Rachel and Her Children (9 page)

Mrs. Allesandro, however, is not here tonight. Her son is on his own—a skeleton of hunger, disappointment, fear. I look at him, at the two girls, asleep, and at the boy—awake, alert. The boy’s persistent gaze unsettles me. I ask him: “Are you sleepy?” He just shakes his head. His father is too proud to tell me that the boy is hungry. I feel embarrassed that it’s taken me so long to ask. At my request he opens the refrigerator door. There is one packaged dinner, smuggled out of the lunch program. “There was something wrong with it,” he says. It has a rancid smell. “It’s spoiled.” There’s a gallon tin of peanut butter, two part-empty jars of apple sauce, some hardened bread. That’s it.

Mr. Allesandro takes the $20 that I hand him to the corner store. Christopher sits up halfway and talks with me. He lists for me the ten largest cities of America. I ask him whether he likes school. He does not give the usual perfunctory affirmative response. “I hate it,” Christopher says. I ask him what he does for fun. He plays ball on the sidewalk at the corner of the street across from the hotel.

“Is there room to play ball on the sidewalk?”

He explains: “We play against the building of the bank—against the wall.”

He falls asleep after I think of giving him a candy bar. His father returns in twenty minutes with a box of Kellogg’s Special K, a gallon of juice, half-gallon of milk, a loaf of bread, a dozen eggs, a package of sausages, a roll of toilet paper. He wakes his son. The boy has a bowl of cereal with milk. His father stands before the counter where he placed the food. He looks like a man who has been admitted to an elegant buffet.

Is Mr. Allesandro laden with anxiety? Is Christopher depleted, sick, exhausted? Yes, I suppose both statements are correct. Are they candidates for psychiatric care? Perhaps they are; but I should think a more important observation is that they are starving.

A few months after my evening with the Allesandros, President Reagan meets a group of high school students from New York. Between government help and private charity, he says, “I don’t believe there is anyone that is going hungry in America simply by reason of denial….” The president says there is a problem of “people not knowing where or how to get this help.” This is what he also says of those who can’t find space in public housing that he has stopped building.

His former counselor and now attorney general, Edwin Meese, concedes that people have been turning to soup kitchens but refuses to accept that they are in real need. They go to soup kitchens “because the food is free,” he says, and adds, “that’s easier than paying for it.”

Marian Wright Edelman of the Children’s Defense Fund makes this interesting calculation: If Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger were to give up just a single Pentagon budget item, that which pays for him to have a private dining room, one million low-income schoolchildren could get back their morning snack—a snack denied them by administration cuts.

Hundreds of miles from Christopher’s bedroom in the Martinique, a reporter describes an underground limestone cave near Kansas City: the largest surplus-food repository in the nation. In this cave and in some other large facilities, in the winter of 1986, the government was storing some 2 billion pounds of surplus food. To a child like Christopher, the vision of millions of pounds of milk and cheese and butter secreted in limestone caves might seem beyond belief. Storage of this surplus food costs taxpayers $1 million a day.

Getting surplus food from limestone caves to children’s tables calls for modest but essential transportation costs. In an extraordinary action, termed illegal by the General Accounting Office, the president deferred funds allocated by the Congress for transporting food to homeless people. The sum involved, $28 million, is a small amount beside the $365 million spent to store this food in limestone caves and other warehouse areas. The withholding of such funds may possibly make sense to an economist. I do not know whether it would make much sense to Christopher.

November 1986: I’m in New York and visit with the Allesandros. Grandma’s back. She says her health is good. But Christopher looks frighteningly thin. Food was scarce before. The situation’s worsened since I was here last. Families in the homeless shelters of New York have been cut back on their food-stamp allocations. The White House has decided to consider money paid for rental to the hotel owners as a part of family income. By this standard, families in the Martinique are very rich. “Tightening of eligibility requirements” has an abstract sound in Washington. On the twelfth floor of the Martinique what does it mean?

I study the computerized receipts that Mr. Allesandro has received. In June, his food-stamp allocation was $145. In August, the first stage in government reductions lowered this to $65. In October: $50. As of December it will be $33.

Mrs. Allesandro does not speak in ambiguities about the lives of her grandchildren. I ask her what the cuts will mean. “They mean,” she says, “that we aren’t going to eat.” New York announces it will help make up the difference but, at the time I visit, no supplemental restaurant allowances have been received.

