The personnel director, a middle-aged guy between forty and fifty with a pale, meaty face and bulging belly, sat behind his desk, scanning the folder in his hands. “It’s been a while since we’ve had someone as low as a ninety,” he said, leaning back in his swivel chair. Dismayed by his unthinking insult (did all the others get a hundred?) and sweating in a homemade corduroy jacket my wife had made for me, I remained silent. We didn’t have a typical interview with questions about my likes and dislikes or how I would react in a particular scenario. All he needed was my score on a civil service test. “I’ll put you downstairs,” he said.
He meant the local food stamp office on the fifth floor of the midtown building that also housed the program’s headquarters. On earning my master’s, I mailed out over a hundred resumes and took several government exams. The yield was uncounted rejection letters and two other meetings, both fruitless. Although relieved to have a job, I had stooped to employment with the Division of Family and Children Services (DFCS), the welfare department. Standing outside the building in the sweltering mid-summer heat, waiting for my wife to pick me up, I mulled over my situation.
In 1970, I dropped out of college and came to the South, volunteering “to help the poor help themselves.” I witnessed a welfare bureaucracy that demeaned low-income people for their indigency. One rural director had a sign on her door that people requesting assistance could read from the waiting room: “I fight poverty—I work.” Viewing it, I tensed up and became queasy. When I later applied with an urban arm of this bureaucracy, I stifled the sign’s image. Yet, the disquiet it brought persisted on the edge of my consciousness.
Several weeks before the interview, I had put in for an opportunity in the North Georgia foothills, where my wife and I wanted to relocate. Each local community action agency (federally established, antipoverty nonprofits) was receiving funds to create a planner position to document objectives and track program activities. Although I had committed to DFCS, I called the North Georgia Community Action Agency director, Frank—who I’d known from my days as a poverty volunteer—about his schedule for filling the planner slot. He said it would be another three or four weeks before he could begin seeing applicants, but he would like to talk to me. I had practicalities to consider related to moving for the DFCS post and then quitting it in short order if Frank hired me. Or I could refuse the proffer I had, hoping for the best from Frank, but I risked remaining unemployed. My mouth became dry. Notions of honesty and trustworthiness flitted across my mind, but they were rationalizations I used later. I swallowed hard, thanked Frank, and went to work at the job I didn’t want.
* * *
During the first week of a month-long training I went through, my wife visited her family in Philadelphia. When I got home on the second or third day, our dog, Pearl, who I tied to the clothesline behind our apartment that morning, was missing. During my frantic search, a resident told me she saw an animal control truck that day. Though I hadn’t confirmed animal control captured her, I knew Pearl was likely in a cage at the county facility forty miles from the training site. I recall eating a TV dinner in the shadowy living room. I was mad at the unlucky creature for getting loose and irked at the unknown person who reported her to the county, but my enmity shifted to distress at the prospect Pearl could be put down in two or three days if I didn’t claim her. I didn’t have the necessary leave to take off and get her. And I was second-guessing myself for turning my back on Frank. As these thoughts whirled in my head, I grasped my utter isolation. The needling sensation of tears began filling my eyes. Embarrassed, I stemmed the teardrops after a few moments.
The following morning, I called the pound and verified they had our dog. They weren’t open in the evenings or on weekends. I would have to pay a fine and face the possibility of taking off work without pay. I got a minute of the trainer’s time to tell her about my predicament, uncertain what her reaction would be. But she was a dog-lover. When I explained the problem and asked to leave early, she jokingly said, “Ok, but only because it’s your dog. If you had asked to take off for your wife, I wouldn’t let you go.” I still needed to trek up the interstate and locate the pound. Yet my palpable relief enhanced by the trainer’s odd sense of humor, lifted the worst of the melancholy consuming me for the past eighteen hours.
I remember most trainees were like me, out of college and unable to find decent employment. But at least two aspired to be caseworkers. One, a stocky, white guy with sandy hair and beard who came from above the Mason-Dixon line, declared he planned to get a year or two in Fulton County under his belt and then transfer to the “so-called bad-ass country” in South Georgia. He evoked a remembrance of six years earlier when I pursued “meaning” and a spirit of “Beloved Community” by serving the underprivileged. But the job was tedious, and my efforts were futile. I discovered I lacked resolve and saw my hopeful dreams rebuffed. I shuddered at my associate’s credulity in supposing he could help the vulnerable and his belief in the efficacy of the food stamp program.
