Voices of the Poor Echo With Puzzlement, Pain--and Survival

Members of the underclass sometimes do not seem to realize how different their lives are from those of the mainstream.

Their inner-city neighborhoods are as isolated from middle America as the most remote and distant isle. Asked to tell about their lives, many of them reply matter-of-factly, naturally, without rancor, without embarrassment, without emotion, without self-pity.

At the Robert Taylor Homes, one of the nation’s most notorious public housing projects and the scene of more than one in 10 murders in Chicago, Willie Jean Nash, a heavyset, 30-year-old woman, talks about her five children. She and her youngest are taking part in a new preschool program at Beethoven Elementary School.

The five children have two fathers, but Nash, who is supported by welfare, never married either man. She does not oppose marriage as an institution.

“I’m waiting for the right man,” she says. “I’m waiting for someone who has a good job and is good to the kids, but they are hard to find.”

Many women in the ghetto say they have never had an abortion, but Nash is different. “I became pregnant when one of the little ones was just 2 months,” she says. “So I had an abortion. I didn’t like it. Now, I think five kids is enough.”

Although she lacks a high school diploma, she says, “I want to be a nurse.” When asked if she knows what kind of schooling she might need, she shrugs and shakes her head.

Throughout the country, social workers have a different perspective from most other Americans on poverty and the poor.

Sitting in her office at Grady Memorial Hospital here, Charlene Turner, a warm, open and assertive medical social worker, does not hesitate to say what is on her mind.

“I think in a country as rich as the United States, we should not have people who are homeless,” she says. “I think people who need work should get a job.”

She laughs and turns to hospital public relations officer James Driscoll: “Does that sound socialistic or something, Mr. Driscoll?” Without waiting for a reply, she adds: “We sort of think that nobody out there cares.”

Joseph Dallas, a 6-foot-6 Atlanta police detective, played basketball at Cumberland College in Kentucky. Now he bemoans the lack of a Police Athletic League--officers assigned to organize amateur sports leagues for youngsters and take them to watch professional baseball, football and basketball games for free. Atlanta once had such a group.

“The kids got a chance to see the police in a positive role, as opposed to coming in and arresting one of their parents or chasing everybody off of the corner,” Dallas says. But a budget problem a few years back forced the department to shift the officers from Athletic League duty to truancy duty. Now they hunt down students instead of taking them to ballgames.

While driving through the Techwood public housing project, Dallas, who is black, is asked whether some of the kids playing basketball there might be pushers. He shakes his head.

“Your drug dealer doesn’t play basketball,” he says. “He’s too busy. You are looking at boys who are looking for something to do. They are begging for things to do, but there’s nothing for them to do.”

When the poor muse about their lot, they are puzzled as to what went wrong. Doris Pryor, 40, is technically homeless. She lives in a Lutheran Church transitional apartment in Washington, D.C., while hoping to find permanent housing. She is a quiet woman with a costume-jewelry sense of style, and she has decorated the doorway of her living room with a curtain of big, colorful beads that must be parted to enter. She lives with one of her four sons and two grandchildren, twin 5-year-old girls.

She dropped out of the city’s Cardozo High School in the 11th grade after her son was born 22 years ago. The young man is now in jail.

“He was pushing drugs,” she says. “He didn’t want to work. He wanted to live the fast life.” He is the father of the twins. Their mother cannot care for them, Pryor says, because she is “strung out on drugs.” Pryor won custody of her granddaughters because “they were abused by my oldest son, their father.”

As a school dropout, she could not cope with bringing up her first child. “Maybe if I was a little more for my oldest son,” she says, “I could have done more. You see, my mother raised him until he was 16. He was a hot-headed son, so she took him off my hands to help me.”

The records of her other sons are spotty: One has a job with Wells Fargo, one is in a retreat for wayward boys in Florida and the youngest, a withdrawn 14-year-old, is enrolled in special education. “The past is just like something I’m trying to forget,” she says. “I’m trying to move ahead now.”

Jared Samples, a 21-year-old college graduate, grew up in the Perry Homes, a public housing project just outside Atlanta. He surprised the city by winning election to the council a few months ago. Though concerned that he is depriving the project of one of the few young blacks who can serve as a role model, he and his mother recently moved out of Perry Homes.

Samples is the son of a minister who moved into Perry Homes 30 years ago, when such housing was made available to people of modest income who were not on the welfare rolls. He attributes his success to a strong family background. His father, who died in 1984, had a small disability pension from service in World War II. His mother worked as an assistant in the Atlanta Housing Authority.

Samples calls it a misconception that everyone in public housing is on welfare. “A lot of people work,” he says.

He sometimes is pessimistic about the poverty that has long surrounded him. Perhaps, he thinks, it is time to give up on almost all but the youngest of the poor blacks. “This is an inhumane thought, I guess, or insensitivity,” he said as he showed the Perry Homes to visitors. “But you have to weigh what you have and weigh the decisions that have to be made in order to save the future of all.”

The logic of that course troubles him. “I think to myself, what if someone would have said that about me,” he explains. “I live in Perry Homes. What if someone had said, all right, let’s discard public housing because they’re not going to do anything with their lives and stuff, and we’re going to leave them sitting over there on the side? So I tell myself, having been in that same boat, I could have been discarded.”

The wisps of pessimism soon waft away, and Samples feels very good about the people around him.

“One thing about the blacks of America, poor blacks anyway, is that we’ve always been able to do a whole lot with just a little bit,” he says. “That’s where I feel we’re some of the most innovative and creative people that exist. We’ve come though some adverse conditions that, people say, ‘I don’t see how people could have lived through this, that, and the other.’

“They lived through it by creating and adapting to what was put before them. Yet and still, they were not comfortable, but they lived, and life is worth living and that’s it.”

For people who work with the young poor, comparisons to their own youngsters make the deprivation clear. “When I dropped out of college at one point in the 1960s, I didn’t have a dime,” says Elliott Currie, an influential UC Berkeley criminologist studying juvenile offenders. “But I went to work in the steel mills, and I was making really good money.

“It would not have been such a great life had I continued doing it,” he says, “but at the same time, I was making good bucks and I got myself an apartment and had all these things and, had I chosen to, I could have lived all right.

“You try and do the same thing now. You’ll get the job at Burger King instead of the job at the steel mills. It makes a lot of difference. You can’t get married and support anybody if you only work at Burger King. Believe me, the kids know it.”

Mary Jones, a 59-year-old Mississippi-born California resident, is bringing up her 9-year-old grandson and a 7-year-old granddaughter because their mother, a crack addict, neglected them.

“My daughter was raised very proper,” says the gentle Jones at a mental health clinic in Oakland, “and I was surprised when she went on drugs. She had a good home, and she was brought up in church. I lived a good life around here. That is what a parent should do for their kids.”

The grandchildren’s father was shot to death in the street by an unknown gunman in the aftermath of the 1985 Super Bowl game, she said, and after that, her daughter began using cocaine. “She had a crack house where the people went in and smoked crack,” Jones says, “and I think this affected the minds of the children.”

After legal battles with her daughter, Jones has custody of her grandchildren. “They were abused,” she says. “Not abused by beating, but they were neglected. She wasn’t feeding them, she wasn’t clothing them, they had no shoes on their feet, she wasn’t bathing them. Just mistreating them.”