Doing the Best I Can. Kathryn Edin
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that pitted Andre and his younger brother against two other boys landed all four in the principal’s office. The school called in Andre’s paternal grandmother—the only adult on the emergency contact list who answered the phone—as part of the disciplinary process, which led to the following scene: “She came to the door and the other boys was like, ‘Grandma!’ And we was like, ‘Grandma?’ And she was like, ‘Ya’ll are brothers.’ We was like, ‘Brothers?’” After these experiences, Andre started to wonder, “Dag, how many kids do my dad got?” Contemptuous of his father’s behavior, Andre vowed to do right by his kids when he became a father. “I started saying, ‘If I ever have a child I refuse to let my child go without a father. I want to be there for my child, for her to know that she or he has a father that she can come to, and I’ll be there when she needs me.’ It’s just like I was inspired by my dad treating me wrong to take care of my kid.”
Fast forward two years. Jalissa is seventeen months old, and Andre is more involved with her than ever. In fact, Andre’s mother now has custody. Andre had visited Jalissa one afternoon when she was still an infant and had immediately seen that things were not right. “I happened to go over there one day, and she was lying on the couch. But I could have sworn that it was a doll baby ’cause she was real skinny and her head was big. Her head was big ’cause her body wasn’t at its right weight with her head. And I was like, ‘Oh no.’ I was like, ‘Where’s my baby?’ They was like, ‘Right there!’ I was like, ‘Where?’ They was like, ‘Right there on the couch.’ I said, ‘Give me my baby!’ I took her to the hospital and everything.” The hospital’s social worker reported Jalissa’s condition to the Department of Children and Families, who levied a charge of child neglect and removed the child from Sonya’s care. At Andre’s prompting, his mother went to court to seek custody.
In a tragic and ironic turn of events, just after Andre intervened to rescue Jalissa from Sonya’s neglect, his older brother Charlie was killed for coming between a child and his father. “Charlie had a girlfriend,” Andre tells us, “and he was taking care of her and her son. The son wasn’t his and the father found out that my brother was being a father to the little boy. He shot Charlie in the back.” Andre’s mother has struggled for years with a drug addiction (one reason why Andre, his mother, and his brother and sisters are doubled up with his aunt Charlene), and while she had managed to get clean before the shooting, Charlie’s murder has driven her back to her old habit. While his mother struggles for sobriety, Andre has dropped out of school to care for Jalissa. By all accounts, he is performing the role well. “Every time I take her to church, people say, ‘Oh Andre, you’re doing a beautiful job. That baby is gorgeous. You’re taking care of her; you’re doing her hair nice and stuff.’ I say, ‘Thank you.’ They’re like, ‘Andre I’m very proud of you’ and stuff like that. It feels good.”
When we moved into East Camden and began to study the lives of inner-city fathers, we were eager to learn how they reacted to the news of a pregnancy. Did they “hit” and then “run” like the stereotype exemplified by Timothy McSeed, or did they grit their teeth and determine to face up to their impending responsibilities? Both of our guesses proved wrong; most greeted the news with happiness, and some, like Andre, even with downright delight. But the “happy” reaction, and the complex realities that prompt it, is molded by men’s often-troubled childhoods and the challenging neighborhood environments in which they came of age. If one listens carefully enough, the happy reaction speaks volumes about these men’s highest hopes and deepest desires, and how these will animate men’s subsequent efforts.
Andre was one of the first young men we spoke with after arriving in Camden. We were stunned by his story. We had to ask ourselves whether this guy was for real. Although Andre had not set out to become a father—his liaison with Sonya was a brief and mostly unhappy one—when he hears the news of her pregnancy he is overjoyed. His mother and aunt are not so thrilled. After all, Andre is still in high school, has no job, lives in a neighborhood full of violence and crime, and has long since broken up with the girl who is about to become the mother of his child. Most Americans would probably agree with Andre’s elders that raising a baby under these circumstances is a profound mistake. Yet young men like Andre have their own reasons for welcoming these children into the world.
In our conversations with each father, we explored the story behind how he became a dad, some for the first time like Andre, and some for the second, third, or even the sixth time. We asked each father about every pregnancy he claimed responsibility for. We wanted to know if he had wanted to have a child right then, if and when he had used contraception, and if he had talked about having a baby with the woman he was with at the time. We asked him to think back to the moment when he first heard about the pregnancy and to describe what went through his mind. And we inquired about the reactions of both his and the mother’s family, as well as any advice these kin gave.
REACTIONS TO THE NEWS
Men’s responses ran the gamut—from vehement and panicked denials of paternity to loud shouts of joy—when they first heard about the pregnancy.1 Only a handful outright rejected the news. A pervasive sexual mistrust—the conviction that women couldn’t be trusted to be faithful—featured large among men who responded this way.2 Another handful said they were either shaken or scared or didn’t quite know what to think when they heard about the pregnancy.3 Craig, a black twenty-eight-year-old day laborer was just fifteen, like Andre, and had recently been kicked out of the tenth grade at Camden High when he learned that his girlfriend was pregnant. We ask if he had felt ready to become a father. “No, no, I am not going to sit here and lie to you. No, I was not ready at all.” Craig then says, “When can you actually say that you are ready to have a child at a young age?” Lee, a black forty-two-year-old, part-time construction worker was already twenty-four when his girlfriend conceived. Thinking back, he says his first reaction was, “Run!” explaining, “I didn’t have no job!” Several others say they were unsure how to respond because the woman in question kept changing her story about who the father was.
For one pregnancy in five, men say they responded by “accepting” the news, a generally positive reaction but one tempered with a sobering realization of their new responsibilities. When Marie told Jack, the thirty-three-year-old white father we met in chapter 1, that she was expecting he says he was “excited.” Yet, he admits, “I was a little scared.” When we asked what had him worried, Jack replied, “Responsibility. Staying home all the time instead of hanging out with my friends, the financial costs—diapers, diapers, diapers. Formula! Ow! But I was looking forward to having a little baby running around my house. That’s what I focused on.” Jack took the news in stride, dropped out of college, and got a job. Alex, age thirty-six, was raised in Camden by the oldest of his six siblings; when he was three his mother died and his father abandoned the family. This black father of three was eighteen when he learned his girlfriend was pregnant the first time. Alex’s initial emotion—delight—was quickly overtaken by a second: an almost overpowering sense of duty to his unborn child. “The first thing that hit my mind was, I did not want to be like my dad. This is the summer between the eleventh and twelfth grade, and I said, ‘look ain’t no sense in me going back to school. I need a job.’”
Unadulterated happiness—even joy—was by far the most common reaction though; more than half of all pregnancies were welcomed in this way without reservation.4 Byron Jones, age forty-six, whom we met in the previous chapter, is clear about his response to the news: “Shoot! I was happy, man!” Thirty-nine-year-old Amin Jenkins, also from chapter 1, says that during a brief interlude in his late teens when he was not incarcerated, he fathered a son with a woman he was not even together with at the time. Nonetheless, he tells us, he reacted with considerable enthusiasm to the news that this mere acquaintance was pregnant with his child. “Even though I was not in love, I wanted a son.” Many fathers were surprised that we would even ask them this question. “I was glad! It was no major obstacle!” says thirty-three-year-old Steven, a black father of three who works as a casual laborer for a city contractor, describing his reaction to the news that he was going to become a father at age twenty, as if the answer to our question was so apparent that it could be assumed.
In story after story,