The oldest person in training was a lady who was, I guessed, about fifty. She had a coppery complexion, dark brown eyes, and charcoal hair streaked with gray. She hinted she didn’t need to be employed, emphasizing, “I don’t want to be like those Buckhead ladies playing bridge and having tea every afternoon.” With the tenacity of a trophy hunter, she set her sights on uncovering fraud. During the last week of training, we processed actual cases from the initial interview through ascertaining eligibility. Midmorning at the end of the week, I heard her shout, “I got one. I got one.” With a wolfish grin and holding her limp hands above the table, she announced, “I found a fraud.” Her quest stirred up memories of the sentiments held by welfare authorities in the hinterlands. And I soon realized she wasn’t alone.
Not long before I started, Fulton County installed a fraud investigator, maybe the first in the state. A former caseworker with a night school law degree, I recollect him proclaiming his loathing of welfare and food stamp cheats. Earnest but somewhat aloof, his conviction jibed with others besides the middle-aged woman I trained with. I met one zealot at the Grant Park office, a guy with long, blond hair who favored cowboy-styled shirts. He professed he fantasized about taking down the civil rights leader Hosea Williams. He was confident he could apprehend Williams if he spent some time searching for him on the recipient list.
* * *
Every weekday morning, at about eight, with a pen and calculator ready on my desk, I prepared for a face-to-face that might end in accord or escalate into a messy skirmish. With tingly hands but a clear head, I walked to the counter in the waiting room and read out loud the first name without a line through it on a sheet of names. Returning to my workspace, I tried to anticipate whether the ensuing dialog would take ten minutes or upwards of an hour. A subset on welfare—single moms in public housing—was the easiest since their income could be verified in an internal system showing how much assistance families received, and their expenses were simple to document. The most difficult were working people without a regular job because we had to piece together what they made based on pay stubs for part-time work or notes from someone they did odd jobs for. I sat in the worn secretarial chair at my metal desk and directed the petitioner to a straight-back chair on the side of the desk. I took the green form a staffer at the counter had instructed them to complete. They never did.
Not everyone who needed help complied with my notion of down and out. A short, chubby guy in his late twenties bearing a Ph.D. replied to my compliment on attaining it, “That and a quarter will get me a cup of coffee.” A student living in an airy Midtown apartment played classical music during my home visit. A woman from New Orleans stockpiled bags of red beans and rice in her pantry. A transgender woman caused me to wonder if she had undergone an operation, an idea that made me squeamish. While I never worked on their case, I routinely noticed a family of five or six clustered around a hapless caseworker’s desk, with documents showing that, despite their Buckhead mansion, their earned income and resources fell within the guidelines for food stamp eligibility.
My role exposed me to assorted demographics: the unhoused, homeowners, students, laborers, the unemployed, people with disabilities, and public housing tenants. Race was another: a majority seeking aid in my office were Black. While in college, I tutored two Black adults studying for the General Education Diploma and in my stint in the War on Poverty, I lived in southern Appalachia, where I had infrequent contact with Black folks. Besides these experiences and brief interactions with a few students in school, my knowledge of Black culture and society emanated from writers such as King, Baldwin, Cleaver, and Wright. Until I landed in the food stamp office, I had not grappled with nuanced racial issues such as color. It cropped up more than once.
In one encounter, a large guy in his thirties, with a part-time job and a family to support, sat impassively, answering my questions in a subdued voice. Although his facial features appeared Black, his sallow complexion threw me off. I couldn’t decide which box to check, so I mumbled, “What’s your race.” His eyes widened, and his head jerked back almost imperceptibly as he absorbed my question. “Black,” he said. I felt the heat of his startled stare, and my gaze dropped, my cheeks prickling like poison ivy on sunburn.
In another instance, a teenager, sixteen or seventeen, donning a loose-fitting, ratty dress, sat in the chair on the side of my desk. Skimming her renewal application, I asked a few questions from the form—number of household members and any nonrelatives living with her. I thought I had misheard when she replied in soft but distinctive Black English. I stared at her blue eyes, milky forehead sprinkled with tiny freckles, and brown hair hanging to her collarbones. My mind churned: Was she a white person who a Black family had adopted years before? I couldn’t comprehend how the tone and accent of her speech belied her appearance. A dilemma confronted me. Her record showed her race was Black, but I beheld a white person. A future caseworker could uncover the mistake, and even if no one held me accountable for the oversight, I would look careless or foolish. Feeling obligated to ensure the accuracy of her record, I considered changing the box for race to white. But uncertain and uneasy, I didn’t.
