Serenity

Right after College I was hired by the N.Y.C. Dept. Of  Welfare. It turned out the job as nothing more than investigating people's eligibility for financial assistance, an allowance expected to cover all basic needs like food, rent and clothing but required a home economist's skill and the self denial of a pillar saint to survive it. Applicants were neither. Most were unmarried mothers who shopped on credit and chronically ran short. Many lived in damp basements or stifling third floor walkups, their diet poor, and children inadequately dressed despite occasional handouts from narcissistic boyfriends. Yet the City celebrated its largesse in the waiting room of the Welfare Center by decorating it with festive posters depicting sizzling steaks and chops, roasted chickens, steaming fish, glasses of milk and nutritious juices and cornucopias pouring glistening fruits and vegetables before children dazzled by Welfare's bounty.

Eviction notices for non payment of rent or threatened utilities shutoff were frequent and required investigations, consultations with surly specialists, conferences with sanctimonious supervisors and approvals from distant officials in Central Office, a bureaucratic tour de force which often resulted in punitive restrictions.

To get around this a few caseworkers manipulated an obscure procedure allowing them to handle emergencies in the least harmful way. This curious document listed every household item to which a family was entitled: so many blankets, so many sheets, pillowcases, towels, dishes, cups, etc. everything spelled out in exquisite detail. It was rarely used but could be exhibited to mystify anyone looking too closely at the Department. Since no family had all the things described a missing colander a cheese Grater, or a bedspread, could always be discovered and approved to avert a crisis. Not acceptable practice but legal. It required a moral balancing act of course because the items would still be missing but it seemed the lesser evil at the time.

I used this method routinely with an African American woman with a certain reputation in my Welfare Center. Her name was Serenity. Lyrical and exotic names, it seemed, were the legacies of the poor, but in her case only a mother with the gift of divination and a sense of humor could have chosen it. With massive shoulders and hips, jaws of basalt and heavy duty hands she was well adapted to back up a hair trigger temper. She dressed fastidiously with clothing bought at the Goodwill store, clean but shopworn and out of date and a coquettish hat and when she came to the Center, which was often, she took her seat ceremoniously to wait her turn. Her overly polite manner had a disarming effect on people who didn't know her, but let her detect a hint of sophistry in an interviewer's jargon and she would roll bloodshot eyes like lava about to erupt, her voice rising to a nasal tenor to strike fear throughout the Intake Section. Her story was no different from that of many other women. Lured to the City by the hope of decent employment they worked for a spell at unskilled low paying jobs, sought relief from loneliness and found inevitable pregnancy and desertion. Serenity's daughter was a studious and shy teenager who didn't share any of her mother's characteristics and it was even hard to imagine the circumstances of her conception. The paternity of the child was never established and it was clear no one had ever attempted to do so because that meant treading the minefield of Serenity's susceptibilities. Still, Serenity had a code of ethics. She never resorted to the crude and emotionally damaging practice of coercing the Department by abandoning her child in the Center on a late Friday afternoon. Such drama brought the Department around because it dreaded publicity, but the gesture exacted a price: the child was placed in the Shelter and sometimes farmed out to a foster home. Her approach was straightforward and, for the most part, limited to the suggestion of potential violence. No one ever reported an injury on staff but her mere presence generated a flurry of activity throughout Reception: Security itched their trousers, focusing on their most vulnerable areas and interviewers removed staplers, in/out baskets, paperweights, potted plants, framed family photos, hanging testimonials or plaques carved with amusing proverbs, attaché cases full of sandwiches and doughnuts, jars filled with sand from Caribbean beaches, leaving only hefty files on their desks, presumably hoping they might be blown away.

I learned about Serenity's flare-up as soon as I set foot in the Center after a bout with the flu. Several coworkers welcomed me warmly and eagerly (too eagerly) filled me in with the details. Serenity showed up for emergency assistance and a new employee, who had not been briefed, asked one too many questions and then, sensing an easy mark, went into a denial mode by quoting the Manual. The predictable result was files scattered like shrapnel, several upended cabinets, three exhausted guards and her eventual arrest.

The next day I was accompanied to the Court hearing by a senior supervisor and realized the extent of Serenity's impact on the Center when he, playfully, suggested I might try to provoke her by sticking my tongue out at her when she appeared before the bench.

