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Swamp Nurse

Cecille Isidro — Mon, 06 Feb 2006 04:00:00 -0500

In the swamps of Louisiana, late autumn marks the end of the hurricane and the sugarcane seasons -- a time for removing plywood from windows and burning residues of harvest in the fields. Then begins the season of crayfish and, nine months having passed since the revelry of Mardi Gras, a season of newborn Cajuns. Among the yield of infants in the autumn of 2004 was a boy named Daigan James Plaisance Theriot, and, on the morning of Daigan's thirtieth day of life, he was seated next to a bag of raw chickens in the back of an Oldsmobile Cutlass. His mother, a teen-ager named Alexis, was in front, squeezed between her younger sister and her sister's latest beau, a heavily tattooed man who had just been released from maximum-security prison. The car came down a road that begins with a bayou and ends in dented trailers, and stopped at a small wooden house.

When Alexis's sister leaned into the back seat to fetch the poultry, the young man, grinning, slipped a hand down the back of her jeans. Alexis stared at the couple for a moment, then pushed them aside to pick up Daigan. Alexis's hair was long and streaked with pink, and her face was a knot of frustration. As Daigan began to cry, she crossed the yard denouncing in absentia his father, whom she called Big Head: "If I see him, I will hurt him -- Big Head asking for it now." When she reached the porch, which was crammed with auto parts and porcelain toilets, she fell silent, then forced a smile. Amid the fixtures stood a tall black nurse.

The nurse, Luwana Marts, holds one of the stranger jobs in the Louisiana state bureaucracy: she is a professional nurturer in a program called the Nurse-Family Partnership, which attempts to improve the prospects of destitute babies. A few months earlier, Alexis, eighteen and pregnant, had arrived at a local government office seeking Medicaid for her impending delivery. She ended up with both the Medicaid and Luwana. As a rule, Cajun families don't welcome government intervention, especially when it occurs inside their homes, involves their infants, and means the presence of a dark-skinned person. To some parents, Alexis among them, Luwana was a spy in the house of maternity, and so she now and again had to lie in wait for reluctant beneficiaries.

Alexis maneuvered herself and Daigan past the toilets, from which cacti had started to grow, and pushed open the front door with her hip. She entered a combined living room, dining room, kitchen, laundry, and storage facility that was home to five people, a dying cockatoo named Tweety, and multitudes of flat silver bugs. Luwana followed Alexis, Daigan, little sister, and boyfriend inside. That morning, feeling the onset of flu symptoms, Luwana had decided to avoid contact with the infants she called her "little darlings." In the field, though, calculations of risk were subject to change. She dropped her satchel, slathered her hands with Purell disinfectant, and reached out. Alexis handed over Daigan and wrapped her arms tightly around herself. "So, tell me," the nurse began with practiced tranquility as she scanned a body in a playsuit for damage. "Not the happiest day of your life?"

Alexis and nineteen other girls in Luwana's caseload call her their "nurse-visitor," a term whose genteel ring seldom comports with the details of her job. She is one of eight nurses, all mothers themselves, who work the parishes of Terrebonne and Lafourche, persuading poor first-time mothers-to-be to accept assistance. The Nurse-Family Partnership model is currently being tried in Louisiana and nineteen other states on the basis of promising preliminary results -- results achieved in the face of the nurses' preposterously difficult assignment. In regular visits until a baby is two years old, they try to address, simultaneously, the continual crises of poverty and the class -- transcending anxiety of new maternity: this creature is inexplicable to me. Despite its ambition, the program is rooted in a pessimistic view of the future that awaits an American child born poor -- a sense that the schools, day-care centers, and other institutions available to him may do little to nurture his talents. Shrewder, then, to insulate him by an exercise of uncommon intrusion: building for him, inside his home, a better parent.

Thus, no matter how chaotic the scene -- no matter that Alexis's sister had taken a break from hacking chicken parts by the kitchen sink in order to satisfy the ex-inmate's sexual needs in the next room-Luwana's first task is to create an aura of momentousness around the new baby. As she moves through a household, giving advice about routine building, breast-feeding, and storing shotguns out of reach, she attempts to win over not just a young mother but a typically unwieldy cast of supporting players, from the baby's father to the great-grandmother getting high in a tent behind the house. What Luwana tells each family may seem, on the face of it, fiction: that in this infant enormous possibilities inhere. But such fictions can be strategic, especially in cultures in which the act of becoming a mother is honored far more than what the mother subsequently does for her child.

Alexis, who wore a tight red T-shirt, would have been striking even without the pink improvements she'd made to her caramel-colored hair, and since fifth grade, when she'd lost interest in schoolwork, most of her opportunities had come from men who'd taken note of her looks. Lately, she'd been wishing that she'd had a longer, simpler childhood, but, in the childhood that she had, full hips and breasts and lips had served her well. They served her less well now. To Luwana's questions about Daigan's feeding schedule, she responded monosyllabically while studying her manicured fingers. She'd received the manicure, plus some blue balloons and a chocolate-chip cake, on what she called the "heartful" occasion of Daigan's birth. The days preceding his arrival had not been happy. Alexis lived with her mother and father, a grocery clerk and a construction worker who were in constant conflict. When Alexis was eight months pregnant, the fights grew so fierce that she fled the household altogether. Her recent return testified less to domestic reconciliation than to the impact that a squalling baby has on the sleepover invitations a girl receives.

As Luwana tried to draw Alexis out, the phone rang, and Alexis covered her ears. "I'm guessing this is Daigan's dad who keeps on calling," Luwana said, after the third round of unanswered rings. Alexis met her eyes for an instant, then burst into tears. "O.K., now," the nurse said, "spell it out for Miss Luwana." Between sniffles, the proximate cause of distress became clear. Daigan's father, a sturdy twenty-six-year-old named James, worked on a tugboat on the Mississippi River. That weekend, he would be returning to shore and expected to have sex with Alexis, though she was not healed from childbirth, nor was she using contraception.

"No way!" Luwana said. "Keep your legs closed: embed that in your brain. Tell him to keep his hands to himself. And if you can't stand up for yourself, stand up for Daigan. You've got a lot of work ahead, giving him what he needs. Look around, Alexis. You need another baby in this picture?"

"No," Alexis said dully. Then she brightened: "Miss Luwana, maybe you can write me an excuse note, like for gym?"

Luwana's church friends smiled knowingly when they learned that she worked for the state. They pictured cubicles, potted plants, and cushy hours. She seldom corrected this impression, nor did she say that some mornings, driving her six-year-old Maxima toward some difficult case, she wanted to turn north and spend the rest of her working life in more high-minded quarters. But Luwana's efforts were invigorated by the fact that twenty years ago she was herself a poor, pregnant teen-ager in these swamps. "I know now that there were government programs on the books designed to help girls in my situation, but back then, especially if you were black, you didn't hear about them," she said. She is now thirty-eight, with two sons and a husband who has spent most of his working life in a mill that makes paper cups. It took her fourteen years, between child-rearing and stints as a nurse's aide, to earn a bachelor's degree in nursing. Her state job pays thirty-five thousand dollars a year, half of what she'd make in the emergency room of a private hospital. "Oh, I have my material longings -- every so often I'll throw a pity party for the house I'll never have," she said. "But quite a few of us nurses are working, you could say, in the context of our own memories."

"How he doing?" Alexis asked uneasily, as Luwana's fingers explored Daigan's soft spot.

"You're the mama," Luwana responded. "You tell me."

"He's got a big head like his father," Alexis said under her breath. Then she rallied: "He's not as cranky as he was. And one thing I learned already is how he cries different when he's hungry than when he's wet." Luwana bestowed on Alexis a dazzling smile that she had thus far reserved for Daigan. "Making that distinction is important," she said. "You're listening to him, and in his own way he's explaining what he needs. Pretty soon now he'll be making other sounds, and when he does you'll want to make that noise right back. He'll babble, and then you'll talk to him, and that's how you'll develop his language. Now, what you may also find, around five to eight weeks, is that he'll be crying even more -- it's a normal part of his development, but it can also stress out the mom, so we'll want to be prepared for it. The main thing will be keeping calm. And if you just can't keep calm -- if you find yourself getting all worked up and frustrated -- well, then what?"

"Put him down? So I don't hurt him, shake him, make him brain-dead?"

"Put him down and . . . ?" Luwana drilled her girls hard on this particular point.

"Call someone who isn't upset? Let the baby be, and get help."

Luwana turned to Daigan and clapped. "See, your mama is getting it," she said, using the high-frequency tones that babies hear best. "She's surely going to figure you out."

There was a trick that Luwana relied on to stave off dejection: imagining how a given scene would unfold if she weren't in it. In Alexis's case -- one that, in terms of degree of difficulty, fell roughly in the middle of her caseload -- she knew that slight improvements had already been made. At Luwana's urging, Alexis had stopped drinking and smoking when she was pregnant and had kept her prenatal appointments. So she wasn't incapable of changing her life on Daigan's behalf; the odds were just long.

Sitting cross-legged on the floor now, Luwana sang "Clementine" and made faces at Daigan, and for a moment Alexis studied this demonstration of engagement with her child. But then her gaze drifted over to her sister and the ex-con, who had emerged from the bedroom to chop the rest of the chicken. The young man, whose tattoos included white supremacist ones, put on mirrored sunglasses for this task, a fashion choice that made Alexis giggle. Luwana's primary subject that day was infant attachment, a topic she tailored to fit Alexis's limited attention span. "A funny thing about the axe murderers," she said casually. "Usually something missing in the love link." And, indeed, axe-murdering seemed to register with both Alexis and the former prisoner, who set down his knife and came over. "I need to hear, too -- mines is horrible," he said. "We whup him but since he turned two he don't do nothing we say, probably 'cause his mama on drugs and sleeping around and getting locked up -- well, she's a whore."

"You hit a two-year-old?" Luwana asked, her eyes narrowing. "You teach him how to fight and are surprised when he turns around, starts fighting you?" She then fixed her stare on Alexis, who began examining the brown linoleum floor.

"The love link," Luwana began again. Now the room was still. "It's a cycle. When there's no safe base for the baby -- when you're not meeting his basic needs, satisfying his hunger, keeping him out of harm's way -- there will be no trust, no foundation for love. And that's when you might just get the axe murderer. Maybe sometimes we have a baby and expect that baby to comfort us? Well, sorry, it works the other way around. It's on you now to comfort him, earn his trust, because that's how Daigan is going to learn how to love."

Infant-development strategies, like other forms of social capital, are perversely distributed in America-fetishized in places where babies are fundamentally secure and likely to prosper, undervalued in places where babies are not. The nurse-visiting program aims, in a fashion, at equalization. The territory that Luwana and her colleagues cover begins an hour's drive southwest of New Orleans, down fog-prone highways lined with cypress trees which lead to the Gulf of Mexico. On the shoulders, turkey vultures pause, flicking mud from their wings. Mississippi River sediment shaped this marshy delta, to which eighteenth-century French Acadians, expelled by the British from Nova Scotia, laid a claim not hotly contested. The terrain now occupied by the exiles' descendants is muggy, heavily wooded, and visited so often by hurricanes that Katrina, which made landfall near here, failed to register as a main event. Residents have another, steadier battle with nature, because they've built their lives on one of the fastest-sinking landmasses on earth.

The social demographics are almost as fragile. Louisiana literacy rates are among the nation's lowest; infant mortality and child-poverty rates -- thirty per cent of all children are poor -- are among the very highest; and almost half of all births are to single mothers. Historically, the swamp region's topography isolated it from the rest of the state, but drawbridges and thoroughfares have been erected in recent years, and cane fields now give way to Wal-Marts. Still, idiosyncratic child-rearing beliefs endure: a baby will become constipated if held by a menstruating woman; formula is healthier than breast milk; giving an infant a haircut before his first birthday will stunt his growth and hurt his brain.

The cases that Luwana and her fellow-nurses take typically begin with a referral from a public-health or prenatal clinic: a form indicating the age and address of an expectant mother and the baby's due date. Occasionally, a nurse shows up at the given address to find a mother-to-be converting Sudafed to methamphetamine on a hot plate. Other times, a pregnant girl's father is hostile because he's the probable father of his daughter's child. But the nurse's typical commission is to work with what she finds. And while Luwana believes that some aspects of mothering are instinctual, what she teaches is more like applied science. Her tools include a polystyrene demonstration baby named Dionne, picture books, a raft of developmental checklists, and, above all, her trade's bleak knowledge: babies can get used to almost anything -- as many of those babies' mothers had.

The Nurse-Family Partnership program began twenty-eight years ago as the obsession of a developmental psychologist named David Olds. He is fifty-seven years old, with clear blue eyes and a tendency to fidget not unlike that of Luwana's adolescent mothers. He grew up in a working-class household and as a young man taught in an inner-city day-care center, an experience that led him to suspect that by age four or five some children are already gravely damaged. In the nineteen seventies, after earning a Ph.D. at Cornell under the late child psychologist Urie Bronfenbrenner, he began working with colleagues to translate this grim view into an elaborate scheme of prevention. At the time, scientific knowledge about early brain development and the importance of a child's first years of learning was more limited than it is now. But for Olds, who has one biological child and two adopted children, intuition as much as evidence suggested that the rescue effort should begin before birth, and unfold in the setting where an infant would spend most of his time. As for what sort of person a low-income young woman might trust inside her home, he and his colleagues settled on nurses, who in poor communities have high status and medical expertise that many pregnant women want. In 1978, Olds used a federal grant to test his idea in Elmira, an economically depressed, mostly white community in New York's Southern Tier, which had the highest rates of child abuse and neglect in the state.

"Some policymakers look for cure-alls, which this isn't," said Olds, who continues to study his protocol's effects as the director of the Prevention Research Center for Family and Child Health, at the University of Colorado, in Denver. "We keep refining how we do this as the nurses report back on their experiences, because there's still a lot that we don't know -- for instance, how best to help mothers who are battered or mentally ill." Nonetheless, when he conducted random-assignment evaluations (among the most strenuous tests of a social program's effect) to gauge how the Elmira mothers and children were faring at the completion of the program, he found more improvement than he had expected. One of his chief concerns had been child abuse, and it turned out that children whose mothers had finished the nurse-visiting program were far less likely to be abused or injured than their counterparts in a control group. He also discovered that by the time the nurse-visited children were four, their mothers were more likely to be employed, off public assistance, and in stable relationships with their partners. Evaluations of two subsequent pilot programs-with primarily black families in Memphis and a racially diverse group in Denver-showed less dramatic results against control groups but suggested additional possibilities. By age six, for instance, the nurse-visited Memphis children had larger vocabularies, fewer mental-health problems, and slightly higher I.Q.s. In all three sites, the mothers had fewer subsequent children and longer spaces between them. An economic analysis of the Olds experiment commissioned by the state of Washington concluded that the approach -- which currently costs around four thousand dollars per year per family -- was cost-effective as well, because the children aided by the nurses had required fewer expensive social services such as foster care and hospitalization.

The early optimism surrounding programs meant to help poor children is often dispelled by the rigorous assessments that come later. Children may make startling intellectual and functional gains in the hothouse of a model program -- say, a preschool run by skilled and idealistic teachers -- but those gains tend to vanish when the children move on to their communities' less hospitable institutions. This phenomenon, known as "fade-out," is one of the great frustrations of antipoverty policy, and I was first drawn to Olds's work because his long-term findings seemed to defy the regressive trend. By the time the Elmira children turned fifteen, they were still demonstrably better off than their control group peers. For instance, they'd been arrested far fewer times, one of several findings that inspired the U.S. Department of Justice to cite Olds's infant intervention program as a model for the prevention of juvenile crime. I wondered, however, about the objectivity of the Olds studies, since, regardless of acceptance by peer-reviewed publications like the Journal of the American Medical Association, he is essentially grading his own work. When I raised specific questions about the long-term outcomes in Elmira, Olds decided to recalculate his data using seven different evaluation methodologies, grasping that such a test might undercut his life's work. He later reported that some of the original findings -- for instance, those about Elmira teen-agers drinking and running away less than their counterparts -- weren't holding up under a preliminary analysis. He was so dismayed by these results that he seemed oblivious of the fact that other evidence of the improved futures of nurse-visited children and their mothers was now about as solid as findings can be when the subject is social policy's impact on human behavior.

The nurse-visitor approach makes some liberals uneasy, because they fear that its focus on good parenting will undermine the fight for decent schools, quality day care, and other institutional supports for poor children. Libertarians recoil at a government-funded program that meddles in private lives, and child-welfare advocates have been frustrated by Olds's restraint. In their view, a "scientifically proven" approach like nurse visiting could have attracted bipartisan support and been widely implemented years ago, if its creator had more emphatically promoted it.

Olds's cautiousness is based not just on a sense of personal fallibility but on what he considers the faltering of Head Start in the late sixties and seventies. A rapid, politically driven expansion inflated public expectation while diluting program standards; by the eighties, conservative policymakers were using Head Start's modest results to justify the rejection of other government antipoverty programs. Olds wants his protocol to expand incrementally, as he fine-tunes it. Currently, thanks to a hodgepodge of public and private funders, nurse visitors in places as diverse as Los Angeles, Fargo, Allentown, Tulsa, and Bedford Stuyvesant serve an annual twenty thousand of the United States' 2.5 million low-income children under the age of two.

Louisiana, where I decided to watch Olds's ideas at work over the course of a year, is one of nurse-visiting's most difficult settings. Legislators there have been sufficiently impressed with the program to more than double its size in four years, with the help of federal Medicaid dollars. But, in a state where nurses often run out of breath when recounting the disadvantages of their clients ("The mom I'm working with now is a sixteen-year-old unmedicated, bipolar rape victim and crack-addicted prostitute with a pattern of threatening to kill her social worker, who recently abandoned her baby at her ex-boyfriend's sister's, and who has an attempted murder charge in another situation -- well, I think I've got all the risk factors," a colleague of Luwana's said one day), nurse-visiting is unlikely to be mistaken for a cure-all.

In the bayou, every schoolchild knows that a shrimp's heart is in its head, and that now it's cheaper to buy that shrimp from China. So last winter, in a neighborhood called Upper Little Caillou, people who once worked on the water were trawling for a service sector niche. On homemade signs in yards, the inventory of salable goods continually evolved: "Shrimp/Alterations/Vinyl Blinds"; "Turtle Meat, Adult Novelties & Bail Bonds." Maggie Lander, a seventeen-year-old client of Luwana's, was among the residents hawking what she imagined rich people might want, such as her mother's cache of Harlequin novels. In the interest of clarity of message, though, the front of her home bore just one sign -- "No smoking" -- on behalf of her one-year-old daughter.

In a few years, Maggie figured, her daughter would perceive the deficiencies of her home, as Maggie did -- understanding, for instance, that a sheet stapled to the ceiling wasn't what people usually meant by an interior wall. But she chose to believe what Luwana had told her: that babies didn't care about the surface of things. Their standards were deeper, Maggie believed, than those of some grownups she knew.

In addition to selling secondhand goods, Maggie worked for a janitorial service. She has a lisp, a vulpine face, and auburn hair that she parts down the middle and often lets fall over her eyes. When Luwana came around, though, Maggie tucked the strands behind her ears, revealing the sallow beauty of a Victorian consumptive. For a half-Mexican, halfNative American schoolmate named Jose Hernandez, the sexual attraction had been intense. It wasn't entirely an accident when, after a year and a half of courtship, she got pregnant.

In the bayou region, which is traditionally Catholic, no doctors admit to performing abortions. Home remedies, though, are highly evolved: blue cohosh root, a belly flop from bed to floor, the placenta-rupturing magic of cocaine. ("Is the baby shaking yet?" practitioners of this late-stage strategy asked when they entered the local emergency room; they knew the drill better than the doctors did.) But most pregnancies here were not terminated; as Maggie's mother liked to say, "God doesn't make mistakes." Maggie concurred with this theory. Still, when Luwana first appeared on her broken front porch, she was relieved to have a fresh pair of eyes on her life.

David Olds and his researchers like findings that can be quantified, and Luwana has learned to report her experiences accordingly. The forms she filled out, however, didn't always capture the extent of a family's despair. The first time she'd come to Maggie's house, she had found an intelligent, underfed tenth grader in her second trimester who was sick with untreated hepatitis B and was also trying to care for her mother, who was bedridden and weighed eighty-two pounds. "I was in another world then, wanting to die," Maggie's mother, whose name is Tammy, recalled. "I'd been played the fool by a man I thought wanted a wife." Though mother and daughter shared malnourishment, depression, and very close quarters, they seemed to exist in separate spheres.

One afternoon before Christmas, the effects of Luwana's yearlong campaign against hopelessness were easy to see. The baby, whose name is Maia, was an exuberant babbler, with a paunch so magisterial that her patchwork jeans were left unbuttoned. Maggie's mother was rounder, too, thanks to antidepressants, and she was working alongside Maggie at the cleaning company. Maggie was buoyed by her recent engagement to Jose, whom Maia plainly adored. He had moved into the house shortly before his daughter's birth, and he, Maggie, and Maia now occupied a sweltering room in the rafters.

As Maggie discussed her low-budget wedding plans with Luwana, she bounced her dark-skinned daughter gently, while her fingers traced shapes on the baby's thigh. Maggie had become a diligent student of child-development technique, reading aloud so often from the parenting handouts Luwana had given her that she got on Jose's nerves. "She's, 'Listen to this on early brain development,' and I'm like 'O.K., I was here when Luwana went over it, I know,' " he said. "But she has to memorize this stuff." Luwana, of course, found the habit agreeable, and privately gave Maggie her highest praise: "The girl's an overcomer." But, in the swamps, a massively improved life is not the same as a good one.

