The American Underclass

(4 of 10)

home in a fetid ghetto flat, where children make morbid sport of chasing cockroaches or dodging rats. There may never be hot water for bathing or a working bathtub to put it in—or any other functioning plumbing. Under these conditions, afflictions such as lead poisoning (from eating flaking paint) and severe influenza are common. Siblings often sleep together in the same bed, separated by a thin wall or a blanket from parents (though frequently there is no man around). Streets are unsafe to walk at night—and, often, so are halls. Nobody starves, but many people are malnourished on a diet of hot dogs, Twinkies, Fritos, soda pop and, in rare cases, whatever can be fished out of the garbage can. Alcoholism abounds; heroin is a favorite route of escape. Another road to fantasy is the TV set. On it dance the images of the good life in middle-class America, visions that inspire envy and frustration.

Strutting pimps and pushers, cutting a sharp swath with their broad brims and custom-made suits, are often the local heroes and the successful role models for the kids. Schooling is frequently a sick joke: teachers conduct holding operations in the classroom, while gang leaders instruct. Inordinate numbers of the black young drop out of school before graduation, landing on street corners unskilled, undisciplined and barely literate. Those who finish high school are not much better off. Says Richard McNish, director of a manpower training program in Los Angeles' Watts neighborhood: "Kids aren't required to produce to get a diploma. Nothing is required except to be cool and not try to kill the teacher. They don't know how to read and write."

Portraits from a gallery of despair: In Brooklyn's grimy Bedford-Stuyvesant ghetto, a welfare mother surveys her $195-a-month tenement apartment, an unheated, vermin-ridden urban swamp. The bathroom ceiling and sink drip water on the cracked linoleum floor. There are no lights, no locks on the doors. Disheveled and 35, the woman has been on welfare ever since her five-year-old son was born. She joined in the looting during July's traumatic blackout, and calls the episode "convenient. We saw our chance and we took it." Now she also worries: "We don't have any place to shop any more."

In Boston, Ana C., a Hispanic and a mother of seven, speaks no English and has no marketable skills. She draws $294 monthly from welfare. To this she adds the profits from selling heroin at $30 a "spoon" (dose). Ana disapproves of the drug, realizes that it is a major cause of street crime. Yet she rationalizes: "I didn't know how to put food on my table, buy clothes for the children and still pay my $95 rent and the gas bills."

In Watts, a wine-sipping ex-con in his 30s keeps vigil on his doorstep, staring at a cluster of shabby apartments across the street. "I've been looking for a job since I got out of the penitentiary in 1974," he says in a monotone. "I tried to get a job in the CETA [federal Comprehensive Employment and Training Act] program. They told me that if I don't have a telephone, I can't get one." He points at a chain-link fence around the neighboring apartments. "They put up those fences to show the people what they're getting ready for. They have two fences around the penitentiary."

In Harlem,