Curbing Their Unease

When an Eviction Crew Empties A Home, Handling the Personal Is Part of the Balancing Act

The houses on Buckingham Green Lane in Upper Marlboro are, as the name suggests, majestic. Two-story foyers, saplings growing in manicured yards, everything you would want if you had everything, especially if you had recently acquired it. Drapes on the windows obscure the interiors, but you know that the insides are packed with all of the marvelous things you ever dreamed of. New stuff. Shiny stuff. Stuff.

On this late fall morning, with the temperature hovering just above freezing, four team members from All Seasons Eviction ride in a pickup, ready to remove all the stuff from one of these houses in the span of just an hour.

The men look for the address and riff.

Samuel Kifle is explaining the pronunciation of his last name. It's "kee-flay, like souffle," he says. Ozias Richardson guffaws. "Souffle. Where'd you get a name like that?"

"It's French African," says Kifle.

"Man, it's crazy."

"This is it," says Ryan Pulliam. Pulliam -- calm, dreadlocked, 29 -- is the owner of All Seasons. In the current housing crisis, landlords and banks put evictions and foreclosures in motion, and sheriff's deputies serve the papers. But guys like this move your stuff, every bit of it, from inside your home to outside of it. The landlord pays $650 an hour for houses (apartments are less), trash bags included.

This house is something. Six bedrooms, four baths. Corner lot with a lot of yard. Christmas wreath on the door. It's fancier than your typical eviction, though in this economic craziness, who knows what "typical" means.

"Neighborhood like this, rent's at least $3,000, $3,500 a month," Sway Wilson says finally.

"If I lived here," says Richardson, "I'd get one of those hotel bathrobes with my initials on it."

"Monogrammed," says Kifle.

If I lived here is a hazard of the job. You try to treat evictions like a math problem: how to get loveseats and bar stools from point A to point B. But spend too much time handling anyone's stuff, and it starts to get personal. Stories are constructed, lives are imagined, and you start to wonder where in the stuff it all went wrong.