Doing the Best I Can. Kathryn Edin
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says before adding wryly, “There wasn’t no child abuse back then!”
Trouble didn’t find Byron while he attended school down South. His teachers ruled their classrooms with an iron hand, and he thrived within this structure. “There wasn’t any such thing as getting suspended or getting a note home. They beat your butt. They didn’t spare the rod,” Byron says in an approving tone. But once the family moved back to Philadelphia, Byron was assigned to Sulzberger Middle School for ninth grade, where chaos reigned. He began cutting class with increasing frequency, a practice that accelerated when he entered the tenth grade at West Philadelphia High. “I didn’t get into a lot of trouble until I came back up here for ninth grade when I played hooky. Then in tenth grade I started hanging out with a worse crowd. I started drinking.”
It is tempting to speculate about what might have been different had Byron’s mother decided to stay in the South, surrounded by this exacting but supportive extended family. Did the sudden separation from kin rekindle Byron’s feelings of paternal abandonment? Was it the fact that his mother now had to work several jobs to support the family and seemed to have no time or patience for her children? Perhaps it was simply the added temptations of city life. Reliving that return, Byron quips, “The city didn’t have that much brotherly love, as they call it—you know what I mean?”
After showing up drunk at school on several occasions, Byron was expelled from West Philly High. The School District of Philadelphia then transferred him to Bartram High, which was taking on increasing numbers of black students in Kingsessing, an area of the city experiencing rapid racial turnover. Like in Grays Ferry, racial tensions in Kingsessing were palpable. It should be said, though, that Byron didn’t get into any really serious trouble during these years—he drank a little too much and at the wrong times, he once stole the tires off a car to put wheels on the junker of a friend, he went joyriding when an absentminded motorist left his keys in the door of his car, and he got into a knockdown, drag-out fight with four other youth in a convenience store—all of them intoxicated. But after the convenience store altercation (which earned him a night in jail), the antics of Byron’s peers escalated further. Byron was convinced he needed to get out of Philadelphia. With his mother’s blessing, he dropped out of Bartram in twelfth grade and joined the marines.
Discharged after four years of service, Byron took a job as a bookbinder, but the business soon closed. While searching for another job, he subsisted on revenue from an informal speakeasy he opened in the basement of the house he rented in Kingsessing, where he had gone to high school. It is there that he met Shari. “I had my little house. I used to sell a little wine, a little weed. She and one of her girlfriends, they’d come over. She was a lot younger than me. She said she was eighteen, but she wasn’t. When she came over to the house with her friend, me and my cousin was there, and I was like, ‘Dag. I like her, man!’”
Despite Byron’s initial attraction, he was “messing with” a number of other women and didn’t add Shari to his roster for a long time. Meanwhile, he found a job as a truck jockey for a suburban U-Haul franchise, servicing, delivering, and picking up trucks, and, after that business closed, as a caretaker at a downtown apartment building. After that job fell through—he was drinking too much to perform his duties reliably—he met his expenses through part-time cab work, putting in only enough hours to pay the bills and support the alcohol habit nurtured by four years in the military. He was selling weed on the side, often to fares who assumed a black cab driver would know where to find it.
Byron can instantly recall the date that he and Shari first had sex—April 14—and the clear memory hints that he imbues the event with some significance. A couple of months later Shari was pregnant, and while he was twenty-five, she was only sixteen. In Byron’s section of the city, remaining fatherless for that long merits an explanation. Men like Byron with less than a high school education have more than an even chance of becoming a father before that age.24 “I waited until I was twenty-five years old before I had my first child, but I always wanted to be a father,” Byron says, careful to emphasize that delaying fatherhood longer than most of his friends was not due to lack of desire—he just hadn’t had the opportunity yet.
Upon hearing the news that the woman they are “with” is expecting, men such as Byron are suddenly transformed. This part-time cab driver and sometime weed dealer almost immediately secured a city job in the sanitation department and quickly worked his way up to what he viewed as an exalted post on the back of a garbage truck. “I was doing the right thing,” he brags. “After I found out I had that baby coming, shoot! I was giving up my money to her! You know what I mean?” In addition to working more, many feel a sudden urge to clean up their personal lives. Byron, for example, stopped “messing around with certain people,” meaning other girls. Suddenly, his relationship with Shari was “all I wanted. Shoot! I was talking about getting married!” We ask how the pair got along during pregnancy. “We had a good time, man,” he recalls, grinning. “While she was pregnant, I couldn’t go nowhere. Shoot! She wanted me to do this, wanted me to do that. I was like a puppy anyway. I waited on her. I’d do certain things that she wanted me to do, getting pickles and ice cream. I didn’t mind at all. I was glad, man!” Note that Byron’s description of the relationship before and after conception stands in sharp contrast. Shari, once just another girl Byron found himself with, suddenly became “all I want”—a potential marriage partner, and Byron was her willing servant.
A “REAL” RELATIONSHIP
Getting a job and settling down are part of a deeper metamorphosis triggered by news of a pregnancy. Suddenly, what was mere “togetherness” is becoming transformed into something more: the “real relationship” that building a family requires, as the stories of Will Donnelly and Jack Day show. Will and Jack were raised in nearly all-white enclaves at opposite ends of the city—Will in Northern Liberties just west of Fishtown and Jack in Elmwood Park, located just below Byron’s Kingsessing neighborhood in Southwest Philly. Both come from lower middle-class white families—Will’s stepfather owns a used-car lot, while Jack’s father works as a cop. In childhood, both saw their neighborhoods change almost overnight from white to black, though Will’s family stayed while Jack’s fled. Both dropped out of school to help support their pregnant girlfriends, Will at sixteen and Jack at twenty-one. Finally, both experienced relational transformation after conceiving children within haphazard unions and encouraged their girlfriends to go ahead and have the babies. Rather than cutting and running at the news of a pregnancy, or denying paternity, the news galvanized both of these tenuous unions into something that looked more like a “real relationship.”
Will now lives in the Fairhill section of North Philadelphia, has four children by the same woman, and works as a part-time mechanic and a boxing instructor. Fairhill is a beleaguered section of the city just two neighborhoods north of his childhood home. Its only real claim to fame is that the Fairhill cemetery contains the remains of several famous Philadelphians, including Quaker abolitionist and proponent of women’s rights Lucretia Mott, and Robert Purvis, the unofficial “president” of the Underground Railroad. Fairhill is overwhelmingly poor—more than 50 percent—and largely Hispanic and black; only 2 percent of the neighborhoods’ residents are white. Yet Will, like the handful of other whites living there, says he was drawn by the cheap home prices—the median value for owner-occupied units is fifteen thousand dollars less than in the cheapest majority-white neighborhood in the city—which allowed Will to purchase the apartment where he lives despite marginal employment.25
Will recounts his relationship with Lori this way: “I had just come out of a juvenile institution. I think I just turned seventeen . . . and I started going with her friend. And then one day she came around and we started talking, then I went with her and left her friend, and me and her got together and started having kids together and then we got closer and closer. Then we started living together.” Will’s story, like Byron’s, reveals a typical sequence of events: attraction and a moderate level of couple cohesion produce a pregnancy that is taken to term. For Will and most others, it is at this point that the real relationship commences. Getting “closer and closer” and then “living together” are things Will and his peers often accomplish only after they conceive children and