They had no tools, no salt for the sidewalks, no batteries for the broken toys that littered their yard and which the kids hopefully offered in exchange for the use of mine's Toys "R" Us bonanza. When the child I sent home to be bandaged (they played so roughly) came back still bleeding and undisinfected, I left a Megalo-Mart, industrial-size box of bandages and a four-pack of Neosporin on the broken porch chair I used as the drop site for my donations. The next few days, I watched the Smith kids run about festooned head to toe in Winnie the Pooh steri-strips. The next time "Mama said we need Band-Aids" I said I was all out.
It was this summer, though, that I reached my tolerance limit. I learned that they were using my kids to score free snacks at the corner gas station. My kids. Begging. I nearly broke my ankle stepping into a foot-deep hole they'd dug in my front lawn. I found my son playing with a claw hammer lying abandoned in their junkyard of a backyard and my daughter trying to heft a 12-pound bowling ball. But the kicker was the youngest two's increasing demands that I be their mother. When I rubbed sunscreen on mine, it wasn't enough that I offered it to them -- big-eyed and pleading, they begged me to rub it on them, too. They peremptorily ordered cones when I took mine to meet Mr. Softee. Seeing me strap the kids into their car seats, they flew outside saying, "Mama say we can go, too."
They insisted on equal access to my kids' bikes and toys; I'd come home to find them playing on my porch and in my backyard, asking when dinner was. They strew their garbage everywhere like birds molting feathers; Mary would wave at me from her filthy couch when I couldn't stand the trash in her yard anymore and would pick it up. I offered to pay her teenagers $10 an hour to do yard work but "it's too hot." Just as well, because when one finally accepted the offer, he quit after an hour and left my lawn mower and supplies where he dropped them, without a word to me. Last Fourth of July, they were in the backyard blowup pool with my kids from 8 a.m. til 8 p.m. I gave them breakfast, snack, lunch, snack, dinner, snack. When I sent them home for towels, they came back with ragged sheets and grimy curtains to dry off with. Never a sighting of Mom. As I forced them to go home so we could all get some sleep, I decided I'd had enough.
If I'd wanted nine kids, I'd have had nine kids.
I remained friendly, but I disengaged. No more donations, no more trips. Just a friendly neighbor, no more a resource. No more surrogate mom.
Soon afterward, they were evicted, and left behind a house so filthy and battered, it has taken contractors four months to repair the damage. They left the door hanging open and when I stepped in to close it, the stench nearly made my knees buckle. Junk was everywhere. The basement was flooded, food was stuck to the floor and walls, every kitchen surface was scorched and blackened. Mouse droppings made a carpet. As well, they'd vandalized my backyard and garage and keyed the entire driver's side, the side nearest them, of my car. Windows, mirrors and finish.
Wherever they went, I know it wasn't under their own power, arrangement or dime. No doubt those energetic, well-meaning white ladies with their social services lanyards worked their paperwork magic to save the Smiths for another year, another resentful neighborhood, another step down, or at best sideways, on the ladder of hope. Events like Katrina, and programs like Section 8, make the poor visible to us but they don't make them any easier to reclaim. Or to love. Most of the Katrina evacuees who remain displaced are the hardcore, long-term, helpless poor, like the Smiths, and God only knows what will become of them when our patience wanes. However many begrudged millions we pour into the welfare system, the fact is that we abandoned these folks at birth and they know it. We shower them with Winnie the Pooh Band-Aids when they need heart transplants and, like Houston, we just wait to see which will drag themselves to success, which we'll dump elsewhere, which we'll bury, and which we'll incarcerate.
The poor will always be with us but I'm glad the Smiths are gone. My heart breaks for them, but also for their new neighbors.
About the writer
Debra J. Dickerson is the author of "The End of Blackness" and "An American Story."
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