Doing the Best I Can. Kathryn Edin
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around a cluster of Catholic parishes that developed during the first half of the twentieth century. In 1985 two Elmwood Park families broke the unspoken neighborhood code by selling their homes to the “wrong” buyers, one to a black family and the other to an interracial couple. Local whites rioted and Wilson Goode, the city’s first black mayor, declared a state of emergency in an effort to quell the violence, but to little avail. Ultimately, though, the white-hot protest of residents like Jack’s parents could not prevent the neighborhood’s transformation: between 1990 and 2000 the white population was cut in half, with corresponding increases in nonwhites. Jack’s father, the Philadelphia police officer, and his mother, who worked for the school district, fled north along with other white civil servants from the southwest side, moving to the working-class enclave of Manayunk, with its tiny row homes perched precariously on steep streets reaching up to the bluffs above the Schuylkill River.
Jack rebelled at the move and was kicked out of the prestigious Roman Catholic High in his freshman year for cutting class, exhibiting a belligerent attitude toward authority figures, and bullying other students. His parents felt they had no choice but to enroll him in what they viewed as a second-best educational option, the local public school, Roxborough High. Given the relative ease of the classes, he breezed through with almost all As. Penn State was his next stop, the “party school” where he spent three years studying journalism and “polishing my drinking up to a fine art.” Like Will, Jack’s baby’s mother was just a “girl” he met by chance on a weekend visit home. “My grades weren’t great, but I was getting through. I was going back home every other weekend. . . . Met some girls, and in turn met my baby’s mother. Shortly afterwards, she became pregnant, so I quit school, got a job to support her.”
Jack elaborates, “I was coming home one day, and I was pulling up to my driveway, and my next-door neighbor, Michael, was out front with this guy and a girl, and he says, ‘What are you doing tonight?’ And I go, ‘Nothing.’ ‘Why don’t you hang out with us . . .?’ After a couple of drinks I told her that I thought she was gorgeous.” Marie was working at an eyeglass manufacturing plant when she happened upon Jack in the driveway. She was also a new bride of four months but was contemplating leaving her husband. “She was unhappy at the house where she was. She kind of married this guy—her words: ‘I never really liked him in the first place, but I wanted to get out of the house and have a baby and start a whole new life. . . .’ Then we met, and the next day we moved in together,” Jack recalls, of the move to a tiny apartment financed by Marie’s wages. According to Jack, Marie’s family is, “I hate to say this—kind of a lower-class white trash.” Jack comes from an “educated” family and is proud of the increase in status he provided her at the time. “I pulled her out of that situation.”
Eager to spend as much time as possible with Marie, Jack began leaving State College each Friday for the three-hour drive east. After three months of this arrangement, Marie turned up pregnant. We ask whether they’d discussed having children beforehand. “No, that was a subject we never talked about,” Jack replies. “But I knew she wanted to get pregnant because she didn’t want to use any protection.” For Jack, Marie’s failure to employ birth control is the equivalent of a bullhorn broadcasting her maternal desire and no direct conversation is necessary to establish that fact. When asked to describe how he felt about this, Jack simply says, “I was OK.” The two decided to terminate this pregnancy due to their ages—both were twenty at the time—but another pregnancy almost immediately followed. This time, both were adamantly opposed to an abortion. Jack then dropped out of college.
“We were made for each other,” Jack crows, recalling this time, evidencing more than the usual level of romantic feeling. Yet he admits, “I don’t think we’d agreed that we were going to stay together forever.” Marie had never bothered to get a divorce from her husband, yet once they decided to carry the pregnancy to term, Jack and Marie were firmly a couple who “though never married in the eyes of the law” nonetheless thought of themselves as a family.
ATTRACTION, AFFILIATION, CONCEPTION, BIRTH, AND BEYOND
For the middle class, pregnancy is usually the outgrowth of a relationship, not its impetus. It is a reflection of a couple’s decision to commit to each other, not the cause for commitment. On Philadelphia’s affluent Main Line or in well-heeled New Jersey suburbs like Cherry Hill and Haddonfield, shotgun marriage is largely a thing of the past.26 Unplanned pregnancies that occur before marriage are typically avoided or terminated. And while poor men like Byron often become fathers in their early twenties, their middle-class counterparts typically put off parenthood until their late twenties and beyond, and then almost always within the context of a relationship that is years in duration, one in which the signals of commitment—that is, marriage—are unequivocal. But in the neighborhoods we studied, with their lack of opportunities and many challenges, nothing seems to work the way it should. It is not so surprising, then, that this order of events is often turned upside down. Here, once a young “couple” becomes pregnant and decides to take the pregnancy to term (a decision generally ceded to the woman), the bond between the two typically coalesces into more of a “relationship,” though often in dramatic fits and starts.27
While pregnancy often serves as a galvanizing force that transforms “togetherness” into more of a “real relationship,” the birth of a baby can solidify a disadvantaged young man’s dedication to his partner even more, at least in the short term. Take the story of David Williams, a black thirty-year-old father of five, as an illustration. David grew up in Hunting Park, just one mile north of Will’s Fairhill home, across the street from the park the neighborhood is named for. Because his parents were still teenagers when he was born and were soon overwhelmed with the responsibilities of raising him and his three younger sisters, all close in age, David was brought up in his paternal grandmother’s home on Lycoming. This tidy row home built of native sparkly granite “shist” on the first level and with pristine aluminum siding on the second was further embellished by a two-story bay window on the side. The property was secured by a chain-link fence and the pincushion front lawn was filled with freshly trimmed shrubs and well-tended flowers. “My grandmother had a nice house,” he recalls. The neighborhood, now half-black and half-Hispanic, centers on the park, which is its jewel.
Hunting Park was still a desirable residential neighborhood when David was a child—a far cry from the industrial neighborhoods of Fairhill and West Kensington just to the south, known colloquially as the “Badlands” because of the drug activity there. But by the mid-1990s, when David hit his teens, the Badlands had clearly crept north and the jewel of a park had become little more than a haven for drug dealers. Its western boundary, Old York Road, with its imposing three-story Victorian twins and occasional grand stone singles, began to draw prostitutes, pimps, and street hustlers like a magnet.
The father of five children by three different women, David describes his current girlfriend, Winnie, as the “best” of his children’s mothers and refers to her as his common-law wife. Yet their relationship and entry into joint parenthood also had a haphazard quality. “When I was first with Winnie I had a girlfriend on the side too, Kathy,” David explains. “She’s somebody that I met at a Narcotics Anonymous meeting. We got close and we were helping each other with our addictions. One thing led to another, and we got intimate. Me and Winnie would get into an argument; she’d tell me to leave; I’d go stay with Kathy.” “So how did you end it with Kathy?” we ask. “Winnie got pregnant, and I had to do what was right, stand by Winnie.”
David may have been “together” with Winnie at the time his son Julian was conceived, but the relationship was hardly ideal—why else did he find himself so often with Kathy? It took a pregnancy to resolve the dilemma of which woman David should choose. Suddenly, because of an unplanned conception, his course was clear; he “did the right thing” and chose Winnie. The two then began to form a family around the promise of a shared child. As evidence of this decision, David left Hunting Park for South Philly, where Winnie had secured a unit in the Wilson Park Homes, a newly renovated mix of two-story family townhouses and high-rise buildings for the elderly just a stone’s throw south of Tasker Homes (from which Amin and his mother had escaped), where the two now live. He views the Wilson Park location as a big step downward in the local prestige hierarchy from his grandmother’s semidetached