Maggie was now weak from the interferon that Luwana pressed her to take for her hepatitis. Maggie didn't know whether she had caught the disease from the twenty-five-year-old to whom she lost her virginity, at age thirteen, or whether she had been born with it. But the combined pressures of infirmity and maternity had led her to a decision with which Luwana took strong issue: dropping out of school after Maia was born.

"I'm just trying to see that we're taking logical steps here," the nurse said gently. A fiercer iteration of her argument -- that bearing a child as an unmarried teen-ager and failing to finish high school were matchless predictors of lifetime poverty -- had just brought tears to Maggie's eyes. "You have too much to lose, and I know you don't want to clean houses all your life. Remember when I met you? It was one of the first things you said -- how adamant you were about finishing?"

"I will go back, Miss Luwana, I promise," Maggie replied. "It's just now, with my job and Maia doing so many new things -- I don't know. . . ." Luwana's concern with diplomas, career plans, and jobs with benefits wasn't shared by many people Maggie knew. In a sinking region, land and housing came cheap, and dinner could be yanked from the brown water, so uneducated people could in fact "work the odd one," "do for themselves," and get by.

Luwana, like many of her clients, is good at suppressing emotion. Among her cases were a young mother who had attempted suicide in her third trimester, two others who'd been violently abused, and one who was paraplegic and mentally disabled. Maggie's case troubled the nurse differently. She saw in the girl something of her younger self -- "You know, that caged bird singing" -- and feared the potential was going to be lost.

"I mean, I'm not going to be just some dropout," Maggie promised Luwana now, gathering conviction. She reminded the nurse of a pact she'd made with Jose, who worked nights with her on the cleaning crew and spent his days in high school. He'd get his diploma while she took care of Maia, then it would be her turn for school.

"So he's going to be the main one keeping Maia, is that what you're saying?" Luwana said skeptically. "You're going to trust him with her next year when you don't trust him now -- when he doesn't wake up when she's crying?" In the year that Luwana and Maggie had spent together, Luwana had grown alert to the girl's romantic habits of mind.

When Maggie and Jose cleaned houses for lawyers and car dealers, Jose enjoyed discoveries of drug stashes and signs of affairs. "Wife large," he'd say with a broken-toothed smile, brandishing a find. "Panties behind the trash can in the bathroom, petite." Maggie preferred to dwell on other evidence. "I like dirty kitchens more than the fancy spotless ones," she said, "because in the dirty ones you can picture the homey wife and the father and kids all eating together and talking like a family." She hoped to replicate this scenario with Jose and Maia.

"Let's see," she said one day of the family life she had personally experienced. "In the last few years, we stayed in that trailer park we couldn't afford, then the little blue house we couldn't afford, either -- had to give it back. Then a trailer park, then my auntie's trailer when we couldn't afford the trailer, then back to the trailer park, then straight to a little bitty camper behind my aunt's trailer -- now, that was tiny, you walk in the door, there's a mattress and a table and that's it. Then we moved in with my uncle, then with my mom's boyfriend, then back to the trailer park, then back to the boyfriend, then back to my uncle, and then here."

Luwana had bettered her own circumstances with the help of caring teachers and strong parents, neither of which Maggie seemed to have. Her father, an illiterate as well as an addict, beat her mother when Maggie was young, and then his neck was broken in a car wreck. Afterward, he got sober, found religion, and separated from Tammy. Both parents are devoted to Maggie, but their leverage is minimal. "I hear Luwana saying to Maggie, 'It's not about you, you're making decisions for your daughter now,' " Tammy once said, "and I can almost see it on the tip of Maggie's tongue, 'But you didn't, Mom. You didn't look out for me.' " Tammy thought often about a day, shortly before Maggie got pregnant, when her daughter told her she was suicidal. "I didn't want to hear it," Tammy said. "I just wanted to believe that Maggie was the one thing in my lousy life I'd done right." Now Maggie considered Maia one thing that she was doing right.

Shelter and the Storm

Cecille Isidro — Mon, 28 Nov 2005 04:00:00 -0500

Terrebonne Parish, Louisiana, is a hub of oil and fishing industries on the Gulf of Mexico. The hamlets along its waterways rise in elevation and affluence as they increase in distance from the coast. Trailers, aluminum foil in their windows to beat back the sun, give way to communities screened by oak and cypress trees. One of the loveliest neighborhoods is Bayou Black. There are thoroughbreds on lawns there, and an alligator farm. The week's sole rush hour begins Saturday before dawn, when fathers and sons leave home to fish and hunt. Later that morning, the shell-pink great house of a nineteenth-century sugarcane plantation opens for tours. The gift shop, in what the docents call "the servants' quarters," sells books with such titles as "Myths of American Slavery" and "Slaves by Choice." Hurricane Katrina only grazed this house and its environs, pulling shingles off roofs and whipping the moss from the trees. After the levees of New Orleans broke and poor blacks fled, Bayou Black was only sixty miles down one of the few open highways from the city.

When an emergency shelter in Houma, the parish seat, filled quickly, several members of a Catholic church in Bayou Black asked local officials if they could open the basketball court of their recreation center to refugees. Earlier in the summer, the pressing social issue at the gym had involved the casings of sunflower seeds: a sign at the entrance read "What Goes in Your Mouth You Must Swallow Not Spit Back Out on the Bleachers." On the evening of September 3rd, though, a gunshot victim, a four-hundred-pound woman, and a man with a broken spine arrived at the gym simultaneously, joining two hundred other evacuees. The only medical expertise on hand belonged to an eighteen-year-old lawn cutter who had once passed a lifeguard course. "He could have told me his back was broken before I moved him," the teen-ager later complained. A Cajun woman named Roxie Bergeron had put aside her duties as a Catholic youth-group leader to organize the volunteers. "None of us knows what we are doing," she said. "This is Shelter 101." Other white residents were more conflicted than Bergeron about giving refuge to former New Orleanians. Shrimpers, boat captains, offshore oil workers, and the personal-injury lawyers attendant on these trades wanted the gym available for themselves and their families, should another hurricane hit.

A thirty-year-old black businessman named Gary Harrell managed the night shift at the shelter. He had a shaved head, Pentecostal leanings, and subscriptions to The Atlantic Monthly and The Economist; he'd grown up down the street. "There are a hundred thousand people in this parish, but we think we're Magnolia, Mississippi," he said. "The whole identity and appeal of this place is as a not-New Orleans. So what's happening now is something that never crossed people's minds, except in nightmares: that New Orleans would be coming to them."

Still, the Bayou Black volunteers, like many other Americans, were eager to play a role in what followed the evacuation. Popular sympathy, at least outside Terrebonne Parish, was with the displaced people, now known collectively as victims; and with that concern came the opportunity ("should they choose to take it" was the standard qualifier) to turn tragedy into renewal. Former residents of the Lower Ninth Ward and other segregated neighborhoods of New Orleans might now be supported in their attempts to advance into the cultural and economic mainstream -- "to ascend to normalcy," as Gary Harrell put it. It was a romance of transformation, and for some of the adults unpacking trash bags of possessions on the basketball court this idea of fresh starts had a basis in fact: lost in the flood was evidence of schooling that had stopped at ninth grade, misadventures in the work world, pending appointments in court. Even the children of the Bayou Black gym -- among them a dark-skinned thirteen-year-old girl in a donated tie-dyed T-shirt -- sensed possibilities in the wake of disaster.

The girl's name was Jasmine Williams, and she understood that she was unwelcome in Terrebonne Parish. She had been reared by an unstable and uncaring mother, so this feeling was nothing new. Nor was her shelter life much different, emotionally speaking, from the one that she'd left behind: her mother's boyfriend had just taken seventy-five dollars from her in order, Jasmine suspected, to buy drugs. "Then my mom thrashed all over me for being mad about it," Jasmine said. But, as Gary Harrell gently insisted, this was a time to look ahead, not to sulk about familiar injustices. And late one night in the second week of September she removed from her mouth a pacifier that she had swiped from an infant-supply drawer and articulated her understanding of the work at hand: "You know that song by Mike Jones? 'They used to love to dis me, now they run to hug and kiss me -- now?' The rest of the song is pimps and Escalades, but the dis-and-kiss part is what goes through my head since I been coming here. Like maybe before the storm they treated you not so good, said you were stupid or something, but after, it might be -- like, if you change from here on out and don't get put out of school and be working and all, people might be noticing you, knowing your name."

Jasmine was curious about Gary Harrell. "Beaucoup smart," she said, adding hopefully, "A person I can rock with." Her sense of the community where she now lived came largely from him. "When I was growing up," Gary liked to say, "they allowed one of us colored kids in every class at Mulberry Elementary." Returning home after graduating from college, in Birmingham, Alabama, he discovered that his studies in international business and Japanese qualified him only to sell Toyotas. Recently, though, he had started a management-consulting business. Now he hoped to help Jasmine and the other evacuees make their own adjustments and advancements.

*****

Mattress-to-mattress living turns private lives into public theatre, and Jasmine, after settling in, began hovering in corners and doorways to observe her neighbors. She was particularly interested in a middle-aged couple, Carolyn Tompkins and Gus Davis, who, despite long residency in New Orleans East, had what others in the shelter called "country-ass ways." After a lifetime with a volatile mother, Jasmine is skittish; Carolyn and Gus mesmerized her with their placidity. He is illiterate, with failing eyesight, and had worked as an oysterman before Katrina and its accompanying oil spills. Carolyn has a mellow laugh and, in Jasmine's estimation, a woeful fashion sense: she wore a faded house dress, pink flip-flops, and a black polyester do-rag every day. The couple's great interest was their sons, aged one and almost three, whom Carolyn rocked for hours in a donated chair to which someone had affixed stickers that said "Wassup?"

Carolyn had worked in the kitchen of a New Orleans nursing home, and had taken Gus and the toddlers there to weather the storm. In the days that followed, twenty-two elderly patients died after the electric power went out, floodwaters poured in, and medicine washed away. The police and other officials failed to organize a rescue, but eventually the brother of a co-worker arrived from Georgia with a boat and a big red truck. Most of the employees and survivors ended up in Terrebonne Parish. Now Carolyn's older boy asked anxious questions about dead people, and shook when he was taken to the bathroom. His parents could only guess what he'd seen while they had been moving patients to the top floor and taking bodies downstairs. "The main thing is to be with these little guys," Carolyn said, handing a stuffed Elmo to her one-year-old. "So if the government and the folks here want to take a bit of our lives out of our hands for a minute, help us get some work and all, we'll be coming back strong to do the rest."

Others at the shelter, among them Jasmine's mother, sought a different kind of aid. Experience had made them skeptical of government notions of opportunity and the longevity of public concern, so they were placing their bets on an immediate redistribution of wealth. Reports on CNN served as tutorials in which they learned that the traumas of cute young children had more cash value than those of adolescents like Jasmine, and that to elicit maximum sympathy from potential donors one should have, or might now invent, a lost pet.

"Trixie -- that a dog's name or a cat's?" a woman asked Jasmine's mother as they sat one afternoon on the recreation center's front porch. "I'm looking for something that fits one of them weenie dogs." Jasmine's mother wasn't sure about pet names, but she agreed that strategy was in order. She said, "The way people helped during the Chinaman thing" -- someone proffered the word "tsunami" -- "I best be getting a house!"

Also sitting on the porch was a mother of four who was in the throes of heroin withdrawal. She had, in fact, lost a cat she loved. However, the woman's teen-age daughter, who had left home with only a handbag and three negligee sets, was probably right in saying that its name, Hootchie-Mamma Kitty, was "too ghetto" for middle-class sympathy.

*****

In an affluent society, a deficit of things can swiftly be remedied. Within a week, surplus food was rotting in Louisiana shelters; bags of secondhand clothing filled back rooms and hallways, then spilled outdoors, much of it never to be unpacked. It was easy to forget that, before Katrina, even in the worst recesses of the Melpomene or Calliope projects of New Orleans, people had clothes on their backs, and no one starved, and almost every family had a television. What they often lacked were passable educations, regular medical care, jobs with benefits, or firsthand knowledge of how most other Americans live -- New Orleans's low-income population being one of the least mobile and most isolated in the country. This poverty of opportunity was harder to redress and, at least at first, impolitic to discuss.

One evening, on a television in the gym, President Bush articulated his version of the romance of transformation, in which suffering made victims stronger, and compassion bridged divides of race and class. "In the journey ahead you're not alone," he told the displaced, promising an influx of public and private aid to help them and their communities "not just to survive, but to thrive." Outside the shelter, where federal aid had not materialized, Gary Harrell's romanticism was being tested. Throwing up his arms, he said, "I don't have a clue what to do about Pookie!" Pookie, Jasmine's cousin, was a disturbed seven-year-old boy whose grandmother operated on the theory "A baby's old enough to sock you, he's old enough to be socked back." He had crept past the recreation center's outdoor swimming pool (unavailable to the "out-of-town guests") and had set off for the road that linked Bayou Black to the rest of the parish. Meanwhile, police officers arrived at the gym; they were returning a middle-aged woman who had pulled a knife on her daughter for "opening her legs when she's not fixed."

In the gym office, Jasmine dialed a series of phone numbers of male acquaintances, her pacifier clenched like a cigarette at the side of her mouth. Though she was a little afraid of growing up -- not just the sex thing, but the distinct possibility of competitive reprisals from her mother -- she often felt odd, unlovely, in the shelter. Someone outside it, she hoped, might tell her otherwise. "Do you remember me?" she asked these men again and again.

As Bush's speech concluded, with a call for armies of compassion, a telephone rang next to Jasmine. The caller was a Midwestern businessman with the sort of offer that the volunteers had prayed for: a big house on a farm an hour north of Wichita which some of Bayou Black's evacuees were welcome to use. Gary grabbed a legal pad to write down the details. Many of the adults were eager to work, and the volunteers had been finding jobs for them on pipelines, in laundries, and at a waste-treatment company. But the new workers had nowhere to live. Although local churches had raised enough money to cover security deposits and a month's rent, FEMA representatives and oil-platform repairmen had taken almost every available room in the parish.

While Gary talked with the Midwestern businessman, Carolyn wandered in to get a towel for the shower. Soon she was perched behind Gary. "A farm?" she asked. "I'll milk 'em, I'll rake up after 'em, I'll even cut 'em up if need be -- if it's a private place to stay." Carolyn and Gus had lived in an apartment just off Chef Menteur Highway in New Orleans East -- a strip of pawnshops and motels where junkies sold sex for the price of a catfish platter. Yet the couple had made a stable home there, and it had been lost in the levee break. Now Gus had taken a grass-cutting job. It didn't pay as well as his oystering had, but, after a week and a half at the shelter, he was worried less about the money than about his sons. "They're changing here -- too much distraction and too many thug babies," he said. "These kids starting to walk the walk and talk the talk, and still in diapers." He wanted to get them out fast.

Gary's telephone voice had grown strained, and he'd dropped his legal pad on the table. "Well, sir, I don't mean to sound ungrateful for your offer," he told the businessman, "but we have to do this right for our people. And we certainly don't want to be sending them into indentured servitude!" There were apparently opportunists outside the gym, too. Carolyn went, dejected, to the shower.

*****

By the middle of September, the evacuees had realized that federal aid was not imminent, and that the help they needed to re-start their lives might come more quickly from local residents. Qualifying for such donations required conforming to the Terrebonne definition of "deserving poor." To be deserving, one had to be willing to work, of course, but there were other expectations: to attend church on Sunday; to wear the donated clothes that exposed the least flesh; to be quiet when laughing and talking among themselves, and loud and clear when expressing their gratitude. "Everyone's got their mask on now," Gary Harrell's mother, who was tutoring the shelter children, said. Some evacuees saw a liability in what had been their lives' great expenditure -- glittering gold-capped teeth -- and began to cover their mouths when they smiled.

Gary believed that, as Terrebonne residents got to know Carolyn, Gus, and the rest of the evacuees, they'd see a common ground, or at least a situation that served their own interest. "Their energy and eagerness to work are going to help us compete economically," he said. Terrebonne community leaders also sensed that Katrina's destruction had created an economic opportunity. The parish president and his aides were trying to persuade displaced New Orleans businesses to relocate in the parish.

The officials had had enough of the displaced people, however. Two weeks after the arrival of the first evacuees, the Houma Courier ran a one-sentence story: "The Terrebonne Consolidated Government announced this morning that local shelters are full and are no longer able to accept evacuees." The assertion was false; the shelters had space for at least a thousand more people. But it reflected the sensibility of a community in which the word "comfortable" had become a term of art. "We don't want people to get too comfortable here," the director of the major shelter in Houma liked to say. Local unease increased when one of its residents was charged with intent to distribute prescription pills -- despite the fact that, before Katrina, Houma's own drug dealers sold crack, methamphetamine, and the steroids ubiquitous in a community that took high-school football to heart. Terrebonne's predicament was an intensified version of a classic American dilemma: the belief that ghettoizing a disadvantaged population is morally wrong, joined to the conviction that the disadvantaged population might be a lot happier in the next county. At a public meeting after the drug bust, a city official said, to general approval, "We don't want to be the people who turned away the refugees, but we don't want a Superdome situation."

*****

The recreation center looked out on the bayou, which most of the evacuees avoided -- there were alligators there. So it was considered daring when Carolyn and Gus began taking their toddlers to the water's edge each afternoon, when the light made everything around them glimmer gold and red. "I want their eyes to be steady full of something beautiful," Carolyn said, "enough beautiful to push the ugly things they've seen out of their brains."

One afternoon, Jasmine went to the bayou, too. It was the most beautiful place she'd ever been. Like many neglected children, she'd grown used to her lot in life, and barely paid attention when her mother asked the volunteers, "You got kids? I been trying to get rid of mine for some time." Jasmine had an eleven-year-old brother, and neither of them expected their mother to do "regular stuff," like helping with homework. Their mother said, "My kids don't even ask me anymore -- my nerves is bad, so they gets beat up after one problem. Other thing they know is when I put that forty dollars' worth of food on the counter every month and they eat it too fast, they be going hungry until next month comes around."

One kind of poverty is that of the imagination -- the inability to envision a future truly different from the present. Jasmine had long judged people based on whether or not they gave her food and clothing, but, as she watched Carolyn and Gus and other families, she found herself mulling different gauges of worth. She'd been working lately on a definition of love. "Maybe it's that, like, you honor somebody and they honor you back," she said carefully. "If you do for them without being all, like, See, I did this for you, now you best do something for me -- like, you just do it for the kind of your heart."

Jasmine had seen her father only once since she was five. She knew that he had been in prison for selling drugs and attempted murder, and that he now put siding on houses. He was six feet two, had a place in suburban Minneapolis, and had sponsored the three best days of her life: "It was February and he was in a car, and he came by his cousin's house. I was playing in the parking lot then, so I caught a look of him. I knew right away -- I said, 'That my daddy,' but because I'd grown big he didn't know me. But then he did know, and he took me eating at Manhattan's in New Orleans and bowling and to a movie, then he took me by my other cousin's, then we ate doughnuts, then he brought me to Avondale, too." Jasmine's furious dialing now had direction: she would ask her father to take her in.

*****

In August, before the levees broke, the Associated Press began a story on New Orleans violence by citing a study: "Last year, university researchers conducted an experiment in which police fired seven hundred blank rounds in a New Orleans neighborhood in a single afternoon. No one called to report the gunfire." Afterward, the experiment was mentioned in newspapers, magazines, and on television to illustrate the morally deadening effects of the inner city. The report, like that of Terrebonne's "full" shelters, was incorrect, yet it agreed with the thinking of policymakers as Katrina stories grew less frequent on cable TV: though New Orleans could be rebuilt, its former inhabitants might be beyond saving.

Historically, considerations of poverty range between extremes: sentimentality and sensationalism, structural causes and individual volition. In this case, the moment of attention to structural causes passed quickly. On September 15th, the President spoke of aggressive action against "deep, persistent poverty" with "roots in a history of racial discrimination." Two weeks later, members of the Republican Party were using the deficiencies of the evacuees as evidence that contemporary anti-poverty approaches were ineffectual. Congressional debate did not then turn to more hopeful approaches; it centered instead on how many billions of dollars to cut from Medicaid and other social programs in order to offset the cost of rebuilding the Gulf Coast. The politicians perhaps understood their constituencies: a public that desires to help the poor without paying a price, or even particular attention.

One day, a family in the Bayou Black gym got a real opportunity to transform their lives. In Kalamazoo, Michigan, some Catholics had been thinking about how to direct their charitable instincts, and a housewife there called a nun in Terrebonne in search of a large family. Within a matter of days, the largest family at the gym -- a middle-aged laundress from the Ninth Ward, a seventeen-year-old girl who spent her shelter days writing in her journal ("My story is basically ghetto, ghetto, ghetto," she said), and seven others -- had got a furnished five-bedroom house, rent-free, for two years, down the street from the home of Kalamazoo's former mayor. They also got a minivan; a line on good jobs; medical and dental care; and parochial-school tuition for the seventeen-year-old and three younger children -- "but only if the family is inclined that way," the Kalamazoo housewife said, noting that the local public schools were excellent, too. This turn of events raised expectations throughout the shelter, though nothing like it happened again.

The children in the gym with whom Jasmine felt most kinship were the unaccountably cheerful teen-age sons of the woman who was withdrawing from heroin. The boys, whose names were Christopher and Crishad Riley, dated their mother's addiction to the night, five years before, when their father, having finished his shift in the kitchen at Applebee's, was robbed, shot, and killed by a fifteen-year-old girl. "After that, Katrina is nothing," their mother said. She was forthcoming about the misery in which she'd let her children live -- "like Christopher finding me passed out for five hours, my drawers off and the handkerchief still tied on my arm." But the state's shrinking child-protection system hadn't intervened to help the Riley kids, and the public schools had contributed further to their misfortunes. Three-quarters of the students in the New Orleans school system were impoverished, and, by Louisiana's own standards, most of them were getting an "academically unacceptable" education -- intellectual losses, endemic to inner cities, that don't engage the nonurban imagination in the way that crime stories do. Christopher, a high-school junior who hoped to attend Florida State, could recall reading only one book. "I liked it," he said. "It was about a king that was unhappy and he did everything to be happy and he never found a way to be happy." This achievement put him well ahead of fourteen-year-old Crishad, who considered himself more of a soldier than a scholar -- "though my padres be dead, God bless they graves." Crishad, an eighth grader, could not read a word.

