Doing the Best I Can. Kathryn Edin
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how they grapple with shifting contexts over time can we fully understand how so many will ultimately fail to play a significant and ongoing role in their children’s lives.
The men in these pages seldom deliberately choose whom to have a child with; instead “one thing just leads to another” and a baby is born. Yet men often greet the news that they’re going to become a dad with enthusiasm and a burst of optimism that despite past failures they can turn things around. Conception usually happens so quickly that the “real relationship” doesn’t begin until the fuse of impending parenthood has been lit. For these couples, children aren’t the expression of commitment; they are the source. In these early days, men often work hard to “get it together” for the sake of the baby—they try to stop doing the “stupid shit” (a term for the risky behavior that has led to past troubles) and to become the man their baby’s mother thinks family life requires. But in the end, the bond—which is all about the baby—is usually too weak to bring about the transformation required.
Not surprisingly, these relationships usually end, but instead of walking away from their kids, these men are often determined to play a vital role in their children’s lives. This turns out to be far harder than they had envisioned. Nonetheless, they try to reclaim fatherhood by radically redefining the father role. These disadvantaged dads recoil at the notion that they are just a paycheck—they insist that their role is to “be there”: to show love and spend quality time. In their view, what’s most important is to become their children’s best friends. But this definition of fatherhood leaves all the hard jobs—the breadwinning, the discipline, and the moral guidance—to the moms.
As children age, an inner-city father’s scorecard can easily show far more failures than successes, particularly because of the “stupid shit” he often finds so hard to shake. In this situation, it can require incredible tenacity and inner strength to stay involved. But few of these men give fatherhood only one try. Each new relationship offers another opportunity for “one thing” to “just lead to another” yet again. And a new baby with a new partner offers the tantalizing possibility of a fresh start. In the end, most men believe they’ve succeeded at fatherhood because they are managing to parent at least one of their children well at any given time. Yet this pattern of selective fathering leaves many children without much in the way of a dad.
By examining the unfolding stories of these men’s lives beginning at courtship, and moving through conception, birth, and beyond, we come to see that the “hit and run” image of unwed fatherhood Moyers created by showcasing Timothy McSeed is a caricature and not an accurate rendering—a caricature that obscures more than it reveals. Some readers will argue that our portrayal is no more sympathetic, or less disturbing, than Moyers’s. Others will find seeds of hope in these stories, albeit mixed with a strong dose of disheartening reality. But getting the story right is critical if we hope to craft policies to improve the lives of inner-city men and women and, of course, their children.
ONE
One Thing Leads to Another
While witches and goblins lug candy-laden pillowcases and orange, plastic pumpkin-shaped buckets up and down the streets of Philadelphia, black thirty-one-year-old Amin Jenkins is experiencing the best moment of his life. It’s October 31 and he’s in the delivery room of the University of Pennsylvania hospital welcoming his baby Antoine into the world—a boy who he says “looks exactly like me.” Though he admits the child was far from planned, Amin is proud that he “never said I wasn’t responsible, that I had nothing to do with it”—“it” being Antoinette Hargrove’s pregnancy. Far from it. “From the time that she was pregnant I was always involved, talking to her and spending time with her and rubbing her stomach.”1
By the time the baby arrived, Amin and Antoinette were clearly a “couple.” By then, Amin was certain that he “really, really loved” Antoinette and was cautiously optimistic about their future together. Eighteen months later, however, “the communication just stopped.” Amin explains, “as time progressed we started having certain irreconcilable differences and that caused our fire and that spark to diminish.” Soon both were “seeing other people” on the side, which led to a “retaliation-type situation.” Finally, around Antoine’s third birthday, Antoinette, fed up with the tit for tat, moved out, leaving no forwarding address. Antoinette’s sister and mother weren’t willing to reveal where she was living. A year later Amin is still crazy about Antoine but doesn’t know his address; he can only see his son when the boy visits Antoinette’s mother.
What brings inner city couples like Amin and Antoinette together in the first place? How well do they usually know each other before becoming pregnant? Is it usually true love or little more than a one-night stand? Faced with an unplanned conception, how is the decision made to go ahead and have the baby? Do the pressures of pregnancy fracture an otherwise strong relationship, or is it pregnancy that transforms a fairly casual liaison into something more—at least for a time? And what aspects of men’s larger life stories—their childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood experiences and the neighborhoods they come of age in—both drive their desire and hamstring their attempts to forge a lasting relationship with the mother of their child? As we will see, the way in which men like Amin become fathers can tell us much about the many struggles they will face after their children are born.
Following a quiet career at James Alcorn Elementary, Amin’s seventh- and eighth-grade years at Audenreid Junior High were pockmarked by suspensions for fighting, stealing, cutting class, and any other form of trouble available. By fifteen he’d been expelled from South Philly High and assigned to the Absalom Jones disciplinary school, and a year later the criminal justice system remanded him to a year in juvenile detention for burglary.2 Immediately after his eighteenth birthday, Amin was convicted of robbery and served his first real time. Out at twenty, he managed to stay free just long enough to father his first child (Antoine is his second) with a woman he barely knew—a child he denied—and acquire a GED before embarking on another and more lengthy prison stint, this time on multiple charges including burglary and aggravated assault. He wouldn’t see the outside again until twenty-seven.
Amin’s behavior seemed inexplicable to his poor but respectable three-generation South Philadelphia family, ruled by a strict grandmother with high expectations—the one who helped raise the kids and “steer us right” while his mother worked long hours keeping house for well-off Jewish families in West Philadelphia. This prodigal son’s older siblings embraced and even exceeded their grandmother’s goals, staying out of serious trouble, finishing school, getting married, and going on to lead middle-class lives. The sister he’s closest to because they share the same father pretty much stayed on the straight and narrow too; now she holds a coveted state job.
But Amin is the youngest and the only boy. For him the neighborhood—the racially charged Grays Ferry on the westernmost border of South Philadelphia—took a special toll.3 In the mid-1960s his mother, Betty Jenkins, had been one of the first blacks to move into the hardscrabble working-class Irish community. With her mother and two oldest daughters in tow, Betty took up residence in Tasker Homes, a federal low-income housing development built for white war workers in the 1930s that, three decades later, had just begun accepting black applicants. Amin came of age there in the late eighties and by that time both the housing project and the surrounding neighborhood had taken a nosedive. Amin describes Grays Ferry as a “very, very rough community. Very racist, prejudiced. When you grow up in an environment such as that, it does have a tendency to affect and to infect your attitude and your disposition.”
In this community everyone from peers to the police seemed intent on scapegoating black boys like Amin: for the declining economic fortunes of its industrial workers; for the deteriorating streetscapes; for the mounting racial tension; for the plunging property values and epidemic white flight. An enormous animosity toward whites who, in his view, were always ready to “start something” with the neighborhood’s black residents and a bottomless anger toward authority figures were the contaminants that turned to poison in Amin’s teenage years. Engaging in a little self-analysis, he says that it was these dispositions piled on top of the aching sense of abandonment he felt when his father simply drifted away that explained his compelling desire to find trouble whenever the opportunity arose. Not