Doing the Best I Can. Kathryn Edin
Читать онлайн книгу.
months of my prison term was when I began to realize that I was wasting time,” he explains. “I had to do better things with my life.”
After his release Amin moved back in with his mother, who was still living in the now nearly all-black Tasker Homes. To prove the sincerity of his jailhouse conversion, Amin immediately hit the streets looking for work and eventually landed his first real job stocking shelves at Rite Aid. Determined to do even more to ensure he could “take a different course in life,” he enrolled in evening classes at the Community College of Philadelphia to earn certification as a dietary assistant, a career choice inspired by his twenty-three-cent-a-day job in the prison kitchen. This coursework eventually qualified him for a position in the dietary department at the University of Pennsylvania hospital, just across the Schuylkill River from Grays Ferry.
Flush for the first time with real wages, Amin then made another positive move. He and his mother decided to pool their resources and trade life in public housing for home ownership. Over a year’s time, the two managed to put away five thousand dollars. Thanks to a special program offered by a community-development corporation, this was sufficient down payment for a mortgage on a renovated row house in the Strawberry Mansion section of North Philadelphia. Soon, Amin and his mother were fitting the key into the lock of their own home and marveling at the freshly painted walls, gleaming wood floors, and the kitchen equipped with brand new appliances.
Amin’s new world was the 2900 block of Diamond Street, just east of Fairmount Park and a few streets away from the historically significant “Mansion Row” running the length of the 3200 block. There the traces of the neighborhood’s nineteenth-century heyday as a wealthy Jewish streetcar suburb are most evident, albeit in dilapidated form. On Amin’s own block, the decrepit “mansions” with their turrets and pillars give way to solid, spacious three-story brownstones, some with dusty red or white metal awnings. It is a relatively good block, unbroken by the gaps of vacant lots that lend a bombed-out look to most others in the neighborhood. In Strawberry Mansion, lots cleared of some of the most flagrantly neglected and structurally unsound structures in the city nearly exceed those with residences. This is not to say that the 2900 block doesn’t have “vacancies”—as passersby, we can’t help but notice as light reflects off the broken window glass that leaves several abandoned structures exposed to the elements.
Although Strawberry Mansion was well away from the peers that had led Amin astray in the past, “out of the frying pan and into the fire” is how many outside observers would see his first concrete step toward upward mobility. While there is no Grays Ferry–style racial tension here—the neighborhood is 98 percent black—there is little else to commend it: sky-high poverty, unemployment and crime, failing schools, abysmally low property values, and, other than the massive church and synagogue structures that anchor nearly every other block, almost no amenities.4 Nonetheless, Amin viewed the move as an astonishing achievement and incontrovertible evidence that the prodigal son had returned home.
About this time, buoyed with newfound optimism about his future, Amin began to take notice of Antoinette, a coworker who was signaling her attraction to him. Flattered by the attention, he reciprocated. “She was attracted to me when I first saw her, and I made my approach,” he recalls. We ask Amin to tell us how he and Antoinette met and what led to having a child together. His reply is noticeably succinct. “We began to socialize and communicate and then from there we began to affiliate and at some point in time we became intimate and my son was born.”
In just a few words or a single sentence, inner-city fathers like Amin can often summarize what passes for courtship of the women who become their children’s mothers. Perhaps this is because everything usually happens so fast: in Amin’s case it was only fifteen months’ time before “attraction” had led to “affiliation,” then to an intimacy that resulted in conception. Nine months later Antoine entered the world. Amin’s relationship with Antoinette is the most significant adult bond he has ever had outside of his tie to his mother, yet he, like most others we spoke to, uses vague, even bureaucratic language to describe his relationship in the period before pregnancy. In these accounts “affiliation”—a term indicating that a couple is “together”—often takes the place of other expected words like love or commitment.
Typically though, the two are definitely “together” by the time a child is conceived; Amin assures us that this was the case for him and Antoinette when Antoine was conceived. In fact, he can more or less pinpoint exactly when the two moved from “socializing” to togetherness. As men like Amin define it, this state is halfway between what middle-class youth refer to as a “hookup”—sex with no commitment—and a “real relationship.” In the hookup phase, many men claim they use condoms quite consistently, and women in these communities confirm these assertions.5 But once the couple moves to “the next level” of togetherness, condoms, defined more as disease prevention than birth control, are left in the nightstand drawer. Indeed, if both partners have “tested clean” from STDs, men who continue to use condoms might as well be calling their female partner a “cheater” or a “whore.”
Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas’s in-depth conversations with single mothers in many of these same neighborhoods suggest that women may overinterpret this signal and define what men deem mere togetherness as something more. It is perhaps because of this that their vigilance with regard to the pill, patch, or the shot so often falters once this level of couple cohesion has been achieved. Most—though by no means all—pregnancies brought to term among the men we spoke with across the Philadelphia metropolitan area were conceived in the context of bonds that, in their view, at least meet the minimum criteria of “togetherness,” the point at which he, and then she, typically stops using protection.6
How selective are the men about the women who will bear their children? Do they “choose” their children’s mothers with care, or do they just end up together by chance? Let’s turn to the stories of Tim O’Brien and John Carr. These men have never met, yet their lives have amazing parallels. Both are as Irish as the shamrocks proudly displayed on the marquees and in the windows of their neighborhood’s pubs—the Starboard Side Tavern, Dempsey Irish Pub, Shannon’s, Bob’s Happy Hour—and in the front windows of homes. Both Tim and John grew up in Greater Kensington, northeast of Center City Philadelphia, where tattoos and bumper stickers, like the bars and front windows, often feature symbols of ethnic pride. This area was an eighteenth-century industrial suburb that now encompasses the very economically and ethnically distinct Philadelphia neighborhoods of Kensington, Fishtown, and West Kensington. Tim and John were both raised by single mothers and have had little contact with their fathers since childhood. Both dropped out of Kensington High in the tenth grade due to utter lack of interest in school. Both have been touched by the area’s feverish drug trade—John as a dealer and Tim as a user. Finally, both became fathers at a young age and in the context of exceedingly fragile, short-term relationships with girls they “stole” from their friends.
Kensington proper, where John resides, is enmeshed in a slow and bitter battle between its older inhabitants—the Irish and the Poles—and the newcomer Puerto Ricans, Asians, and African Americans, though whites are still the largest ethnic group and make up almost 80 percent of the population.7 The nonwhites, whom John and many fellow Irish Americans view as “intruders,” began permeating the northwest boundary between Kensington—the poorest majority-white neighborhood in the city—and the largely minority neighborhood of West Kensington in the 1980s, gradually eroding the de facto Berlin Wall of Kensington Avenue. This frightens young men like John, for across that divide lies West Kensington, once also a relatively stable, working-class, and staunchly white area and now 70 percent Latino and 20 percent black. It is also the poorest and one of the most violent areas of the city; the correlation between the area’s changing complexion and social and economic conditions is one many white Kensingtonians take as causation.
John grew up just east of that line on the 1900 block of East Hagert between Jasper and Emerald Streets. Brick two-story row houses are tucked in here and there along the denuded street, dwarfed by multistory shells of textile mills that still create a decaying corridor five blocks long—the formerly proud homes of Albion Carpets and the Bedford Fast Black Dye Company at the corner of Hagert and Jasper, Job