Raining in Baltimore

It's Wednesday morning, and it's raining in Baltimore. Pouring; the sky seems to have opened up and dropped a river straight onto the city. Inside, the coffee percolates, black and aromatic in the suspended slow time that is found only on weekday mornings. The room just hints at mildew, in its subterranean position, halfway below the street of row houses.

At 10 a.m., a group of women begins to arrive, straggling into a room that has been carefully prepared: soda, sugar packets and utensils sit on the table beside the cheerfully boiling coffee. But that isn't the only thing which as been prepared for them: five feet away, a video camera sits on a tripod, poised to begin its onerous task of pulling in information. Later, the videotapes will be analyzed and results will be mailed off for re-inspection at another location.

The group is not the cozy setting that it first appears as the women mingle and catch up on each others lives. One woman, seated with the rest, but set slightly apart by her more formal dress and language, can gradually be discerned leading the discussion, angling it with the precision of a skilled handler of human affairs.

Karen is a Ph.D. student; the women are her subjects in a study on HIV risk prevention. All of them got into the study as a result of responding to a questionnaire in which they revealed that they were in some way at risk for contracting HIV. Most of them are unemployed and on welfare.

But you often wouldn't know it from what they talk about. In a group which is supposed to deal primarily with issues of sexuality and drug abuse, the range of related issues can be surprisingly large. One woman wants to talk with her semi-estranged mother. Another wants to go to a doctor's office to have a suspicious lump examined, but can't because she fears what she'll find out. These and other details all emerge as the members of the group take turns discussing their behaviors, goals and obstacles.

At other times, different worries are more apparent. One woman discusses her trouble relating to her daughter. Elsewhere, the issue might have played out as a normal part of growing up; here the daughter's flight from the house meant going into a community filled with crime and drug abuse. By the time the mother found out how the daughter was spending her time, she had become addicted. Later the mother revealed that she herself had only recently stopped abusing drugs. Ever since then, she felt, there wasn't much left for the two of them to talk about.

"I know how it is out there. And she's young and not hip to a lot of games people play...." As she continues, the "out there" that she referred to recurs, and in the repeated reference of her description, it becomes clear that its something more than the physical space beyond the door to her house. As she talks about it, the other women nod in recognition. They know the place.

Out There is another dimension. It is a place where people change in qualitative ways, where drug dealers roam, seeking to entice the innocent, the naive who arent hip to the games people play. It is a place where the lack of opportunity stares so baldly at passing wanderers that they run away, rushing off to buy illusions, to believe that things aren't really as bad as they seem. It's a place where there has been so little, for so long, that you cannot walk through it without some trace of its shabby residue getting caught on your clothes, your papers or your ambition. But Out There was the last place where this woman could talk with her daughter. Now, it seems, she watches helplessly over a transformation she feels powerless to prevent.

"She let herself go so much she doesn't even look like my same daughter. And she was a pretty girl. I got a picture of her.

"But now she doesn't take care of her of her hair.... And she used to be so conscious of herself if the wind was blowing she wouldn't go outside, you know, she didn't want her hair to get messed up."

The next week, when the woman comes in, she is groggy and inattentive. The relentless forces of whatever it is that is out there seem to have pulled her in yet again, at least this time.

Karen seems to genuinely sympathize with the woman in her study: "It's so hard for some of these women to express themselves," she tells me afterwards, detailing childhoods filled sometimes with violence, more often simply missing the background in social skills like self-presentation that so many other people take for granted.

Without doubt, the environment here in East Baltimore is different from the sheltered one in which I grew up. In one lesson, in which Karen goes over parts of the female anatomy, one woman pipes up, recognizing a term--that's the one the dirty old man on the corner used to say to us when we walked down the street--and I try to think about what it's like to be a little girl in a place where such incidents could be part of daily life. Occasionally, one of the women droops slightly--definitely methadone, thinks Janice, the woman who works upstairs, who has been doing this counseling for the longest time.

Later that day, she elaborates for me on the subtle calculus of recognition that is the expertise of some residents of these neighborhoods. With methadone, she explains, there is a particular way in which users droop--heroin addicts are different, more dazed-looking, in a stupor. Again, I imagine what it is like to leave childhood with this legacy of knowledge, rather than multiplication tables and reading skills.

Which is not to say that this characterizes all residents of the neighborhoods in the area--admittedly, our study, with its focus on HIV prevention, draws a large sample of people involved with drugs. Nevertheless, it is certainly fair to say that these neighborhoods see more than their fair share of drug-related violence and social upheaval.

As we drive, we pass teenagers standing in the street--just to hang out Janice tells me, evident disapproval in her tone. At times, she tells me stories of adults selling their children's food stamps to support drug habits; at other times, there is a different story.

"I ask the young men, in some of the sessions that I lead, to tell me what they plan to be doing just think about it for a moment, 10 years down the road. I ask them for a goal.

"They look at me like I'm crazy; 'We aren't going to be alive 10 years from now.'

"I think about the plans I'm making now...for retirement and IRA, paying my home loan off in installments over the next few years...."

And I think about my plans: career, activities, even the plan of study that has to be submitted down to the details of which amusingly irrelevant Lit and Arts C I will be taking in the spring of my junior year.

I'm not equipped to pass judgment on human nature, and I'm suspicious of those who say they are. The people I met who were receiving welfare were like people anywhere else: They ran the spectrum of character and values. Most shared basic concerns with people I had met everywhere else--housing, families, economic stability. The biggest differences I noticed were not those of character; people were not unusually lazy or unintelligent, as many people seemed to believe, at least according to the news I'd been hearing all summer.

Rather the difference lay in opportunity. Were the women I saw really the economic parasites of the state they were portrayed as? Or was their misfortune rather to have belonged to a social group in which their position as non-wage earning mothers could not be justified with same title they might have earned elsewhere as housewives? Was the problem for people in their community that they were really less motivated? Or that they had grown up in a world bereft of evidence that hard work would make a difference?

One thing that did strike and surprise me about some of the people I met was their attitude towards the place where they lived. Despite all the instability, many of them still referred to their neighborhoods as communities. For them, the fragile ties of common interest and mundane existence had not yet been as totally shattered as I had been led to believe, given the circumstances of their lives.

Their use of the word made me think. How far did the bonds of that community reach? Did they include only the people who were united by a common circumstance of impoverishment, the people I was meeting now, who were commonly portrayed as a monolithic block in the news stories I heard--the "welfare population"? Or was that merely a device, a creation of an out-group, in order to make non-members feel that there was some real difference separating them, and thus absolving them of responsibility for a group of people who in reality, shared a common history, a common popular culture, and more basically, a set of characteristics of human nature-laziness and affection, ambition and despair--that were present everywhere that people live?

It is easy to dispose of a problem when you feel that it doesn't concern you., to say, "Go take care of it yourself everything that goes wrong is your fault."

It's not so easy when you realize that some of the causes for those problems lie in the same basic character traits that you possess yourself, and that given the same circumstances, you might not have acted so very differently.

Welfare recipients share with their wealthier neighbors the nation's cities and towns, its social mores and a part of its collective future as it hurtles to the close of the millennium. Perhaps before anyone decides that they are unworthy of assistance,, it would be worthwhile to take a harder look at the common fears, concerns and abilities that people on welfare share in common with all of the other citizens of their extended communities.