Rachel and Her Children (19 page)

It is easier to be impatient than to live with sadness. Finding fault with Holly may divert us from the thought of what we might have done—or what the people we elect to office should have done—to have prevented this disaster. It may also be a way of distancing ourselves: “She’s not like us. This nightmare could not happen in our lives or to our children. There must be something wrong with her—some
flaw we do not share.” In this way perhaps, we find some consolation for the grief we feel and some assurance that our own lives are secure.

A middle-class woman who sees a homeless woman on the street in New York City shares her fears with a psychiatrist. “If I don’t do something about my life,” she says, “I could be like that. Who would take care of me?” Another response, says the doctor, is an inability to cry: “They say, ‘What’s wrong with me that I could walk past these people and feel nothing? How cold have I become?’”

Many of us wrestle with this question.

Is Holly’s story unique in any sense? If it is, then it makes sense to ask hard questions about Holly. If it is not, then it would make more sense to ask hard questions of ourselves.

“Some 800 homeless infants” in New York City, according to documentation published by the Coalition for the Homeless in 1985, “routinely go without sufficient food, cribs, health care, and diapers.” The lives of these infants, writes the coalition, “are put at risk because of the reckless negligence” of welfare personnel. The coalition states that “high-risk pregnant women” are routinely sent to barracks shelters, others to EAUs: “Coalition monitors, making sporadic random checks, found eight women in their
ninth
month of pregnancy sleeping in EAUs…. Two women denied shelter began having labor contractions at the EAU.

The coalition is an advocacy group and, for this reason, may be viewed as partisan in its defense of homeless children. The New York City Council is not an advocacy group.
A letter dated April 30, 1984, written by Carol Bellamy—president of the city council at the time—notes that social work departments at six of the city’s public
hospitals indicate that they would discharge women with newborns to barracks shelters or hotels “only as a last resort”—but that frequently they have no choice. “In those cases, they generally referred the families to Special Services for Children as potential abuse and neglect cases because of the substandard housing.”

What this seems to mean is that an option open to the city is to charge a mother with abuse of her own child if it sends them to an unsafe shelter. Who, then, has abused the child?

The
New York Times
(1984) reports that “mothers and young children” have been sleeping “on chairs, counters, and floors” of city welfare offices. A year later, the city concedes, about 2,000 children have been forced to sleep in EAUs during a single three-month span.

Some of these situations have improved. Others have not. In September 1986, the Legal Aid Society was forced to go to court to stop the city from assigning pregnant women and infants less than six months old to barracks shelters. One plaintiff in the case, according to court papers, had suffered a miscarriage in the communal bathroom of a shelter in the Bronx. The woman had asked that she be transferred from the shelter when she learned that she was pregnant—a request that was apparently ignored. On the night that she miscarried, she lay on the bathroom floor for half an hour.

According to the
New York Times
, a state regulation forbids the referral of pregnant women to such shelters.

There are thousands of poor women who could tell us similar stories. If we try, I suppose that we can find a flaw in every one of them. But all the flaws that we may find in Holly—or her counterparts in Washington, Chicago, or wherever homeless women wander in America—cannot justify the larger flaw in national priorities. Devastated mothers
may well blur some details or confuse them. Infant mortality figures do not lie.

“The first thing that has to be said about the homelessness problem,” writes Thomas J. Main in the
New York Times
, “is that solving it is going to take time. There are no quick fixes….” The author criticizes those who wish “to improve allegedly ‘damaging’ conditions” in the shelters. His concern is less with the conditions in the shelters than with those who live there. “Homeless families,” he writes, “seem to have greater behavioral and psychological problems than similar nonhomeless families.” He speculates that “such families” are “less able to adapt” to a tight housing market than the rest of us.

This is correct. Families whose welfare rental limit is $270 in New York City do not adapt well to a market where the lowest rents begin around $400. Heads of families not on welfare, earning minimum wages of $560, don’t adapt successfully to rentals that consume three quarters of their income.

