No way out
Saturday 13 December 2003
Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble and Coming of Age in the Bronx
by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc
408pp, Flamingo, £17.
Someone once said, apropos nonfiction, that every writer betrays her subject. Intentions have nothing to do with it. Even fuelled by the best of them, "the story" is no longer the subject's but a processed thing, the real-life character's mixed-up narrative of history, memory, self-deception or protection made a coherent commodity, tradeable, by the writer, for cash, prestige, prizes. Any professional who has ever written about poor people especially has had to face this. I imagine Adrian Nicole LeBlanc must have done so more than once over the 11 years she spent assiduously recording the big events, daily goings-on, small-time joys and agonies of the "random family" of which, by her own account, she became a part in the course of her research. Then she wrote herself out of the story, becoming in the process its most provocative character: the voyeur who is everywhere and nowhere, watching and telling as things fall apart.
The book follows the journey of two young women in one of New York's most desperate neighbourhoods of the South Bronx. When we first meet Jessica, it is 1984 and she is 16.
For Jessica, love was the most interesting place to go and beauty was the ticket. She gravitated towards the enterprising boys, the boys with money, who were mostly the ones dealing drugs - purposeful boys who pushed out of the bodega's smudged doors as if they were stepping into a party instead of on to a littered pavement along a potholed street. Jessica sashayed on to the street with a similar readiness whenever she descended the four flights of stairs from the apartment and emerged, expectant and smiling, from the paint-chipped vestibule.
Jessica's mother, Lourdes, warned her that her dreams of having "a king with a maid" really were just dreams and "caution[ed] her daughter as she disappeared down the dreary stairwell, 'God ain't gonna have a pillow waiting for your ass when you fall landing from the sky'."
This is on page five. By page 75 it is 1989, and Jessica jots a note in her pocket calendar: "Bad day (went to jail)." In the interval she has had three children who are parcelled out to her mother and a friend, and has hooked up with a wildly successful heroin dealer named Boy George, working her way up from mill girl in one of his processing "factories", to concierge of one of his stash houses, to mistress. George buys her things, diamonds and emeralds and one-of-a-kind outfits, "customising" her like his Mercedes and beating her because he can. George had run away from a violent mother at 10, to the more violent streets. By 17 he'd secured his street rep. Just past his teens he was grossing $500,000 a week and throwing a Christmas eve bash for his employees, which, with gifts and prizes, cost close to a quarter of a million dollars. By 23 he had been sentenced to life without parole
LeBlanc met George while covering his trial for a magazine article and, through him, met Jessica and their extended clan. Jessica was lonely then, fearing her own possible prosecution as a co-conspirator, writing George's name across her heart and several other body parts in a tattooing spree and running fast with other boys, perhaps in a frantic bid against the day she'd be sent away for 10 years. I say "perhaps" because we don't really know what was going on inside Jessica, just as we don't really know when the family came to allow LeBlanc into their homes and their secrets. At some point LeBlanc's recreation of events (the whole beginning of the book) slides gracefully into her eye-witness account of them, but the how and why of that remains as obscure as whatever else LeBlanc may have been doing besides taking notes, as the people who make her their intimate get evicted, move house, become homeless, go to jail, get pregnant, get pregnant again, move house again, do drugs, sell drugs, get beaten, cheat welfare, move upstate, get jobs, lose jobs, skip school, fail school, have a breakdown, discover a child's been abused, fight rats, fight roaches, fight heartbreak and somehow keep on going.
In her author's note at the end, LeBlanc thanks Coco, the young woman who, "in the deepest sense, made a home for me", and whose story serves as a parallel life to Jessica's. "Coco's just regular", people would say. Not glamorous, not beautiful, not a drug-dealer or user, not greedy or rude, not in jail, not the worst off but, with five children from four fathers, not the best off either. Love might have been the most interesting place for her too, only unlike Jessica, who "appeared to have no boundaries, as though she were the country of sex itself", Coco had a conventional appeal and a simple dream: a man, a family.
When we meet her, Coco is 13 or 14 and eyeing Jessica's little brother, Cesar. By 15 she is pregnant with their first child and he is a "stickup kid", robbing local shops and petty dealers to relieve boredom and boost his mother's household income, and going to prison for the first time. Across the next 300-plus pages their stories and those of their loved ones play out like a soap opera, and one turns the pages avidly, wondering what else could possibly happen to these people. But they are not characters in an afternoon drama, and at some point, despite the considerable strength of the writing, the whole exercise feels wrong.
Why are we watching Coco compulsively pick her face, or reading the vicious letters Cesar writes to her from jail, or hanging on any of their humiliations? Why are their private hurts public business? And why, the umpteenth time LeBlanc describes a room thick with garbage, a house without a table, a child craving attention, a young woman hungrily searching for someone to celebrate her birthday with or someone to love, doesn't the author pick up a broom, purchase a table, play with the child, take the woman somewhere surprising, or speak heart-to-heart about sex and condoms, desire and self-defence?
I'd wager LeBlanc did a version of all those things and more over her 11 years with these people. Her interventions could not have changed the basic contours of their lives, but her presence, which after all was part of their story, would have changed the story. Some self-exposure on her part would have differently coloured so much revelation on theirs. So would the addition of some context. But then the book might not have read like a novel. The less personal dramas of de-industrialisation in New York City, of the Bronx as a national sacrifice zone, of drug dealing and incarceration as New York state's de facto economic development strategies, of school collapse, welfare collapse and racism, of legal theft and the rot beneath the shine of New York's renaissance, are here present only by inference, and sometimes not at all.
LeBlanc is extremely skilful at revealing "an unspoken, unappealing truth: that even living right was just another precarious hold"; that "success was less about climbing than about not falling down"; that in a world of pain and want, what is gracious (Lourdes's sublime cooking) often bumps up against the grim (her addictions and cruelties), and family generosity, however defeating, might be the only bulwark between awfulness and horror; that, most of all, babies are a little bit of goodness and a little bit of hope in a life without enough of either.
In the end, though, such truths drown in the onrush of personal detail. It seems the destiny of Jessica's and Coco's daughters to follow in their paths. It seems the destiny of young Puerto Rican men to go to jail (and, judging from Cesar's maturity there, seems a not half-bad solution). It seems the destiny of the whole community to live with extraordinary drama.
It is only by accident, in the acknowledgements, that the book finally confronts the reader with the "American experience of class injustice" that is ostensibly its subject. So many institutions, so many funds and fellowships, retreat centres and universities, publishers, mentors, editors, friends, formed a net to support this one writer. Nothing comparable exists to hold up the countless Cocos and Jessicas. If this is not LeBlanc's fault, as it surely is not, it is the condition that helped shape the story she told. The history of American letters is studded with the journeys of writers to the "other side", the side of danger and need. Sometimes they are imposters, and sometimes, like LeBlanc, the omniscient eye. One might ask why their subjects let them in, why they confess, and for so little in return.
But the tougher question is why the stories of poor people - and not just any poor people but those acquainted with chaos and crime, those the overclass likes to call the underclass - are such valuable raw material, creating a frisson among the literary set and the buyers of books? Why are their lives and private griefs currency for just about anyone but themselves?
· JoAnn Wypijewski, a journalist in New York, is on the editorial committee of New Left Review.
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