Angie liked the class more than the work. She had understood, in a theoretical way, the physical strain involved: the lifting and pulling, the washing and feeding, the business of bedpans. But once she started at a nursing home, the sadness of it all set in. "I don't want to find no dead person!" was all she could think. She lasted eight days. Angie stayed home for a few months, then caught another break. She had thrown in an application at the post office, and an offer came through. The post office! A job for life! People look at you with respect when you work at the post office! It wasn't what she thought. She wasn't a full-fledged unionized worker, but a temporary employee at $6 an hour with no benefits or security. She didn't even work in the main post office. She caught a van to an airport annex, where she spent her time double-checking the presorted mail. All the same, it was a foot in the door, and she liked the routine. Since it was second-shift work, she could stay out late with the deejay and still have time to sleep. The welfare office didn't know she was working, so she kept her full benefits. Two more friends from Chicago had moved into the compound, which felt like a cross between a kibbutz and a sorority house; there was always someone to talk to or babysit the kids. Angie felt sufficiently good about herself to enroll in a GED class. A year after she arrived in Milwaukee, indigent and effectively widowed, she was reassembling a life.

The first sign of trouble was the Vienna sausage. The second was the naps. She'd drag herself to class, then stop by her girlfriend's house to munch potted pork and sleep on the couch. As the mound of empty weenie tins grew, so did her girlfriend's suspicions. "You need a pregnancy test," her friend said. Angie knew she wasn't pregnant. She had ditched the deejay months ago. She couldn't be pregnant. She had just had her period and she was taking birth control pills. She better not be pregnant. Von, her youngest child, just started school, and she wasn't going back to diapers. "I ain't," she said. "You is," said her friend. "You crazy!" Angie said. In November 1992, just after Clinton won the election, her friend ran an errand at a clinic. Along for the ride, Angie took a pregnancy test just to prove her wrong. "Miss Jobe, I need to speak with you," the nurse began. Unh-uh, Angie thought. Unh-uhhh! She drank for a week and cried for a month. Then she quit the postal job. When you're too depressed to get out of bed, there's no sorting the mail.

Sorting the mail didn't cross Jewell's mind when she arrived in Milwaukee, no longer a girl yet not quite grown. Neither did making beds, mopping floors, frying chickens, or any of the other jobs she could land. Her adult work history consisted of a few months locked in the cashier's booth at an all-night Amoco station. Jobs weren't something that Jewell thought much about. Babies were.

Unlike Angie, Jewell was delighted to be pregnant. It didn't matter that her first son's father was long gone or that the new baby's father was in jail. Babies made Jewell feel alive. Like lots of girls who have a baby in high school, Jewell had gotten pregnant on purpose, thinking a child would bring her something to love. Unlike most, Jewell had found the theory worked. She loved everything about her first son, Terrell, from the moment he was born. His new baby smell. His miniature clothes. Even his middle-of-the-night cries. Ghetto life requires a hard face, but babies let Jewell smile. She went into labor in December 1991, two months after she arrived in Milwaukee. It was the middle of the night, but soon everyone in the compound was shouting. Angie stayed behind to watch the kids, while another friend rode with Jewell in the ambulance. By breakfast, Jewell had a second son, Tremmell. A few weeks later, Jewell swathed him against the Lake Michigan wind, got back on the bus, and carried him into the Cook County Jail, where father and son caught their first glimpse of each other through a partition of bulletproof glass. Jewell enjoyed showing Tony his son, but it was starting to sink in that Tony wasn't coming home.

Thrown into troubled waters, Angie and Jewell navigated in contrasting ways. Angie chugged ahead like a rusty tug, forming a wake of jettisoned plans: she was going to be a nurse or a postal clerk; she was going to get her high school degree; she was going to figure out what God wants of her; she was going to stop crying about Greg. Jewell was a sailboat without a sail, adrift with no plan at all. Passivity offered protection; when you don't get your hopes up, there's less to let you down. The new baby was almost four months old when one of her younger brother's friends floated into town - a wild, wiry street kid, barely out of his teens, whom everyone knew as Lucky. Or as one of the gang later said, "His name is Lucky but he's not." Lucky liked to drink, and drinking made him talk. He covered Jewell in verbal rainbows - Technicolor pledges of devotion, mixed with white lies and purple jokes. "Jewell! You want me to rob a bank? I'll rob it for you, Jewell!" "Jewell! I been wanting to talk to you ever since we was in grammar school! Man, you had a big ol' butt!" "Jewell! Can you be my lady?" They danced. She wasn't so much smitten as amused and lonelier than she knew. In Lucky, the court found its inebriated jester, and Jewell found a man.

