Free Rachel and Her Children by Jonathan Kozol

graduated from a school in Flushing and has worked for eight years as a lab assistant. Burnt out of her home, she stayed for two years with her sister’s family: three adults, eight children, crowded into four unheated rooms. Evicted by her sister when the pressure on her sister’s husband and their kids began to damage their own marriage, she had to take her children to the EAU at Church Street in Manhattan. Refusing to accept a placement at a barracks shelter, she’s been sleeping here illegally for several nights in a small room rented to her cousin.
    When we meet, she’s in the corridor outside the crisis center, crying and perspiring heavily. She sits on a broken chair to talk to me. She’s not on Medicaid and has been removed from AFDC. “My card’s being reprocessed,” she explains, although this explanation explains nothing. She’s not on WIC. “I’ve got to file an application.” Her back is aching. She is due to have her child any day.
    This is the reason for her panic: “If I can’t be placed before the baby’s born, the hospital won’t let me take thebaby. They don’t let you take a newborn if you haven’t got a home.” As we will see, this is not always so; but the possibility of this occurrence is quite real. Where are her kids? “They’re here. I’ve got them hidden in the room.”
    She takes me to her cousin Wanda’s room. I measure it: nine feet by twelve, a little smaller than the room in which I store my files on the homeless. Wanda’s been here fifteen months, has four kids, no hot plate, and no food in the refrigerator. She’s had no food stamps and no restaurant allowance for two months. I ask her why. (You ask these questions even though you know the answer will be vague, confused, because so many of these women have no possible idea of why they do or don’t receive the benefits they do or don’t deserve.) She’s curled up in a tattered slip and a torn sweater on a mattress with no sheet. Her case was closed, she says. Faintly, I hear something about “an application.” Her words are hard to understand. I ask her whether she was here for Christmas. The very few words she speaks come out in small reluctant phrases: “Where else would I go?” She says her children got some presents from the fire department. There’s a painting of Jesus and Mary on the wall above the bed. “My mother gave it to me.”
    A week later I stop by to visit. She’s in the same position: drowsy and withdrawn. I ask her if she celebrated New Year’s Eve. “Stayed by my lonesome” is all that I understand. She rouses herself enough to ask me if I have a cigarette. In the vacuum of emotion I ask if she ever gets to do something for fun. “Go to a movie …” But when I ask the last time she’s been to a movie she says: “1984.” What was the movie?
“Dawn of the Living Dead.”
    When she says she’s pregnant and is planning an abortion I don’t care to ask her why, but she sits up halfway, props herself against a pillow, looks at Terry, shrugs, andmumbles this: “What you want to bring another baby into this place for? There ain’t nothin’ waitin’ for them here but dirty rooms and dyin’.”
    Her children, scattered like wilted weeds around her on the floor, don’t talk or play or move around or interrupt. Outside in the corridor I ask her cousin if the kids are sick. Terry says: “They’re okay. They just didn’t have no food to eat today.” So I ask: “Did you?” She shakes her head. I go down to Herald Square, buy french fries and chicken at a fast-food store, milk and cookies at a delicatessen, and return. The minute I walk in Wanda sits up, clearheaded and alert. Her kids wake from their stupor. Fifteen minutes later, every bit of chicken, all the french fries, cookies, milk have been consumed. There is a rush of energy and talking in the room. The kids are pestering the adults, as they ought to.
    “I have a problem,” Wanda says. “My blood sugar goes down. It is