INTRODUCTION......................................................xiii
NEW HAVEN............................................................1
DEEP EAST TEXAS.....................................................93
THE YAKIMA VALLEY..................................................209
THE ANTELOPE VALLEY................................................269
EPILOGUE...........................................................341
NOTES..............................................................353
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS....................................................397
INDEX..............................................................401

Cold New World
Growing Up in a Harder Country

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CHAPTER ONE

Beulah Morgan had lived in Newhallville, a working-class neighborhood of New Haven, Connecticut, since 1953. She moved there with her parents from Ansonia, a mill town a few miles west, because, she said, "black people couldn't buy a house in a good neighborhood in Ansonia." By Beulah's parents' lights, Newhallville was a very good neighborhood. Its leafy streets and well-built three-family houses had been home to a stable population of factory workers and their families for more than a century. The neighborhood got its name from George T. Newhall, whose Carriage Emporium was, in 1855, the largest manufacturer of carriages in the world. After the Civil War put Newhall, whose main trade was in the South, out of business, the Winchester Repeating Arms Company became New Haven's--and Newhallville's--largest employer. After the Winchester plant was sold to Olin Industries, a Midwestern ammunition and brass company, in 1931, Olin became the neighborhood's mainstay. Newhall Street, where Beulah's parents bought their house, dead-ended at the Olin plant. In 1953, there was every reason to believe that Beulah's family's social mobility would be, in the American way, upward.

    New Haven has had an African American community since the seventeenth century, but until the Second World War, its members usually found themselves blocked from the better industrial jobs--compelled to accept instead lower-wage employment as, typically, waiters or porters at Yale University. For many years, they were also blocked from living outside a ghetto, near Yale, known as Dixwell. Factory work, like housing in Newhallville, went first to Irish immigrants, later to Germans and Eastern Europeans, and then to Italians. When the era of immigration from Europe ended, however, many of the jobs generated by the wartime industrial boom of the 1940s went to blacks. New Haven's black community grew from 5,000 in 1930 to 10,000 in 1950, then to 23,000 in 1960. Most of the new arrivals were from the South--most came, in fact, from one particular area of North Carolina--and in the 1950s and 1960s many black families settled in Newhallville. The Olin plant was going strong; in 1954, it employed 6,500 people. Although none of the men in Beulah Morgan's family worked at Olin, they all worked in factories. Her first husband worked at Scoville Manufacturing, in Waterbury. Her second husband, Carl Morgan, whom she married in 1954, worked at Simkins Industries, in New Haven. Beulah herself was a doctor's receptionist on Dixwell Avenue for twenty-two years. In 1990, when we met, she was working as a receptionist for a dentist in Newhallville. Her husband was still, after forty-five years, at Simkins Industries.

    Like every old industrial city in America, New Haven fell into a steep economic decline starting in the 1950s and 1960s. Factories began to cut back and then to close. Unemployment mushroomed. By 1981, when the Olin plant was sold to a local consortium, it employed barely a thousand people. The city's middle class, which had been trickling off to the suburbs since at least the First World War, started leaving in earnest. And while the overall population of the city shrank, from 150,000 in 1960 to 119,000 in 1994, its black population continued to grow. By 1980, there were 40,000 black people in New Haven; by 1990, there were more than 47,000. An influx of Latinos, mostly from Puerto Rico--and mostly, like the swelling population of blacks, unskilled and ill educated--also began in the 1960s. Poverty came to engulf large parts of the city. The 1980 federal census found New Haven to be the seventh-poorest city in America. The 1990 census found neighborhoods where the poverty rate ran as high as 40 and 50 percent.