“Can anything be done?” The writer answers that we need more research: “Such work could do for the study of homelessness what the development of the poverty line did for the study of poverty; it does not solve the problem but it imposes a sorely needed discipline … on the discussion.”

What does it do for someone with no home?

We may wonder if the author would propose such patience if he were, just once, in Holly’s situation. We know, of course, that he would not be patient in that case; he would act with the dispatch of any frightened parent. But the distance he has already created by his clinical finality makes it impossible for him to see himself in Holly’s situation. This is one reason why I think we ought to view
the use of psychiatric labels, especially by those who aren’t physicians, with considerable caution. It can too easily create a distance that does more than to alleviate our fears; it may at length permit us to be rather cruel and, even worse, a little smug and comfortable in our detachment.

Labeling a homeless woman as defective (“less able to adapt,” to use his words) also leads us to avoid some of the documented causes of her suffering.

“A Cold-Blooded Assault on Poor People.” This headline in the
Washington Post
precedes an article by William Raspberry. “Programs for low-income Americans,” he writes, represent “just over a tenth of the federal budget,” but are “ticketed” for one third of the 1987 Reagan budget cuts. “Are appropriations for low-income housing so excessively generous,” he asks, “that it makes sense to cut them by a third?” Do indigent people waste so many of our dollars on “imagined illness,” he asks, “that a $20 billion cut in Medicaid over the next five years” is justified? “Do housing repair grants, rural housing programs, emergency food assistance, legal services, and the Work Incentive Program” represent such foolishly misguided policies that “they should be terminated altogether, as the president proposes?”

The essay by Mr. Main speaks of the “behavioral and psychological problems” of the homeless. What of the behavioral peculiarities of those who place a child in a “pigpen” a few minutes from the White House? What of the behavior of a president who tells us that there is no hunger in the land, while children die of diarrhea caused by malnutrition, or because their mothers were malnourished—both the consequence, at least in part, of policies he has advanced?

“A continuously rising level of child abuse and homelessness,” writes New York City Council President Andrew Stein, “is not a force of nature….” This is a point he is compelled to make because we tend so easily to speak of
homelessness as an unauthored act: something sad, perhaps the fault of those who have no homes, more likely that of chance. Homelessness “happens,” like a flood or fire or a devastating storm—what legal documents, insurance forms, might call “an act of God.” But homelessness is not an act of God. It is an act of man. It is done by people like ourselves. It is done to people such as Benjamin.

Phrases such as “no quick fix” do more than to dilute a sense of urgency; they also console us with the incorrect impression that we are, no matter with what hesitation, moving in the right direction. All available statistics make it clear that this is not the case.

“Federal housing assistance programs have been cut a full 64 percent since 1980,” according to Manhattan Borough President David Dinkins in a study released in March of 1987, “from $32 billion to $9 billion in the current fiscal year.”

In 1986, the Department of Housing and Urban Development subsidized construction of only 25,000 housing units nationwide. When Gerald Ford was president, 200,000 units were constructed. Under President Carter, 300,000 units were constructed.

“For each dollar authorized for national defense in 1980, nineteen cents were authorized for subsidized housing programs,” according to another recent study. In 1984, only
three
cents were authorized for housing for each military dollar. This is neither a “quick fix” nor a “slow fix.” It is an aggressive fix against the life and health of undefended children.

Mr. Stein poses a challenging scenario. “Imagine the mayor of New York calling an urgent news conference,” he writes, “to announce that the crisis of the city’s poor children had reached such proportions that he was mobilizing the city’s talents for a massive rescue effort….” Some such drastic action, he asserts, is warranted “because our city is
threatened by the spreading blight of a poverty even crueler in some ways than that of the Great Depression half a century ago.”

We hear this voice of urgency too rarely. Instead, we are told that all these children we have seen—those who cannot concentrate in school because they are too hungry and must rest their heads against their desks to stifle stomach pains, those who sleep in “pigpens,” those who travel sixty miles twice a day to glean some bit of education from a school at which they will arrive too late for breakfast and may find themselves denied a lunch because of presidential cuts—must wait a little while and be patient and accept the fact that there is “no quick fix” for those who are too young to vote and whose defeated parents have no lobbyists in Washington or City Hall.

