In recent years, welfare and the underclass have become a prominent part of the national conversation. But pundits’ portrayals of the urban poor are often distressingly simplistic, usually presenting the underclass as a mass of indistinguishable brown and black people inhabiting a murky, foreign land. In 1988, Washington Post reporter Leon Dash began a seven-year project that he hoped might dispel reductionist thinking, trying to make this unfamiliar world complex and real by focusing on a single case, one that shows many of the facets of underclass life. He tells the story of a single Washington, D.C., woman and her family-four generations of poverty, pathology and crippling dysfunction. Rosa Lee Cunningham “is fifty-two years old, a longtime heroin addict, with a long record of arrests for everything from petty theft to drug trafficking,” Dash writes. “Her eight children-the oldest of whom she bore at age fourteen-were fathered by six different men, and six of the children have followed her into a life of teenage parenthood, drugs, and crime.” Rosa Lee’s story is hardly inspirational-and yet in it there are glimmers of brightness. Amid the sadness and squalor, Dash leaves room for hope.
“Rosa Lee” grew out of a controversial Washington Post newspaper series that won a Pulitzer Prize in 1994; about half the book is fresh material. Dash paints detailed portraits of Rosa Lee and her children; presented nonjudgmentally, his depictions are founded on ambiguity. He makes it clear that-in the name of “survival”-she condemned at least two succeeding generations to follow her example, alienated from broader, productive society. “Rosa Lee exposed all of her children to her criminal lifestyle, the underworld path she argues was her avenue to survival,” he writes, “and four of her six sons followed her onto the same path, with ruinous outcomes for each of them.” One chilling example: Early in the book, Rosa Lee describes a shoplifting trip with an 11-year-old grandson and how a 5-year-old granddaughter had once helped her sell heroin. “Rosa Lee has introduced her granddaughter to the drug trade,” Dash writes, “as something to do to earn enough money to eat.” Despite her behavior and legacy, though, Rosa Lee remains somehow likable and sympathetic throughout the book. “I can’t help but think that if circumstances had been different, if she hadn’t faced so many obstacles in her life, her drive and her charisma might have caused her to create a different life for herself, her children, and grandchildren,” Dash writes.
Facing poverty, dysfunction and ruined lives, Americans weaned on tabloid TV tend to look to assign quick blame. Who’s at fault for Rosa Lee and her children? “There is something in her life story to confirm any political viewpoint,” Dash writes. “Some may see her as a victim of hopeless circumstances, a woman born to a life of deprivation because of America’s long history of discrimination and racism. Others may give her the benefit of the doubt in some cases but hold her personally acountable for much of what she did to herself, her children, and her grandchildren. A third group might say that Rosa Lee is a thief, a drug addict, a failed parent, a broken woman paying for her sins, and a woman who seemingly was so set on placing her children on the path to failure that it is amazing that even two of them manage to live conventional lives.” If Rosa Lee is invisible to lawmakers who-only a mile or two away-see her as only a nebulous parasite, they are equally intangible to her. She “has no interest in politics or government. She has never voted,” Dash writes. “There is almost no connection between Rosa Lee’s world and the world of Washington’s policy-makers and politicians.” She is unaware, he notes, that elections even take place. Though wards of the state, entirely dependent on government subsidies and handouts, the family is completely alienated from civil society: They don’t seem to recognize that their drug abuse and shoplifting have larger societal costs-indeed, that their actions affect others at all.
Dash shows us the most troubled of Rosa Lee’s family: “Bobby, Ronnie, Richard, Patty, and Ducky live a kind of nomadic existence, bouncing from friends’ apartments to jail, to the street, to Rosa Lee’s. All five are addicted to heroin or cocaine, or abuse both drugs,” he writes. “Their lives and choices provide an intricate blueprint of just how bad guidance and bad decisions so easily ensnared them in lives of drug addiction and criminal recidivism.” But he also focuses on Alvin and Eric, the two of Rosa Lee’s sons who “found a different path and moved up out of poverty into conventional middle-class and working-class respectability.” Somehow, “they rejected the lures, avoided the pitfalls, and got around the obstacles that they faced in their home and in their neighborhoods from the day they were born.” Dash attributes much of the family’s continuing poverty to its lack of education and frequent teenage parenthood. Rosa Lee had her first child at 14; so did her daughter Patty. Rosa Lee’s mother Rosetta gave birth three days after her 13th birthday. All dropped out of school still illiterate.
Dash’s writing is nonjudgmental, enviably clean and straightforward, without pseudonyms or euphemisms. He never pretties up his language with gratuitous adjectives or unnecessary color; he never clumsily writes around a cliché if the cliché is clearer. The only stylistic flaw is his confusingly frequent tense shifts to accomodate his jumping back and forth in the chronology. As a black, middle-class journalist, he is an inextricable part of his own tale, and it’s fascinating to see him run up against his own journalist-subject boundaries. “I lay down ground rules that I will buy them meals and even cigarettes, but I will pay for the purchases. I explain I will never give or loan any of them any amount of cash. I know from past experience that drug users go to considerable lengths to collect small amounts of money from many people until they gather enough to buy drugs. The drug-users among Rosa Lee’s children boast to her that they will eventually get some money out of me. They are sorely disappointed.” Dash fights not to show feelings, to remain scrupulously impartial, all the way through his realistic and informed book’s-end discussion of remedial action. “Viable solutions to poverty will never be simple,” he writes. “As Rosa Lee’s story shows, immense difficulties await any effort to bring an end to poverty, illiteracy, drug abuse, and criminal activity. In the poorest neighborhoods, these problems are knitted together into whole cloth. . . . Reforming welfare doesn’t stop drug trafficking; better policing doesn’t end illiteracy; providing job training doesn’t teach a young man or woman why it’s wrong to steal.