Satisfying incidents, albeit rare and fleeting, did occur. A young woman, perhaps twenty-five, spotted me in the waiting area and rushed up to me, expressing appreciation for aiding her family. After a moment, I vaguely remembered her, her husband, and their preschool children. She gushed, “Thank you so much.” But when she departed, my elevated mood dissolved into bewildered embarrassment at her public display. On another occasion, the supervisors assigned me a short project to assess office security—a small ego booster, implying their trust in my competence. A week or so later, I submitted a report suggesting changes, gleaned from employees, in the waiting room procedures and the layout, and additional rooms for privacy during interviews. Though preparing the report was a bright spot in my routine, its anticlimactic content nettled me, giving off the air of a high school term paper. The supervisors made minor changes to the counter placement and intake process.
* * *
The crude disrespect for those seeking assistance I observed in a small county welfare office manifested in a different style in the metropolitan county that employed me. Despite hearing claims that our clients were dishonest, I didn’t come across any fraud beyond the type of corner-cutting I engaged in when filing expense statements for travel. Yet, many workers spoke about recipients with disdainful tones and knowing looks. I sometimes gave them supportive smirks that inevitably instilled an inner discomfort with my effort to fit in, like an atheist at mass.
Margie, my supervisor, was in her late twenties. She had curly brown hair, a square jaw, a pale complexion, and an athletic build. Stern, though not unfriendly, Margie held to a strict reading of the rules. From time to time, she stayed after hours to get caught up scrutinizing the cases handed in by the half dozen workers she supervised. By a large margin, I had more cases returned for corrections than anyone else. I’d often arrive in the morning to see ten to fifteen folders stacked in my chair, waiting for revisions, compared to three or four in a neighboring chair. Some of the returns had minor omissions or a misspelled word (it took me months to learn how to spell “separate”). Some were more serious: check stubs not recent enough, suspicious rental receipts, or a copy of a child’s birth certificate missing. Fixing these errors took time from processing the new cases that never ceased. Glumly anxious, I placed the flawed records in a file cabinet, hidden until I addressed them later. I was a runner grappling with exhaustion three miles from the finish line.
For the better part of a year, I toiled in a bullpen with dingy, yellow walls and scattered clusters of two or three desks pushed together. Except for the families on welfare residing in subsidized apartments, I began each series of queries in fear the unexpected would ambush me. My anxiety rose during rambling or evasive answers as I waited for an opening to interrupt. My misgivings clabbered into anger at those unable or unwilling to play the game—responding with clumsy deception instead of subtle dissimulation. Accepting their uncorroborated word required the least effort, but I didn’t want Margie to send me back to collect more information. I dealt with embarrassed, bitter, despairing, and occasionally desperate people. And no tricks of the mind could dislodge the belief my acquaintances looked down on me because of the people I dealt with.
* * *
In her mid-thirties, I thought of Greta as our unit’s senior citizen. Our desk setup had us facing each other, and I could eavesdrop on her conversations as she could mine. A German immigrant, she didn’t shy away from giving her opinions in a lightly accented voice. Greta thought some clients were cheating or lazy but would become sentimental over stories from others.
A new caseworker joined our unit two months before I left. A big guy with dark brown hair and a thick beard, his gentle demeanor seemed incongruous with his Paul Bunyan aspect. He maintained a quiet confidence. Deliberative, he appeared concerned for each person he interviewed. Though his pending caseload grew, superseding mine, he didn’t exhibit the anxiety that backlogs induced in me. And he withheld judgment on those seeking aid. For the first time since my arrival on the fifth floor, I intuited I shared meaningful values with a colleague.
One morning, Greta’s caustic words broke through the mental cocoon that enveloped me as I worked on a case file. I missed the source of her carping but overheard her upbraid the big guy for having a lackadaisical attitude, ending with, “I don’t know how your wife puts up with you.” He fixed his gaze on her without speaking, his countenance blank, and after a moment, turned his attention to the papers on his desk, acting as if she was talking to someone else. While her antagonism seemed gratuitous, his reaction rattled me. I couldn’t fathom his passivity and, recoiling from it, struggled with emptiness radiating in my gut. To calm down, I directed my thoughts to other matters.
I would be taking a planner position with a CAA in the western part of the state. The pay was a tad higher, and the work looked reasonable on paper, although I wasn’t sure what I would be doing day in and day out. The employees, including the senior staff, were a mix of Black and white. My next boss gave me an ancillary assignment as the equal opportunity officer, dealing with discrimination complaints raised by staff and folks getting services. While the agency’s mission was to assist poor persons in alleviating or ending their poverty, I had long since given up on participating in a Beloved Community. However, I didn’t abandon the hope of finding fellow believers.
