid her phone and overdue electricity bill. She had enough left over to buy Jori a new pair of sneakers. That felt amazing.

Crystal was eighteen, younger than Arleen's oldest son. She had been born prematurely on a spring day in 1990 shortly after her pregnant mother was stabbed eleven times in the back during a robbery—the attack had induced labor. Both mother and daughter survived. It was not the first time Crystal's mother had been stabbed. For as far back as she could remember, Crystal's father had beat her mother. He smoked crack and so did her mother and so did her mother's mother.

Crystal was placed in foster care at age five and had bounced between dozens of homes. She lived with her aunt Rhoda for five years. Then Aunt Rhoda returned her. After that, the longest Crystal lived anywhere was eight months. When adolescence arrived, Crystal started getting into fights with other girls in the group homes. She picked up assault charges and a scar across her right cheek. People and their houses, pets, furniture, dishes—these came and went. Food was more stable, and Crystal began taking refuge in it.

When Crystal was sixteen, she stopped going to high school. When she turned seventeen, her caseworker began transitioning her out of the system. By that time, she had passed through more than twenty-five foster placements. Crystal was barred temporarily from low-income housing owing to her assault charge. But her caseworker arranged for her to move into an apartment subsidized by a child welfare agency. To keep the apartment, Crystal had to find a job. But she was not the least bit interested in pulling half-day shifts at Quad Graphics or dropping onion rings at Burger King. She submitted a single application. Plus, having been approved for SSI on account of bipolar disorder, Crystal thought that her $754 monthly check was more reliable than any job she could get. After eight months, the caseworker told Crystal she would have to leave the apartment. Crystal stepped out of foster care and into homelessness.
3
She slept at shelters and on the street. She lived briefly with her grandmother, then a woman from her church, then a cousin.

Arleen and Crystal met under peculiar circumstances, but they were engaging in a popular strategy poor people used to pay the bills and feed their children. Especially in the inner city, strangers brushed up against one another constantly—on the street, at job centers, in the welfare building—and found ways to ask for and offer help. Before she met Arleen, Crystal stayed a month with a woman she had met on a bus.
4

In the 1960s and 1970s, destitute families often relied on extended kin networks to get by. Poor black families were “immersed in a domestic web of a large number of kin and friends whom they [could] count on,” wrote the anthropologist Carol Stack in
All Our Kin
. Those entwined in such a web swapped goods and services on a daily basis. This did little to lift families out of poverty, but it was enough to keep them afloat.
5
But large-scale social transformations—the crack epidemic, the rise of the black middle class, and the prison boom among them—had frayed the family safety net in poor communities. So had state policies like Aid to Families with Dependent Children that sought to limit “kin dependence” by giving mothers who lived alone or with unrelated roommates a larger stipend than those who lived with relatives.
6

The family was no longer a reliable source of support for poor people. Middle-class kin often did not know how to help or did not want to.
7
And poor kin were often too poor or troubled or addicted to lend much of a hand. Legal entanglements got in the way too. This was why Crystal believed her aunt Rhoda refused to open her door to her after she aged out of foster care. Rhoda had caught a case for her son, his dope found in her apartment, and was serving two years on probation. This meant that law enforcement officers could inspect her apartment. Knowing this, Crystal asked if she could sleep outside on her porch. Rhoda said no.

It was next to impossible for people to survive deep poverty on their own.
8
If you could not rely on your family, you could reach out to strangers, make disposable ties. But it was a lot to ask of someone you barely knew.
9

A week after Crystal moved in, Arleen sat at the kitchen table, circling apartment listings in the newspaper and
RedBook
, skipping the addresses that included “background checks.” Jafaris played with a caulk gun Quentin had left behind. Arleen's plan was to move by the first of the month. “I don't want to live in the inner city ever again,” she said. That first meeting with Crystal had felt like a blessing; so Arleen decided to be picky. What she would love was a two-bedroom downtown apartment for under $525.

When Jori walked in the door, Arleen straightened her back. He dragged his backpack into the kitchen with his head bowed, wearing his new shoes. “You already know your teacher called me.” Arleen's voice was sharp. Jori tried to explain himself, but Arleen cut him off. “I don't want to hear it, 'cause it's always a problem at every school you go to.”

“Nah, 'cause he, he stepped on my shoes. I—I, I turned 'round, like, ‘You done stepped on mine.' And teacher gonna say, ‘What you say? What you say?' Everybody in that school, they say the teachers get slick with all the kids.”