    The arc of New Haven's decline was mirrored by an arc within Beulah Morgan's family. Her parents sold the house on Newhall Street in 1975 and, for their retirement, bought a house in Hamden, just outside New Haven. Their standard of living remained much the same. And Beulah and Carl, when we met, still owned a modest house in Newhallville. But none of Beulah's five children--the youngest was born in 1961; they all still lived in New Haven--owned a house of any kind. Indeed, four of them were unemployed and could not afford even to rent. Two had moved back in with Beulah and Carl. The other two had each lived on and off with their parents since becoming adults, and both were living, at the time we met, in apartments paid for entirely by public assistance. Beulah's six grandchildren, meanwhile, had all lived with her at various times. She had effective custody of one, and her mother had legal custody of three. In other words, none of Beulah's children had been able to form and maintain a two-parent family for their children. And each generation's social and economic prospects were looking worse, not better, than those of their parents.

    This alarming eversion of the normal American expectation of generational progress was the grim backdrop, as I see it now, for the months I spent with one of Beulah's grandsons. Terry Jackson, as I shall call him, was sixteen when we met. His mother--let's call her Anjelica--was thirty-three, never married, with two sons by different fathers. Let's call Terry's younger brother Buddy.

Terry and I are eating spaghetti at the kitchen table in his mother's apartment on Wallace Street. It's mid-December. Anjelica, a glass of wine in her hand, is standing in a doorway watching us eat. The telephone rings. Terry stops eating and watches his mother. Something about the way she mumbles tells him that the caller is his grandmother. He goes back to his supper. Terry's girlfriend, Lakeeda, has been calling every few minutes. Terry and Lakeeda, who is eighteen, have been estranged lately. Anjelica, has been trying to broker a reconciliation. Lakeeda has just invited Terry over to her house. Hence his rush to eat.

    Talking to her mother seems to turn Anjelica into a teenager. She pouts, murmurs, and pouts some more. Anjelica is a slight, fine-featured woman with short straight hair and clear chestnut-colored skin. She is dressed tonight in sweatpants and a T-shirt advertising the Connecticut state lottery with the slogan YOU CAN'T WIN IF YOU DON'T PLAY. Buddy, who is six, is playing Nintendo on the television in the living room. Somebody has cut Buddy's hair in a stubbly fade that makes him look like a tiny Mike Tyson. He's a stocky child, wearing flannel pajamas. I think Buddy should come and have some spaghetti. Buddy doesn't agree. I realize I've never seen Buddy eat anything that isn't sweet.

    Beulah is in the hospital for surgery. Anjelica is trying to explain why she and Terry have started visiting her in shifts. Somebody, it seems, is trying to break into their apartment. Twice she has come home and found the doorjamb scratched and smashed. Leaving the apartment empty even for an hour is now out of the question. Anjelica thinks she knows who the would-be burglar is. She and her sons moved in here four months ago. They had no problems--nothing--for a month and a half. Then a Puerto Rican woman moved in upstairs. The woman's boyfriend is the suspect. He drinks and he beats her up. Whoever it is trying to break in, Anjelica has a plan to catch him. She will have her own boyfriend come over late at night, park on the next block, and slip in the back door. In the morning, she and her sons will leave the house. Her boyfriend will stay inside, making no noise. When somebody tries to break in--boom. Her boyfriend is big and strong and, Anjelica says, crazy. He works as a painter, off and on, at Yale.

    Anjelica says good-bye to her mother and moves to the living-room doorway. She stands there studying Terry. A huge, soft smile slowly lights her face. "I remember first love," she says. Her voice is husky. She shakes her head. "I was crazy. I was sixteen, too. When I got upset, I went and got a gun and I was going to kill him, then kill myself."

    Terry, devouring the last of his spaghetti, does not look up from his plate.

    His mother still wears a dreamy smile as she says, "After all the time we was going together, he met somebody else and a month later he married her."

    Anjelica turns to watch Buddy, who is twisting frantically in front of the TV, pushing buttons on a remote control unit to make Mario, an animated character in plumber's overalls, jump over lethal creatures and bounce into stars that make him temporarily invulnerable. "Use your bullets!" Anjelica shouts.

    Terry, dropping his fork and rising from the table, pauses to watch Buddy play. Terry is the household Nintendo champion. "I'm a crazy Nintendo freak," he says. But Lakeeda is waiting. He dodges into a bedroom to dress.

