 A police officer helps Elizabeth Jones don a bulletproof vest before her physical aptitude test. (By Juana Arias/The Washington Post) |
Job in Jeopardy
Worry.
Jones, in her hearts-and-bears nightgown, has forced her eyes to stay open until 11 p.m. Her employer, holder of a $1.2 million city contract to help welfare recipients find jobs, is the subject of a Channel 7 exposé The reporter is saying PIC spent funds meant for the poor on living-room furniture and a lavish retreat.
What to feel, besides relief that you never ranked a key to the cash box? Jones turns from the TV to the note she wrote to herself and tacked to her bedroom door one gloomy day: "Cookie, This Too Shall Pass." Maybe the news story is hype. After all, a PIC class taught her Microsoft Word. Then, after other employers refused to bet on a woman who had spent her whole adult life on welfare, PIC hired her to answer phones.
But this trial does not pass. City auditors soon descend on the office, unearthing more misspent funds.
In her gray boat, drifting, Jones can imagine East Cap oldheads rolling their eyes. Same-old same-old, from Great Society to century's end: Aid from the Capitol often evaporates before it reaches the poor folks' end of the street. But the cost of trailing the wrong string through the socioeconomic maze is higher today. For those who get lost, a welfare clock is ticking now: The new law allows recipients only five years of federal assistance in their lifetimes.
At a staff meeting, her boss warns that PIC's contract is in jeopardy, that they all – even he – could lose their jobs. Hard cheese for those with a mortgage. Harder still for Jones, who, no matter how wide she sets the margins, has the shortest reésumeé in the room.
She joins the hordes applying for jobs at the MCI Center. She scours the classifieds: Pentagon City shops seek a host of Christmas clerks, they say. At $6 an hour, she'd have to work 75 hours a week to make what she earns now – and at New Year's be cast back into classified hell. Because of such low wages, Virginia now predicts that 80 percent of its first welfare-to-workers will fall back into poverty when temporary benefits expire next summer. And that's in Virginia, which unlike the District has had years of steady job growth.
In an era of sunny economic indicators, urban unemployment remains 2.5 times the national average. The District alone lost 50,000 jobs this decade, many of them the career jobs in government and the military that historically were the best springboards out of East Cap. This is why a janitor watching Jones lunge at a playground fence grasps what she's up to: The siren call of new police jobs is so rare it resounds. Congress has ordered the troubled D.C. police to hire new officers. And 5,500 people have applied.
"How tough can the requirements for the police department be?" some tease. "Bench-press a chocolate doughnut?"
Let them laugh. Evenings she discovers that to run more steps, it helps to have a distraction. Police benefits are a fantasy of choice. 401(k)! Health care for the kids! Because her job doesn't insure them, the District gives them Medicaid coverage for now: crucial when Wayne went over his handlebars and broke his leg in August. But that help expires this winter.
Lunch times, Jones sets aside the typing test that begins "Life is not a bowl of cherries" and bears down on man-in-blue math. Before the physical aptitude test is a written exam. Twenty-one clock radios were stolen, worth $1,050 total. What's the average value of the radios? She hated math at Eastern High School. A decade later, scratch paper laced with cross-outs, she hates it more.
She sat for this written exam three years back, on a whim. Entered the test site nervous, sat in the wrong place. A policewoman-proctor dressed her down. Instead of directing thought to long division, she found herself storming inside at the rebuke. Was her fury's object the uniformed woman, embodiment of accomplishment out of her reach? Or was it herself, for not mastering the math? Long before a terse yellow card slipped through her mail slot, she knew that she had failed.
If that humiliation wears gentler on her now, it is perhaps because of the confidence she has gotten from her job. There was a time when she took men's punches and then repaired to her bathroom mirror, seeking the fault in her own face. "But you can't tell me I ain't all that and a bag of chips today," she says firmly. Still, she sees now that the buttress of a job can easily be kicked away.
The October morning of her second stab at the police exam, she rises early, tries to drown out doubtful noise. In a near bedroom wakes the year's great miracle: Wayne, her first-born, last spring so unhappy in public school that every day when she dropped him off she cried. This year, at the private Ivy Mount School, he is thriving under teachers he calls "my private people." To see his nose in a book, lips in a reader's secret smile: the deepest joy her life has thus far known.
