Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx

by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc

Exactly how she was supposed to do this was unclear, but Coco might have instinctively understood that success was less about climbing than about not falling down. Since there were few real options for mobility, people in Coco’s world measured improvement in microscopic increments of better-than-whatever-was-worse.

A lifetime assault of contradictory messages—to be sexy, to respect, that all men were dogs but that without them women were nothing—reinforced her sense of powerlessness and futility. In a sense, Coco had been both fighting this eventuality and waiting for it all her life, so that now her guilt and failure trumped the very real question of whether the abuse had actually happened or not.

Coco’s attempts at birth control had been much like her attempts at many other things—well-intentioned and wholehearted, dwarfed by other problems, and eventually forgotten.

Coco kept her appointment at Planned Parenthood and decided on the Depo-Provera shot, but she didn’t react well to it. She bled heavily for a solid week; when she reported to Planned Parenthood again, she was instructed to continue taking Motrin. Coco asked if she could get her tubes tied and was told she had to make several appointments, including one for an hour of counseling. Between her chronic problems with Frankie and with Pearl, she never made it back.

You see Jessica, while I was growing up I put up a shield. I couldn’t let the neglection get to me so I closed up. But that was how it affected me. It caused me to become frustrated. That’s why when I was a bit older I took to the streets. I was acknowledged out there. I was taken in and they showed me love (or so I thought). But now I realize that all they loved was that hatred inside of me. They fed it. And I kept that shield up for all that was good & vibed off of the evil.

Many of the candidates who contacted them for help shared similar backgrounds to Jessica’s and had traveled the same worn-down paths—sexual abuse and teenage motherhood, family violence and violent men, overcrowded housing, inferior schools, dangerous neighborhoods, few decent jobs, high stress, lousy health.

To hold the prison legally accountable for Jessica’s predicament, the students had to prove that the injuries she had suffered were intentional. The legal challenge was a lot like the challenge of demonstrating the impact of racism or poverty or substandard housing: How could you untangle the structural injustices from the self-inflicted damage? How could you separate neglect from malice, the intended from the unintended harms?

Every opportunity Coco seized on improved her life, but sustaining the improvements proved impossible against the backslide of poverty.

In thinking about his adolescence, he’d realized the punishments for his behavior never gave him clues about how to go about making improvements: “They made me pay the consequences when I did wrong, but not one ever tried to show me a solution or identify the cause.”

there had been the suspension, followed by probation and counseling, and then the roof had caved in—literally. A whole chunk of Coco’s kitchen ceiling came down, after a weekend’s rainstorm. And then roaches—wave upon wave of roaches—made use of the sudden hole. Coco left increasingly desperate messages for her landlord, but the landlord never called back. “That lady have a habit of not returning calls,” Coco observed dryly. Then Coco and Frankie broke up again, but this time they’d even parted on kind terms, exhausted from the recriminations and arguing. Next, Coco lost her job: Garden Way closed. Not long after, the authorities discontinued Pearl’s SSI benefits; “She does too good in school,” Coco said. Within weeks, Rent-A-Center retrieved the velveteen green sectional couch that had effectively furnished the living room, and cable cut off access. Frankie brought milk and Pampers for La-Monté and called every night to calm him because he had trouble falling asleep without his father; then the phone company shut off the phone. In the barrage of trouble, Coco’s worries about Mercedes had once again been eclipsed.