Jasmine had been in special education at one of the Ninth Ward's worst middle schools, a placement that pained her and mystified a retired teacher who now volunteered at the Bayou Black gym. Jasmine, too, had managed to finish a book. "I forgot its name," she said, "but it was about this boy, and his daddy taught him to grow up, like, do you follow the passion or the pay?" Now Jasmine and her friends were putting on white and khaki uniforms and attending school in Terrebonne Parish. By national standards, these institutions were mediocre; for the new students, they were astonishing. "Still can't read yet," Crishad reported excitedly in the third week of September. "But I think I might be coming along." The question, though, was how many new students would be staying. When another storm began to move toward Louisiana, the parish president ordered the gym cleared by the following week.

*****

In the final days, residents who were about to be evicted unearthed a box of T-shirts imprinted with the words "Leadership Breakthrough Mastery." The residents wore them when they prayed for one of the thousands of trailers that the federal government was sending to Louisiana. However, Terrebonne officials, like the leaders of other Louisiana communities, had decided not to make space for those trailers. Even some of Bayou Black's staunch volunteers were reconsidering their hospitable impulses. One night, while the evacuees slept, Gary Harrell mentioned to the daughter of a sugarcane farmer his fear of a Disneyfied reconstruction of New Orleans, with no place for poor blacks to live. "Sounds great," the farmer's daughter replied with unexpected heat. "We can all go to New Orleans, and leave this parish to them."

It was left to Roxie Bergeron, Gary's counterpart on the day shift, to find homes for all the shelter families. "Three thousand dollars a month?" she said into the phone, sounding incredulous. She called again. "Goodness, I know you have a business to run there, but these children -- of course I haven't known them for long but they're extremely well mannered, and if you could waive that extra fee?" By the end of the week, she'd found homes in Terrebonne for seven families. The rest would be moving away. Carolyn and Gus's best offer had come from the American Red Cross: fourteen to twenty-eight days in an extended-stay motel on the industrial outskirts of Rochester, Minnesota.

For Carolyn and Gus, the President's promise to help the evacuees now translated into something specific -- a six-hundred-and-twenty-one-dollar voucher for rent. This was welcome, though not perhaps the stuff of transformation. Gus gamely taught his elder son to say "snowmobile," but the idea of moving to a cold, remote area where they had no friends, work, or transportation left him sleepless. Late one night, he paced the porch of the recreation center, holding the younger boy in his arms. "Carolyn and me, we worked and made do on nothing before," he said, "and I expect we can do it again. It's just these boys," he added almost inaudibly. "These are my dreams." Carolyn, for her part, began repeating an idea she'd picked up from the volunteers. "The more help you get in life," she said, "the less successful you'll be."

Just before the shelter closed, Jasmine went into the gym office and asked to use a computer. Her father had agreed to take her in, and the next morning an elderly white couple was going to drive her and Carolyn's family to Minnesota. Jasmine didn't know if Minnesota was north or south of Bayou Black, just as she didn't exactly know when to use words like "thank you" or "goodbye." But she thought that she could learn. A lawyer who had volunteered at the shelter drew up custody papers, which her mother, who was returning to her apartment, readily signed. Before Jasmine left, though, she wanted to draw up a paper of her own.

First, she typed into the computer a fact she thought might impress her mother: that the Mall of America was way bigger than anything that New Orleans had to offer. And then, forehead furrowed, she pecked out what she called her "last commemoration":

I have a mother and a lil brother that's down here in Bayou Black Gym and that's why I am writing this to dedicate to them that I will always have them in mimory and I will try to keep in touch with them the best way that I can. But I also hope in pray that they never forget about me. I would want my lilbrother to always knoww that I will always be his big sister, and I will want my mother to know I was her baby girl.

Then, using the largest font she could find, she typed the word "love." A few minutes later, she watched as her mother peered into the computer screen, mouth tight, and then looked over the screen to a box of walkie-talkies behind the computer. "Oh, I've been wanting one of these," Jasmine's mother said, pulling one out and examining it intently. "Might be fixing to take it," she said, as she walked out the door.

*****

By mid-November, Carolyn had taken a job in the cafeteria of the Mayo Clinic, in Rochester, while Gus had embarked on an effort to learn to read. From time to time, they wondered how Jasmine was faring in her part of Minnesota. "Hard on that child, her mother sinning her that way," Carolyn said. "But she's a good little girl, mainly, and time can bring a person up, I seen it happen. I don't know. She might grow straight in the end."

"I don't know," Jasmine's father said one day after a meeting with Jasmine's teachers. "She's been living with them ways for fourteen years, and all she knows is a place where dudes gets killed every day and the teachers don't care and the worst racism is just daily life. So she comes to school up here, and she likes it, but people don't understand her because she speaks so backward, and she thinks she has to fight everyone for the littlest things. I try to explain to her what I had to learn myself, that it ain't like that here. It's safe and I'm watching her back and not going to fight her, either -- when she gets into it at school, I put her cell phone in the drawer. But it's going to take a while for her to get it, you know, that America's not all hard and mean as what she thinks."

The Factory

Cecille Isidro — Mon, 18 Oct 2004 03:00:00 -0400

A year ago in September, strangeness was afoot in Boston. A gorilla roamed the streets of Dorchester, and the Red Sox made the playoffs. Water droplets on the window of an ophthalmology clinic coalesced into the shape of the Madonna and Child, and forty thousand pilgrims came to marvel. A burly seventeen-year-old from Roxbury named Rousseau Mieze, a child of Haitian immigrants, welcomed any climate obliging to miracles. His family was poor, his high-school grades were mediocre, and he wanted to go to college.

Rousseau had felt burdened as a child by his unusual name. He was pleased to discover, not long ago, that he shared it with an eighteenth-century French philosopher who wrote of institutional inequity, lost childhood, and other matters about which Rousseau had some insight. As he began his senior year in high school, however, such knowledge left him less philosophical than glum. He was six feet two and two hundred and fifty pounds; adults sometimes crossed the street when they saw him. And yet some mornings it was an effort just to open the door to his school -- two floors of a former Westinghouse factory in a landscape of rotting pallets and obsolescent gears. "Academy of the Pacific Rim," a cardboard sign taped at the entrance said. His mother, Cazilda, who was a cleaning woman, had forced him to enroll, and he knew now that he'd been lucky. Other urban high schools greeted their students with pat-downs and metal-detecting wands. Pacific Rim, a charter school, opened up to a stairwell the color of canaries, on which his classmates had painted exhortations. "We are what we repeatedly do," Aristotle said, apparently; on optimistic days, taking the steps two at a time, Rousseau would say those words, too. On other days, his own words drowned out Aristotle's:

My life yo I'm thankful
On the real I feel I'll tank though
I feel like death is hangin' on my ankle.

Rousseau once wrote lyrics about money and girls, "your standard rapper concerns." But writing, his English teachers insisted, was also a way for a person to listen to himself, and he was working with fresh themes. One was the regulation of desire. With prayer and self-discipline, he had found, he could suppress his yearnings for random female companionship and the FUBU jerseys that other kids wore. "Two-hundred-dollar shoes? Invented necessity," he'd tell his friends. "Really, what's the point?" But he knew that there was a difference between an expensive four-year college education and the one he could get at the community colleges and trade schools of Roxbury. In his journal, Rousseau had scribbled a list of reasons for coveting the pricier variety: "get good job," "support parents," and "experience life outside of the strain of being poor." Long-term strategy was not his forte, however, and now his miscalculation became clear. His S.A.T. scores of eleven hundred were above the national average; he'd been class president repeatedly, and could discourse on Homer when required. But three years of nonchalance toward ordinary schoolwork had given him a cumulative grade-point average of C-minus. "Maybe you can't make a new beginning to your life," teachers sometimes said to kids in his position. "You can, though, make a new ending." The kids, of course, knew the real-world proviso: It's easier to improve your ending if you don't begin so far behind.

"You know the stressed-out review period before the exams?" Rousseau said. "It's like this whole senior year is one big review -- your final opportunity to show colleges what you can do, to say, ‘I am more than my numbers.' But, on some level, you don't know what you can do yourself. Maybe your teachers say you're smart, a leader, have potential, whatever. But you're kind of wondering if the numbers might be right."

If he was rich and able to write a check for tuition, Rousseau suspected, some college might take a chance on him. If he was a promising point guard, he'd be golden. As much as he loved pickup games at a court up the slope from his apartment, he was exasperated by the cultural assumption that the dreams of tall, black kids involved not B.A.s but the N.B.A. Pacific Rim didn't care for competitive sports, anyway; it asked students to change their prospects by using their minds.

In the seven years since it opened, the Pacific Rim charter public school, which serves sixth to twelfth graders, has hopped around southern Boston, holding classes in a church attic, a former barbershop, and on the second floor of a parochial school called Most Precious Blood. Rising rents have driven Pacific Rim ever farther from the hub of Boston; it now sits in Hyde Park, the city's southernmost tip. Amtrak trains pass within a few feet of the factory it shares with two Hummer-driving white rappers, construction companies, and a metalworking shop. Train shrieks are something that the faculty have been learning to ignore, just as students have been learning, sometimes the hard way, that the abandoned coils of concertina wire behind the school are best stepped over, not on.

More than three thousand charter schools have sprung up in the United States since 1991, when Minnesota became the first of forty-one states to establish alternative institutions as competition for the nation's troubled public schools. Of those institutions, Pacific Rim is one of the oddest. It was the inspiration of a Chinese-American dentist and father of three named Robert Guen, who believed that Boston's black-and-white politics were leaving Asian kids underserved by public schools. After Guen was appointed to the Boston school board, in the early nineteen-nineties, he and another public-schools activist, Robert Consalvo, began to think not just about different school policies but also about a different sort of school: small, marked by strict discipline, character education, and compulsory Tai Chi and Mandarin Chinese classes. Its school day would be eight hours and its school year eleven months -- time in which students who had been overwhelmed by large, sometimes lawless public schools might peacefully prepare for college. Guen and Consalvo applied for a charter, and in 1997, when the school they had envisioned opened, it proved more popular than they had anticipated.

In September of 2003, two of Guen's daughters were enrolled at Pacific Rim. They were among the few Asian kids in the school. Given the grim educational options in neighborhoods like Dorchester, Roxbury, and Mattapan, African-American and Haitian-immigrant students had come en masse. And so Pacific Rim became an Asian-Creole-American stew -- a place where kids studying Mandarin and Tai Chi were mostly black and poor. Cultural collisions were inevitable, and sometimes delightful: Rousseau's friend Marcus McCroskey had recently translated Snoop Dogg's "Gin and Juice" -- an anthem to efficient sex, strong drink, and tribal loyalty -- into Mandarin. More significant, every student in the school's inaugural graduating class, of 2003, had passed the state math-and-literacy competency tests on the first try. (At the city's public schools, only the famed "exam" schools, like Boston Latin, matched this feat.) The entire class of 2003 now attends a four-year college.

Pacific Rim teachers considered this success statistically meaningless. They had embarked on their experiment tentatively, beginning with a few sixth and seventh graders and adding a new grade each year; the class of 2003 was just eleven students. Nonetheless, this curiosity cabinet of a school enlarged. By September of 2003, there were three hundred and thirty students; the new batch of sixth graders had been selected by lottery from a list of applicants four times that large. The faculty absorbed this growth with both pride and fear. School achievement is the key to ending racial inequality, they'd tell college friends who were now writing legal briefs or bundling bonds. It's the civil-rights issue of our time. Among themselves, they indulged in self-doubt. While many Americans and the politicians who serve them concentrate on what inner-city kids shouldn't do -- have babies, drop out, collect welfare, sell drugs -- Pacific Rim emphasizes accomplishment, and not just in the form of a post-high-school job or a military enlistment. The school wanted to see every single student enter college, America's escalator to the middle and upper classes.

"Welcome to our awkward adolescent stage of growth," Pacific Rim's director, Spencer Blasdale, said one rainy morning last fall. Despite fashion pointers volunteered by his charges, Blasdale, a wiry thirty-six-year-old, was wearing wide-wale corduroy trousers that grew soggy as he paced the sidewalk in front of the school, shaking the hands of backpack-laden kids. "Nice to see you, Savannah. Good morning, gentlemen -- and, please, your chains." In response, jewelry that had been exhibited on bus and train rides across Boston -- some students had been traveling for an hour and a half -- disappeared beneath collars of the maroon polo shirts that the school required. Blasdale wiped the raindrops from the lenses of his spectacles and fretted. "I want to think that good things happen here, but I'm probably not the best person to wave the banner," he said. "I'm always worrying about where we are weak. Take the Advanced Placement tests in English. Our kids are scoring very low on the essays -- one of several signs we're not doing enough to promote analytical writing. We're trying to work on that this year."

That, and a thousand other things. Massachusetts, like most other states, was in a budget crisis last fall, and in the state legislature support was gathering for a moratorium on charter schools, which were said to siphon money that the regular public schools needed. (Of the state's eight-billion-dollar schools budget, the charters consumed 1.5 percent.) In a white middle-class neighborhood just south of Pacific Rim's industrial strip, opposition was simmering, too, as residents registered the presence of many young new neighbors. Meanwhile, although enrollment had surged, Blasdale had just been forced to cut four faculty positions. In the days before school began, the remaining twenty-seven teachers had decorated the hallways with notices of internships at the zoo and the Museum of Science. Their own workspace had a fresh posting, too: a Times article predicting "one of the most austere school years in memory."

Thirty years ago, Boston became emblematic of the futility of American efforts to achieve education equity, when an attempt to desegregate public schools by busing children from neighborhood to neighborhood inspired riots and racial violence. In subsequent decades, many other prescriptions for improving the educational prospects of low-income and minority children have been hazarded: less bureaucracy, more funding, smaller class size, a computer on every desktop, back-to-basics, phonics. This decade's fix is a federal law called No Child Left Behind, whose theoretical pillars are accountability and market competition. Passed by Congress in 2001, No Child Left Behind is seen on the right as the greatest domestic achievement of George W. Bush, and on the left as an underfunded, punitive assault on public schools and teachers' unions. The law mandates "standards-based" testing across the nation, to expose schools that are failing their students; it also supports the creation of more charter-school alternatives like Pacific Rim, in order to incite productive educational rivalries. Thus far, however, most charter schools are not like Pacific Rim: according to a recent, much discussed analysis of U.S. Department of Education figures, charter-school students nationwide score worse than their public-school counterparts. Although charters serve a more disadvantaged population, their unexceptional early showing has tended to reinforce the hopelessness that many Americans already feel about urban education.

"Everybody's looking for the hundred-per-cent solution," Blasdale said. "And when they find it call me, I'm there. But in the meantime, as one of my principal friends likes to say, I'll take a hundred one-per-cent solutions instead." Of the urban schools he admired, public and charter, he had noticed two not particularly cost-efficient consistencies. They were small enough for each child to be known, and staffed with smart, loving, relatively autonomous teachers. But how to find those teachers was something that No Child Left Behind didn't answer. Blasdale's faculty, four of whom had advanced degrees from Ivy League schools, earned an annual salary of about forty thousand dollars. Calculated at an hourly rate, this wasn't much more than several of the seniors commanded working after school at Krispy Kreme. Blasdale's teachers worked in spite of, not because of, market incentive, and the effort to actually leave no child behind in the course of the 2003-04 school year would drive a few of them out of the profession.

Of the twenty-four kids starting senior year last September, Blasdale felt confident about the college prospects of, perhaps, six -- all bright, motivated girls. The rest were not, in the shorthand, "givens." There was a sloe-eyed long-distance runner who was prone to moodiness and confusion, and whose mother had been forced to give him up because of her own mental state; a brilliant girl given to incapacitating depression; a spirited boy with acute developmental problems whose mother had sent him to Pacific Rim after he was robbed at a public school; another "special-needs" boy, who arrived at school just after dawn and sometimes stayed until nine at night, lingering in the parking lot with faculty as they discussed the difference between political and social democracy, before someone drove him home. On paper, he had his share of diagnoses; at school, he was an intelligent, iconoclastic kid intent on going to a four-year college in Maine. Blasdale suspected -- correctly, it turned out -- that this would happen. Children with sensational burdens weren't necessarily the hardest to help; they often found a home inside the school and excelled. The students who made Blasdale panic were the resisters.

Of the seniors, the leading resister was Dwayne, a handsome kid with a wispy mustache who was cagier about his intellectual gifts than he was about his life in the streets. When not hanging with friends outside his public-housing complex, he crammed the margins of Orwell's "1984 and Robert Dahl's "On Democracy" with ideas about fairer societies. In class, though, he preferred to shrug and to sleep. "When there is no governmental authority, do individuals still have rights?" his government teacher asked one day, to which he responded in song. "Nobody knows the trouble I've seen, nobody knows the sorrow," he crooned, one eyebrow cocked, as his classmates tried to swallow their howls. After six years at Pacific Rim, Dwayne was still unable to risk letting others see him striving.

Blasdale had studied at Princeton and the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where some child-development theorists suggested that by early adolescence many urban kids were already past the point of help. At Pacific Rim, though, he had seen his share of transformations. One of them was Dwayne's friend Rousseau.

Emotionally troubled, said teachers in some of the schools that Rousseau had attended before Pacific Rim. "The cliché angry black boy," Rousseau himself said. In his first years at Pacific Rim, his mother had been summoned to school for discipline conferences with such frequency that it threatened her ability to make a living. Cleaning houses and office buildings, she earned about three hundred and fifty dollars a week, with which she supported not just her son but a stream of family members emigrating from Haiti. (Rousseau's father is a self-employed taxi-driver, and he and Cazilda are separated.) "I don't know what to do with this child, but I do know I need to pay my bills," she told the teachers. "Please, just do what you can." And so they had.

One September morning, a local news anchor announced, "Five shootings, one stabbing, eight hours." Rousseau made his way down Pacific Rim's crowded, locker-lined hall to the library, an airy room of tables and books, most of them secondhand. At one table, a graceful, long-limbed girl named Sarabina advised a friend about the S.A.T.s: "You gotta do them mad fast, because they'll be saying, ‘Put your pencil down,' and you've got eight questions left." Rousseau had a thing for Sarabina. Her father, an itinerant preacher, was strict, and she hadn't chafed, as Rousseau had, at Pacific Rim's regimented culture. Now she was interning at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, trying to decide whether she wanted to do premed next year.

"That's a good-but-in-the-woods college," Sarabina's friend was saying of Hamilton College; they were "trading skinny" on the schools. "In my top ten," Sarabina agreed, "but not my very top." Rousseau surveyed the room. Dwayne was at one table, sleeping. Marcus, the "Gin and Juice" translator, was at another, turning raw data into frequency distributions and then plotting them on a graph. The morning's lesson combined science and statistics, and required students to do the kind of independent research that might await them in college. Rousseau dropped his book bag onto Marcus's table and settled into a seat. Having a "top ten" was a chance he'd already squandered. He just wanted one decent four-year college, preferably situated very far from Roxbury.

"Yo, my slow bro," Rousseau said to Marcus. In response, Marcus raised his eyebrows into perfect circumflexes -- his catchall rejoinder, that month, to slights. Rousseau used to be able to provoke him, but this was senior year. Everyone was trying to focus. Sighing, Rousseau set to work on what would be a yearlong senior project, a study of benthic macroinvertebrates and their substrate preferences. He kept himself alert by rapping a song he'd heard on MTV's "Making the Band" the night before:

I'm way ahead of the game, thuggin' runs in my veins.
My pocket's chubby, so I went and got a gin in my name.
It's just me, him and my blunt in the Range.

Soon Marcus was rapping, too; they were virtuosos at recalling lyrics. Today, though, Rousseau's mind drifted. Marcus," he said, "let me ask you something. Have you ever wondered about the literacy levels on that show? There was that one night, remember, where the one guy could barely read -- he was seriously struggling -- and the other guys in the band just started making fun of him. But as I've been watching I'm realizing the other guys can hardly read, either. I mean, they can read, but they're not…fluent."

Marcus was smart; of course he'd noticed. "Loves their illiteracies like a fat kid loves cake," he said. "Not good, not funny." He looked down at his half-plotted data and, frowning, began to erase what he'd just done. "This -- not good, either. I'm frozen here on the y-axis."

"Me, too -- standard deviation." Rousseau pivoted in his chair. "Mr. Wood?"

David Wood, a gifted teacher with a Ph.D., had taught Rousseau science twice before. For some of that time, Rousseau had undermined him, inventing excuses tailored to make a teacher lose heart. "What do people expect?" Rousseau would say upon ditching an assignment. "I'm just another low-achieving black male." But Wood had an earnest, Midwestern way of keeping after Rousseau -- "gift for science," "leadership ability" -- so that, eventually, when Rousseau laughed at the teacher it seemed a little like denying his own worth. A lot of Rousseau's teachers, it occurred to him in retrospect, had been sneaky that way.

"The male lead in the school play -- made for you, Rousseau."

"Can you give us a hand judging these summer-internship proposals?"

"Rousseau, there's a ninth grader who says he's going to leave school. Can you find him and do what you can?"