At 10 a.m., her bubble of peace is lanced. As exams are being distributed at the police training center in Southwest Washington, Jones is lost in the nearby Blue Plains sewage plant, barreling down dead-ends. By the time she finds the center, late, she is irked at every nerve. By the time she hands back the white booklet, she is brooding.
"If I failed again ..." Her voice trails off. "I guess I know what I'll do. I'll keep taking it and taking it, until I pass. I will be hunchbacked, too old to be a police officer, but I'll still be taking the test. Because I just cannot go back on welfare."
Housing Horizons
Drenika looks up from her folklore workbook: "Mommy, what's a trickster?" At which, Dernard pokes Drenika with a pencil.
Another Tuesday night they've been dragged by Mom to Homebuyers Club. Boring for kids, crucial for Jones. The official purpose of this class run by the nonprofit Marshall Heights Community Development Corp., is to help working people save and plan to purchase a house. The emotional purpose, for Jones, is to remind herself that there are others out there trying too. She used to have a role model at work – a commanding older woman she ferociously observed. One day last spring, the woman dropped dead. Now the auditors say the woman spent funds meant for the poor on her graduate-school tuition.
As class begins, Jones slips a photo out of her wallet and shows it to her friends: a boarded-up bungalow in a working-class neighborhood five blocks from East Cap. Others might call it an eyesore. Others aren't as desperate to raise their kids outside the projects. "When can we move to our private house?" her kids ask almost every day. The down payment is $5,000 – a long shot on her current paycheck, unthinkable without it. But the support of her peers balms the frustration. Go girl – you're even starting to look like a policewoman. Call me after you put the babies down. Call me. Don't forget.
Jones feels better as she packs her kids into her mother's car after class. The gospel station is playing Dernard's favorite. "Through the hard times, through the good times, be grateful, be grateful": seraph-toned he transports them through a bleak strip of city. Until Jones hits the brakes.
Two stoned citizens careening into the street. "Do they think they have bumpers?" she mutters.
As winter nears, there is something battened-down about East Cap. Community folk erect a pretty playground at one school; a youth is found bullet-ridden at another. From which truth do you fashion a way to live? Simpler to burrow in with the TV and caller-ID. But how long before children tire of steering their bikes around the bedroom – before they strain against the bars a parent's love erects against a perilous place?
One November day, her children hadn't called by 4:45. She lit out for the subway, tore up the hill. Seeing the windows of her house dark, she felt her heart seize: Her kids, oblivious to electric bills, turn on all the lights when they're home alone. She banged on doors, enlisted neighbors – and soon learned they had not been abducted. Tired of house arrest, they had slipped off to the library.
Her children really don't like her police dream; they think she'll get hurt. She fears they'll get hurt if she gives it up. For years, Wayne has stayed up late sketching the hats and dresses of women he sees at church. Now breasts bloom in his drawings, slits run up the thigh. Wayne's father lives at East Cap but rarely stops by. Jones never met her own father. What does she know about raising an adolescent male?
From the memory of her own childhood, she does know this: If she doesn't escape, outsiders will look at her boys, for whom she dreams of college, and see predators. They'll see her daughter as – well, she won't even think it. She wants Drenika to bloom into a princess. A princess pediatrician, Drenika qualifies. But how the world sees her children will shape them.
Whether history looks back on welfare reform as a period curiosity, or as the stroke that smashed the cycle of poverty, depends in part on the future choices of children like Jones's. Like many city youngsters, they already have absorbed from their elders reform's arc: that supporting a family now involves, not a pregnancy-driven welfare-office visit, but a workplace. This fall, the number of D.C. public school students needing day care for infants declined by 10 percent. It may be coincidence, or it may be early evidence that city teenagers are changing their thinking about having babies. But how reform's children ultimately judge the logic of the post-welfare world will derive from a more sophisticated calculus – one that measures the perceived decency of their daily lives as children and the perceived justice of the fates of their mothers.
"Mommy?" Dernard leans toward the front seat. "My teacher is hard."
"Everything is hard," responds Jones, rounding a corner toward home.
"No, Mom!" Dernard's emotion jerks her to attention. "You always say that. But not everything is hard."
She promises she will try to remember.
© Copyright 1997 The Washington Post Company
