The worst night’s sleep always came on the eve of your birthday. If you fell asleep that night, you could be sure that Patrice would sneak into your room and smear mayonnaise or ketchup on your face. For the past six years, the Hinkstons hadn’t been able to celebrate Christmas—they didn’t have the money. But on your birthday, you woke up smiling with goo on your face and a cake on the table. The Hinkstons loved pranking one another. Once Natasha put pepper in Patrice’s underwear. Patrice retaliated by sneaking Ruby out of the house on a day Natasha was put in charge of watching her younger sister. When Natasha noticed Ruby was gone, she spent the next several hours patrolling the neighborhood, frantically searching.
The Hinkstons’ rear door was off its hinges. The walls were pockmarked with large holes. There was one bathroom. Its ceiling sagged from an upstairs leak, and a thin blackish film coated its floor. The kitchen windows were cracked. A few dining-room windows had disheveled miniblinds, broken and strung out in all directions. Patrice hung heavy blankets over the windows facing the street, darkening the house. A small television sat on a plywood dresser in the living room, next to a lamp with no shade.
After Patrice had moved downstairs, Sherrena discovered that she had been pirating electricity. The meter-repair bill would cost $200, and Sherrena refused to pay it while Patrice was living with Doreen. “I ain’t incurring shit,” she said. “They black asses are gonna incur everything, or they gonna be cold this winter.” It took the Hinkstons a couple months to save $200; during that time the back of the house, including the kitchen, was without power. Everything in the refrigerator spoiled. The family ate dinners out of cans: ravioli, SpaghettiOs.
The Hinkstons treated the refrigerator, sour-smelling and sitting tomblike in the kitchen, like they treated the entire apartment: as something to endure, to outlast. It was how they saw the mattresses and small love seat too, each deep-burrowed with so many roaches they planned to leave them all behind when they moved out. The roaches were there when the Hinkstons moved in: crawling the sinks, the toilet, the walls, filling kitchen drawers. “They were rushers,” Sherrena said about Doreen’s family. “They moved in on top of roaches.”
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Before the Hinkstons had moved into Sherrena’s apartment off Wright Street, they’d lived for seven years in a five-bedroom house on Thirty-Second Street. It wasn’t perfect, but it was spacious and the landlord was decent. They pooled their money to make rent: $800 a month. Patrice was serving up lunch at a fast-food joint, and after dropping out, Natasha had started working too. Doreen hadn’t completed high school either, though she had learned to type seventy-two words a minute at Job Corps years back. Patrice almost finished high school, making it to the eleventh grade even after having Mikey at fourteen, but in the end she started working full-time to help the family stay afloat. At sixteen, Natasha began logging twelve-hour shifts at Quad Graphics for $9.50 an hour, sometimes falling asleep on the printing machines. They didn’t ask her age, and she didn’t offer it. Doreen’s monthly income was $1,124: $437 from a state-funded child support supplement and $687 from SSI, which she received for an old leg injury. In eighth grade, she had broken her hip on Easter Sunday—her new wedge high heels did her in—and the fracture had never quite healed. Maybe it would have if her father had rushed her to the hospital instead of keeping her home for several days. The old man hated doctors. When his knees began going out, he just sawed off a kitchen table leg and used it for a cane.
On Thirty-Second Street, the Hinkstons became a neighborhood feature. The children ran in and out of neighbors’ homes, and from her front steps Doreen got to know the other families on her block. She would rock and laugh with the grandmothers and yell at the neighborhood boys when they terrorized stray cats. When summer arrived, the children would buy bottle rockets from a neighbor and shoot them off in the street. Every so often, Doreen would host a party and invite everyone.
Then one August day in 2005, Doreen turned on the television and saw New Orleans underwater. A muddy expanse filled the city, and black bodies bobbed past folks on rooftops. She immediately called her best friend, Fanny, asking her to come over. Doreen and Fanny were shocked by what they saw on the news. “This is a total disgrace,” Doreen remembered thinking. After a few restless nights, Doreen felt called to do something more for the flood victims than fret and pray. She left Patrice in charge and boarded a southbound bus with Fanny. She was forty-one. Patrice was twenty.
It wasn’t like her to do something like this. She was a soft-humming stoop-sitter. “I don’t go no further than my front porch,” Doreen said. But there were moments along the way when she struck out against life’s current, like the January night in 1998 when she hurriedly packed up and moved the family to Illinois without telling anyone. She needed to get away from C.J. and Ruby’s father, who would go on to serve a long sentence upstate.
After two days on the bus, Doreen and Fanny found themselves in Lafayette, Louisiana. They joined dozens of other volunteers, passing out blankets and serving food.
The trip caused the Hinkstons to fall a month behind in rent. But they had been long-term tenants and their landlord was loyal. “He wasn’t sweating me,” Doreen recalled. The landlord told her to pay him back when she could. Doreen gave him extra when she had it, $100 here and there. She worked to clear her debt, but then something would happen and she’d come up short. Months passed; then years.
One early spring night in 2008 two neighborhood boys on Thirty-Second Street shot at each other. Bullets zipped through the Hinkstons’ front door, shattering its window. Natasha, who was seventeen at the time, was sweeping up the glass when the police arrived. They asked to take a look inside. To hear the Hinkstons tell it, the officers ransacked their house, looking for guns or drugs. (Patrice speculated that a neighbor associated with one of the shooters had pinned the crime on the three young men who were staying with the Hinkstons at the time: Patrice’s and Natasha’s boyfriends as well as a cousin.) All the police found was a mess: dishes piled high in the sink, overflowing trash cans, flies. The Hinkstons were not the tidiest family, and to make matters worse, they had thrown a party the night before. There were less superficial problems too, like the plywood board the landlord had haphazardly nailed over a sagging bathroom ceiling. Perhaps because of the mess, or because Patrice began snapping at the officers around two a.m., or because they believed the Hinkstons had played a role in the shooting—whatever the case, the police called Child Protective Services, who called the Department of Neighborhood Services (DNS), who dispatched a building inspector, who issued orders to the landlord, who filled out a five-day eviction notice, citing unpaid rent. Doreen had only managed to get halfway caught up when the shooting happened. There had never been a need to rush.
After the court commissioner stamped their eviction judgment, the Hinkstons needed to find another place quickly. They searched on their own—but without a car or the Internet their reach was limited. They sought help from social workers, and one put them in touch with Sherrena. She showed them the apartment off Wright Street, and they hated it. “I wouldn’t advertise it to a blind person,” Patrice said. But anyplace, the family figured, was better than the street or a shelter; so they took it. Sherrena handed Doreen the keys on the spot, along with a rent receipt dashed off on a scrap of paper. Doreen tucked the scrap with PAID $1,100, RENT + SECURITY DEPOSIT into her Bible.
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