Doing the Best I Can. Kathryn Edin
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chosen an abortion over bearing his child. Andrea was also seventeen and was already caring for a son she had had at fifteen from another man; she didn’t feel she could cope with a second child. This argument held no water with Tim, who discovered—after the fact of conception—that he was desperate to be a father.
One weekend shortly after the breakup, Tim met the woman who ended up fulfilling that dream. He was “hanging at a friend of mine’s house, and Mazie and a couple of her friends were there.” Mazie had just broken up with Tim’s best friend: “My friend was trying to get back with her, and I ended up getting with her,” he explains, as if poaching other men’s girlfriends is fair game. “I really wasn’t having sex with her too much,” Tim confides. “She was only fourteen.” But nonetheless, “we were only together for about two months, and she was getting pregnant!”
How did Tim respond to the news that he had gotten a fourteen-year-old he barely knew pregnant? “I didn’t mind at all!” he declares. When pressed to explain his reaction, Tim notes that he “thought I really cared” for Mazie at that time. But, as he is careful to explain, this doesn’t mean he ever considered Mazie a “real girlfriend”—he reserves that designation for Andrea, his first love. Nor is he willing to characterize his bond with Mazie as a “real relationship.” In fact, he specifically asserts that it was not.
Like John, Tim only “ended up getting with” his baby’s mother—he didn’t choose her. The courtship was exceedingly brief—only two months in duration—but the two were more or less “together” when conception occurred, and there was just enough cohesion to prompt a positive response to the pregnancy. Plus, in Tim’s case, Mazie’s pregnancy was a way to satisfy the strong desire for a child evoked by Andrea’s conception. Mostly, though, Tim is perplexed by the question we pose. Why would he mind, the tone of his answers imply.
BEING TOGETHER
So what does “being together” imply? Generally, it means that the two are spending regular time with one another and view the relationship as something more than a mere sexual encounter.13 Being together is more than a “hookup,” borrowing from the terms more privileged high school and college students use; hookups have no distinct beginning or end, while the termination of these liaisons requires a “breakup.”14 There is an expectation of fidelity, at least in theory; outside relationships are still usually designated as “cheating,” though this norm grows a lot stronger once a baby is on the way or has entered the world. Tim clearly knows he’s done wrong when he’s caught having sex on the couch with Andrea one night when he thinks Mazie and his child, Sophia, are asleep in bed. But, as the ambiguous language men use to describe these ties suggests, at the point of conception, Tim and his peers seldom view their unions as serious or “real relationships.”15
For simplicity we refer to this stage in men’s romantic relationships as “being together.” But blacks and whites use somewhat different terms. In poor black neighborhoods across the Philadelphia metropolitan area, like Amin Jenkins’s Strawberry Mansion, youths and adults alike frequently use the description “associate” to denote persons they spend time with but who are not “friends.”16 In the same way, the terms “affiliate” and “associate” depict a bond that is more than just a one-night stand but not exactly a boyfriend or girlfriend relationship either. In economically struggling white neighborhoods like John’s Kensington or even Tim’s more respectable Fishtown, the language tends to be simpler—Tim “gets with” his baby’s mother, while John and Rayann are simply “together.” These terms are as distinctive in what they include as what they do not: much evidence of a search for a life partner.
We asked each of our 110 fathers to tell us “the whole story” of how he got together with the mother of each child, what the relationship was like before pregnancy, and how things developed over time. As was the case with Amin, the prepregnancy narrative is often startlingly succinct: the couple meets, begins to “affiliate,” and then “comes up pregnant.” Few men even mention, much less discuss, any special qualities of their partners or any common tastes or values that drew the two together. Usually, the girl lives on his block, hangs out on the stoop near his corner, works at the same job, is a friend of his sister’s or the girlfriend of a friend, and is willing to “socialize” with him.17 Obviously, there is a spectrum here; Amin was with Antoinette much longer at the time of conception than Tim was with Mazie. It is also true that some conceptions are to very stable couples who may already share children, while others are the result of one-night stands. In the typical scenario, however, couples are usually together, but for only “a minute”—just a few months is the norm—before their first child together is conceived.18
In sum, a common feature of our fathers’ narratives about the nature of the relationship before pregnancy is the brevity and modest cohesion of the tie.19 Only rarely do such couples “fall in love,” get engaged, or get married before conceiving a first child together, though they may do so later on. Indeed, they rarely even refer to each other as boyfriend and girlfriend. As we have already indicated, and show in chapter 2, planned pregnancies are rare, yet once the pair deems themselves “together,” any serious attempt at contraception usually fades.20 Then the inevitable occurs: the woman “comes up pregnant.”21 Precious few men are consciously courting a woman they believe will be a long-term partner around the time that pregnancy issues a one-way ticket to fatherhood. Indeed, there is little evidence that many were even attempting to discriminate much among possible partners based on who they felt would be the most suitable mother to their child.22
COMING UP PREGNANT
Given their haphazard origins, these relationships might well have been short-lived had it not been for an unplanned conception. As the stories of Byron Jones, Will Donnelly, and Jack Day will illustrate, pregnancy, and not a shared history, similar tastes, or common goals, is what typically galvanizes partnerships in the low-income neighborhoods of Philadelphia and Camden, though this is not always the case. An unplanned pregnancy and the decision to carry it to term transforms relationships of mere “togetherness” into something more.
Byron Jones was born in rural South Carolina, but his parents moved to Philadelphia when he turned three. He was raised in “The Bottom,” the local nickname for Mantua, the working-class West Philadelphia neighborhood that black southern migrants began flocking to in the 1920s. His mother was only fifteen when she gave birth to Byron’s sister, and his father was just a shade older. His parents married soon after and had five more children together, Byron right in the middle. While his father labored for a Jewish factory owner in the neighborhood (given racist unions and mill owners, holding a factory job was a rare accomplishment for a black man in Philadelphia at this time), his mother worked as a domestic for a wealthy Jewish family living nearby, whose matriarch took a shine to young Byron. Each summer she paid his way to the leafy Golden Slipper Summer Camp, where he marveled at its gleaming lake, heated swimming pool, and pristine playing fields. Byron grins as he recalls that part of his childhood. “Golden Slipper Camp—I’ll never forget it—all the way up in the Poconos. The majority of the blacks that was there, their families worked for the Jews ’cause it was a Jewish camp.”
While at camp during the summer between fifth and sixth grade, Byron learned that his father had died of a terminal illness, and the news had a seismic impact.23 “I didn’t know he was really that sick! They sent me up to summer camp, and the next thing I know he’s dead. I was just starting to get to know him,” Byron says of the man who worked long hours to ensure his family’s survival. “I started getting in more trouble when he passed. I felt like he abandoned me.”
A widow with six dependents, Byron’s thirty-two-year-old mother returned home to her family in South Carolina. “I had a good childhood,” Byron insists, expressing especially fond memories of the three middle-school years he spent down South among extended family: the sound of the ax as his grandmother chopped wood in the backyard and the sizzling of greens fried on a woodstove, Sundays spent sweating for hours in an “old, hot country church” with no air-conditioning, church “suppers” that lasted all day long, and trips of several hours to his uncle’s place even deeper into the up-country of the South Carolina piedmont. The adults