    Anjelica and I join Buddy while Terry agonizes over what to wear. He keeps reappearing in different shirts and sweaters. Anjelica and I tell him, without looking away from the TV, that the white turtleneck and the boots look great. Yes, he has used enough cologne. Terry starts singing, in a wild falsetto, "The girls, the girls, they love me."

    Terry, who is tall and lithe, stands in the doorway. Wearing a manic grin and a high-low cut that rises in a solid cylinder at least four inches above his head, he looks electrified: fifty thousand volts of high spirits surging through his frame. He hunches his shoulders, splays his arms, and starts an explosive little hip-hop dance. The apartment seems suddenly too small to hold him. I offer to drive him to Lakeeda's.

    In the car, with the Gothic ramparts of Yale's Payne Whitney Gymnasium rolling by on our right, Terry says, "My mother love Lakeeda." Terry is wearing a Chicago Bears parka over his turtleneck, and a tall blue ski cap. "And Lakeeda's mother love me. And Lakeeda's little son, Tyrone, he love me dearly. I love him, too. And me and Lakeeda, we love each other. So, I guess, when push come to shove, me and her just gotta be together."

    Terry is gazing raptly up at a red stoplight. He is a strikingly good-looking boy, long-eyelashed and fine-jawed. The most striking thing about him, though, is an eerie purity of self-expression. He can say "I love him" with utter naturalness. And when he tells me stories, which he does a lot, he always tells them the same way--eagerly, easily, with no discernible embarrassment or pride--regardless of whether the story he is telling reflects well or shamefully on him. His indifference to manipulating me sometimes seems too good to be real, and yet I've noticed few inconsistencies in his accounts of his adventures. I can't imagine what he thinks of me, this white dude from New York with a notebook and a million questions. I give him rides and buy him meals, and he says he enjoys our chats.

    "Welcome to the Terrordome," Terry murmurs. This is a rap lyric, and hearing it reminds me suddenly of something Lisa Sullivan, a black Yale graduate student and community activist, told me. "The older folks just don't understand that being a teenager these days is brutal," Sullivan said. "It's much worse than it was to be a teenager in the forties, when people were afraid of the Klan, of being called 'nigger,' of having somebody spit on them. These kids know that the whole society hates who they are. And they can't help who they are. Why do you think their favorite band calls itself Public Enemy Number One?"

    "Welcome to the Terrordome" is the latest release by Public Enemy, which is indeed Terry's favorite band. We are now passing a Kentucky Fried Chicken that is a notorious teen hangout. Terry cranes to see who is inside. "'Round about midnight, that's when it's showtime there," he says. "All the crazy cars, all the crazy girls, all the crazy clothes. I bet some of my homeboys will be there tonight. I won't be, though. I'll be with Lakeeda!"

I drop Terry on the west side of town--on a dark, quiet street lined with large white houses--and start back toward his mother's. On Edgewood Avenue, black teenage boys in bulky parkas and tall ski caps stand on every corner, despite the cold, selling drugs. At the western edge of the Yale campus, the drug dealers abruptly disappear. On the radio, a woman chants, rap-style, "I wanna see a bank account with lots of zeroes after the first five numbers, I wanna see Hamiltons." Downtown New Haven looks deserted. The road passes under an immense concrete parking garage. Wallace Street lies east of the city, in a ramshackle, unfocused neighborhood, one of the many areas of New Haven marooned by postwar highway construction. It is miles from Newhallville, Anjelica's real home. Anjelica studies me through a window before she lets me in. We sit at the kitchen table drinking an ice-cold rose wine called Canei.

    "I was sixteen when Terry was born," Anjelica says. "It was my freshman year. His father was a couple years older. After he graduated, he joined the service. Terry's real name is Peter, same as his father. He has his last name, too. But I call him Terry because me and his father never got along. He never took responsibility for his son. On the day after Terry was born, though, I met this other guy, who worked at the hospital. Me and him fell in love. We was high school sweethearts. Then he went to the Air Force. He stayed away ten years. He just came back a few years ago."