That ninth grader changed his mind. When he wanted to, Rousseau knew, he could make an argument -- an intellectual facility that helped him get by. After a few minutes absorbing his classmates' questions about Machiavelli, he could pick up a theme and argue so assuredly in the opposite direction that his teachers thought he had actually read the book. Then they began catching on.

"That's the interesting thing about science, Rousseau," Wood was saying now. "There's no answer in the back of the book. You're collecting your own data and then analyzing them to find the answer. And statistics is the tool that helps you figure out what's going on."

"But this, what I've got here -- is it right?"

"We're experimenting," Wood said. "There's more than one way to be right."

Rousseau considered his very existence to be a question, and he had looked at the data. Four hundred times in four years, at least, his teachers asked him his favorite question: "What's the point? You ace a test, then ruin your average by not doing the homework. Why the self-sabotage, Rousseau?" As the fall progressed, he'd been mulling a variety of explanations -- one or two of which might be rendered persuasive in college-application essays.

"It's easier to write an explanation when you actually understand why," he said. The up-from-poverty narrative seemed to be what some people wanted from kids like him, but pride militated against this "pitiful" genre. Moreover, Rousseau believed in personal responsibility.

Taking a comic approach to his own story was more fun: the pudgy character with no-name clothes and crooked teeth who decides to devote his intellectual energy not to homework but to strategies of retaliation against his teasers. An alternate explanation came to mind during the Bible study he did at the church across from his apartment: his home had been inhabited by demons. But, whatever explanation he might use to justify underachievement, colleges might want a cure: the moment at which the right path lit up, and down you ran.

"It was then that I realized I had been lying to myself," he typed one day. Another day: "That night, I made the decision to give my life over to Christ."

Even after finding religion, however, the "state of being Rou" was a fluid condition, and he, like his teachers, couldn't neatly account for the days or weeks when motivation drained away. There were only questions, like the one he asked one afternoon when he caught up with Patrick McAllister, his twelfth-grade English teacher, in front of the school. McAllister, a Boston-raised Irish Catholic with a sly sense of humor, was a guy with whom, students said, "you could go deep."

"Mr. McAllister, it's interesting about that play -- reading it and then seeing it performed, you start to think about it differently. Like, what if Oedipus knew?"

"Knew what, Rousseau?" McAllister asked, folding his arms and leaning back as if he didn't have a faculty meeting in five minutes.

"Well, we're supposed to think he's an innocent searching for an answer who gets destroyed by what he finds out, right? But maybe what he wanted wasn't to discover the curse but to grab his mother and the other guys by the collar and make them admit what he'd already figured out, so he wouldn't feel so crazy. Like, he just wanted them to stop denying things and say it: ‘Oedipus, on the real, the choices you were making didn't count for anything. The way you were born, you didn't have a chance.'"

One November day, the sixth-grade winners of the admissions lottery settled into turquoise metal chairs and mismatched desks beside a bulletin board adorned with their self-described academic goals for the year:

"STAY FOCAS."

"PAST THE SIX GRADE!"

Ervens and Shawrod, Jewrisha and Ivanna and Ivelisse: eventually Blasdale and his colleagues would know the test scores and family situations behind those names. They would learn which ones possessed the social advantages peculiar to the sixth grade, like being champs at double Dutch, and which ones would react to a routine fire drill by collapsing, distraught, on the floor. For now, though, the children's histories typically consisted of a few words on school-transfer forms -- an absence of data that seemed fitting. Teachers at their new school preferred to begin with the exuberant, if untenable, assumption that every child thrown in their path could succeed.

As sixth graders scrambled into a classroom, some of them wearing khaki pants optimistically large, a regal young teacher named Elizabeth Weston rose from her desk and raised her hand, palm forward -- the signal at Pacific Rim for silence, respect. The students responded in kind. Weston and her colleagues could occasionally demonstrate a vaudevillian vocal range, but the volume in the classroom was typically lower. Although class sizes were as large as those in nearby public schools, a student who disrupted teaching at Pacific Rim, or even turned his back on a teacher, faced parents, principal, and a round of intense behavioral instruction.

The emphasis on discipline was balanced by a student's closeness to his assigned "academic adviser" -- the staff member whom students thought of as "belonging to me." This adviser followed a child's progress from grade to grade, fought for his interests, got to know his parents, and helped him with his algebra. At Pacific Rim, teachers spent nearly a quarter of their work lives tutoring and counseling individual students. There were Sundays spent wandering the Museum of Fine Arts, or biking in the Blue Hills; there were late-night crisis phone calls. And for eight hours a day there was class.

Weston, who is an African-American, had studied English and psychology at Williams. "I love to read your independent-reading logs," she told the sixth graders as she collected the previous night's assignment. She paused to make eye contact with a boy in the back row who was removing from his earlobe a clip-on cubic-zirconia earring. "Your notes are examples of your thinking. This is how I know what's in your brain."

A hand went up. "I left mines in my backpack -- can I get it?"

Yes, you can. You also lose a recess break. Do you know why?"

"I said ‘mines,' not ‘mine'?"

"That's right. Now, people, tell me: what do I expect of you when you are reading? Steven!"

"Write down the main ideas as we read!"

"Yes! And what else?"

"Put down any questions and thoughts we have in the margins."

"Yes! And what else? Can anyone tell me? Well, I see one big gap in this list we're making. I see an abyss. I see a chasm."

"Words we don't understand!"

"Yes. When you don't understand a word, look it up in the dictionary and write down the definition." As she spoke, she sketched on the whiteboard two tree-lined cliffs with the letters "c-h-a-s-m" stretching between them. "The ‘h' is silent in the word ‘chasm,' isn't it, Leonard?" she said conspiratorially. Leonard turned to his classmates to confirm.

Weston and the other sixth-grade teachers shed this unblinking authority at Wednesday-afternoon faculty meetings, when they sat cross-legged on the floor with Doritos, M&M's, and a long list of "students of concern":

"It's not just that he's angrier than ever this year, but I'm finding his explanations less comprehensible. I've tried what I can think of, and I'm at the point of thinking he needs special-ed testing sooner rather than later. Do we wait, see another trimester come and go, when he's not learning and not getting help, either? Maybe they'll find nothing, but what's the harm in doing the tests?"

"But there is harm. You tell the family we want to do the testing, all odds are they tell the child, and there are consequences to that. The question is, have we done everything we can to figure out what's going on -- to watch, listen, experiment, try to reach him ourselves before we risk the label?"

On the floor below, teachers in higher grades were having similar conversations, agonizing first about the students who'd spent their summer vacations deciding whether or not to live another year:

"I don't want to put too much stress on her to catch up, but where's the line we draw? I can't just promote her. Should we speak to the parents?"

"Her attendance problems are worse at home than they are here."

"I found the mother to be an easier way in than the father."

And then they turned to Dwayne, perennial student of concern. To their surprise, he had recently produced an eloquent oral history of his grandmother. Shortly after writing it, he was among a crew of boys arrested for jumping a guy and stealing his cell phone. It was the moment, teachers decided, to put the press on Dwayne's intellectual side.

"There's more engagement with the literature than he lets on. It's like over the summer when Mr. Berman gave him that book about two kids growing up in the projects. He was totally loving it, but he also made Mr. Berman promise not to tell anyone he'd taken it home. The interest about racial identity and class is something we've got to tap into, turn the anger into something literary, creative."

"There's this group of artists downtown who do interesting work with at-risk kids. I'll make a call."

The teachers had recently given up a much anticipated annual raise. While many charter schools rely on foundation grants and individual donations to supplement their public allotment -- around ninety-six hundred dollars per pupil in Boston -- contributions didn't necessarily increase with good academic results. "B.F.P.," teachers said to one another, shrugging -- bleak financial picture, one not improved when some students broke into a classroom and stole three hundred dollars that parents had raised during a book fair.

For those teachers, the consolation -- a considerable one -- was the company of passionate, analytical colleagues. The dilemma at places like Pacific Rim was that people who loved to be with and think about kids tended, sooner or later, to have some themselves. Once that happened, sixty-hour weeks for low pay were even less appealing. In October, Blasdale's deputy, a brilliant and intuitive woman named Piel Hollingsworth, had her first child; during labor, she had called Blasdale twice to deal with student matters. After the baby was born, her priorities changed; with some anguish, she had decided that she would not return full time the following year. Blasdale's wife wished that he could redirect some of the time he spent with three hundred and thirty adolescents in perpetual states of crisis to their two-year-old at home. Their second child was due in June.

Blasdale and his faculty spoke often about the balance between rigor and rescue. Demand a lot from students like Rousseau and Dwayne, and risk damaging their G.P.A.s and their chance at college admission. Demand little, and when the students get to college they'll fail. There were times when rescue won out, and an ode to Tupac Shakur slipped by as literary analysis. That didn't happen regularly, though; as a consequence, many students, particularly younger ones, were less than grateful to be there. While adolescent rage has infinite wellsprings, many complaints could be distilled to these: Pacific Rim stripped you of your logos and jewelry, your ways of speaking, and your means of defending yourself. Its teachers plotted behind your back, sometimes nosing into family things. Then, if your invaded, denuded self didn't live up to the school's high standards, they wouldn't even expel you. They'd imprison you in the homework center at the end of the official school day -- more hours, and even more attention, with people from the place you despised.

Pacific Rim did have one seductive treat -- a chance to go on a trip to China, where all those Mandarin lessons could be put to use. But that was twelve days out of the fourteen hundred or so that a kid would spend in this place before graduating. Moreover -- and this mattered to students, a lot -- Pacific Rim didn't look like a proper school. Not far away were several new public schools with high windows, smooth dark running tracks, and bleached-wood basketball courts. At Rousseau's instigation, Pacific Rim had started a basketball team, too. But the school day was too long, and money for transportation too scarce, for the team to compete seriously. Besides, the old factory had no gym, just a small, cracked blacktop outside. On clement days, a rubber ball and scuffed orange traffic cones would be set out on the blacktop for recess.

Another respite from academics came after lunch, when students pulled on rubber gloves and scoured the tables and the floor in the cafeteria. This was both a cost-saving measure and one of several ways that the teachers conveyed to the students something crucial: that the school's existence depended on them. It was not, however, fun, and many Pacific Rim students shrieked with relief at the end of the day. Packing onto public buses, they joined contemporaries from what they called "normal" schools, or from no school at all. One day, as the bus wended past Haitian groceries, auto-parts stores, and several evicted families trying to sell off the goods that marshals had piled on the sidewalk -- such "flee markets" were frequent in gentrifying southern Boston -- a toothless young man in a skullcap struck up a conversation with two Pacific Rim girls. "Well, I gots a diploma, too," he told them. "My diploma said, ‘Get the Fuck Outta Here.'" One of the girls looked at the other and laughed. "If only our teachers would kick us out."

To begin their Pacific Rim school day, the middle-school students said a Japanese word in unison: gambatte, which roughly translates as "preserve." By the end of those school days, teachers, more often than not, had also found occasion to say this word to themselves.

As the Christmas holidays approached, the yearbook staff prepared a ballot for senior superlatives. In keeping with school culture, categories like "most popular" and "prettiest" were rejected in favor of "most helpful," "best writer," and "most likely to become a teacher at Pacific Rim." Rousseau was chosen "most noticeable," and, had the seniors conducted a vote regarding the faculty, his counterpart would have been a tiny, driven college counselor named Doreen Kelly-Carney. Kelly-Carney, who was forty years old, had, in a previous generation, won the lottery that some of her kids played now: born to low-income teen-age parents, she'd received undergraduate and master's degrees from Harvard. Kids and college admissions had both grown more complicated since.

Kelly-Carney had been hammering her charges since junior year with the expectation that they would at least try the college-application process. To this end, the school's post-industrial setting was not just poignant but persuasive: from the window of the science lab, anyone could see that there would be few manufacturing jobs awaiting him at graduation. Still, as deadlines approached, several seniors balked. Some parents balked, too, declining to fill out financial-aid forms that they considered invasions of their privacy. Other parents inflated their incomes as a matter of pride. Kelly-Carney negotiated gently with the parents. With students like Dwayne, whom she had known for six years, she was blunt. "O.K., so maybe all these colleges will reject you," she said. "Make them do it. Don't reject yourself first." Kelly-Carney had worked in the admissions office at Harvard before coming to Pacific Rim, and she respected the college process's capacity to surprise.

Although many affluent white college applicants presume that their black, urban counterparts have enormous advantages, Kelly-Carney was aware of studies that showed that more than three-quarters of the beneficiaries of affirmative action at selective colleges were affluent and middle-class. Among low-income kids of all races, attendance at selective colleges has declined in the past twenty years, in part because college costs have risen faster than federal and college aid for needy students. The students affected by the new economic equation weren't the athletes or the top students, of course. They were the middling kids like Rousseau, whose freestyle raps had lately explored this phenomenon:

You be the minority, preferably black?
The new social profiling is green in fact.

Like most of the faculty, Kelly-Carney had fallen for Rousseau's intelligent, independent voice, his honesty, and his unusually strong sense of justice. As for his G.P.A. -- well, it was too late for lectures. To better his odds, she encouraged him to apply to thirteen schools.

For his college essay, Rousseau had settled on an account of his school trip to China, where villagers screamed, "You N.B.A.? Shaquille O'Neal?" when they saw him, and where he'd overcome his urge to stereotype them, too. He had fine-tuned the prose with Elizabeth Weston, to whom he'd grown close when she ran the homework center. "All us knuckleheads got to know Ms. Weston pretty well," he said. Now even Rousseau's mother considered Weston family.

Rousseau's mother had been a good student in Haiti, but by the time her son reached middle school his English and math skills outmatched hers. Nonetheless, Cazilda, too, had college anxieties. With tuition bills in mind, she'd recently added several freelance hair-relaxing jobs and a course at a local cosmetology school to her work schedule. Hard labor was "in her genes," she said, and, having studied the evolution of Roxbury's shopping strips, she regarded nail gluing and hair styling as growth professions. Although she suffered from diabetes and high blood pressure, and had no medical insurance, she was deft at emotional triage. The greatest harm would be to have no college financing to worry about.

Pacific Rim, seeking to minimize that possibility, had recommended Rousseau to a nonprofit organization called the Posse Foundation, which worked with selective colleges to identify and tutor urban public-high-school kids who might otherwise be overlooked. One evening, the Posse people invited Rousseau to join several dozen other kids in a preliminary competition at a local community center. There, they sat around in small groups discussing abortion politics and developments in robotics, as Posse evaluators listened. It was nerve-racking, Rousseau thought, trying to make intelligent conversation while trying to mind-read the people wandering behind you. But he also understood his own position:

Situation's dire
Verbal vernacular for hire.

His fluency served him, and he was invited to the next round, a personal interview in an office as colorful and self-consciously optimistic as Pacific Rim.

One by one, the seniors who had arrived before him were following pretty young women into interview rooms. Rousseau didn't want to dwell on the competition, so he focused instead on the décor: cool red chairs, beakers full of Snickers bars, a boom box on which OutKast and Alicia Keys played. People were trying to make him feel comfortable, Rousseau sensed, and he might have found this patronizing if the atmosphere hadn't pleased him so well. He took a closer look at the photographs that covered the walls -- minority scholarship kids kicking it at Bowdoin, Bryn Mawr, wherever, looking happier in every single shot than most humans ever get to feel.

Studying the photographs, Rousseau was surprised to see Felix, a Roxbury guy he'd jostled with in pickup basketball games. Felix hadn't been around lately; the guys Rousseau played ball with often disappeared. It hadn't occurred to Rousseau that Felix had been hiding at Hamilton College. The boy had never let on that he was smart.

Rousseau had been praying over this Posse business, and seeing Felix was, while not a sign, exactly, at least suggestive. By the time he sat down to be interviewed, he felt confident. By the time he stood up, he felt more so. He wasn't too surprised, a few days later, to learn that he was in the Posse finals.

He's stepping with some newness
What problems? He can do this.

Again, the Posse finalists gathered in small groups, this time with college admissions officers present. Rousseau's group was asked to solve some campus disputes, as if they were college honchos themselves. Rousseau, hearing the assignment, brightened. Having been a honcho -- well, a student-government leader -- at Pacific Rim, he'd sorted through a number of pitched, emotional battles. But then came the specific problem: parents who refused to let their kids be taught by a homosexual teacher.

His church in Roxbury didn't accept homosexuality. College admissions officers, he suspected, didn't share this point of view. Rousseau couldn't sell out the church he believed had saved his soul, nor did he wish to sound "like a gay-bashing jerk." In the pleasant conference room full of pleasant people, he felt emotionally trapped. And, long before the letter arrived to make it official, he sensed that his picture would not be hanging next year alongside Felix's in the room with the comfortable chairs.

The long-distance runner -- the one prone to moodiness and confusion -- arrived for a meeting with his adviser. He was carrying a dog-eared pocket dictionary and was shaking with anger. The room was the size of a broom closet, and in fact contained a broom, as well as the boy's alarmingly red-eyed adviser, Alexander Phillips. An exacting thirty-two-year-old history teacher, Phillips caught every virus his students brought to school.

"Mr. Phillips, I know the work, but the teachers aren't testing me right," the boy began, clenching and unclenching his jaw. "I mean, maybe I couldn't do it before, but I've got my disability fixed now, with the drugs. I've turned around a hundred and eighty degrees. I could have proved it to them, but they wouldn't let me." His body folded forward until the house key he wore on a lanyard dangled between his knees.

The boy had for years struggled to keep up with his classmates, and lately strange things had been happening in his mind. While on one level he knew this, as the months passed he preferred to retreat into a happier scenario, in which he would do well on his tests and win a track scholarship to Harvard. Many of Pacific Rim's teachers had known this boy for six years. They ached for his future, but they also knew that there was something they could do for him now. He had twice failed the state competency tests that were required for graduation. He had one more chance before June, and his teachers wanted him to have a high-school diploma. In the small room with Phillips, more than anywhere else, the boy could at times still trust his mind.

"You couldn't prove what you knew in the science quiz?" Phillips said between coughing fits. "Well, prove it to me, now."

The questions were rapid-fire, and as the boy reached for answers -- "Colder water contains more oxygen than warmer water!" -- his body began to unfold. Phillips, who had a pink, open face and was wearing a sweater vest, seemed to know when it was time to inch his chair closer to the boy, and when it was time to raise the stakes. In an hour, the boy faced a quiz on Thoreau.

"So: ‘Life Without Principle.'"

The boy hunched up again. "I don't get that we're doing things so long in a short time -- "

"What your teacher wants you to think about is what Thoreau believes in most, and why."

"That you shouldn't do things for money, that stuff, you know, I don't want to go too deep into the details."

"Mmm."

"He was…freethinking."

"About what? About capitalism? About labor?"

"Basically, he was hauling and making things, and he got critical."

Phillips opened the book and laid it on the table; a concrete object sometimes helped the boy to focus. "We don't give credit as a society to the proper people," the boy began again. "I think that is what Thoreau thought -- that only the people with the money get the praise. It's like today, the large people, the athletes and actors, they get the stories and the Hollywood star. And the other ones, the lesser ones, do the things the large people say matter most, hoping that they will get a star, too. But the people who labor the hardest should really get the most credit. Like, today, how hard some people work, no one writes it down."

The boy pulled the book toward him. "Here is one place where he talks about it":

The title wise is, for the most part, falsely applied. How can one be a wise man, if he does not know any better how to live than other men? -- if he is only more cunning and intellectually subtle?

Then the boy fingered a phrase that had troubled him: It is wonderful how indifferent men of all classes are."

"Mr. Phillips, this word ‘wonderful' is wrong."

"Thoreau is just using it differently. As you know, ‘wonderful' usually means fantastic, but sometimes it also means what the word itself breaks into: full of wonder. An idea that makes you think."

"So something can be amazing," the boy replied after mulling it over, "whether it is happy or not."

"So why is the Invisible Man keeping all this junk in his briefcase?" McAllister asked the seniors, pacing. "Bledsoe's letters, the Sambo dolls, the broken bank -- what is Ellison trying to convey?"

"He's carrying around the legacy -- these broken images that constitute the black man."

"Dwayne, excellent. It's like poetry, the way you put that."

The other seniors looked up, impressed. Poetry? Dwayne the resister?

Elizabeth Weston had been urging the class's other poet, Rousseau: Start forcing yourself out of your comfort zone, because you'll be out of it when you get to college. Boston's Four Seasons Hotel was farther out of that zone than she'd imagined. There, two hundred or so white people were celebrating the fifteenth anniversary of the Pioneer Institute, a conservative think tank that counted among its causes charter schooling; Rousseau, as a student-government leader, had been invited to say a few words before the columnist Charles Krauthammer made a foreign-policy address. Rousseau's best suit was not the "black tie" that had been called for on the invitation, but he didn't sweat it. There was novel information to process: the elderly black man handing out towels in the men's room, the gravity-defying chandeliers, the astonishment of filet mignon -- although pre-speech anxiety interfered with full relish. A few days earlier, he had put his lines on paper: "I count it as a blessing from God that I came to a school like the Academy. It has prepared me for college and for life." But, when called up to the lectern, he forgot the speech in hand. He freestyled a little, advising the rich people, among other things, "gambatte," and when he finished, to his shock, they rose and cheered.

It was his life's first standing ovation; he worried that there would not be others. But, reliving the moment in his journal, he felt anger encroaching on his pride. "The powerful people (and the rich) must be doing the right things if this one boy (me) out of hundreds of thousands, is so well spoken," he wrote, with a sarcasm he rarely used in the journal. It was "so ‘Invisible Man.'" Back in his defiant days, it had occurred to him that he might be perpetuating one stereotype. Now he feared that he was perpetuating another -- a superficial success story that might be held against kids who lacked the chances he'd had. And even he, the privileged one, wasn't sure he was going to college.