It was a few days before Christmas with few spectators scattered around the dreary courtroom: a young man with two huge chains around his neck and another man more conservatively dressed, possibly a law student taking his girl on a cheap date, a worried family huddling together, a few dazed men and women drifting in from the cold. The judge, a portly man with a benign expression, probably thinking of knocking off early and head for home and a good dinner, must have reckoned that the approaching Holiday, a child in the Shelter and the fact that no serious crime had been committed, called for a politically safe act of clemency. Unfortunately this magistrate also felt compelled to impart some advice to Serenity, so after referring to the plight of her child and his reluctance to separate her from her mother, particularly during the Holidays, with judicial gravity he went on to intone " I must warn you, however, that such acts of violence will not be countenanced by this Court in the future. The rules and regulations of the Welfare Department have a purpose. They are meant to provide services for you and your child." Serenity, who was beginning to rock on her feet during the second part of his homily, suddenly broke in: " I don't give a flying crap about your rules and regulations, I got me an eviction notice and if I don't fork over the rent money that damn landlord’s going to kick us out! " At this point the judge decided to forego additional exchanges and sentenced her to as week in jail.

I saw her again after her release and her daughter reunited with her. A somewhat chastened Serenity. I anticipated complaints and when she did not bring up anything I made a quick inventory of missing household items, went over the budget to make sure the rent got paid, then gave her the name of my replacement, his phone number plus the name of his supervisor because I was being transferred to another Center and planned to take a short vacation. She was uncharacteristically passive but brightened when I told her I would be visiting friends in Florida.

" How you planning to go?"

" I'm planning to drive. "

" You'll be going through Georgia then. "

" Yes, I think I will. "

" I was born there on a farm."

I had a spasm of anxiety at the possibility she might ask for a ride, then asked:

" What did you grow? "

" Lots of vegetables, goobers, that's peanuts you know, collard greens, but I liked cotton best"

" I never saw a cotton field in my life " I replied, " Did you actually plant cotton?"

" I sure did. First you put down those furry seeds and, say, after about ten days little green plants begin to show, but you better take some away to make room, give others a chance to grow. Bottom branches, they like their sun too and you want to take out weeds that don't like plants, let them spread out. Pretty soon those bottom buds open up like hollyhock blossoms, first white then pink then all sort of darker shades and when they fall they leave behind a green boll, that's what we call it, growing all summer long, and before you know it the whole field is covered with little pink and white flowers like a sea of rose bushes. "

  Here she waved her hand over the kitchen table rubbing thumb and forefinger together to conjure the image.

I had to leave, but could not tell her the judge had been wrong because in fact the rules had not been made for her benefit. But, with her dream of cotton fields, I was sure things would eventually work out for her.

After my transfer I found out that Serenity had not changed. But the Department had.  Like the rest of the City it was undergoing one of its periodic transformations. Recent College graduates converging on Fun City were casually hired and marched into the Centers with flowing beards, sandals and heads often stuffed with revolutionary fantasies. Since the masses meant everything in their philosophy and the individual was but a little cog in the grander scheme they naturally disdained the forms and procedures required for authorizing a trifle such as a check for a pair of shoes. They believed (with some justification) the entire system should be scrapped but proposed to do it by enlisting the clients themselves. Demonstrations, confrontations sit-ins were their specialty and they practiced these skills enthusiastically. In fact one rainy morning, as I passed a neighboring Center, I saw two burly cops barring entrance to a group clutching appointment notices, a pregnant woman holding a squalling toddler and a young couple with drooling open mouths and woolen caps pulled over their ears among them. The couple held hands while listening to the cops who tried patiently to explain why their caseworkers had gone off to demonstrate.

I quit shortly after, and eventually so did the new recruits who rolled up their Che Guevara posters and vanished into the Establishment, but I often  wondered whether Serenity made any impression on any of them.

Serenity's encounter with her bearded social evangelist must have been memorable. His confident walk into her apartment afire with reforming zeal, anticipating expressions of gratitude for the longed for enlightenment, her polite silence as she tried to follow her visitor's drift and its relation to the eviction notice sitting on top of the bureau, then blood draining from the young man's ears at the first salvo of expletives directed, surprisingly, not at the Establishment, but at himself, then his fatal attempt to elaborate his position, followed by panic as the stentorian voice and body language began to signal violence and the final humiliating scene as he was compelled to stoop to the weasel like language of the bureaucrat in order to make a clean getaway, explaining he was " only doing his job. "

Whatever happened to them? That young man probably worked it all out with his analyst and may even be the better for it. Who knows?

And Serenity?  I like to think she's back in Georgia with the red dirt of the heartland under her feet watching the sun settle on the cotton field and fireflies sparking over it or listening to the rustling of the brown thrasher in the morning. It beats the lights of police cruisers and the rattle of garbage cans in N.Y.

Al Staffetti 260 Sarles, Pleasantville N.Y 10570

Email: Al Staffetti

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