    Anjelica smiles to herself. Then she frowns. "He never should've come back," she says. "He's smart. He's had some damn good jobs. He was a manager of Wendy's. But he blew it. Now he just sits around his house smoking cocaine. I heard he broke into someplace and was out on the street, selling stuff. Uh-uh. He blew it."

    The phone rings. Anjelica picks it up, grunts a few times, and hangs up without saying good-bye.

    "Let's see," she says. "I graduated from Hillhouse High in 1975. Then I went to secretarial school. But I was mainly into drugs. In high school, we just smoked reefer and took acid and black beauties--some kind of speed pill. But then I got into snorting coke, and freebasing. My big sister, Charlayne, was really into it. She was into P-dope--that's like heroin. And my other sister, Darla, she'd take anything you gave her. She still will. And my little brother, Button, he got to be a dealer. He was into freebasing. He used to bug out."

    Anjelica laughs. "One night, Button took a glass basing pipe and just broke it in his hand," she says. "He was crazy. We was all lookouts for Button. I was a bag lady, too. I held the drugs. I never had to buy no drugs because I got paid in drugs. I used to make runs to New York sometimes. I was the pickup girl. Reefer, cocaine. I only tried P-dope once, on my twenty-fifth birthday. I didn't like it. And I never injected nothing."

    Anjelica pours us both some more Canei. "But Terry got kind of tired of me. He said he didn't want me no more. He went to live with my mother. That's when I landed on the street. I was twenty, twenty-one years old. I ended up living a lot of different places. Had a house on Brewster Street. Stayed at the Pond Lily Motel. I always kept a room for Terry, but he just liked living with my mother more than he liked living with me. He stayed with his father's parents, too, over on Bassett Street. They were good to him. When I was twenty-eight or twenty-nine, I got down to ninety-six pounds. I was freebasing. I was dehydrated. My mother, she was hysterical. She put me on a special diet, with lots of water and fruit juices and meat. I kept getting high, though, even when I was staying with her. I went into the hospital for a month, but when I come out I got right back into it. I just couldn't get away from it. Living with my mother and my brother, it was like living in a hell house. They're always picking fights. They're crazy about money. You come in with any money, they want it. Soon as I put Buddy down to sleep, I was gone, into the street."

    Buddy comes into the kitchen. He starts clamoring for Jell-O. Anjelica ignores him. "Buddy's father came up here from North Carolina. He's a car mechanic, had him a good job, but he got too involved with the street life, so he had to go back. I went down later, in 1986, with Buddy and Terry both. Mount Olive, North Carolina. It's real quiet. Terry settled down good there. He stayed about a year. I just came back. This is my first Christmas back up here."

    Buddy is now crashing around under the kitchen table, running a plastic tractor over our feet. The tractor is a Christmas present from his father that came today in the mail. The remains of its foam packing are scattered across the kitchen floor. "I was going to get him one of these," Anjelica says, nodding toward the tractor. "But I put it back on the shelf and got him a bigger one. More money. Forty-nine dollars. He's going to freak when he opens that box. That truck is bad. Buddy!" Anjelica seizes the tractor. She stuffs it back in its torn box. "Put this under the tree," she tells Buddy. A Christmas tree stands near the television, a bright heap of presents beneath it.

    Anjelica starts making sandwiches. They are for Beulah, she says, who may or may not be out of the hospital for Christmas. "One thing about my mother, she never tried to get custody of Terry," Anjelica says. "He's still mine. I have to thank her for that. The state never tried to take him, neither. My caseworker, Mr. Johnson, he's a good guy."

    Anjelica puts the sandwiches in the refrigerator and returns to the kitchen table. "You know, I haven't got high since we moved here," she says. "If you don't go out there on the street, you don't got problems. My problem is, I just don't like being alone for too long. That's why I'm going to school now--try to keep busy. I'm taking a two-year course at South Central Community College--word processing. When it's over, and I got a certificate, I'll get a job. I can type seventy words a minute."

