Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
Brenda
Papers, Papers, Papers
Two worn canvas suitcases fell to the Brooklyn sidewalk with a defeated clatter. Brenda Lee Fields had been carrying her whole life in those bags for months -- bags heavy with papers, clothes, papers, forks and spoons, papers, cigarettes, can openers, papers. Inside was a smudged certificate announcing Brenda's birth in a Queens hospital on May 4, 1960; her class of '79 diploma from Fashion Institute High School; paperwork on her three-year-old son, Tyjahwon, and seventeen-year-old daughter, Loreal; a transcript for one semester of community college studies; and a letter from her Bronx landlord saying he'd sold her apartment out from under her. All of it was proof of her very existence, her current crisis, neatly folded inside an old Avon cosmetics bag. Somehow, none of the documentation was ever quite good enough.
It was nearly midnight in an unfamiliar part of Brooklyn, and this American family felt less like citizens than refugees, swept up in a foreign era of welfare reform that would determine the course of their lives. Fort Greene, once an important jumping-off point for the Civil War's Underground Railroad, was now home to an ethnic mix of working-class immigrants and Wall Street bankers. Ty, an unflappable toddler, buckled under the weight of his bookbag stuffed with clothes, a Thomas the Train toy, and a worn-out “Cat in the Hat” book. He stood before the classical structure looming above him, another assessment center that would serve as a temporary home and determine his short-term future.
“Myhouse?” he asked his mom. “Is it a monster?” To the cranky, bleary-eyed three-year-old, the once-abandoned hospital building looked haunted. Loreal, a senior at the well-regarded Harry S. Truman High School in the North Bronx, just rolled her eyes. To a seventeen-year-old high school senior, the place merely represented another numbing commute. She tried to cipher how she could make it to her 8:00 a.m. class that was now ten miles away, at least. The regal teen was just months away from graduating. She had plans for college, for a life on her own. She'd missed a lot of school already this year in all the upheaval. Her immediate future was fading before her.
“Come on, let's get on in here,” Brenda told her exhausted brood. She figured this relocation to a temporary dormitory in February 1997 was some new form of calculated humiliation. She still had nineteen dollars in her pocket from yesterday's emergency check. She still had her kids. But her proud composure was slipping. Her beautiful daughter's quiet disappointment hurt, deeply. “This city wants me to give up,” Brenda thought as she calculated how long the three of them could make it on the few dollars in her pocket. Between sleeping on city agency floors and shuffling back and forth to temporary beds, she had missed at least three appointments to sign up for public assistance. The city was not making this easy.
Brenda contemplated the decrepit Auburn Assessment Center, a neglected former hospital turned makeshift city shelter for those with nowhere else to go. Here in the heart of the Walt Whitman Housing Project was where hundreds of people were sent to wait for days, for weeks, while the city decided whether their circumstances were dire enough to qualify for city-run shelters. And qualifying as “dire enough” was becoming more difficult. At Auburn, rodents rushed along the lobby baseboards, leaving holes so large that wires bulged through like electrified hernias. Its shabby rooms were filled with families like Brenda's, people who had tried and failed to convince the increasingly skeptical city that they were indeed homeless.
Three years earlier Rudolph Giuliani had been sworn in as mayor of New York City pledging to “end welfare by the end of this century, completely.” It was a quiet vow that would later become a hallmark of his administration. One important strategy in his new war on welfare was to combat fraud, making it much tougher to enter the system in the first place. To stem the flow of people seeking shelter, a timeworn first step onto the public dole, the mission of the Emergency Assistance Unit was changed from “assistance” to “fraud investigation.” Under the new rules, applicants were discouraged from seeking shelter if they had relatives or friends with apartments anywhere in the region. Such an appeal would constitute deceit in the eyes of the investigators. The city would no longer be a sugar daddy, Giuliani reasoned. It would not offer simple sanctuary, but rather an encouraging segue into the work world. Government was not in business to pamper souls but to build hardworking citizens. Families that had once been considered eligible, pre-Giuliani, were now being routinely rejected. A few returned to viable apartments, but many were sent back to volatile homes, or dangerously crowded conditions.
City Hall and a large segment of the taxpaying public seemed pleased enough with the results. The nation's largest welfare rolls had dropped more than four hundred thousand names by 1997 -- the entire population of Buffalo, the mayor was fond of saying -- just one year after the federal government passed its own reform laws. No city department was charged with following the paths of these welfare refugees after they vanished. Giuliani believed that tracking the poor was akin to playing Big Brother. Without hard numbers, the mayor could claim success. He pointed to low crime rates and empty beds in homeless shelters as proof that the former dependents were finding work and a new sense of purpose. The city's public advocate countered with a report that found twenty-four hundred people turned away unfairly from homeless shelters in a four-month period, even while nearly four hundred beds went unused. The busiest homeless processing outpost in the city had already collected some unwanted headlines. The New York Times ran several...
Hands to Work. Copyright © by LynNell Hancock. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.
