The Working Poor (47 page)

Having stepped into the maw of the judicial system, Leary had placed herself in extreme jeopardy. She could not afford a lawyer. She had no defense, anyway, because the charges were true. She was black, addicted, homeless without the friends or connections or even the know-how to beat the rap or make a savvy plea bargain. When she stepped into the courtroom, she was sure that she was going away to a perverse salvation from the drug-infested streets.

She got salvation of a different kind, perhaps by some random quirk of chance, perhaps because she was finally ready for a different outcome. The District of Columbia had begun an experiment. Instead of jailing firsttime drug offenders (meaning the first time they were caught), those who showed judges a spark of hope were sentenced to treatment programs,
monitored closely with unannounced urinalysis, and helped into support groups and job training. Leary’s Legal Aid lawyer recommended her, and the judge agreed to send her to a center on Martin Luther King Avenue. She became one of the program’s first beneficiaries, so grateful that she would long remember the name of everyone who helped her along the way—the lawyer, the judge, the counselor, each member of the center staff, immortalizing them all in a biographical sketch that she composed. “Drug Court was the turning point in my life,” she wrote. “Ms. White was the first counselor to greet us. Her voice and tone was calming and embracing, not what I expected.” Leary emerged from “this unreal world I had been living in for so long,” as she put it. “During this time my true self emerged with a thirst for life and living that I am still quenching even now.”

Once she came to, she saw clearly how bereft she was of the skills she would need to hold a decent job. She took a course to become a certified nursing assistant, worked a little in the medical field, but found herself drawn to the keyboards and screens and gadgetry of the computer world that seemed comfortable to everyone except her.

So it was that Leary Brock walked a couple of blocks from her mother’s house and entered Mr. Harris’s class at SOME’s Center for Employment Training. She put her hands on computers, spoke before the group of strangers, doubted herself and took pride in herself, achieved a small success every day along with many frustrations. Something was happening inside her that had never happened before, some growing sense of competence and drive. “My metamorphosis,” she called it.

She had polished her résumé, had gone through the interview training, and had sent her applications. Interview appointments were being arranged, and as she sat by a computer in the classroom, she tried to grab her anxiety, wrestle it to the ground, and make it work for her. “I am afraid, and I’d be a fool not to be,” she said. “It’s a dog-eat-dog world out there now. I learned that in a seminar. She let us know, they all let us know, your interviewer is not your friend, OK? So don’t get friendly with ’em. Don’t put your guard down.… But you can’t let that discourage you. Everybody should have a little bit of fear. That’s gonna make you do a better job. That’s gonna make you have more determination so that you can face the fear, OK?”

The critical interview came with Xerox, at its offices in Arlington, Virginia. “Beautiful building!” Leary exclaimed. “From the sidewalk going up the steps you’re on marble, OK? And when you get in there it’s so classy.

Now, look, I’ve been to some really classy bathrooms, all right? Never with a decanter of mouthwash, never with a hair spray, and a HUGE bottle of Alpha Keri lotion—after you wash your hands, you know, soften them up. The place is very classy, and it shows that they care where their employees work. They look out for your little comforts. Like mouthwash, that was going above and beyond the call of duty there. But people do need it, you know, so they’re making sure that they got it! Just go to the bathroom, you know? Freshen yourself up!”

Xerox was hiring to fill its contracts to run mail rooms, do photocopying, and print color reports for firms in Washington, and trainees from SOME’s center looked attractive. “The interview was very calming. It was very comfortable,” Leary said in surprise. “I talked so strongly about team playing and about being excited with the opportunity that the company could offer, because I’d researched and saw how they were involved in the community and how they had did this and that.” The interviewer seemed impressed. “She said the difference between us and the other training programs out here was like night and day because people were coming there from these programs only interested in the hours, ‘What is the pay?’ You know, I never brought that up. You understand? I never questioned her as to what none of that was at any time. So that let her know that my first interest is becoming a member of Xerox. And whatever Xerox had to offer me I would be gratefully inclined to go with because I knew about the company.”