    The phone rings. Anjelica answers it, listens, grins. "Good," she says, and hangs up. "Sounds like Terry and Lakeeda's getting along good."

    Anjelica goes to the sink and starts washing dishes. "My older brother, Kenny," she says over her shoulder, "he got into drugs a little bit, but not like the rest of us. He never let it take over his life. He's thirty-five. Works for the lottery. He's divorced. No kids. Smart." She guffaws. "He used to help with Terry. But he was too rough with him, always jumping on him. Button tried to be a father to Terry, too. But he couldn't make Terry follow him, neither. Nowadays, the only thing Button does is try to get everybody to go to church with him. No wonder Terry's confused. He was living in a house full of nuts!"

    Buddy runs in from the living room, shouting, "Five sixty-five! Five sixty-five!" It's a winning lottery number. He heard it on TV.

    Anjelica stares at Buddy. She looks like she wants to spit. "This keeps happening," she says heatedly. "I been playing five sixty, a dollar a box, all week. We're going to win something, I swear we are. My grandmother, she gave us all the stuff for this house--the beds, sheets, towels, blankets, everything. So I been playing her house number, five sixty, a dollar straight, a dollar a box, all week."

    Buddy runs back into the living room.

    Anjelica dries her hands. "I'm going to send him down to his father in North Carolina next summer. And I'm going to San Diego to see my grandfather. Flying in an airplane. I never been in an airplane before. I sure hope it don't get hijacked. California's supposed to be beautiful. One thing I know, anywhere is better than here."

Peter Jackson, Terry's father, had spent six years in the Air Force. He was a youthful, intense, good-looking man, sharp of speech, dress, and carriage. Although he paid Anjelica twenty-five dollars a month toward Terry's support, he had very little to do with her. Peter married soon after returning to New Haven. His wife had a good job with a cable-television company. They had two young sons and lived in a racially mixed neighborhood. Peter did some substitute teaching after getting out of the service. (He went to community college while in the Air Force.) Then, in 1984 his father, who was a high school custodian--Peter's mother worked at the public library--helped him get a job as a custodian at a New Haven junior high school, where he eventually became the night-crew leader.

    Peter didn't have much to do with Terry, either. He worried that as a small child Terry was "exposed to lots of the wrong kind of excitement--cussing, fighting, drinking, drugs." He also worried that Anjelica's family "gives him no positive input about myself." Finally, he worried that Beulah and Anjelica indulged his son. According to Peter, Terry had not been happy living with his paternal grandparents because they were disciplinarians. Beulah, he said, had always let Terry "follow the grotesque fashions of the day." Peter had tried to offer a corrective to this policy. When Terry was a student at the junior high where Peter worked, for instance, all fashion-conscious boys were wearing their shoelaces untied. Peter, seeing that his son was a la mode, one day hauled him out of class and into a rest room where he tucked in his shirt and tied his shoelaces--"nice and neat, the way the athletes wear them when they play basketball"--before sending him back to class. Terry was humiliated. Beulah was furious. She phoned Peter and berated him for his insensitivity. Peter was unrepentant. Beulah's permissiveness, he believed, was one of the reasons Terry "doesn't show me or my parents the respect he should." But now, when it came to Terry's upbringing, Peter said, "I choose, on the advice of my parents, to remain pretty much neutral."

    Indulgence is actually not Beulah Morgan's most apparent trait. She is an ample, bespectacled, vinegary woman, the owner of a piercing glance and a biting tongue. When I ask her about Terry's childhood, she immediately starts apportioning blame. "Terry's father used to come and take him downtown, saying he was going to buy him all kinds of things. But then he would just buy himself something. He used to bring Terry back with nothing." Anjelica, according to Beulah, was even worse. "She couldn't take care of him. She was too busy running the street."