M
r. Allesandro is too shaken to attempt to hide his frailties from me. He tells me: “When you’re running scared you do some things you’d rather not …” He does not regard himself as saint or martyr. There are virtues, feelings, and commitments he has forfeited during this long ordeal. Love is not one of them. His desperation for his son and daughters and his adoration of his mother are as solid and authentic as the marble pillars of the Martinique Hotel. The authenticity of love deserves some mention in discussion of the homeless.

Houses can be built without a number of ingredients that other ages viewed as indispensable. Acrylics, plastics, and aluminum may substitute for every substance known to nature. Parental love cannot be synthesized. Even the most earnest and methodical foster care demonstrates the limits of synthetic tenderness and surrogate emotion. So it seems of keen importance to consider any ways, and
every
way, by which a family, splintered, jolted, and imperiled though it be by loss of home and subsequent detention in a building like the Martinique, may nonetheless be given every possible incentive to remain together.

The inclination to judge harshly the behavior of a parent under formidable stress seems to be much stronger than the willingness to castigate the policies that undermine the competence and ingenuity of many of these people in the first place.

“Men can be unequal in their needs, in their honor, in their possessions,” writes historian Michael Ignatieff, “but also in their rights to judge others.” The king’s ultimate inequality, he says, “is that he is never judged.” An entire industry of scholarship and public policy exists to judge the failing or defective parent; if we listen to some of these parents carefully we may be no less concerned by their impaired abilities, but we may be less judgmental or, if we remain compelled to judge, we may redirect our energies in more appropriate directions.

New Year’s Eve.

She stalks into the room. Her eyes are reddened and her clothes in disarray. She wears a wrinkled and translucent nightgown. On her feet: red woolen stockings. At her throat: a crucifix. Over her shoulders is a dark and heavy robe. Nothing I have learned in the past week prepares me for this apparition.

She cries. She weeps. She paces left and right and back and forth. Pivoting and turning suddenly to face me. Glaring straight into my eyes. A sudden halt. She looks up toward the cracked and yellowish ceiling of the room. Her children stand around her in a circle. Two little girls. A frightened boy. They stare at her, as I do, as her arms
reach out—for what? They snap like snakes and coil back. Her hair is gray—a stiff and brushlike Afro.

Angelina is twelve years old, Stephen is eleven, Erica is nine. The youngest child, eleven months, is sitting on the floor. A neighbor’s child, six years old, sits in my lap and leans her head against my chest; she holds her arms around my neck. Her name or nickname (I do not know which) is Raisin. When she likes she puts her fingers on my mouth and interrupts the conversation with a tremolo of rapid words. There are two rooms. Rachel disappears into the second room, then returns and stands, uneasy, by the door.

Angie: “Ever since August we been livin’ here. The room is either very hot or freezin’ cold. When it be hot outside it’s hot in here. When it be cold outside we have no heat. We used to live with my aunt but then it got too crowded there so we moved out. We went to welfare and they sent us to the shelter. Then they shipped us to Manhattan. I’m scared of the elevators. ’Fraid they be stuck. I take the stairs.

Raisin: “Elevator might fall down and you would die.”

Rachel: “It’s unfair for them to be here in this room. They be yellin’. Lots of times I’m goin’ to walk out. Walk out on the street and give it up. No, I don’t do it. BCW [Bureau of Child Welfare] come to take the children. So I make them stay inside. Once they walk outside that door they are in danger.”

Angie: “I had a friend Yoki. They was tryin’ to beat her. I said: ‘Leave her.’ They began to chase me. We was runnin’ to the door. So we was runnin’. I get to the door. The door was stuck. I hit my eye and it began to bleed. So I came home and washed the blood. Me and my friends sat up all night and prayed. Prayin’ for me. ‘Dear Lord,
can you please help me with my eye? If you do I promise to behave.’ I was askin’ God why did this happen. I wish someone in New York could help us. Put all of the money that we have together and we buy a building. Two or three rooms for every family. Everybody have a kitchen. Way it is, you frightened all the time. I think this world is coming to the end.”

Stephen: “This city is rich.”

Angie: “Surely is!”