Communal living got to Jewell - the noise, the gossip, the lack of privacy. She and Lucky moved away for a few months, but Lucky had problems with the neighborhood gang and they raced back after he got shot in the hand. Bored, restless, putting on weight, Jewell did something wildly out of character. She volunteered for JOBS, the same welfare-to-work program that had summoned Angie. "Dear Jewell M Reed," came the reply. "Please read the rights and responsibilities pamphlet." The dour bureaucratic response set the tone for what followed. Her case got handed to an inner-city group, the Opportunities Industrialization Center, whose renown lay more in winning state contracts than in finding poor people jobs. First she got parked in a motivation class. Then a caseworker urged her to forget about work and pursue her GED, though Jewell insisted that she wanted to make money. Finally she got herself referred to a course for nursing assistants, like the one that Angie had taken. She waited for two months, then learned that it was canceled. "They don't ever do much of nothing except take you through a lot of hassles," Jewell said. It was the last time she asked the welfare office for anything but a check..

Home soon after to visit Chicago, Jewell was catching up on family news when she learned that one of her favorite cousins was having problems. She had had another baby, split up with her husband, and moved in with her mother. Nearly a decade had passed since Jewell had seen Opal Caples, though as kids in the projects the two had been close. Even the big-city names chosen by their rural-born mothers had framed them as natural friends: Ruthie Mae and Hattie Mae had Opal and Jewell. Jewell wasn't one to act on impulse, but something made her pick up the phone, and the conversation clicked. Opal said she had three young daughters with rhyming names: Sierra, Kierra, and Tierra. "F'real?" Jewell said. "Yup!" Jewell had two preschool sons with rhyming names: Terrell and Tremmell. "F'real?" Opal said. "Yup!" Opal was drawing welfare, too, and her dilemma was the same one Jewell had faced: without help, she couldn't afford a place of her own in Chicago. Living with her churchy mother left Opal feeling caged. Jewell said her landlady had an empty apartment for $325, and welfare would pay more than $600. "Yahoo!" Opal said. "I'm coming."

Jewell didn't take her seriously - no one makes a decision like that in a few minutes on the phone. Yet something about Opal had always set her apart. She was probably the smartest of Jewell's childhood friends and definitely the wildest. Expelled from not one but two public schools, Opal, unlike Angie and Jewell, went on to graduate and even did a semester of community college. While Jewell didn't spend much time mulling life beyond the ghetto, Opal worked worldly allusions into her conversation. Her husband was so stuck on himself "he thinks he's the Prince of Wales." When their mothers made them go job hunting as teens, Opal got all the offers. "I have a personality that attracts people to me - I do!" she said. "Lotta people tell me that." With education, experience, and a gift for making friends, Opal could leave a welfare office voted most likely to succeed. But there was something that neither her caseworkers nor cousins knew. Opal had been smoking cocaine. A little at first, then a lot - off and on during her second pregnancy and constantly during her third. One reason she was living at home is that she had smoked up the rent money and fled before her husband found his stuff on the street. Opal's mother didn't want the extended family to know, and Opal wasn't about to tell. Among the hopes she held for Milwaukee was the hope of getting clean.

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Copyright © 2005 Penguin, a division of Penguin Putnam Inc, used by permission.

Tags: Society

About the Author

Jason DeParle, a reporter for The New York Times, has also written for The New Republic, the Washington Monthly, and The New Orleans Times-Picayune. A former Henry Luce Scholar, DeParle was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1995 and 1998 for his reporting on the welfare system. More