Xerox hired Leary, along with Peaches and Wendy Waxler, and everything about the job seemed to delight her: the classes on the machines, the pension plan and stock options (which she didn’t quite understand), the potted plant her co-workers gave her when she arrived. She was first assigned to the copying room of an insurance industry lobbyist. A month later, when she joined her fellow graduates at a SOME reunion, they were all bubbly and excited, like kids who had just come back from a visit to a firehouse. They puffed themselves up into postures of one-upmanship, strutting and bragging about their responsibilities, their access to inside information, and their clients’ size and influence. Leary breezed in with a bag full of stationery, binders, and cover pages for reports that she had produced for the lobbyist. “They send stuff to every state!” she crowed. “I work with the DocuTech computer copier, I work with the on-line UPS computer, the Bryce printer, and the Pitney Bowes mailing machine. I also
work with a networking machine, where someone somewhere is networking a job to me.”

Wendy was at a law firm so vast that “they have an office in Moscow,” she boasted. “And they have 250 lawyers here in D.C. I’m a mail messenger. They just made me a supervisor. I’ve been told I’m one of the best workers that they has.”

In another law firm, where Peaches had been assigned, “They have a fax room—eight machines!” she declared. “I’d love to have this in my house—the racks slide all the way around!”

When Leary touted the “high security” in her office, where you need a special key to get onto the tenth floor, Wendy proudly held up the plastic insert key she wore on a chain around her neck.

“I work at Hogan and Hartson downtown,” reported Richard Ivory, a big man whose mellifluous voice was rich in pride. “It’s one of the biggest law firms in the country—
the
biggest law firm in the country. I work in the mail room. I handle all the mail, UPS overnight deliveries.” It was a highly responsible position, he explained to the group, because of the importance of the shipments and the precision with which they must be dispatched. “I have to be very careful about how I send the mail. I’ve been in my supervisor’s office three times for compliments on my work. I’m going to go to the fax room. He sees a lot of potential.”

Leary was practically giddy with her newfound worth. She started at $17,000 a year, rose to the low twenties, and stayed there amid financial problems that dogged Xerox in the following years. But the world had opened to her. The previous night, she told the alumni, she had taken her mother and a friend to dinner at John Harvard’s Brew House, on Pennsylvania Avenue, and then next door to the Warner Theatre for a gospel musical. Her friend asked, “Who’s paying?” Leary said, “I’m paying.” When her friend saw the price on the ticket, she said, “What?” and Leary decided to keep the stub as a souvenir of her expanded horizons.

She had gone from victim to victor. She attracted praise from supervisors. One said she had caught on so quickly that she made the job look as easy as eating cereal. Another wrote in praise of her demeanor: “No matter how difficult my day may have been, when I go to Ms. Brock with a job, her attitude and smile remind me that I can take time to breathe and relax. Tasks will get done.” Steadily rising, Leary was transferred from the insurance lobbyist to a position overseeing nearly fifty machines at D.C. General Hospital, where she had once flunked out of a detox program, then to
the Department of Energy, where she was given the title of Service Coordinator and Technical Service Manager. Along the way, she garnered public recognition. Hers was the story everyone wanted to believe in, the story of redemption. A Washington television station did a feature on her, and she became a celebrated client of Suited for Change, a nonprofit group of well-dressed professional women in Washington who donate clothes and advice to impoverished women who need a decent wardrobe to make their way in the working world. She was chosen one year to say a few words at the organizations fundraiser, a swish affair of which Laura Bush was honorary chair.

In 2000, Leary was invited to speak in the chamber of the United States Supreme Court. The Justice Potter Stewart Award was being presented to the D.C. Superior Court Drug Intervention Program, “in recognition of its success in rehabilitating drug-dependent non-violent criminal defenders.” Leary had been selected to represent all who had been given another chance.