There is a degree of cruelty at stake when those who aren’t in pain assume the privilege to counsel moderation in addressing the despair of those who are, or when those who have resources to assuage such pain urge us to be patient in denial of such blessings to the poor. It is still more cruel when those who make such judgments are, as they are bound to be, articulate adults and those who are denied are very frail and very small and very young.

No quick fix, the essayist decrees, for Laura’s children. No quick fix for Raisin or for Doby or for Angelina. There is no quick fix for those we do not see as having human claims upon us. We move fast for those we love, more patiently for those we neither love nor know nor feel that
we
could ever be. This is the great danger in the clinical detachment that allows us to assign the destitute their labels.

The debate persists as to how many homeless people are the former patients of large mental hospitals, deinstitutionalized in the 1970s. Many homeless
individuals
may have been residents of such institutions. In cities like New
York, however, where nearly half the homeless people are small children, with an average age of six, such suppositions obviously make little sense. Six-year-olds were not deinstitutionalized before their birth. Their parents, with an average age of twenty-seven, are not likely to have been the residents of mental hospitals when they were still teenagers. But there is a reason for the repetition of such arguments in face of countervailing facts. In a sense, when we refer to “institutions”—those from which we think some of the homeless come, those to which we think they ought to be consigned—we are creating a new institution of our own: the abstract institution of an airtight capsule (“underclass,” “behavioral problem,” “nonadaptive,” or “psychotic”) that will not allow their lives to touch our own. Few decent people or responsible physicians wish to do this; but the risk is there. The homeless are a nightmare. Holly’s story is a nightmare. It is natural to fear and try to banish nightmares. It is not natural to try to banish human beings.

The distancing we have observed receives its most extreme expression in the use of language such as “undeserving.” This is, in some sense, the ultimate act of disaffiliation and the most decisive means of placing all these families and their children in a category where they can’t intrude upon our dreams.

A classic nineteenth-century distinction draws the line between two categories of the poor: those who are “fit” to survive, and those who aren’t. Of the latter, Herbert Spencer wrote: “The whole effort of nature is to get rid of such, to clear the world of them and make room for better.” Few people would use such words today; but several prominent authors do accept the basic notion of a line between two categories of the indigent: those who merit something in the way of mercy or forgiveness, those who don’t. If such a distinction may be made at all without some injury to our humanity, we need at least to ask if
those who fall into the former category (the “deserving”) have deserved—and, if so, how they have deserved—precisely the abysmal treatment they receive.

Holly and Benjamin presumably are two of the deserving. Annie Harrington and Gwen and Mr. Allesandro and their children may also be regarded as deserving. If they are, I should think that they deserve a little better than they get. It is true that they receive “a free lunch,” holidays and weekends not included. They also get “a free ride” if they can survive for thirty months within the Martinique Hotel in order to be eligible to use a public van to search the city for apartments. This much is permitted the deserving. What, then, of the ones who are the less deserving? The deserving group receives so little that it isn’t easy to imagine what remains to be denied. Life itself, perhaps, may be denied. That would then become the final penalty for failure.

Even if some of us feel comfortable with such extreme distinctions and are not embarrassed to wield quite so sharp a blade, will we not feel hesitant to let that blade fall also on the child of the adult who has been found lacking? For an answer to this question, we may listen to the words of a conservative author named Charles Murray. “The notion,” he writes, is to reduce the reproduction of poor children by intensifying the unpleasantness of circumstances that precede their birth, rendering “unwed parenthood,” in Murray’s words, “contemptible.” But how does one apply this stigma to the parent without savaging the child too? Undesirable existence is the child of contemptible conception. One word of contagion necessarily entails the next. The social worker does not enter into dialogue with Benjamin but with his mother. If the mother is contaminated in his eyes, the child’s likelihood of finding a benign reception in the world is undermined as well.