Erica: “City and welfare, they got something goin’. Pay $3,000 every month to stay in these here rooms …”

Rachel: “I believe the City Hall got something goin’ here. Gettin’ a cut. They got to be. My children, they be treated like chess pieces. Send all of that money off to Africa? You hear that song? They’re not thinking about people starvin’ here in the United States. I was thinkin’: Get my kids and all the other children here to sing, ‘We are the world. We live here too.’ How come do you care so much for people you can’t see? Ain’t we the world? Ain’t we a piece of it? We are so close they be afraid to see. Give us a shot at something. We are something! Ain’t we
something?
I’m depressed. But we are
something!
People in America don’t want to see.”

Angie: “Christmas is sad for everyone. We have our toys. That’s not the reason why. They givin’ you toys and that do help. I would rather that we have a place to be.”

Erica: “I wrote a letter to Santa Claus. Santa say that he don’t have the change.”

Raisin: “I saw Santa on the street. Then I saw Santa on another street. I pulled his beard and he said something nasty.”

Angie: “There’s one thing I ask: a home to be in with my mother. That was my only wish for Christmas. But it could not be.”

Raisin: “I saw Mr. Water Bug under my mother’s bed. Mr. Rat be livin’ with us too.”

Angie: “It’s so cold right now you got to use the hot plate. Plug it in so you be warm. You need to have a hot plate. Are you goin’ to live on cold bologna all your life?”

Raisin: “Mr. Rat came in my baby sister’s crib and bit her. Nobody felt sorry for my sister. Then I couldn’t go to sleep. I started crying. All of a sudden I pray and went to sleep and then I woke up in the mornin’, make my bed, and took a bath, and ate, and went to school. So I came back and did my homework. And all of a sudden there was something
irritatin’
at my hand. I looked out the window and the moon was goin’ up. And then—I had a dream. I went to sleep and I was dreamin’ and I dreamed about a witch that bit me. I felt
dead
. When I woke back up I had a headache.”

Angie: “School is bad for me. I feel ashamed. They know we’re not the same. My teacher do not treat us all the same. They know which children live in the hotel.”

Erica: “My teacher isn’t like that. She treats all of us the same. We all get smacked. We all get punished the same way.”

Stephen: “I’m in sixth grade. When I am a grown-up I be a computer.”

Erica: “You’re in the fifth. You lie.”

Raisin: “When I grow up I want to be multiplication and subtraction and division.”

Angie: “Last week a drug addict tried to stab me. With an ice pick. Tried to stab my mother too. Older girls was botherin’ us. They try to make us fight. We don’t fight. We don’t start fires. They just pickin’ on us. We ran home and got our mother. They ran home and got their mother.”

Raisin: “Those girls upstairs on the ninth floor, they be bad. They sellin’ crack.”

Erica: “Upstairs, ninth floor, nine-o-five, they sellin’ crack.”

Raisin: “A man was selling something on the street. He had some reefers on him and the po-lice caught him and they took him to the jail. You know where the junkies put the crack? Put the crack inside the pipe. Smoke it like that. They take a torch and burn the pipe and put it in their mouth. They go like this.” (Puffs.)

I ask: “Why do they do it?”

Erica: “Feel good! Hey! Make you feel fine!”

Angie: “This girl I know lives in a room where they sell drugs. One day she asks us do we want a puff. So we said: ‘No. My mother doesn’t let us do it.’ One day I was walkin’ in the hall. This man asked me do I want some stuff. He said: ‘Do you want some?’ I said no and I ran home.”

Raisin: “One day my brother found these two big plastic bags inside his teddy bear. Po-lice came up to my room and took that teddy bear.” She’s interrupted. “I ain’t finished! And they took it. One day we was by my uncle’s car and this man came and he said: ‘Do you want some?’ We said no. We told my uncle and he went and found the man and he ran to the bar and went into the women’s bathroom in the bar. And so we left.”

Angie: “I think this world is ending. Yes. Ending. Everybody in this city killin’ on each other. Countries killin’ on each other. Why can’t people learn to stick together? It’s no use to fightin’. Fightin’ over nothin’. What they fightin’ for? A flag! I don’t know what we are fightin’ for. President Reagan wants to put the rockets on the moon. What’s he doin’ messin’ with the moon? If God wanted man and woman on the moon He would of put us there. They should send a camera to the moon and feed the people here on earth. Don’t go messin’ there with human beings. Use that money to build houses. Grow food! Buy seeds! Weave cloth! Give it to the people in America!”