She couldn’t believe it, and she called me all in a flutter, asking if I would help with her speech. Sure, I said, but she would do beautifully if she just stood up there and told her story in her own words. I sent her transcripts of the interviews I had done with her during the previous two years, and urged her not to write her speech, just talk it. She did, and afterwards, still enchanted by the filet mignon dinner, the august setting, the powerful judges in attendance, she told me that she had looked out at the courtroom full of people wiping their eyes, that Associate Justice Antonin Scalia had walked up to her and said that she had brought him to tears. I did that? she thought to herself.

Another judge, having listened carefully, gave her a more sober reaction: She had to earn her way back into her family. He was right, for that success still eluded her. “My kids have not given me any respect or love because of the way I trashed their lives,” she lamented. She was trying now with her grandchildren, bundling them off to the Smithsonian, reading them books, filling the vacuum she had created for her children. This, too, was part of the pattern of failure and redemption—a failed mother whose children also fail as parents, and thereby give her a second chance as a grandmother.

The Brock family tree, which I drew up while sitting one evening with Leary and Velma at their dining room table, looked like the wildest of Alexander Calder’s mobiles. It began simply at the top—Velma’s parents,
married, had eight children, and Velma and Horace, also married, had two. It then descended into a chaotic whirl of offspring from multiple liaisons by Leary and, a generation later, by some of her children. The diagram was so complex that if it had been made into a wind chime, the din would have been unrelenting, and not harmonious.

Leary had been violent with her children, she admitted. In her first year of recovery, when she thought she could suddenly resume a parental role, she got so rough with a daughter that a son had to pull her away. Now, the connections were still frayed sometimes; there was still violence in her tone of voice. In all her elation about her job, she did not seem to have energy left to reconstruct the damaged relationships with her adult children. One afternoon, as she sat watching television in her darkened living room, she saw a daughter come in through the front door carrying a suitcase. Leary’s greeting had an edge of accusation: “You movin’ back here?”

“No.” Then the young woman disappeared into the back rooms. I asked about her.

“I don’t know,” Leary snapped. “I heard a rumor she’s moving to North Carolina. I don’t know what’s going on with her.”

With Leary’s recovery, she and her mother had patched together a mutual respect. They lived together in her mother’s house, which was still mortgaged but sustained by Velma’s pension of $30,000. Most of Leary’s children were self-supporting most of the time: one son as a roofer in Pennsylvania, another as a security guard in the Energy Department, one daughter with Xerox, and another cleaning CIA headquarters. Velma’s household included a changing cast of Leary’s daughters and their children, with Velma the great-grandmother at the hub of the crazily revolving wheel.

“I love babies,” said Velma, “but they’re a little much. One is enough, into everything.” She was eighty-six and frail and critical of her granddaughter (Leary’s daughter), who finally put her children with a babysitter during the day. “We had to have a big falling-out for her to do it,” Velma said. “She doesn’t realize that I’m not as young as I was when I was taking care of her, you know. She thinks I can do the same thing that I did then, but I can’t.” How did she feel about raising her children, then her grandchildren, and now her great-grandchildren? “Tired,” she said with a weak smile. “Don’t feel any special way about it. That’s just one job accomplished, I think. And always lookin’ forward to what is next.”

Velma’s style with her great-grandchildren, whether from exhaustion
or as a practiced method of child rearing, had a harshness to it at times. One evening, at a birthday party for a school principal friend named Sarah, the conversations among adults were sweet and gentle, but they were punctuated by the small-arms fire of scolding words to the children. As if the room were taut with hair-trigger anxiety about the slightest misbehavior, Velma interrupted the pleasantness with staccato bursts like preemptive strikes. Not a kind or loving sentence was uttered to the youngsters. Perhaps these children would have otherwise been hellions, but it was hard to see. Besides twins of three months, there were two girls ages five and seven and a three-year-old boy, Deandre.

When dessert came out, an open gallon of ice cream—half chocolate, half vanilla—was placed right in front of Deandre. What would any three-year-old do? Stick his finger in it, of course. So that’s what Deandre did, into the vanilla half, and his great-grandmother, Velma, slapped his hand and threatened to send him to bed. He started to cry, though almost silently, as if he were afraid to cry. “Why are you crying?” Velma asked sharply, and threatened again to send him to bed. “Don’t cry!”