Doing the Best I Can. Kathryn Edin
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elite is especially wide. Here, the statistics are stunning: only about 6 percent of college-educated mothers’ births are nonmarital versus 60 percent of those of high school dropouts.15
In the wake of this dramatic increase in so-called fatherless families, public outrage has grown and policy makers have responded. In the 1960s and 1970s liberals worked to help supplement the incomes of single mothers, who were disproportionately poor, while conservatives balked, believing this would only reward those who put motherhood before marriage and would thus lead to more such families. Meanwhile, surly taxpayers increasingly demanded answers as to why their hard-earned dollars were going to support what many saw as an immoral lifestyle choice and not an unavoidable hardship. This taxpayer sentiment fueled Ronald Reagan’s efforts to sharply curtail welfare benefits in the 1980s and prompted Bill Clinton’s promise to “end welfare as we know it,” which he fulfilled in 1996.
Meanwhile, scholars have responded to the trend by devoting a huge amount of attention to studying single-parent families, detailing the struggles of the parents and documenting the deleterious effects on the children. These studies have offered the American public a wealth of knowledge about the lives of the mothers and their progeny, yet they have told us next to nothing about the fathers of these children.16 Part of the problem is that most surveys have provided very little systematic information from which to draw any kind of representative picture.17 Unwed fathers’ often-tenuous connections to households make them hard to find, and many refuse to admit to survey researchers that they have fathered children. Thus, vast numbers have been invisible to even the largest, most carefully conducted studies.18
The conventional wisdom spun by pundits and public intellectuals across the political spectrum blames the significant difficulties that so many children born to unwed parents face—poor performance in school, teen pregnancy and low school-completion rates, criminal behavior, and difficulty securing a steady job—on their fathers’ failure to care. The question that first prompted our multiyear exploration into the lives of inner-city, unmarried fathers is whether this is, in fact, the case.
CAMDEN AND THE PHILADELPHIA METROPOLITAN AREA
In the following chapters we go beyond the stereotyped portrayals of men like Timothy McSeed and delve deep into the lives of 110 white and black inner-city fathers. Each of the fathers whose stories we tell also hails from the urban core—in our case, Camden, New Jersey, and its sister city across the Delaware River, Philadelphia. Like McSeed’s Newark, these cities have some of the highest rates of nonmarital childbearing in the country. Roughly six in ten children in Philadelphia and an even greater percentage in Camden—nearly three out of four—are now born outside of marriage.
We argue that to truly comprehend unmarried fatherhood, it is not sufficient to focus on the men alone. Understanding their environments—the neighborhood contexts and the histories of the urban areas they are embedded in—is also essential. The streets of Camden and Philadelphia are such a critical part of the story, so we begin with a description of the neighborhoods we lived and worked in to gather the stories of the fathers whose lives we chronicle. At the outset of our study, we loaded a Ryder truck and moved into the Rosedale neighborhood of East Camden.19 We were to take up part-time residence in a tiny apartment carved from the first floor of a clapboard Victorian-era home on Thirty-Sixth Street near Westfield Avenue.
The two-room apartment became our headquarters that first sweltering summer as we tried to figure out how to approach the men we were interested in talking to and convince them to trust us. The fenced-in backyard behind the house, equipped with a deck, plastic lawn chairs, and a picnic table beneath a large oak tree, served as the location for many of our initial conversations during the gradually cooling evening hours, our dialogue accompanied by the buzz of the fluorescent back-porch light and the occasional siren or thumping bass from a passing car. This intensive fieldwork, living daily life among the families of the men we interviewed while raising our own children there, shaped our initial ideas and forged the set of questions we eventually posed to fathers across Camden and Philadelphia.
Our goal was to build relationships with unmarried fathers and engage them in a series of conversations, thereby gaining an in-depth knowledge of their experiences and worldviews. We began with two years of ethnographic fieldwork—hundreds of hours of observation and casual conversation—in Camden, followed by five years of repeated, in-depth interviewing across Camden and a number of Philadelphia neighborhoods. As we were writing this book, we visited each of these neighborhoods multiple times to collect supplementary information. We drew fathers from across Camden, from Greater Kensington (including Kensington, West Kensington, and Fishtown), Port Richmond, Fairhill, Harrogate, North Central, Strawberry Mansion, Nicetown, and Hunting Park—all north of Center City Philadelphia; from the Pennsport, Whitman, Grays Ferry, and Point Breeze sections of South Philadelphia; and from Elmwood Park, Mantua, Mill Creek, and Kingsessing in West Philadelphia (see table 1 and map 1 in the appendix).
East Camden, where our study began, has the mix of housing typical of the Philadelphia metropolitan area. Row homes are the most common dwelling type, usually plain brick affairs. Twins come next—each side often in a different state of repair, with occupants seemingly eager to distinguish their side from its mirror image with different trim colors, distinctive siding, and layers of gingerbread. Here and there, only one-half of the twin now stands, creating an eerie asymmetrical look. Then there are the singles, most built in a simple Victorian-farmhouse style, but some in stone with pillars bracing roofs that reach over deep porches.
When we arrive in early summer, everything is in bloom— prawling hydrangeas, climbing roses, lush crepe myrtle. In the deep backyards there are several aging aboveground pools, though few seem to be in use—one is totally covered with dead branches. To compensate, parents place plastic kiddie pools in their yards. But perhaps the most noticeable thing about the relatively quiet side streets for the newcomer is the trash—it lines curbs and sidewalks everywhere. We’ll soon observe how the city’s sanitary engineers seem to show their contempt for the neighborhood by ensuring that only a portion of the garbage they collect actually finds its way into the back of their trucks.
Homeowners ward off the neighborhood squalor by encasing every square inch of their property with chain-link fencing, sometimes adding the green plastic fill that creates a greater sense of privacy. Secure in these compounds, the more affluent residents—civil servants and immigrants running small businesses—tune out the neighborhood that surrounds them and focus instead on their little pieces of heaven. Cars usually park inside the fenced perimeters, not on the street. Few homes have garages, but many have freestanding metal carports with arched roofs, often listing to one side or another. Inside these dubious structures, we spot church vans for a dozen congregations, the trucks of food vendors, cement trucks, junk cars, and the like. One morning we see evidence of an informal restaurant alongside such a structure, with dozens of small tables in the backyard. In the driveway two black men wrestle a small cement mixer into the back of a truck ready for a day’s labor. Later, they’ll presumably drink beer and cook ribs for their patrons on huge half barrels serving as grills.
By the time we arrive in Rosedale, this once-desirable residential section of the industrial town has mostly lost the struggle against poverty and crime. The oldest, largest, and most notorious of the city’s nine housing projects, Westfield Acres, located on Westfield Avenue at Thirty-Second Street, looms over the neighborhood’s main thoroughfare, though the housing authority is about to demolish its high-rise towers. Over the years the area has earned a certain reputation; the Philadelphia Inquirer won’t deliver to the local convenience stores because the drivers are afraid to enter the neighborhood, we can’t get a pizza delivered, and even the Maytag repairman won’t come, as we learn when our washing machine breaks down.
Like many inner-city neighborhoods, Rosedale is in a war between the homeowners struggling for a slice of respectability and the tawdry row homes and public-housing tracts that provide shelter for some of the most disadvantaged families in the metropolitan area. The homeowners arm themselves against blight in any number of ways: disguising rotting clapboards with aluminum siding, replacing 1920s single-pane windows with new vinyl models, converting the front yard into a concrete pedestal for the family car, and so on. Porches