By March, the appearance of the Virgin in the ophthalmology-clinic window had been discounted: chemical deposits, an inquiry of the archdiocese concluded, and most of the pilgrims dispersed. What criminologists had called the "Boston miracle" -- a dramatic drop in violent crime during the nineteen nineties -- had been unraveling, too. In four days, three local teen-agers had been killed, and more shootings and stabbings followed, until the homicide rate was double the previous year's. On buses, kids began wearing yellow police tape around their arms and ankles, to commemorate or invent a closeness to the dead.

Rousseau, for one, was happy to keep a psychological distance. He and his mother had moved to a new neighborhood. There, he had been promptly jumped and robbed by seven kids his age. For months afterward, returning from school, he felt on edge. He had let his street smarts soften, when the college referendum on his future was suggesting that he might well need them:

Hamilton College: no.

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill: no.

George Washington University: no.

University of Massachusetts-Boston: no.

St. John's University: waitlist.

Northeastern University: if you do well next year in community college, maybe.

Williams College: if you do another year of high school, we'll give you a good, hard look.

Marcus was choosing among the University of Virginia, Virginia Tech, Syracuse, and Ohio State. Sarabina, whose parents expected her to stay close to home, had accepted a scholarship from Boston College. A few months before, Rousseau had arranged to retake the S.A.T. -- a last effort to improve his scores and compensate for his G.P.A. But then he forgot the date and slept through the test. In his notebook appeared lyrics too terse to be called freestyling:

I won't lie
Why
Try

One afternoon in Pacific Rim's library, Rousseau huddled with Kelly-Carney, the college counselor, his enormous sneakers toe to toe with her red flats. "It's my own lack of discipline that caused this, but my mom and dad don't understand," he said. "They think everything is going to be fine. I can't stand to tell them anything now."

"There's still time, Rousseau, still schools you haven't heard from, and safer schools where it's not too late to apply," Kelly-Carney said. "At the University of Richmond, you'll be given geographic preference. Why don't we push to get you an interview? Once they meet you -- well, to not do it would be doing yourself an injustice."

He held his head in his hands for a moment, then looked up.

"Ms. Kelly-Carney, it's just -- I aimed too high."

One weekend, a teen-ager was robbed at knifepoint in a playground three blocks south of the school. "Factually and actually," as Pacific Rim kids like to say, no one from the school was involved. Yet somehow they were in deep. While the school was bordered on the north and east by train tracks and old factories, the southern side, where the playground was, faced Readville, one of Boston's white, middle-class enclaves. The mayor lived there, in one of the Cape-Cod style houses and peony-filled yards that evoked the age when good manufacturing jobs brought whole communities into being. With the armed robbery, the residents came together in a safety crusade. Among the identified threats: Pacific Rim kids who were turned loose in their neighborhood after school. As the days got warmer, some of them decided that they preferred Readville's well-tended, uncrowded playground to the ones awaiting them back home. And so Spencer Blasdale's phone began to ring.

Late spring was, for Blasdale, the season of Excel spreadsheets -- a time of analyzing an influx of test scores and devising improvements for next year. Grave deficiencies were getting harder to find. On the Stanford 9 tests, the sixth graders under Elizabeth Weston and her fellow-teachers had risen from the thirty-ninth percentile, nationally, to the fifty-first. In math, they finished in the seventy-eighth percentile, a phenomenal accomplishment for an inner-city school, but an achievement that would be overshadowed by the state competency-test results of the tenth graders. Eighty-two per cent had demonstrated good or excellent skills in English, and ninety per cent had demonstrated such skills in math. Not one of the tenth graders had failed. And the troubled long-distance runner had not failed, either. On his final try, the senior earned the right to get his diploma.

Blasdale had little time to celebrate, however, and not only because his second daughter was about to arrive. Readville residents' children were afraid to use the swing sets. Pacific Rim teen-agers had been seen kissing on a Readville hill. And so he added to his list of daily duties an after-school walking tour of Readville.

"It's understandable," he said one cloudless day, heading from the old factory toward the park. "Kids in groups can be intimidating. We're trying to impress on the students that they're ambassadors for the school, and if I'm out here more, letting residents know what we're doing, I think things will be fine." He hated the thought of moving again and losing students in the process. "It's been tense, but once you meet people in the neighborhood, they're much nicer than you -- " Suddenly, he stopped, inhaling sharply.

Across the quiet street, a blond woman with a baby stroller was approaching a corner. Around the corner, by a hedge, was a Pacific Rim sixth grader with his pants down.

Blasdale sped across the street. "I had to pee," the student said, putting things in and pulling things up. The woman with the stroller blithely passed.

Indecent exposure? Temperamental bladder? Later, after many painstaking discussions with the child and his family, Blasdale would have a better idea. But even now he knew that, to a skeptical community, the distinctions would be moot. The judgments of this neighborhood would not be too different from the judgments of the society at large.

In May, Pacific Rim seniors dawdled in the computer lab, planning their last weeks of high school.

"It's a tradition, like the prom. We've got to have a senior skip day."

"Should it be a Friday? Whose house can we kick it at? Dwayne?

A voice came from behind a computer. "Y'all go. I can't be with it."

"Dwayne, you can't be serious. Every other day's senior skip day in your calendar."

"My grandma would kill me. Anyway, I've got to do my government paper."

Dwayne continued to assure his teachers that college meant little to him -- vocational, recreational, whatever. The page he designed for himself in the yearbook featured wads of twenty-dollar bills. But the act of applying to college had helped to remind him that places beyond Boston existed. To his mild embarrassment, he had just won a school achievement award for great improvement in math.

"Now I'm analyzing community policing from the other side," he told the senior-skip-day plotters. He'd been fired up by a book that a teacher had given him, "The Tipping Point," one chapter of which examined a dramatic decrease in crime in New York City. "From where I stand, here in Boston there's more say-so than actual police," he said. "Increased law-enforcement presence, closeness to the people -- sure you're going to hear about it in the papers, but the numbers don't add up when you look at them. Or maybe they add up in headquarters, but not in South End or Grove Hall or Roxbury."

The plotters sidled away.

"I can see clearly now the rain has gone, I can see all obstacles in my way…"

In one room, the chorus was injecting some Caribbean groove into a seventies standard, in preparation for the graduation finale. Down the hall, an uncommonly relaxed Doreen Kelly-Carney was tackling senior-class questions about hot plates -- whether colleges would let you have them in your dorm room. The process was over, the verdicts were in, and Pacific Rim seniors had done spectacularly well.

Elisa had chosen Williams over Smith. Kim had a full scholarship to Bryn Mawr. Ike had picked Syracuse, Melissa chose Simmons, and Suzie was Wellesley-bound. Simone, the first person in her extended family to finish high school in a quarter century, was going to Hampton. Jasmynn would be continuing her Mandarin studies at the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth. But the shocker of the season was Dwayne, who had followed one of Kelly-Carney's Hail Mary strategies: apply to a place where there won't be too many other applicants like you. As gang conflict escalated in his neighborhood, a small liberal-arts college in the hills of New Hampshire offered to pay his way.

Rousseau had been less fortunate. He had finished the year with high honors and been accepted off the waiting list at St. John's University. Then he saw the offer of financial aid. Maybe his parents had filled out the forms wrong. Maybe St. John's didn't want him very much. He and his family would have to borrow about twenty-five thousand dollars a year -- more than his mother's annual income.

"Impossible," Kelly-Carney said.

"Don't worry," Rousseau's mother said. "If I have to go corner to corner, church to church, you will be going to college in September." As she and his father took out big loans from the New York State college-financing agency, Rousseau lined up a summer job helping at-risk kids in his new neighborhood. At three hundred dollars a week, it would do little to change the economic equation. But he had done all the worrying about the future that a boy in his last days of high school could bear. How miserable could he be, anyway? He was taking Sarabina to the prom.

One June morning, the U.P.S. man delivered two brown boxes to the administration office at Pacific Rim. They contained the caps and gowns that the seniors eagerly awaited, but it took hours for the faculty to notice. In the public high schools near Pacific Rim, over a quarter of the children had dropped out before graduation; across the state, dropout rates among seniors were higher than they had been in the nineteen-nineties. At Pacific Rim, every senior had finished. One developmentally delayed boy would go to a respected non-degree program at a local four-year college, where he hoped to study early-childhood development; the troubled long-distance runner would attend community college in hopes of becoming a personal trainer. Each of the remaining twenty-two had been accepted to a four-year college. Later, Blasdale and his teachers told one another, they would bask. But three hundred other futures required immediate attention.

The class of 2005 was a larger, harder group, and nine teachers -- a third of the faculty -- were leaving. They'd found jobs with bigger paychecks, more time to be parents, less emotional depletion -- the usual reasons. Blasdale had reviewed three hundred résumés, interviewed dozens of people, and thought he'd found some good new teachers, but he knew that in a year he'd be searching for replacements again.

In mid-June, Rousseau and the other seniors gathered on a curved stairway at Faneuil Hall, downtown. The boys leaned against Doric columns, comparing ties. The girls shifted their weight from stiletto to stiletto, mulling whether to walk in bare feet. Below them they could see the hall growing packed, people sweating and sniffling already, but the seniors were trying to delay their entrance as long as they could. It wasn't a matter of sentiment. Dwayne, that knucklehead, had yet to arrive.

"Dwayne! Where you at? We're blowing up your cell phone here!"

"Yo, Dwayne, even you aren't too cool to come to graduation. I'm going to call right back in sixty seconds -- pick up!"

"Dwayne, please -- they're making us turn off the cell phone, just get your butt over here now."

Two days earlier, at a dinner that the faculty gave for the seniors' families, Dwayne's mother had arrived sobbing and laden with flowers for the teachers who she believed had saved her son. Tonight, however, Dwayne's classmates went forward without him, as they would do again in September. The kids sensed already that they had lost him. The teachers sensed already the more difficult rescue effort that lay ahead. Within three weeks of graduation, he would suffer two gunshot wounds, be arrested, and plead not guilty to assault with a dangerous weapon. As freshman college orientation in New Hampshire came and went, he would be in the Suffolk County jail. "This is no place for you guys," he'd say when Rousseau and a classmate tried to visit. It was no place, Rousseau thought, for Dwayne, either.

Rousseau now came forward to give the commencement address. Standing under a portrait of Daniel Webster, with Blasdale and Weston beside him, and six hundred people in front, he felt uncannily calm. The next time life got hard -- and it would get hard, he suspected -- there was something he was keen to remember: that once, when challenged, he rose.

The Best Job in Town

Cecille Isidro — Mon, 05 Jul 2004 00:00:00 -0400

One Monday this spring, a forty-three-year-old salesclerk at the Home Depot in Plano, Texas, scribbled some updates onto an old resume and took it to his local copy shop. To his education and work history -- a bachelor's degree in industrial engineering and technology, service in the U.S. Marine Corps -- he added a recent moonlighting job as a handyman and a new "career objective." Ten minutes later, in southern India, a middle-aged Hindu man in a cavernous workplace began to type the Home Depot clerk's words. A prevailing fiction in the Indian office was that the dozens of "document specialists" doing American work didn't actually register the content of the resumes, funeral programs, pro-se lawsuits, and erotic manifestos sent to them over broadband from store counters with "While-U-Wait" signs. Rather, the document specialists were to type, format, proofread, and zap things back while maintaining an exquisite blankness of mind. But American resumes, as much as American erotica, caused an inconvenient upwelling of emotion. "To secure a position at a company that would utilize my skills and provide an opportunity for advancement: row upon row of typing Indians recognized the Plano clerk's yearning as their own.

The typists were new, entry-level employees at a prominent firm in the sprawling coastal city of Chennai -- still "wet behind the ears," as Americans would say, or so they'd been informed during a company crash course on Western ways. Their narrow cubicles were lodged on the sixth floor of a pink stucco building whose lobby possessed, in addition to a purposeless set of turnstiles and a statue of the Hindu god Ganesh, solid evidence that even plastic rhododendrons will wilt in extreme heat. Most of the workers had been born in Chennai and would, in all likelihood, die there. Still, from their workstations they could imagine, not unreasonably, that they were seeing a bit of the world. Their employer, a company named Office Tiger, did the work not just of an American copy-shop chain but of seven of the twelve biggest banks on Wall Street -- confidential labor carried out in unmarked rooms with film-covered windows, closed-circuit cameras, and electronic security so unforgiving that as the typist finished the resume from Plano three bankers, accidentally locked in a nearby room, were frantically pounding on a door. Office Tiger also performed work for a Big Four accounting agency, several white-shoe Northeastern law firms, an insurance conglomerate, two large publishing concerns, a Madison Avenue advertising agency, global management consultancies, and other enterprises whose identities were not divulged to workers of the resume-typing rank.

The document specialists, all college graduates, earned roughly a tenth of what they would have commanded for this work in the U.S., and less, too, than they would have been paid in some call centers. But it was the possibility that one could rise up from a lowly position that had made Office Tiger one of the city's status employers, a firm whose workers were so pleased by their affiliation that they put it on their wedding invitations, just below their fathers' names. A foreign notion -- that jobs should be distributed on the basis of merit -- was amending the rules of a society where employment had for millennia been allotted by caste, and great possibilities abounded. A clerk who today did a bang-up job of formatting the work history of a part-time handyman in Plano might be an adjunct investment banker by year's end.

Chennai, the capital of the state of Tamil Nadu, was at one time an agglomeration of fishing hamlets near the Bay of Bengal -- a mile-wide spit of sand upon which seventeenth-century British traders imposed the name Madras. As the imperialists built forts and seaside promenades, the less refined aspects of colonialism sharpened the Tamil-speaking locals' preference for their indigenous culture. This now vast community -- the fourth-largest city in India, after Delhi, Mumbai, and Calcutta -- was, until recently, a willfully anti-cosmopolitan place. If the Calcuttan post-colonial ideal was outward-looking, intellectual, and romantic, like the heroes of Satyajit Ray films, Chennaians rated hard work over lofty thought, science over poetizing, and humility over everything else. Though most Chennai residents were Hindu, violence against the city's Muslim minority was relatively rare. Discord between rich and poor was similarly muted -- perhaps because the city's elites tended to leave ostentation to the peacocks, which (along with goats, water buffalo, auto-rickshaws, roosters, and homeless families) beautified the roadsides.

For centuries, the Western world knew this city, if at all, through a group of unpresumptuous tradesmen: weavers who rendered the colorful, comfortable madras plaid that has long outfitted the gentries of Cornwall and Nantucket. This "better cheape" cloth, as one seventeenth-century British trader described it, provided the city with an economic base until the late twentieth century, when tariffs and global competition brought many power looms to a standstill. Some former weavers earned renown for a more macabre kind of trading: as one of the international black market's primary sources of human kidneys. Other citizens, though, turned to more renewable resources for economic survival. Capitalizing on their celebrated work ethic, on a dozen practical-minded local universities, and on the ability of the elites to speak, in addition to Tamil, the clipped and elegant English of their colonizers, Chennaians developed the sort of forward-looking economy that many of America's post-manufacturing cities still struggle to achieve. "Better cheape" Western business is Chennai's new niche.

Schoolgirls here maintain a picturesque ancient tradition -- entwining their braids, morning and night, with fragrant jasmine flower. The perfume is particularly welcome lately, as constant road construction, unprecedented automotive pollution, and a three-year drought have created a stench that the vanilla candles in the new wi-fi coffeehouses cannot mask. Flower fields have given way to steel-and-glass buildings, which, despite continuous exposure to sun in one of the world's least temperate climates, have become a status essential. The glass in these office towers is blue and black and silver, and its impenetrability seems at first to be a consequence of the city's blinding sun. The refraction is partly by design. American uneasiness about outsourcing -- an issue in the current Presidential campaign -- has turned Chennai into a secretive city, where the American back-office presence, everywhere felt, is almost nowhere stated. Although American companies with Picassos in their foyers and Corbusier chairs in reception still dispatch work to South Asia office buildings fronted by beggars and spavined cattle, the company names have been deleted from phone books, Web sites, and corporate entryways. The American International School in Chennai, which serves children of American executives and diplomats, recently doubled in size. It wears no sign on its gate.

The British were drawn to India as a physical place: a repository of precious raw materials from which the natives might be parted, and a locus of beauty and mystique. The new American attachment is not physical but conceptual -- the lure of cheap, smart, pliable labor. Among Chennai's janitors and security guards, as well as its bankers, the need for discretion about that labor is understood. Even the ephemera of the United States offshoring debate becomes front-page news here; many of Chennai's young professionals now know the names John Kerry, Lou Dobbs, Benedict Arnold, and Timothy Platt -- the latter the proprietor of a U.S.-based Web site called yourjobisgoingtoindia.com, which is as closely followed in Chennai as it is in Silicon Valley. Fascination with the American controversy is more bemused than fearful. Chennaians in general believe that what they call "outsource hoopla" has already redounded to their favor, alerting a wider audience of executives and stockholders to the benefits of wage arbitrage.

Some American companies, such as Ford, have been manufacturing in the region for years, working to capture a piece of a potentially vast consumer market. But now non-factory, professional employment is surging. Among the white-collar options available to Chennai's college graduates are work for Verizon, Bank of America, Hewlett-Packard, Citibank, Visa, MasterCard, and Electronic Data Systems, a Plano-based tech company founded by the free-trade opponent Ross Perot, which recently announced a layoff of fifty-two hundred U.S. employees.

One indicator of Chennai's new corporate mass is the recently opened Park Hotel, where a glass of Chablis costs nearly as much as the monthly salary of the low-caste busboy who spirits away the empties. Situated near a faded mural of Mahatma Gandhi, bare-chested and bent into his walking stick, the hotel features Texas barbecue, "appletinis," and, to ease executive stress, poolside chaises in cabanas. One spring evening, a tense Indian doing Harley-Davidson work sat in one such cabana, promising his ten-year-old daughter, whom he was "raising by cell phone," that on his day off he would take her to a theme park called M.G.M. Dizzee World. The initials M.G.M. are for the park's founder, M. G. Muthu, who made his first fortune introducing the city's growing middle class to American-style installment plans. Now he is educating working parents about expensive American antidotes to guilt -- roller coasters and Seven Dwarfs-like characters resembling incarnations of Vishnu.

The Americanization of Chennai has been so swift and -- save inside the Park Hotel -- so quiet that many of its citizens do not yet grasp the change in their cultural and literal landscape. An animation company makes cartoons seen by American children on Saturday mornings. Radiologists read American MRIs, clerks adjudicate patients' insurance claims, and programmers automate Medicaid eligibility for an entire Midwestern state. Chartered accountants complete U.S. tax returns while underwriters certify U.S. mortgages. And within Office Tiger's pink building aspiring financiers analyze American firms that are ripe for corporate takeover in a place they call Wall Street East.

One afternoon in late March, Office Tiger's wiry thirty-three-year-old co-C.E.O. stood at his desk, surrounded by luggage, receiving from Manhattan the news that his firm had just landed Wall Street investment bank No. 8 -- a half-a-million-dollar "starter" contract. "There are a few liability issues still outstanding, but basically we're good to go," an underling on a speakerphone said. She anticipated a doubling of the contract within the year. "The only tricky thing is that we've got to get the employees hired and ready in three weeks." "Three weeks," the C.E.O. repeated; he was pleased but also harried. Executives of a Fortune 10 company would be descending on the office the following day, but he had decided he would have to miss the visit: officials of a Fortune 5 company were awaiting him the same morning in Bangalore, a thirty-five-minute plane ride away.

The co-C.E.O. is Joseph Sigelman; the other co-C.E.O. is Randy Altschuler, also thirty-three. Their enterprise, Office Tiger, is named not for the fauna of the East but for the mascot of Princeton University, where they met in the cafeteria their freshman year and became best friends. Joe and Randy, middle-class boys who had attended, respectively, St. Ann's in Brooklyn and Manhattan's Hunter College High School, were the kind of Princetonians who sough entree into student government, not the eating clubs. They shared abstemiousness and obsessive work habits (if you dined most nights on applesauce that you kept in your dorm room, you saved money and gained an extra hour to invest in your medieval-history paper) that since college days have become a selling point.

After Harvard Business School and jobs at Lazard Freres Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, and the Blackstone Group, in 1998 the friends gave up a combined annual income of half a million dollars and the experience of hearing Paris doormen say, "Welcome back to the Ritz, Mr. Sigelman," in order to pursue an idea born in a late-night fit of pique. It had become apparent to them that not every typist and copyist working the midnight shift in their investment banks -- the moonlighting actor, the artist with the ring in his nose -- was putting his heart, soul, and syntactical memory into completing the PowerPoint presentations that needed to be done, perfectly, by morning. Randy began to speculate that workers overseas might invest more care in the menial jobs that Manhattanites seemed not to relish. Joe, who had been introduced to Madras on a family vacation when he was twelve, thought that some of its underemployed citizens might be grateful indeed. "You met people in factories or running the elevator who had the intelligence and spirit to do so much more," he remembered. "We thought, why not release that talent?"

The Indian government gave them a ten-year "tax holiday." American and British venture capitalists gave them seventeen million dollars for the startup, only a sliver of which they had to spend on labor. (Tamil Nadu's per-capita income equates to thirty-six U.S. dollars a month.) Their first "office" was a sheet-metal shed. Former business-school classmates gossiped that Joe and Randy had cracked from the stress of investment-banking and run off to an ashram. Initially, ashram life would have rendered a better return. "We had virtually no business," Randy recalled, "because at the time people thought it was crazy to be sending work to India. So we had a hundred people sitting in a room and we'd get one fax a day to type. When the fax came through, it was like a five-alarm fire -- we'd all fall over each other trying to get it done, and we always, always fucked it up." But this slow start turned out to be profitable. During the mutual-reassurance sessions common to foundering enterprises, Joe and Randy got to know their employees better than they ordinarily might have. All were college educated. A third possessed postgraduate or doctoral degrees. Randy returned to New York to establish the American side of the business and, from a small office overlooking a Dunkin' Donuts, pressed his former Wall Street colleagues to give the Indian workers a trial run at higher-end labor.

