Part 4

American Dream: Three Women, Ten Kids, and a Nation's Drive to End Welfare
by Jason DeParle

(Page 4 of 4)

When she and Jewell met at the station there was no time for a reunion scene. They piled the kids and suitcases aboard and headed off for the two-hour ride up I-94. When Angie got home from work that night, she found a new resident of the compound - a short, dark, beguiling woman who told riotous stories of her life's escapades and was quick to swap Newports, insults, and beer. "That's my cousin!" Angie and Opal each would insist from then on. Biologically, they're not related (though through Greg their kids are), but that's a technicality that Angie indignantly dismissed. "What you mean?" she said. "We 'bout as biological as it gets!"

A few days later, a book of Jewell's food stamps disappeared. Soon Opal disappeared, too. "Damn, she must a met somebody already," Jewell thought. Her mother had heard a rumor that Opal was using drugs, but Jewell paid her no mind. Her mother said all kinds of crazy things. For years, her mother had said that the government was going to take welfare away. Jewell figured that was just something mothers liked to say.

Now and then at a social event, someone asks me what I do. If I don't feel like talking, I tell the truth. I say I cover "social policy" for The New York Times, and the conversation moves on. In a more adventurous mood, I tell the truth in a different way. I say I cover "welfare." That keeps the table boiling: say the word welfare, and there's no telling what might bubble up. Bill Clinton started one of those conversations on the fly in a campaign season, and what bubbled up was a free-for-all - and an "end" to welfare - more radical than anyone had imagined. This book represents a seven-year effort to find out what happened next.

Though I had spent years watching the welfare bill evolve, I realized why I found the subject so compelling as I listened, in the summer of 1996, to the final hours of Senate debate. The senators were talking about welfare the way people talk of it at dinner tables, in terms so ideological as to be virtually religious. They were talking of how their parents and grandparents had made it. (Or hadn't. Or couldn't.) They were talking of how their communities would care for the poor. (Or didn't. Or wouldn't.) At times, it seemed that the very idea of America was on trial. We live in a country rich beyond measure, yet one with unconscionable ghettos. We live in a country where anyone can make it; yet generation after generation, some families don't. To argue about welfare is to argue about why. I'll be pleased if this story challenges, and informs, the assumptions on both sides as much as it has challenged my own. "Ideas are interesting - people are boring," a welfare expert once told me. Ideas are interesting. But I proceeded on a broader faith, that what has occurred in the lives of the welfare poor is more interesting than either camp has assumed.

The story focuses on three women in one extended family, inseparable at the start but launched on differing arcs. Perhaps no three people can stand for 9 million. But with Angie's gumption, Jewell's reticence, and Opal's manipulative charm, the threesome cover a great deal of ground. A catalog of their collective lives would include everything from crack house to 401(k), with results that roughly reflect the experiences of welfare families nationwide. Two grabbed a toehold on the bottom of the employment ladder. One wound up with a journey through the new welfare system more tragic than I would have guessed possible.

Since welfare is a subject filled with biases, the reader may welcome a word about mine. At the time the president signed the law - the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 - I had been writing about inner-city life for more than a decade. Inevitably, I had opinions. I thought the harshness of the low-wage economy and the turmoil of poor people's lives required a federal safety net, not one torn by arbitrary time limits and handed to the states. I also thought the most constructive thing to do as a reporter was to clean my mental slate. With the welfare system starting over, I tried to do the same. To my relief, the first years brought reassurance: more work, less welfare, falling poverty rates. No signs of children "sleeping on grates," as Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan had famously warned. Surely the vibrant economy helped, and tougher tests awaited. Still, after years on the poverty beat, there was something truly exotic to report: good news.

At the same time, I felt uneasy with the triumphal claims ringing through public life. The "greatest social policy change in this nation in sixty years," is how Tommy Thompson put it, after leaving his job as governor of Wisconsin to become the secretary of Health and Human Services. The Wall Street Journal did him one better: "the greatest advance for America's poor since the rise of capitalism." The very phrase "welfare-to-work" brims with implication: rising incomes, inspired kids, more hopeful lives. But the successes I witnessed were never so clear. Paradoxically, the closer I got to the welfare story, the less central welfare appeared. "Did it work?" people would ask about the landmark law. "That's your crazy stuff," Angie said, insisting the law was no landmark to her. "We don't be thinking 'bout that!"

In assembling this account, I have relied on years of discussions with the main characters. With their permission, I have also examined a decade's worth of welfare and earnings records and talked with others in their lives: relatives, boyfriends, caseworkers, bosses, and friends. Court records, tax returns, school transcripts, and letters have enhanced my understanding, and a trail of genealogical material extends the family history back six generations. In launching the project, I imagined, if only half-consciously, that it would follow a sleek narrative line of underdogs against the world. It is that story, but also a more complicated one - of adversity variously overcome, compounded, or merely endured. In that way, too, it embodies the story of welfare writ large.

Some readers may wonder why I focused on an African American family when nationally blacks and whites each accounted for about 40 percent of the rolls. I first chose to focus on Milwaukee, the epicenter of the antiwelfare crusade, and, as it happened, nearly 70 percent of the city's caseload was black. As the drive to end welfare began, the paradigmatic Milwaukee recipient was a black woman from Chicago whose mother or grandmother had started life in a Mississippi cotton field, a description that fits Angie, Opal, and Jewell. At the same time, there are advantages to seeing the rise and fall of welfare through African American eyes. Given their share of the national population, black families were more than six times as likely as whites to receive a welfare check. Among long-term recipients, the racial imbalance was even more pronounced: nearly seven of ten long-term recipients were African American. Considering our national history, that shouldn't be a surprise; for more than three centuries blacks were barred by violence and law from the full benefits of American life.

The story that follows is rooted in the racial past, a past much less distant than I first supposed. In understanding where it began, I got help from a regal woman named Hattie Mae Crenshaw. She is Jewell's mother, grandmother to Angie's kids, and an elder cousin whom Opal regards as an aunt. She was born beside a Mississippi bayou in 1937, in a shack without electricity or running water. By the time she reached late middle age, a job as a private nursing aide had carried her by Concorde to Paris. In between, she had lived much of the country's welfare history. Barely sixty when I met her, Hattie Mae wasn't old. But she was old enough to remember chopping cotton to pay the plantation store. She settled into her story from a white-tiger love seat in Jewell's living room. Family history bores Jewell; she left the room to do her nails. Hattie Mae smiled as she began: "I growed up on Senator Jim Eastland's plantation in Doddsville, Mississippi. That's when black peoples was just beginning to come out of slavery." Patient with my puzzled looks, Hattie Mae talked on, pointing me toward welfare's forgotten prequel.

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

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.