There Are No Children Here (15 page)

The charge was armed robbery. Ann Mitchell had identified him from the Polaroid photograph taken earlier. He was also charged with theft of a video game at another tavern, a less serious offense than the armed robbery.

Ten

   
WELFARE RECIPIENTS call it “the interrogation room.” It is tucked away on the second floor of the local welfare office, an expansive brick building on Western Avenue, directly across the street from Henry Horner. In 1987, this Department of Public Aid office paid out $31,720,194 in benefits to 23,247 west side recipients of such grants as Aid to Families with Dependent Children, General Assistance, and Medicaid.

To reach the room, one must walk through the building’s front entrance, past the security guard, and up a flight of stairs.
Then, a quick right turn places you in the waiting area. It’s filled with plastic chairs—red, yellow, green, and brown—and decorated with posters on child abuse, nutrition, and teenage pregnancy. One announces the celebration of Illinois Arts Week for 1985, three years previous.

On this windy April day, when it alternately snowed and rained, the waiting area was half filled. LaJoe, dressed neatly in jeans and a blue denim coat, waited nervously. She eyed a poster in a nearby cubicle. As if to mock the poverty of the clients, it advertised a Bermuda vacation, portraying a smiling, wet couple reclining on a beach, the tide lapping at their feet.

“Jesse Thomas,” a caseworker announced. No one answered. “Jessseeee Thomas.” With each appeal, the caseworker drew out the name more, her voice rising with a growing impatience. “Jesssseeee Thomas?”

LaJoe began to think that if Jesse Thomas was, in fact, there, slumped in one of the plastic chairs, he would do well to keep his identity to himself. Finally, the caseworker shouted the name so loud that other caseworkers chuckled at their clearly frazzled colleague. A middle-aged, unkempt man, wearing a red wool cap, snapped up from his sleep.

“Who’s that?” the startled man asked.

“Jesse Thomas?” she curtly asked.

“Yeah, that’s me,” Thomas sheepishly conceded.

The caseworker shot him a look of rebuke. Others giggled as a chagrined Thomas shuffled off behind the woman into the bowels of the building. Don’t get the caseworkers angry, LaJoe thought. If they aren’t your allies, at the very least you want to make sure you don’t antagonize them.

It was clear that no one wanted to be here. Of the dozen or so people waiting, none looked up from their laps—except to catch a glimpse of Thomas. They all kept on their heavy coats, as if they were on their way out rather on their way in. LaJoe kept her denim jacket on, even during the hearing.

“LaJoe Rivers,” a caseworker finally called. LaJoe, clearly thinking of Jesse Thomas, punched her hand into the air, and then got up to follow the caseworker through a tangled maze of desks and dividers to the interrogation room. It was not one office but rather a bank of windowless rooms that lined the far
wall. It was where recipients were questioned about their eligibility.

A few months earlier, LaJoe had received notice from the Department of Public Aid that it had launched an investigation into her eligibility. She knew nothing more than that. The $931 she received each month, a combination of both welfare and food stamps, was her only income. She spent most of the money within three days of receiving it: nearly $400 for groceries, which she bought in one shopping trip; $80 for burial insurance; $122 for rent, and $8.00 to cash the check at the currency exchange. She used the remaining $300 or so to purchase clothes for the children, most of which had been placed on layaway. She planned it so that she finished the payments on the clothes three times a year: Easter, the beginning of school in September, and Christmas. She also used the remaining cash to buy small items that she couldn’t purchase with her food stamps, such as school supplies for the children, laundry detergent, hair grease, soap, and other cosmetics. The money also went to buy food as needed during the month. What remained had to last the family until the next check, four weeks later.

A handwritten sign adorned the door where LaJoe was led:

The room itself was small, perhaps eight feet by eight feet. The combination of its fluorescent lights, four strategically placed metal chairs—one facing the other three—and a large metal desk, devoid of papers, pencils, or books, gave the room the appearance of a place meant for interrogation. There was nothing to distract the inquisitor or accused, no windows or clocks to give any sense of location or time, no pictures or posters to give the room any personality.

LaJoe sat in the chair clearly meant for her, the one standing apart from the others. She folded her hands and waited: Someone brought in one more chair and lined it up with the other three. “All of them on one little old me?” she whispered to herself. Ten minutes later, three women and a man filed in. They did not introduce themselves.

The oldest of the three women, Edith Rogers, whose job it was to investigate welfare fraud, explained to LaJoe that she
was here for a “pre-appeal hearing” in which she would get a chance to hear the charges being brought against her and, if she desired, to respond to them. Another of the women then took over.

“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.