Six years later, the Manhattan banks that Randy and Joe abandoned still have odes to "thrift" in their marble lobbies, but those banks also have rows of capacious, upholstered, untenanted cubicles. Almost twenty per cent of the jobs on Wall Street have disappeared in the last three years. Office Tiger recently doubled its staff, to sixteen hundred and fifty workers, and will nearly double in size gain by year's end, on the strength of "judgment-dependent services": equity analysis, legal research, and accounting jobs that pay an annual salary of up to a hundred thousand dollars in the United States and between ten and twenty per cent of that in Chennai.

"Anything else?" Joe asked the subordinate who had informed him of investment bank No. 8. He ran his hand anxiously through his sandy hair -- he had a reservation on the night's last flight. Well, actually, the colleague said, representatives of an investment bank in London wanted in. "They've just got to get the regulatory approvals, see how much of their work they can take offshore."

"All right, that's good. Is that it?"

Well, actually, the woman said, since he was traveling to the U.S. and London later this month, it might be nice if he stopped in to see some Office Tiger employees who were doing on-site analysis at another investment bank. Joe was momentarily nonplussed; he'd forgotten that his Tigers were in-house there.

"I mean, it's not essential," the subordinate said. "Only, if you had time it would be a nice show of support..."

"I get it, I'll do it -- sweet idea. Anything else?"

Well, actually, there was another impending new contract. "It's been fast-tracked, they want to go live with a pilot."

Salomon Brothers in its heyday received five hundred job applications a month. Office Tiger sometimes receives fifteen hundred applicants a day, many of them accompanied by parents who pray as their sons and daughters take one test after another in the hope of earning an interview with the beautiful, ruthlessly efficient human-resources executive in black pajamas, who does her work in the reception area, behind a thin glass wall. As Joe returned one more phone call -- a cautious executive from Germany, which is experiencing an outsourcing backlash, too -- the narrow hallway outside the firm's door grew crowded with the survivors of that testing. They sat in plastic chairs, heads in hands, awaiting their face-to-face encounters.

"Mercy, how do you think you did on the proofreading test?" the human-resources goddess, whose name is Sudha, asked one such survivor, who was perched on the edge of her seat.

"I found it quite easy," responded Mercy, fatally. Her score was eight-five. Joe and Randy seek workers like themselves -- the type haunted fifteen years later by the single question botched on the college aptitude test, and game to perform even dull tasks, with, to use the local term, "full sincerity." A minute later, another applicant was warming the chair.

"Hindu culture tends to be gentle, forgiving of shortcomings, which is not exactly the Wall Street ethos," Joe said. Though he trains his workers intensively, cultural miscommunications remain. Not long ago, Office Tiger accidentally hand-delivered to the American consul Joe's underwear, which had been sent to him by his mother. Soon after, during a fast-turnaround project, Joe offended his staff by waving rupee notes -- incentive -- in front of their noses. He has given up trying to reprogram the hotel coffee-shop pianist, who, having realized that Joe is perhaps the only Jew in Chennai, routinely serenades him with "Hava Nagila" when he sits down to lunch, even when his companion is a Kuwaiti investor. But after Joe and Randy hired a former Coast Guard petty officer named Lonnie Sapp -- a veteran of semi-pro football, a graduate of Connecticut's Trinity College, and almost certainly Chennai's only six-foot-four-inch African-American -- to manage the workforce a smoothness settled over the operation, even without the grease of government bribes. (The Princetonians say that they won't pay them.) Cost-saving improvements percolated up from the production level. Satisfied clients begat more clients. And, by the time Randy and Joe turned thirty and outsourcing had become a term of art, they were undermining many of the assumptions that Americans try to nurture while watching their nation's jobs go overseas.

One false assumption had been that only the manufacture of goods, not the provision of services, could be exported. Another, supported most recently by the U.S. Department of Labor, is that the number of American jobs lost to outsourcing is minuscule. But Labor statisticians rely on the corporations to link their domestic downsizing to work they now send abroad -- a connection that some corporate leaders are loath to make. Other analyses suggest that the number of American jobs lost to this phenomenon will soon reach a million, as the Indian and Chinese back-office sectors expand by thirty per cent a year. Indian analysts foresee outsourcing in biotech research, pharmaceuticals, architecture, and the law. Although many economists believe that this global transition is mutually beneficial -- that an economy is better off specializing in areas where it is relatively more productive and importing in areas where it is not -- a study by the University of California at Berkeley identifies fourteen million American jobs at risk in the near term. The latest consolation is that, since many outsourced jobs are low-end and mechanistic, Americans are now being liberated to use their exceptional skills as innovators and entrepreneurs. Being tactful, the Tigers pretend to agree. What is the advantage of pointing out that the country of Salman Rushdie and Amartya Sen may not, in fact, be creatively impaired? The résumés and credit-repair leaflets spewing into the copy shop from Texas are less diplomatic. They intimate that some Americans have been "freed up" to do nothing productive whatsoever.

An Office Tiger manager concluded a phone call that required an American accent and began to help one of his document specialists decipher a five-page scrawled submission. "The supervisor called plaintiff gay, child molester, pedophile, and other malicious things": he slowly made out the words. "'Pedophile' misspelled here," the typist noted quietly, in order not to disturb the concentration of her colleagues. "It's not ‘p-h-e-d-o...'"

"And he obviously didn't mean to write ‘viscous,'" the manager said. "It should be "The vicious rumors that were spread...'"

"And in the next sentence that's ‘hostile work environment.'"

"Hostile work environment" was not a concept that Joe and Randy had thought to introduce in cultural training, but the document specialists quickly learned it on the job. The phrase evoked very little recognition.

As Joe prepared to leave for the airport, a worker appeared at his office door -- a slight twenty-six-year-old with a wispy mustache and a smile half the size of his face. In Indian-run workplaces, hierarchies are often too strict for such unannounced visits. Here, employees drop by constantly; they are mesmerized by Joe. As Joe greeted him, his eyes settled on the younger man's collar. "Harish," he admonished. "That's why they put the buttons there -- for you to use them." In his boss's wake, Harish stood buttoning and beaming, as if he'd been named employee of the year.

Seriously behind schedule now, Joe skipped to the front of the security gantlet at the entrance to the firm, where the pocketbooks and backpacks of departing workers were being searched to prevent the theft of Western corporate secrets. (The investigations that day turned up "Who Moved My Cheese?" and the Indian edition of Cosmopolitan.) "The outsourcing backlash?" Joe was saying. To him, it was political entertainment, music for Presidential campaigns. "In the real world, it's inexorable. This is radical global change, and it is going to happen more and more, not just because the labor in developing countries is cheaper but because the work is often done better. Businesses will have to outsource to stay competitive, and eventually the American public will get used to it. Look, that's what a free market is all about."

Joe passed the applicants awaiting interviews, lost time in a balky elevator, and recovered that time by racing through the twilight to the Taj Hotel, a few hundred yards from Office Tiger, where he has been living for the past five years. His route was through a back alley, where he dodged a succession of two-wheelers, three or four passengers astride. Some of the riders were his employees, hastening to work at the start of the American business day. "It kills me," he said, shaking his head. "Their brains are their careers, but I can't get any of them to wear a helmet." He stopped momentarily in his hotel room, where the liveried workers who deliver his meals often petition him, sometimes successfully, for jobs. At the airport, flight attendants were waiting to hand him his ticket and escort him onto the plane. Despite a philosophical commitment to what he calls "lavatory class" travel, Joe is regularly bumped to first class. The flight attendants, it recently dawned on him, might want to be Tigers, too.

His collar properly buttoned now, the cheerful worker named Harish Kumar, who not long ago took pleasure in sewing his own clothes, stood in the front of a white-walled classroom. The room's chief decoration was a flyer stating the criminal consequences of insider trading. Ten middle-aged students wearing electronic-security cards around their necks held their fingers over computer keyboards; they did not want to miss a word. The students were known as Office Tiger "candidates" -- the two per cent of applicants who had been, provisionally, hired. The job of Harish (known as Harry to American clients and Employee No. 489 to electronic security) was to teach them the Western business tools and mores they would need to survive a six-month probation period and become full-fledged Tigers. Much of the previous week had been devoted to the consequences of revealing proprietary information and engaging in securities fraud -- subjects that Joe and Randy had instructors teach until they saw fear in candidates' eyes. Now, following a vigorous discussion of spreadsheets, Harish turned to a practical problem. "Let us ready ourselves," he told his students, "to make an organizational chart using PowerPoint."

Leaning his gaunt frame over the keyboard, Harish tapped until a giant green box was projected onto a white wall. He tapped the keyboard again: two smaller boxes materialized beneath the large one, and then four more boxes, smaller still. Then he laid out the problem to be solved. In most organizations there is one "boss box" and many subordinate ones. "Now, can you make all of them perfectly align?"

When New Yorkers like Joe apologize for speaking quickly, Indians smile. They speak faster -- especially when working for companies like Office Tiger, where a third of all work assignments must be sent back to the United States within an hour. Harish's speech is truly rapid, because before his candidates graduate to permanent status they're expected to master two dozen subjects -- among them securities regulations, Western manners, and Manhattan investment-banking slang. "Verygood, verynice," Harish now complimented one of the classroom's better box-aligners, allowing his "r"s to roll in his enthusiasm, though it violated the conventions of American pronunciation. "And, of course, you can draw the connectors this way, drag-and-drop," he said, demonstrating. "But is it the most efficient way? No. It is too slow. Remember, very often the banker is going to make all sorts of changes. You will want to accommodate him, and quickly."

In his curriculum, Harish wastes no time discussing wage differentials or the asymmetry of the power relationship. Among his students, the colonial resonances are not ignored; they're understood. Upon consideration, the students will argue that, since America is globalization's great hegemon, it's an advantage to work for Americans directly, instead of for Indian-owned companies like Infosys or Wipro, where U.S. work is also done. Tigers can learn from Joe's perfectionism, from his preference for J.C. Penney ties, from his imperviousness to fatigue, and from his wry self-deprecation -- useful, they note, in softening the effect of a command. On the rare occasion that Joe gets angry, his workers sometimes forget to register the cause, engaged as they are in studying the technique. "Joe is our Harvard Business School," Harish says. "We watch his energy and aggression and try to learn."

To explain the yearning that brought them to Office Tiger, Harish and his students invariably use the same word: "exposure." In its Indian sense, "exposure" means not publicity or vulnerability but contact with the world beyond Chennai. After three years at Office Tiger, Harish is still occasionally jarred by dislocation. When Wall Streeters call and say, "Hey, Harry, what's up?" -- as they do, often -- the wrong picture always pops into his mind. What's up is a rotating metal fan on the low Styrofoam ceiling of the room where he sleeps, on the flow, beside his father, mother, brother, and grandmother. The ceiling fan's hum is a baseline to Harish's late-night puzzling about the virtual world he now inhabits.

"I am afraid I was born a quirky and curious boy," Harish says. "Like Harry Potter, you could say, without glasses." Globalization has given him a work life rich in riddles. Why do Americans speak of the "end" of a show called "Friends," when in India it runs in perpetuity, serving as a more effective instructor than anyone at Office Tiger on the subject of the American vernacular? Is it really a compliment to say of someone, "She is dynamite"? The words themselves make Harish shudder. "We'll have to pay through the nose" and "He jumped down my throat" make him wince. More pleasant in its mysteriousness is "couch potato." There was, when he first came to Office Tiger, the expression "just hang loose until tomorrow," but he hasn't heard that one in a while. In the outsourcing business, a sudden surge in clients is called an "escalation" -- a word that warns of seven-day workweeks. Office Tiger has been escalating for nearly two years now, the growth of its Wall Street research operations fuelled by regulatory reforms that came (along with criminal actions and billion-dollar legal settlements) when United States banks were caught manipulating their research in order to boost the profits of favored clients. Companies now send junior-analyst and research jobs to Office Tiger not just because it is cheaper but also because it is nine thousand miles from Wall Street temptations. Harish has been granted full exposure. Now it's home with which he struggles to make contact.

The neighborhood where Harish has lived all his life is named Triplicane, and was once an ancient fishermen's village. It is today so densely populated that some travel guides mistake it for a slum. Harish's house is off the main road, in an alley of jasmine peddlers, Muslim shop workers, and Hindu priests. He rises around 5:30 A.M., mounts his rusted bike, and rides to work, startling the neighborhood parrots and the buffalo that lug the milkmen's wares. His passage doesn't rouse the beggar children, who have learned his recently acquired belief that direct handouts to the poor encourage sloth. At work, he trains his candidates, takes ten minutes or so for lunch in the office pantry, and trains some more. At seven-thirty in the evening, when it's 9 A.M. in New York, he confers with the American banking clients for whom he tailors his training, to insure that he is emphasizing the right skills. And then he turns to a slew of computer-programming challenges that may show management his greater gifts. He often goes home after midnight.

On his concrete threshold in Triplicane, as on others in the neighborhood, is an intricate chalk design known as a kolam. His grandmother, who is seventy-nine, draws it there each morning, in the Hindu hope of keeping catastrophe safely out in the streets. At night, from her mat, she listens for her grandson, sometimes cupping a hand around an elaborately bejeweled ear. The ear adornment was the custom in the village where she was born, a place where the tigers were real and said to devour boys in one go, not bit by bit each workday. She is the first at the door when her grandson rings the bell. He leaves his new square-toed lace-ups at the threshold, swallows a few spoonfuls of rice to silence protests about his declining weight, and joins his extended family on the floor. It is then that his grandmother, if not Harish, can sleep.

"Harish? There are a hundred here like him," the human-resources goddess once observed in passing. To Harish, that's no slight, it's heaven. The office is crammed with smart young people who speak freely and are as open to ideas as he is. It is what he imagines an American college dorm might be like, and in it he has shed the shyness of childhood. Though the money he earns is welcome, he is sometimes at a loss as to how to spend it. "For instance, when I wanted a computer for my parents' home it was simpler to gather discarded parts and make it myself," he said. Since becoming a Tiger, he has made a single significant outlay: to help his parents retire. Every month now, he hands them his paycheck, and when he needs another button-down shirt he has to ask them. Usually, they say yes.

In Hindu families, to acknowledge the gifts of a child too early is to put him at risk -- to provoke the evil eye. So Harish's father put away an accidental tape recording he had made of his firstborn and did not listen to it for years. Harish's parents had been trying to record Hindu devotional songs from the All India Radio station when their son, eleven months old, grew incensed at their inattention. He began to shriek, and in their exasperation at the now-botched recording the parents didn't immediately recognize the content of the baby's cries. In Tamil, he was saying, "I want my ABCs."

As smart as the child might have been, they worried how he would intersect with the world. The family was of the education-revering Brahmin caste, but the parents were too poor for the mother to fulfill her expected role of staying home and tutoring Harish and his younger brother and sister. She worked instead as a clerk in a government office, her intelligence never rewarded. Her husband worked across town, in another government office, and Harish grew up in his own imagination -- a world of Isaac Asimov and astronauts and the ships that he could see dropping anchor in the Bay of Bengal, if he chose a certain seat by a certain window in his schoolroom and trained his peripheral vision just so.

In that schoolroom, he was a failure, flunking math, science, and geography year after year. In sports, he was fast but too small. His solace was "The Harish Book of Records and News": a brown-paper chapbook in which he drew intricate sketches of Gandhi and pasted newspaper clippings. Like other boys, he was drawn to cricket stars and advertisements for films like "Godzilla Fights King Monster." He also collected reports of improbable talent. There was the Delhi boy who set a record by belching ninety-one times in a single minute, and a legless man who swam from Italy to Sicily, and a Chinese dentist who popped his patients' teeth out by pressing his fingers on their necks. Harish longed to find his own unconventional ability, because by the time he reached the age of twelve his teachers had concluded that higher education was not in his future.

His parents, anguished at their own child-rearing deficiencies, couldn't summon the anger to beat him for his academic failure. So he exacted his own punishment. He ran to the Bay of Bengal marina, where he regularly played cricket with the boys he called his "batch." Sitting apart on the sand, he made a stark accounting. Having squandered advantages that his parents had sacrificed to give him, he would try to accept his mediocrity with grace. At sixteen, he left school. After a stint as a magician for children's parties -- "Of course, there was no magic to my mind reading," he said, "just the tricks of psychology and logic" -- he enrolled in a computer-training course.

A society with far more bright aspirants than promising jobs inevitably becomes an over-credentialled one. The institutions from which the young amass certificates and ribbons are sometimes rigorous, sometimes fraudulent, but all have rousing names. Harish's school was called, simply, Brilliant. There were programming languages to learn and independent explorations to launch, and, when his curiosities took him beyond the lesson plan, his new teachers did not object. Some days, there were no teachers at all. On one such morning, Harish rose to help his classmates get through an exercise in accounting. An administrator happened by, registered a smart, coherent presence at the head of the classroom, and hired the boy, age seventeen, as faculty. "My colleagues were much older and more learned than I, but it was such a rich time, sitting there like a pet, being fed what they knew," Harish said. In turn, he enriched seven years' worth of subsequent Brilliant scholars. Now, after insuring that no other Tiger will see him being "over-prideful," he will tap for a second on his keyboard and bring up an American Web site that lists the holders of Microsoft Office Master Instructor certification. The site reports that the United States has seven hundred master instructors, Yugoslavia has five, and Oman and Botswana three each. India has just one: Harish.

In the classrooms of his childhood, he had tried to imagine what it would feel like to be on one of the ships moving out of the bay. When a colleague at Brilliant made the leap to Office Tiger and encouraged Harish to come, too, he saw himself as finally aboard. For other Tigers, there were other metaphors, but the sense of movement after decades of socioeconomic stasis was the same. Harish's friend Vidhya, who is twenty-five, heady with her rise from reception to sell-salaried senior management, bought her parents not just freedom from their jobs but a house -- a gesture so expansive that her parents chose to overlook her new stilettos. Other parents cringed to hear the children they had raised on Gandhian notions of national self-sufficiency faking American accents into their cell phones. But most accepted the air-conditioning units nonetheless, and few could help feeling pleasure. Those parents had had dreams of ships themselves.

Harish, usually lighthearted, was sobered by the fact that the hopes of some trainees would be thwarted in his classroom. The ultimate goal of his teaching was something that Joe and Randy called "fool-proofing." In a company that offered judgment-dependent services, clients needed to believe that those judgments were routine, culturally uninflected, idiosyncrasy-free -- that ten people confronted with the same data set would rank ten different utility companies the same way. As adroit as Harish was at the front of the classroom, it was after class that he excelled. That's when he studied data from intricate programs he'd invented that analyzed keyboard strokes in training and alerted him to students falling behind. These tools were an extension of his peripheral vision -- a means of discerning the person sitting in the corner, miserably lost. Alone with his data, he was excited to find consistent error: those who made the same category of mistake repeatedly were the ones he knew how to help. But wild variations in performance depressed him. "The data analysis is convincing on this point," he said. Erratic, unfocussed students, the ones like him in his re-computing days, were those who would not make the cut.

When Harish tried to explain his inventions, he made them sound modest, self-therapeutic -- fiddlings of a restless wit. There was something else at work too, something that resisted both old-fashioned Hindu acceptance and his new peers' enthusiasm for meritocracy, with its bright distinctions between those who are capable and those who are not. Improbability was, after all, his stock in trade. If he wrote the right programs, taught his classes in the clearest and most effective way, he wondered, why shouldn't all his batch win?

On a sweltering March evening, the glass doors of the inaptly named Breeze Hotel grew opaque with the smudge-prints of noses. One by one, impoverished locals were risking the hard swats of doormen to catch a few seconds of the final game of a historic Indian-Pakistan cricket match, which was being broadcast onto a vast fabric screen in the lobby. Not long before, at the Indian government's behest, tailors had stitched together four hundred square metres of green-and-black cloth, in order to cloak the Taj Mahal, up north, in case of bombing raids. Now a public fatigued by perpetual nuclear threat was investing in the promise of sports. The real unifying mechanism, however, appeared to be the logos of Pepsi and Samsung, plastered on every available swag, signpost, and cap. On the pumped chest of Indian and Pakistani batsman, country identification came second to corporate branding.

This ranking of company over country suited many of the Chennai élite who had assembled that night in the Breeze Hotel's upstairs banquet room. The city's Rotary Club was honoring an entrepreneur named Ranjini Manian, whose firm, Global Adjustments, had settled the families of thousands of multinational executives into the city. Just as Nostradamus had predicted the toppling of the World Trade Center, the Rotary governor said, he had prophesied that India would be a superpower. He gleefully reeled off the names of Global Adjustment's prominent clients, but then his mood darkened slightly. Hollywood -- "a multibillion-dollar industry, you know" -- was not on the list. Reach out to American film moguls, he urged Ranjini and the other attendees. "Tell them that they can film in India for ten per cent of what they're currently spending."

The Rotary governor's interest was not wholly public-minded. His day job was in the film industry. For decades, many of Tamil Nadu's leading citizens have been movie stars. The state's highest office, chief minister, has been held in turn by an action hero, the action hero's widow, and now his mistress, individuals with that electoral essential -- name recognition. The mistress, a clever, voluptuous ingénue named Jayalalithaa, turned to politics two decades ago, when her measurements began to exceed the requirements of feature films. As Chief Minister, she had backed new businesses like Office Tiger, and had become the subject of corruption investigations so bitter and complex that few citizens retained the stamina to follow them.