“I ain't trying to hear no excuses.”

“Because you believing
nothing
,” Jori snapped back. “That teacher already runnin' on people! Even the teacher cuss at the kids.”

“All that what you doing, you can stop it,” Arleen yelled.

Jori sniffed and tried to stop himself from crying. Arleen told him to start his homework, and he sulked back to their bedroom.

Grabbing the newspaper, Arleen left to look for apartments, leaving her boys with Crystal. She headed to Teutonia Avenue, a main thoroughfare that cuts diagonally through Milwaukee's North Side, and considered the snow. Arleen didn't remember seeing this much snow since she was a child. On Teutonia, she began calling on rent signs. Some landlords didn't answer; others wanted more rent than she could give.

Arleen found herself in the neighborhood where her brother Martin lived. She spotted rent signs but decided to move on. “Martin think he can eat off us any dang minute,” she thought. Earlier, Arleen had looked in an area where Ger-Ger's father lived. She avoided that area too. “Those are just
too close
to him.”
10

Arleen was able to call on nine units before she answered her phone and heard Crystal screaming. “You gotta get the fuck out of my house tonight.
Tonight!
Get your shit and go
to-night
!”

Arleen stayed on the phone a few more seconds, then hung up. “This is too ridiculous,” she said to herself. Crystal had said something about Jori being disrespectful, but Arleen sensed Crystal really was saying,
I'm hungry
. There was no food in the house, and Crystal had been complaining. Buying food was never part of the bargain, but Crystal was broke and her food stamps cut off.
11
“As long as we have food, she fine,” Arleen thought. “But when we don't, it's like this.”

Arleen stopped at a nearby corner store and ordered a $99 meat deal, an inner-city staple consisting of forty-five pounds of chicken wings and legs, pork chops, neck bones, salt pork, pig feet, turkey wings, bacon, and other cuts. The man behind the counter speaking in Arabic on the phone threw in two sacks of potatoes for free. Checking out, Arleen added soda and potato chips, paying in food stamps. (She received $298 in stamps each month.) She paid for a pack of Newport 100s with cash.

When Arleen stepped back into the apartment, Jori immediately tried to explain his side of the story. “She talking about putting Jafaris out with no coat on, no shoes, no nothing!”

“Jafaris went outside on his own,” Crystal snapped back. “But Jori like, ‘
Bitch
, I'm gonna punch you in your shit!
Bitch
, I'm gonna do this.
Bitch
, I'm gonna do that.' ”

Arleen listened silently as a mother does when she comes upon fighting children. Jori was saying that he tried to stick up for Jafaris after Crystal threatened to put him outside. Crystal was saying that Jori exploded after she playfully locked them out of the house.

“Okay,” Arleen said when she had heard enough. “You ain't gonna do nothing to her,” she told Jori. Then she turned to Crystal. “And you're not gonna do anything to my child.” When Jori tried to speak, Arleen snapped, “And you can shut your mouth.”

“She not telling you the whole story!” Jori pleaded.

“Why would you call her bitches, Jori?” Arleen asked.

“She was callin' me out my name!”
12

“You know what?” Crystal yelled. “Yeah, I'm a bitch. But remember I'm that
same bitch
that opened up my door and let you stay here even though I didn't know you from Adam and Eve. I was that
same bitch
that let you in! The landlord didn't care. She don't have to care.”

“I don't know why you saying all this 'cause I know that,” Arleen responded, her voice assertive and clear. She sent Jori out for the groceries.

Crystal waved her phone in the air. “Whatever my mom says I should do, I'm gonna do, because that's too much disrespect.
Too
much!” Crystal was putting Arleen's fate in the hands of her “spiritual mom,” an older woman she met at a group home. She dialed the number, pressed the phone to her ear, and kept talking to Arleen. “If he'd just called me one bitch, that would've been fine. I'd have just chopped it off. But to be called a bitch for an hour straight?”

No one picked up. Crystal redialed.

Arleen walked to her room and began venting to the ceiling. “She always complaining there ain't no food. But it ain't my responsibility to feed nobody but my
kids
. Nobody!”

“I didn't ask you to buy
shit
for me,” Crystal yelled back. “Because please believe it,
ple-ase
. 'Cause I'm gonna have whatever I need. Whatever. Whether I have to sell some ass, Crystal Sherella Sherrod Mayberry is gonna get whatever she needs! What-ev-er!”