    We are talking in Beulah's living room. It's a jumbled, comfortable place, poorly ventilated and loosely arranged around a television set, which is playing loudly. Beulah's son Button, her eldest daughter, Charlayne, Charlayne's three children, the eight-year-old son of Beulah's youngest daughter, Darla, and assorted other children come and go, sometimes pausing to watch TV, or to glance shyly at me, while Beulah sits beside me on the couch, crocheting an afghan--the third one since her surgery last month, she says--and watching TV and monitoring the outerwear of each child who heads out the front door. I wonder in passing where Beulah's husband, Carl, is; he never seems to be here when I come by. Terry, who does not get along with his grandfather, has told me I should be thankful for that.

    Peter's parents were actually pretty good to Terry, Beulah says, and their strictness was not a problem. "It didn't work out because Anjelica wouldn't give them any of the state money she was collecting on Terry," Beulah says. "That's all it was. But Peter's mother used to complain about the money in front of Terry. That used to make him cry." Anjelica never gave her any of the money she collected for Terry, either, Beulah says, in all the years he lived with her. If anyone indulged Terry, she says, it was his mother. "When he was nine or ten, he realized that if I told him he couldn't do something he could always just run over to her and she would say okay. Now she's messing up Buddy the same way. She won't hit him. All he eats is candy, which is why he's so hyper. Not to mention what it does to his teeth." Anjelica's problem, Beulah says, is not lack of intelligence. "She's smart. She just thinks everything is funny. That's why she lets her kids do whatever they want. Now Terry's getting the same attitude. Nothing matters. Everything's funny." Beulah and the noise on TV both pause, and for a moment the only sound is the light clacking of her crochet hooks. "I've been a foster mother," she goes on. "I've taken in a lot of kids. And it's always the same. When the real mother gets visiting rights, they start messing up."

    If it was true that nothing mattered to Terry, that he simply thought everything was funny, then he did a good job of concealing the fact from me. And yet it was true that he was more serene, less accusatory, than the adults in his life when he talked about his own upbringing; he seemed to regard himself as more than the product of his family's failings. One dereliction of duty that all his guardians agreed occurred--but that each ascribed to someone else--had to do with Terry's eyesight. He had poor vision but had rarely worn glasses. His reading ability, which was normal in early primary school, later fell far behind that of his classmates, at least partly because of his poor sight. Terry said merely that he stopped wearing his glasses because they gave him headaches. He also became, he said, something of a class clown. His antics eventually gained him a series of interviews with school psychiatrists. The interviews got more interesting as Terry got older. "When I was little, I used to hold my problems in," he said. "Now, I'm just, like, out with 'em. Holding things in just make you madder. If a shrink talk to me now, I really act the fool, I play crazy."

    Terry did not fool around, though, when it came to after-school work. He started selling newspapers on downtown street corners at the age of eleven. At twelve, he got his first real job--with forged employment papers, saying he was sixteeen--as a busboy at the Ponderosa Restaurant, on Dixwell Avenue in Hamden. According to a family friend who used to see him there, Terry showed aptitude for the "restaurant business." He was fast and diligent and the customers liked him. He was worried, though, the family friend said, when she saw him at work that she might reveal his true age. Terry cleared about forty dollars a week and spent his pay on clothes, music, fast food, and video binges with his friends.

    But the importance of his income could not be measured simply by its disposition. To judge from the stories told by his family, Terry's entire life had been spent within earshot of violent arguments over money. He had been the object of many of these arguments--the cost of keeping him, the squandering of the state money received on his account, the failure of his father to buy him gifts--and he had been hurt and frightened by them, but utterly powerless to act. Now, finally, he was making money himself. Beulah and Anjelica approved of his working and let him keep his wages. Terry eventually left the Ponderosa for Kevin's Seafood, another Dixwell Avenue restaurant, where his main occupation was folding boxes. He also worked at Jimmies, a seafood restaurant in Hamden.

    Terry's memories of his restaurant days were fond ones. One evening, at least, he and I were at a cafe in New Haven when he started fingering a pile of not-yet-folded pizza boxes. "I love these things," he said dreamily. "I got really good at folding boxes at Kevin's Seafood. The better you fold 'em, the more you can do." At Kevin's, Terry was earning about fifty dollars a week. Then a friend of a friend offered him work that paid a thousand dollars a week.