Easier to absorb were the vivid, twice-life-size paintings of her agreeable face which virtually coated the city. The fact that most were thickly streaked with the residue of urine streams was not a political expression but, rather, a reflection of the fact that, multinationals or no, forty per cent of Chennaians live in slum dwellings, where latrines are few. In Chennai, such deprivations provoked only intermittent political concern. Although national and regional elections were just two months away, the biggest Jayalalithaa sign -- a monumental bill-board looking down from the highway -- promoted not jobs or political programs but "Jaya TV": a twenty-four-hour-channel that plays, among other entertainments, the romantic-comedy hits of the Chief Minister's svelter days. Jaya TV does not cover such irony-rich events as the one last fall when she called for the arrest of five journalists from one of the country's most respected newspapers, after they editorialized about her capricious use of power.

It is a civic mystery -- albeit one that few people are laboring to solve -- why the swelling number of businesses has failed to correspondingly improve Chennai's municipal finances and access to health care and education. The same was true of Bangalore until a few years ago, when Ramesh Ramanathan, one of Citibank North America's most successful derivatives traders, quit, went home to India, and dedicated himself to empowering Bangalore slum dwellers. He promptly discovered that city bureaucrats had no accounting system in place, and that tax money was disappearing; he set to educating the government himself. But Chennai had yet to produce a civic saint. It baffled Tigers to learn that Joe and Randy hoped eventually to enter Republican politics, as Michael Bloomberg had done -- after making so much money that he was, theoretically, beholden to no one. The meritocrats, who believed that their own hard work was extricating India from a Third World past, were glad to leave public policy to erstwhile movie stars -- a detachment that in turn increased political inefficiency and histrionics. Government would do best, Tigers liked to say, by getting out of the way. At times, this seemed already the case. Though Tamil Nadu had a devastating HIV-infection caseload and nearly a hundred thousand children died annually of preventable diseases, the healthcare topic of greater local interest was the progress of a Chennai-based hospital chain named Apollo. Apollo was aggressively recruiting ailing Westerners who were willing to outsource their hip replacements or chemotherapy. Thanks in part to reasonably priced postsurgical sightseeing tours, the chain's hospitals were now treating twenty thousand foreign patients a year. Meanwhile, as Chennai's population surged on the prospect of good new jobs, rents in Triplicane and other middle-class neighborhoods doubled. Electricity prices jumped, too. But by far the greatest problem was the fact that although residents now had Cosmopolitans and Red Bull, they had no water.

In front of the main local reservoir, there is a sign in Tamil that reads "No bathers and washers," and this spring there were none. Instead, there were men, women, dogs, and Brahma cows walking across the reservoir's bed, which had become an inter-village shortcut, and upon which wildflowers bloomed. Before Chennai's hot season had even begun, water reserves were lower than they'd been in fifty years. Harish's home, like most others, had little or no running water. Inoperative water pumps outside houses and apartments were covered with dust, and were attended by dry troughs for rainwater harvesting -- a conservation technique mandated by the government three years ago, just as the drought began. Residents spent hours queuing for emergency water rations that tankers brought in from the hinterlands. In Triplicane pawnshops, fathers sold pieces of their daughters' dowries to buy bottled water to give those daughters a drink and a wash. In nearby Poonamallee, where a century-old pond evaporated, hundreds of homeless turtles wandered onto a thoroughfare, where their search for an alternative water source ended badly.

The gods' will, residents said of the drought. But to follow the water tankers out of the city in their search for a place to refill was to glimpse a human factor, too. In Chennai, as in most of India, groundwater is not a public good; it's a private, barely regulated commodity. Thus, for decades, corporations and individuals have bored deep into fossil water, which is not replenishable -- a pell-mell water mining that has left what remains as brackish as the sea. Some could afford to drill deeper than others. Just past a village where the price of watermelon had tripled and sheep had died of dehydration, there emerged the shining signage of two soft-drink bottling plants -- Pepsi, first, then the bigger, glossier Coca-Cola, which sits on the greenest plot for miles around.

There is a Tamil proverb, "When someone suffers, offer water first." Villagers say it with irony now. As the water tankers rattled farther and farther into the hills in search of unspoiled lakes, other trucks were rumbling back toward parched Chennai. Their flatbeds were stacked high with yellow-green bottles of Sprite, shimmering in the midday sun.

The beach where Harish wandered one Saturday night contained roughly the same number of kite sellers and beggar children as it had when he was a twelve-year-old failure, but neon signs promoting bank loans and washing machines had altered the quality of the light. The quality of the air, too, was appreciably different, owing to a traffic jam fifty yards away. Harish would have mourned this transformation more if he hadn't been rethinking the concept of place. Lately, he considered community less a function of roads and roofs and teashops than of imagination. Even the solid presence of his grandmother could dematerialize at the late-night ring of his cell phone, the urgent summons of American clients. And while his parents rolled their eyes at the constant needs of the world beyond Chennai, Harish saw the calls as tidings of cultural integration, more niches for curious boys.

He had just seen the film "The Lord of the Rings," which had prompted him to reflect on Asimov and the rest of his science-fiction and fantasy canon. "Now I can hardly think of those books as fiction anymore," he said. "So many new things have been happening, and what just last year seemed impossible is now not. What I think instead is how lucky I am to have been born into this strange, right time. In these last years, we've found that New York and Chennai can do the same things -- that we almost are the same thing. Already, we are half of the time in New York, just our bodies are left behind." In such hybrid lives, he knew, some parts of one's culture disappear. But among the vanished elements might be caste discrimination and religious bigotry-things Harish longed to see go. "So much of globalization is, I think, mischaracterized and misunderstood. It is because of this trend that there will come a day when there are no boundaries, no castes or divides between Muslims and Hindus or Christians -- a day when, indeed, there will be no nations at all? Indian time? New York time? They are passing phenomena, in my opinion. Soon we will all share one time zone -- or, really, there will be no time at all."

There was already, in his life, no time. He had been working like mad for his American clients. There was a programming job that outside contractors had said they'd need three months to complete. Harish did it on his own in sixty hours. "It was just intuitive, a three-day stunt," he said, modestly. "I have no big theories, but some problems I can solve from the bottom up." Such efficiency-minded innovation was a Tiger trademark, and helped explain why, over five years, only a single American company had, after a trial run at Office Tiger, opted out. (The exception was a New York firm that, battered by the events of September 11th, decided not to traumatize workers further by sending their jobs offshore.)

The constant expansion required new macros, databases, quality-control systems, and information systems -- so many inventions, so urgently needed, that Harish didn't always consider their implications. For instance, the system he'd created to help candidates see and correct their data-entry errors had now mutated into a tool that helped executives identify and remove imperfect "permanent" workers. But, at the end of long days of inventing and foolproofing and universalizing the judgments of others, Harish preferred to dwell on his own recent performance evaluation, which described his contribution as "phenomenal."

"Whatever I accomplish, I forget, because I am thinking about the next thing," Harish said. So he focused not on his employers' praise -- "a source of inspiration," "role model," "strong intellectual curiosity," "loyal to O.T." -- but on future possibilities. If he worked to improve his communication skills and written English, he would be "groomed to handle supervisory activities." This faith in his future as an employee was particularly welcome, as he was feeling a bit inadequate at home.

Southern India is a place of euphemism, and so the contagious cultural disease infecting firms that do American business is known simply as "susceptibility." Susceptibility explained why Harish's colleague Mike wouldn't even turn around now if you called him Mohan, the name his parents gave him. It explained why the foreheads on which women wore caste markers of sandalwood paste were now being inoculated against worry lines by Botox. Harish had stood out, among his colleagues, for his genial resistance to some of the American values that were pouring into ears and e-mail in-boxes. Though he celebrated the notion of a boundaryless world, he noticed the inflationary prices in the Triplicane bazaars and the loss of protections for clerical workers, like his mother. He rejected the late-model cell phones his colleagues coveted, and, on the Office Tiger intranet, he began to intersperse the mix of Wall Street news bulletins with the verses of an ancient Tamil poet, Tiruvalluvar. He wanted to remind his Britney-emulating, whiskey-drinking colleagues of their native culture of civility and humility.

"I worry that nowadays anything near us seems unimportant, while anything we can't see becomes larger than life," he said. "We don't see relevance in our great poet, our mother tongue. It is not the tongue of work and money. But hidden inside these simple verses are great meaning and complication -- concentrated understanding of how to live."

There was, however, one verse of the Tamil poet he now skimmed through quickly. To read it would be to hear not his own voice but his mother's:

With a good wife, what is lacking?
Lacking that wife, what is good?

Most of Chennai's young professionals, modern as they are becoming in myriad material ways, still honor a great cultural expectation: to marry by arrangement of their parents. Those parents' methods of identifying future partners have, inevitably, evolved: now many use the Web site tamilmatrimony.com to seek brides and grooms on their children's behalf. Prospective mates are often expected to have compatible castes and horoscopes, "guileless, clean habits," and "glasses -- if at all -- with negligible refractive errors." But, increasingly, parents ask as well for "career-oriented, internationally minded M.B.A.s." Harish was, from guilelessness to business prospects to good eyesight, a more brilliant catch than his parents had once anticipated. They were eager to marry him, and he had wanted to be married -- until the moment was upon him, and he balked.

His grandmother sought solace at the temple, next door; his mother and father were more hurt than they wanted to show. "It was just our wish and will," his mother said, and left it there. She and her husband were still in love, thirty-two years after the match their parents had made. Did Harish doubt their ability to choose well? He seemed to cherish his family, but he had not seen his younger, married sister in more than a year, and she lived right in Chennai. Perhaps his heart had been freelancing? Harish almost wished that were the case. The truth was, he wanted to be left alone to work.

He had somehow thought that holding the line against Americanization would make it simpler to submit to his Indian duty. But, whether or not he bought the Dockers or the Florsheims sold in the shopping mall next to the office, it seemed that his work was changing him more than he had realized. "It's a cat's cradle," he said unhappily. "I don't want to force myself into differing from my parents. I have told them I do not need a love marriage, but I'm ready. There are so many expectations -- for the marriage, first, and then, a year later, for the child -- and my goals for now are different..." He trailed off. "What to do? So much of one's life is an accident."

Harish might have taken comfort from knowing that his venerated boss felt similar pressure. Back in Staten Island, Joe's mother lamented the unmarried state of her handsome, funny, successful son -- thirty-three already and decamped in a hotel in a far-flung city that likely contained not one unmarried Jewish woman. If he lived in New York, Joe's mother suggested, Emma Bloomberg, the Mayor's daughter, would be an agreeable choice.

Great, sure, Joe said -- just not yet. He envied Randy his wife, a ballet dancer who recently finished Cornell medical school with honors. Randy, who is tall and brooding, sensibly fell in love with her at Princeton, before the company had become a preoccupation. They had been married for six years, and she was by now accustomed to his asceticism; their apartment in Jersey City suited her fine, and her schedule was as brutal as his.

Joe couldn't say with certainty the last time he'd been on a date, but it didn't trouble him as much as his mother wished it would. He found more than compensatory pleasure in building the business. After five years of intellectual challenge and cultural escapade, Randy and Joe's company had become first respectable, then profitable; someday soon it might make them quite rich.

Joe took pride in how few employees left the company even when presented with more lucrative offers. A whiteboard in the office listed points for Tiger executives to emphasize when recruiting: "Hi-end / Hi-tech -- Office FAMILY." Workers like Harish keenly believed in the latter. It distressed them to imagine professional lives in which they weren't Tigers. Joe and Randy, though, saw Office Tiger, Chennai, as a particularly meaningful episode of their ever-evolving lives. They were contemplating acquisitions now, maybe a merger later, and then wealthy-enough-not-to-be-beholden political careers.

Ambitious plans, Joe knew, "and I worry that talking about them makes me sound like a jerk. But Randy and I were raised on the premise that, if you work hard for something, most of the time you will get it. You know, that's the single greatest thing about America, and, if that's what Americanization of the world means, I'm all for it. Neither Randy nor I was born rich; Randy's mother raised him by herself. But when we decided we wanted to build something close to a perfect meritocracy, where workers got recognized for what they did, not for whom they knew or how much money they were born with, we committed ourselves totally, and it happened -- it's not perfect, but it's real, and our workers' lives have been changed for the better."

One Saturday night, after ten, he ran from a working dinner to Chennai's Sheraton hotel to say goodbye to visitors from an American publishing firm that had increased its Office Tiger contract more than tenfold over a three-year period. As a matter of frugality, Joe does not own a car, relying instead on the shabby auto-rickshaws that line the streets. "How much to the Sheraton?" he called to one of the waiting drivers. Twenty rupees, the driver responded -- forty-three American cents.

Too much, Joe said, moving on.

"But you can afford it, boss," the driver protested bitterly to Joe's receding back. Such comments gave Joe no pause. Equating what a person can afford to what he is willing to pay -- a classic starter capitalist's mistake.

As the heat rose and astrological predictions of late-March rain turned out to be wrong, the southern outskirts of the city began to look like the inside of a snow globe. Under clouds of white dust, outcaste laborers were hectically crushing stone to supply the foundations of the new Chennai. Infosys, having overgrown its current campus, was expanding it to a hundred and twenty-nine acres; a Teaneck, New Jersey, firm was erecting its second "techno-complex." To support these and other corporate enclaves, a public-works effort was widening roads and building new ones -- meticulously landscaped, the government promised on one of its corporation-luring Web sites, "and cattle-free."

The road improvements had begun a strange gavotte. Poor families were setting up households in sections of drainage pipe that were about to be laid beneath the road. City authorities, conscious of the vistas presented to business travelers, regularly expelled them, after which the pipe dwellers returned, only to be dispatched another day. The stone crushers, inside their white-dust world, were too busy to discern, day to day, who in this dance was actually leading. On hundred-and-ten-degree days, in more than forty makeshift camps, they used pickaxes to break up huge rocks that had been delivered from nearby quarries. They wore no masks, just rags on top of their heads to soften the freight of the stone chunks they ferried to pulverizing machines. When they had crushed their daily quota, they headed home, to dust-coated thatched barracks a few steps from the machinery.

The silica by-product of the stone crushers' livelihood had long ago eradicated most plant life in the vicinity, and made it hard to see, on some days, more than a few yards in front of one's face. Occasionally, though, clouds of siliciferous dust resolved themselves into barefoot children, laboring alongside their parents. At least five people, a five-year-old boy among them, had recently been killed in accidents at the stone-crushing camps. Officially, the stone crushers' children are in school. "No labor for them," one resident explained, "at least until they are seven."

Tamil Nadu was among the first of India's states to attempt to close its opportunity gap by setting aside government jobs for lower castes. After this opportunity was bestowed upon the poor, however, the élites began to realize that government work wasn't the work they really wanted. Today, at private corporations like Office Tiger, the official stance on caste is "Don't ask, don't tell." This scruple excuses executives from acknowledging what impolite inquiry makes clear: Brahmin and other upper castes dominate the supervisory class, while untouchables still clean toilets. They're lucky to have jobs at all.

More than 5.6 million people in Harish's generation alone are unemployed in Tamil Nadu, a depressing answer to the question that Randy and Joe are occasionally asked by New York executives. After so much outsourcing, are there still Indians to be hired? Given the pervasiveness of need, the state literacy rate of seventy-four per cent is impressive, and indicative of the breadth of faith in education. For the poor, however, such faith is unlikely to be rewarded in the new meritocracy.

In one stone-crusher camp, silica settled into the tea and home-brewed liquor that laborers sipped one day after work. They coughed up what they could while contemplating the news that played on a black-and-white television inside one of the huts. The volume knob had been turned high, because the stone-crushing trade is, literally, deafening. The workers learned that Infosys was about to have its first billion-dollar year. They wanted their children to get into the "software trades," too. But English is now, as in colonial times, the sine qua non of Indian opportunity, and neither the stone crushers nor their children can speak it. The government-run schools that serve the camps still emphasize Tamil and require the purchase of shoes, textbooks, and supplies that few can afford. Meanwhile, tuition at private schools that stress English has spiraled, in response to parental demand. And so the stone-crusher children work, while there is work to be had.

Academics who study the future of world labor see, in the middle distance, a divide so stark that the term "division of labor" will no longer apply. Poorer societies will work, they say, while the richer ones will invest and consume. But the stone crushers can sense a third category fast emerging. At a camp a few yards from this one, there has recently appeared a highly automated stone-crushing apparatus. Even illiterate laborers can grasp the economic function: more capital for technology means, at least in the short run, less capital of the human kind. One benefit of the dust was that, except on the stillest days, they did not have to look upon the engine of their obsolescence.

In April came the Hindu New Year and the final campaigns before the national and local elections, which pro-business candidates were expected to dominate on the strength of an 8.1-per-cent increase in G.D.P. In Harish's neighborhood, Triplicane, a crucial issue was joblessness -- a matter that gained urgency when Chief Minister Jayalalithaa fired a hundred and seventy thousand government workers who had gone on strike. In the villages and the countryside, people organized behind the candidates whom they felt best understood the ruinous economic and human implications of the drought. In downtown office buildings, though, the preoccupation remained American work. Joe had just leased a large building, whose sleek reception area would be redone in Princeton colors -- a fitting complement to Office Tiger's new Manhattan office, which had green glass, Italian lighting, and a view of the New York Public Library's marble lions. Joe was traveling now--meetings in London, New York, Chicago, and San Francisco that would soon bring more work to Chennai. In his absence, Sudha, in human resources, felt freer to fret. Though Joe seemed only sharper after weeks of missed dinners and nights with three hours of sleep, some of his subordinates weren't. But the outdoor cafés and game rooms that other companies offered didn't comport with what Joe called his "keep your head down and keep working" style.

"Maybe we can talk him into yoga classes during the lunch break," Sudha said one Friday evening, at the end of an eighty-hour week. A colleague mentioned Ayurvedic neck massage. If masseuses came around to workers' cubicles, the two concurred, productivity would be only briefly impeded.

A little later, in the dark bar of the nearby Taj Hotel, Tigers finishing their own workweek evaluated the efficacy of other treatments. Some had been experimenting with Prozac -- not for depression but because it seemed to help them concentrate despite sleep deprivation. Red Bull was agreed to be another reliable, short-term fix, while opinions differed on whether cigarettes packed a stimulative wallop. "But even if they do give you a little rush," one worker cautioned, "Joe's going to smell them on you, and then you're in for the lecture of your life." This discussion ceased when two Filipina singers in shiny plastic boots, fringed halters, and spandex miniskirts climbed onto the stage to suggest another alertness enhancer now available in Chennai.

"When your day is done and you wanna run -- co-caine." The singers' voices were high, employing differing and indefinable keys, but they were nothing that whiskey couldn't mellow. Soon the Tigers were joined in the bar by jet-lagged Western and South African businessmen, sent by their companies to investigate the Indian outsourcing landscape. On a sofa lay an abandoned newsweekly whose cover story described the lack of youth interest in the elections, which were now only a month away. "It is ALARMING that the biggest segment of the Indian electorate has UTTER CONTEMPT for the political establishment," the article said. "It's time the ‘it's my life' generation stepped out and said ‘it's my country' and cast a vote!" Two sunburned American businessmen tossed the magazine aside and sat down. "He's to the right of Attila the Hun, so I hired him," one said to the other, laughing, but soon they turned silent, too, as the waiter delivered a third round of Johnny Walker Black.

The Filipina singers, Sheri-lyn and Rhea, had eight days left on their contract at the lounge. Between sets, they cornered a manager to ask for an extension. "Please, boss. Boss, our visas expire June 1st," one of them begged. "This is home for us now, and for my sister, too. I don't even know where home is, if not here." But Boss was learning wage arbitrage, too. He had in mind a cheaper act, whose performers promised less offstage whining. Sheri-lyn and Rhea eventually returned to the stage and the Tina Turner cover next on their list -- "You're simply the best, better than all the rest" -- but their shimmies did not fully recover.

Office Tiger had been scouting for new talent, too -- forum-shopping, as it's called in the offshore trade. In addition to his Western travels, Joe had been to the Philippines and Sri Lanka, which was offering multinationals tax holidays of four years, as well as cheap labor and streets that a drought had not filled with water queues and dying sheep. This summer, an Office Tiger facility will open in Colombo. Manila next, Joe said, though Randy had his eye on Eastern Europe. Meanwhile, beseeching presentations from the government of Calcutta--a government of Marxists who were undoing labor protections and actively discouraging strikes -- went unrequited. This spring, the rupee reached its highest level in years against the dollar. Wages were inching up across India, and in Chennai more than anywhere else.

If outsourcing was "inexorable," as Joe argued, it wasn't quite a deus ex machina. It was driven by human beings who wanted to capitalize on global economic opportunities, and made choices to that end. Joe and Randy loved Harish and their other Tigers, perhaps even as much as the Tigers loved them. Still, as they argued to their clients on Wall Street, judgments uninflected by personal alliances are the most reliable kind. The Tigers often wondered why, after five years, Joe still lived in a hotel. But he, better than they, understood that conceptual attachments are necessarily fungible ones -- able, when provoked, to move elsewhere.

In May, India's incumbent political class was thrown out of national and local office by citizens who had been excluded from globalization's spoils. In Tamil Nadu, in a demonstration of unprecedented consensus, voters delivered all forty legislative seats to Chief Minister Jayalalithaa's opposition, the "pro-people" party. Although election day was an Indian national holiday, many offshoring professionals, including Tigers, worked straight through it, needed, as they were, in the West. Within the week, the Indian stock market crashed -- the biggest one-day drop in the institution's hundred-and-twenty-nine-year history. Like most of the country's meritocrats, Harish was stunned. "Perhaps we cannot have leadership for a modern world until our country has fewer millions beneath the poverty line," he wondered on the evening that the results began to come in.

Joe and Randy, who had no money in the Indian stock market, emerged better off from the political turmoil than their deeply invested Indian competitors. Moreover, Randy had just that week negotiated twenty-five million dollars in financing, after which the firm acquired a British outsourcing rival. Joe and Randy will soon be operating in three more countries. Joe explained, "You've got to diversify your geopolitical risk."

Competition is good, Harish told himself, and change too, whether or not it feels so at first. He tried to concentrate on a new class of trainees -- men and women who were just beginning to learn the meaning of "What's up?" and other American puzzles, and all of whom he wanted to see win. It was far too early for them to learn that their yearning word, "exposure," had another, disquieting definition.

He was tired and had developed a wracking cough -- Chennai's polluted air, he said, though family members gently suggested a work schedule antithetical to human health. "I know, it is unlike me," he said on the Friday of election week. "But I am in need of a break." He left his cubicle at eight instead of midnight, waiting patiently in a queue for his backpack to be searched and reassurances made to American businesses that, populist politics notwithstanding, the corporate omertà was intact.

Riding his bike home, he could smell the sea but did not stop. Fewer Chennaians were coming to the beach these days. Many of those with televisions were at home watching soap operas, like "The Bold and the Beautiful." Some without televisions had recently been deprived of the shore as well, the government having increased parking fees from five rupees to fifty. The beggar children were left with few prospects to importune. Amusement-park workers turned the handcranks of empty Ferris wheels as much out of habit as of hope.

On a previous evening's visit, Harish had turned away from the calls of venders and children to stare into the expanse of the bay. It was the most beautiful time of the evening -- the light faint enough to obscure the empty Coke cans and cigarette butts yet sufficient, still, to cast a shine on the sea. "The perfect time and place for thinking about one's life and future, the moment when a person feels free," he had said. But, by May, free thinking about the future seemed less appealing than a spell of thinking nothing at all. This was the burden of trained peripheral vision: sometimes a man noticed what he might have been happier to miss. There were ships that anchored in the bay only briefly, and other ships that sailed right through.

The Churn

Cecille Isidro — Mon, 29 Mar 2004 00:00:00 -0500

Last August, in a corner of South Texas where local newspapers still call businesses "corporate citizens," an emergency vehicle paid a visit to a highly fortified underwear mill. The hundred-and-fifty-three-year-old Fruit of the Loom company, owned by Warren Buffett's Omaha-based Berkshire Hathaway, had just announced that its Cameron County factory would close by the end of the year. Much of its production would be shifted to Honduras. The news brought the county government's mass-layoff response squad to the scene.

The first task of the Rapid Response Unit (actually, one spiky-haired twenty-six-year-old named Mario Maldonado) was to buffer the shock of the eight hundred workers who, only weeks before, had been sure that their jobs were safe. The second task was tougher: to convince those workers, in the face of double-digit unemployment and thirty-three-per-cent poverty rates, that this economic equivalent of an axe blow was in fact a main chance.

Rapid-Response Mario, a local himself, had grown deft at drawing out this line of reasoning. The factories that had closed here in the past four years evoked an informal history of middle-class sartorial choice: Levi's and Wrangler jeans; Carter baby clothes; Converse sneakers; Dickies uniforms; Vanity Fair lingerie; North Face parkas; self-belted Haggar slacks. Mario exudes solidity, from his broad chest to his black, unflinching eyes, and though he suspected that many of the workers would never again have jobs as good as the ones they were losing, sentimentality was not part of his commission. He was here to help workers figure out what happens next.

Fruit of the Loom had chosen a few veteran laborers to go, briefly, to Honduras to train the cheaper workers who would replace them. Some of the others would board the meat- and poultry-industry buses that idled outside the county employment office, luring those sufficiently desperate to take short-term slaughterhouse jobs in the Ozarks. But, as Fruit of the Loom's cutting machines and bleaching vats were cranked up on pallet jacks, loaded onto flatbeds, and hauled to the Port of Brownsville, many of the company's workers pocketed a month's severance and filed into Mario's van. They applied for unemployment assistance equal to roughly half their former wages, took aptitude tests, and studied the twenty training brochures that were taped to the van's walls. And thus they joined the Rio Grande Valley's eight thousand other former inseam, watch-pocket, and waistband experts in what economists call capitalism's necessary churn.

Mario knew a little about revising life expectations, having taken this job when he could no longer afford tuition at the University of Texas. He and his wife had just had their first child, a daughter. If he occasionally felt his resourcefulness flag as he helped middle-aged men with six children type up resumes that said, "Willing to take entry level," he consoled himself with the thought that Fruit of the Loom, a factory nearly the size of Madison Square Garden and one of the county's largest private employers, might be globalization's final local casualty. "Honestly," he said, "there's not much left to close."

Cameron County, which has a population of three hundred and thirty-five thousand, sits at the southernmost tip of Texas and consists of a smattering of small towns and two cities, Harlingen and Brownsville. The shuttered factories bear polite signs on their doors: "At this time we are not accepting applications." Its laid-off workers still speak of their former employers with affection -- their loyalty reiterated on the back pockets of their jeans, the neckbands of their T-shirts, and in the form of pet Chihuahuas named Chuck Taylor and 501. But Cameron County's textile workers are now, as units of labor, generic. After forty-one straight months of job loss in the American manufacturing sector, they are a class of obsolescents in need of repurposing.

Lupita Sanchez is a veteran member of the obsolescent class. Her mother stole across the Rio Grande when she was nine months pregnant, in order to bear a daughter with American citizenship and improved odds of a tolerable life. In due course, Lupita, who is now thirty-three, fulfilled this maternal ambition. Raised on both sides of the border, she grew up to be a decently compensated seamstress, and then a quality-control supervisor, at a Brownsville mill that made Mickey Mouse and Little Mermaid T-shirts for Disney. The stability of this work had given Lupita's daughter Silvia, now thirteen, a sense that she belonged to the American middle class. On the summer day that the Fruit of the Loom announcement marked the end of the county's textile era, Silvia sat erectly at the dining-room table of her parents' small frame house, a ponytail loose at her neck, trying to master Bach's "Bourree Anglaise" on her secondhand flute (thirty-three dollars a month on an installment plan). Silvia seemed unaware that the demise of an industry might in some way affect her well-being -- an outlook that her mother wanted to preserve.

Lupita has a round, open face and a purposeful way of walking even when she has nowhere to go. Before her factory closed, in 2001, she and her husband, a pipe fitter's helper named Sergio, had together earned thirty-five thousand dollars a year, plus benefits. That amount, combined with shrewd home economics, was enough to raise their children -- Silvia and her younger siblings, Sandra and Luis Angel -- and treat them to a weekly blowout at Peter Piper Pizza. In August, 2003, the family's income, without benefits, had fallen to thirteen thousand dollars, well below the poverty line of $21,959 for a family of five.

After she lost her job, Lupita had tried to reinvent herself in accordance with market imperatives. First, she earned a G.E.D. and a certificate at the local branch of the University of Texas, as a "Microsoft Office Specialist." When she discovered that this certificate provided her little entree into actual offices, she took out a thirty-five-hundred-dollar loan and trained to be a certified medical assistant -- taking vital signs, scheduling appointments, and drawing blood (a task at which, given her dexterity with a needle, she excelled). Although few people Lupita knew had health insurance anymore, health-care occupations still accounted for nearly half the job vacancies in the county, a statistic manifest in the classified ads that she read every morning before turning to her current occupation -- rolling out tortillas and grilling two hundred fajita lunches to peddle at local construction sites.

She took home thirty dollars a day from this private enterprise, which was just about what she had earned the last time she worked outdoors. Two years after her father's sudden death (when she was seventeen), she left home to do migrant farm labor in Michigan and Indiana. The work had been predictably dismal, but she had embraced the consolations at hand: the clean rivers, and Sergio, who had followed her North from the border. When she was nineteen, she married Sergio; two years later, they had Silvia, and two years after that, a second daughter, Sandra. Lupita was tormented by the thought that her daughters might grow accustomed to life in migrant barracks. Between picking seasons, she returned to Brownsville, put on her best blouse, walked into a local textile mill, and asked if she might learn to sew.

Since the nineteen-sixties, low-slung steel-and-concrete factories had been springing up all over the county's farmlands and chaparral flats, their owners lured by mild weather and cheap labor. To workers, the mills possessed a clear-cut hierarchy. Fruit of the Loom (whose entryway for a time bore a cautionary banner, "Wear the Union Label -- Unemployed") was a better place to work than Vanity Fair or Haggar, but it was not as good as Levi's, the sole union shop, which paid the highest wages. Most of these employment options had come at the expense of millworkers in places like Lowell, Massachusetts, or Henderson, North Carolina; but until recently few South Texans had given much thought to this correlation. In the race for a cut-rate, docile labor force -- the Great Unregulated Place -- Cameron County had, only a decade ago, been in contention. But, as economic boundaries extended far beyond the North American continent, this community no longer rated.

Cameron County is full of geckos, free-tailed bats, twice-fried-food franchises, and audacious contradictions. A replica of the Statue of Liberty is attended not by the "Give me your tired, your poor" inscription but by a notice that the spot is under twenty-four-hour surveillance. Anglo sons of the Alamo wear cowboy hats with guayaberas made in China. The United States' richest diversity of birds shares the sky with the smoke trails of eight hundred thousand smoldering tires from a dump just over the Mexican border. And, while the rhythms of daily life often seem to have two speeds, slow and stop, the county has negotiated American economic history's two greatest transitions -- from farming to manufacturing and, now, from manufacturing to service -- in the space of forty years.

Lupita's neighborhood, an unincorporated scrap of Brownsville called Cameron Park, has been an axis of both transitions. According to the 2000 census, it is the poorest place in America. Its six thousand residents have a per-capita income of forty-one hundred dollars, and its roads have only recently been paved. There are no street lights, and the scents and sounds of roadside corncob venders and feral cats evoke the homeliest of Mexican villages. Still, the lives unfolding here testify not just to economic hardship but to a strain of what used to be called American exceptionalism -- the elasticity of economic class. Once a landing point for indigent, illegal farmworkers, Cameron Park is now populated mainly by working (and voting) second-generation citizens whose emotional investment in their homes and their community is intensified by their itinerant pasts. Secondhand double-wides have been enhanced with pastel paint jobs, oval windows, and bevelled-glass doors. Yards are gaudy with plumbago, the circular driveways enclosed by wrought-iron fences. The local Catholic church is the neighborhood social center, and the middle-school chess team is nationally ranked. But, these days, the forces of social mobility press downward.

Lupita, like many other Cameron County natives, knows the script that outsiders have in mind now when they visit: the ways in which plant closings wrench the heart from a community. But in twenty-first-century America, where even the bleakest corners have absorbed the cultural authority of Sarah Jessica Parker and Bed Bath & Beyond, the mourning is not for a vanished way of life; and the crippled hands endemic among veterans of twenty thousand inseams stanch a good bit of nostalgia. What's mourned is material and specific: the Tommy Hilfiger watches and the college educations that your teen-agers asked for, health insurance, the decent car, the white kitchenette set you coveted for the house whose loss you're now struggling to forestall -- the stuff, immense and absurd, of family stability.

Since the turn of this century, three million American manufacturing jobs have disappeared. Some economists and politicians attribute this loss to global trade deals. Others credit improvements in production efficiency. But, however the responsibility is apportioned, most people agree on one point: the need to retrain displaced workers. Under a popular, expanding federal program called Trade Adjustment Assistance, workers who are judged to have lost their jobs because of foreign-trade policy are eligible for the sort of expensive, generously conceived assistance that has become a rarity since Great Society strategies fell out of fashion. Beneficiaries like Lupita receive up to two years of aggressive training in "demand occupations" -- jobs identified by government and business officials as growth areas -- as well as unemployment compensation and subsidized health care while they learn. It has been estimated that this assistance can cost up to twenty thousand dollars per worker.

The state of Texas, which was disproportionately affected by the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement, has in the succeeding decade become a national model of this market-driven worker redducation. Since 2000, it has received forty-eight million dollars in federal retraining money, not including a $1.6-million "national emergency grant" awarded after Fruit of the Loom announced its closing. With that financial support, closed banks, mills, and military facilities have been reincarnated as centers for the development of what administrators call "the twenty-first-century workforce."

Across the street from Lupita's closed factory, former textile workers study computer maintenance in a shopping mall whose stores have moved away. In one aisle, a red-white-and-blue poster, near a pile of mannequins from an erstwhile J. C. Penney store, reads, "Creating Higher Skill, Higher-Wage Job Opportunities in Your Community: George W. Bush." At a long-shut United States Air Force base, women who were about to graduate from a business-computing course looked one day like a congeries of Whistler's mothers: clad in black plastic hairdresser's capes with white tab collars, they waited tight-lipped for their waist-long hair to be snipped into blunt cuts and bangs. An instructor in high heels told them, "It's like in that show

The Marriage Cure

Cecille Isidro — Mon, 18 Aug 2003 03:00:00 -0400

One July morning last year in Oklahoma City, in a public-housing project named Sooner Haven, twenty-two-year-old Kin Henderson pulled a pair of low-rider jeans over a high-rising gold lamé thong and declared herself ready for church. Her best friend in the project, Corean Brothers, was already in the parking lot, fanning away her hot flashes behind the wheel of a smoke-belching Dodge Shadow. "Car's raggedy, but it'll get us from pillar to post," Corean said when Kim climbed in. At Holy Temple Baptist Church, two miles down the road, the state of Oklahoma was offering the residents of Sooner Haven three days of instruction on how to get and stay married.

Kim marveled that Corean, who is forty-nine, seemed to know what to wear on such occasions. The older woman's lacquered fingernails were the same shade as her lipstick, pants suit, nylons, and pumps, which also happened to be the color of the red clay dust that settled on Sooner Haven every summer. The dust stained the sidewalks and gathered in the interstices of a high iron security perimeter that enclosed the project's hundred and fifty modest houses.

This forbidding fence, and the fact that most of the adults inside it were female, sometimes prompted unkind comparisons with the old maximum-security women's prison five minutes up the road. But Kim and Corean believed that they could escape Sooner Haven, and so were only mildly irked by what one of their neighbors called "our cage." Besides, other low-income areas had fierce borderlines, too. The distance between Sooner Haven and Holy Temple Baptist Church edged the territories of the street gangs Hoover Crip, Grape Street Crip, and Rolling Twenties. Kim's brother had been murdered by a gang, but she couldn't keep track of their ever-mutating names, boundaries, and affiliations. And Corean had refused to learn, even when Hoover Crip members started shooting at one of her five children. It was Corean's contention that you could be in the ghetto and not of it. Ignoring the stunts of heavily armed neighbors kept your mind free for more enriching pursuits, such as the marriage class for which Corean had roused her young friend from bed this morning.

Oklahoma has rarely found itself in the vanguard of antipoverty thinking, but the class to which the two women were heading embodies a vigorous new idea -- something known locally as "the marriage cure." Traditionally, singleness has been viewed as a symptom of poverty. Today, however, a politically heterodox cadre of academics is arguing that singleness -- and particularly, single parenthood -- is one of poverty's primary causes, for which matrimony might be a plausible tonic. For the past few years, the state of Oklahoma has been converting this premise into policy. In an initiative praised by the Bush Administration, which aims to seed marriage-promotion programs nationwide, the state has deputized public-relations firms, community leaders, and preachers (among them the pastor at Holy Temple Baptist Church) to take matrimony's benefits to the people. Last summer, that marriage drive reached Sooner Haven. "Come learn about relationships!" said the recruiter who knocked on the housing project's beat-up doors.

Kim happened to be available for edification, having recently quit a job that she had found depressing: selling home-security systems over the phone. The script she'd had to memorize still banged around her brain. "What? You can't afford twenty-nine ninety-nine a month but can afford to run the risk of being robbed and losing everything you've worked hard for in life? Or, even worse, a family member? You say God will protect you, but maybe my call to you today is God's way of telling you that the world he created does possess an element of danger, and he wants you to be as safe as you can be. It is quite possible that God has a reason for my call to you today."

"Most of the people I called were old and scared already," Kim said, sighing. "I wasn't putting enough effort into my rebuttals."

Many of Kim's contemporaries are single mothers and thus eligible for welfare between jobs. But for Kim, who is unmarried, childless, and on a strict regime of Depo-Provera contraceptive injections, the decision to quit a job before lining up the next one had harsh repercussions. She was hungry, and hoped that marriage class would come with free lunch. In any event, it would give her respite from her unit at Sooner Haven, which, despite her liberal use of paper doilies, ceramic angels, and lavender-scented candles, was no longer a pleasant place to spend a day. The roof leaked, and an overnight storm had flooded her living room and kitchen. Still, food and sanctuary were not the extent of Kim's interest in marriage class. She had recently fallen, as she put it, "heart over heels" in love.

Kim has moist brown eyes, a body that neighborhood males call "ripe" and "aching for my love time," and a bleeding ulcer that an emergency-room doctor ascribes, not implausibly, to stress. It is her habit to think with a fist on her chin, and the puzzle that engrosses her is how to live a life less indigent and criminal than the one in which she was raised. The youngest of seven children, she was the first of her four sisters to forgo having babies as a teenager. She hoped as well to be the first to go to college, and had recently taken a series of tests for a general-equivalency diploma. Although she didn't know anyone from a background like hers who had obtained a college degree, she didn't see why a smart woman couldn't pull it off. For several years, she'd been trying to do the precise opposite of what people around her had done, in the hope of eventually attaining what she termed "a healthy, wealthy, normal-lady life." Marriage, like staying out of jail, struck her as a vital part of normal-lady living.

The man she'd chosen (although he had yet to be informed of his selection) was a tall, soft-spoken construction worker named Derrick, whom she had first spoken to at the International House of Pancakes. He was a graduate of a two-year college and had a one-year-old son "he actually does for." And, unlike her previous boyfriend, he didn't use or sell drugs.

Kim keeps the things that matter to her next to her mattress, in a cardboard box stamped "Fragile -- Eggs." In addition to a handmade card that her father sent from prison on her eighteenth birthday, and a tangle of blond hair extensions that her mother had mailed when Kim turned twenty-two, the box held several poems that Kim had written about the meagerness of what people around her termed love. Many of the men she knew called their women "bitch" when their male friends came to visit, and they hit those women when the male friends went away. After sex, they wanted to leave, pretending not to hear when a girl offered to turn on the hot plate and make breakfast biscuits from scratch. "You know how they wrassle you down and it's wham wham wham, and then when they come they go, 'Say my name!?" she asked. "It's all about their egos, and that's all I ever knew. But the first time I slept with Derrick he asked, 'Is this O.K., does this feel right?' And, after, I just burst out crying. Because when he held me I felt, this is it -- this is something I've been missing my whole life." Holding on to this something was a feat for which her life's experience had provided no strategy, and she hoped that the marriage class to which she was headed might suggest one.

Corean found it moving that, even among city girls like Kim, who had been nourished on rappers named Kingpin Skinny Pimp, Dirty, and Lord-knows-what-all, the word "love" retained the gentle, Barbara Cartland contours of her own Deep South girlhood. But Corean, who had separated from her husband twelve years ago, was not the romantic she had once been; she applauded Kim's optimism but didn't share it.

So why bother with a three-day seminar at a church whose ceiling, after asbestos removal, appeared to consist of the pelts of a thousand plush toys? Corean Brothers, so outwardly composed that her kids call her the Reverend Doctor Mom, was feeling a little wobbly. In the fall, the youngest of her five babies would enter his final year in high school, and while her grown children were regular, affectionate presences in her life, the cause to which she had devoted herself since her divorce no longer seemed to require her full-time vigilance. Corean had two sets of grandchildren, by her eldest son. But he frequently quarreled with the mothers of the babies, and Corean saw her four grandchildren only intermittently. She busied herself with what she called her "private ministry": visiting nursing-home residents and penitentiary inmates; helping Sooner Haven's younger women, Kim among them, with their monthly budgets or workplace disputes. Still, the days now contained enough hours for a reasonable woman to fret about her future.

Lately, besides the symptoms of menopause, a "burning kind of numbness" had been snaking up her arms. Ineligible for Medicaid and unable to afford private insurance, she improvised treatments, just as she'd improvised over the years to keep her children from noticing when a child-support payment didn't come. Her annual income was five thousand dollars, but, except for ten months when she and her husband first separated, she had not received welfare. "The child support was supposed to have covered us, but when it stopped coming I couldn't afford a lawyer," she said. "So I did what you do when you're a girl from the sticks -- you just make do." Amid the four-o'clocks and marigolds in her flower bed, and in defiance of housing-authority rules, she had planted peppers and cantaloupe. She decorated her children's bedrooms with thrift-shop items and roadside salvage. With the castoffs of a woman whose house she cleaned, she sent each child to school sharply dressed.

The standards of parenting at Sooner Haven are not uniformly exacting. One exasperated resident recently named her newborn De Las' One. But it was generally acknowledge in the complex that Corean Brothers had been blessed with mother wit. "I even found great pleasure in hard work," read a passage from Ecclesiastes, which she had underlined and asterisked five times in the disintegrating Living Bible that now accompanied her to Holy Temple church. "The pleasure was, indeed, my only reward for all my labors."

Her husband had remarried six months after the divorce; Corean had had one second date in twelve years. Mornings now, she interrogated the mirror with new ruthlessness, curious about whether Preparation H could, as she'd heard, reduce the puffiness around one's eyes. If five children had altered her face for the worse, they had at least erased the evidence of her malnourished childhood as a Central Florida field hand. "You're ninety pounds with two bricks in your pockets," boys had teased her then. Now she was shaped like a Coke bottle, and Coke-colored, too –red and gold glints in dark-brown skin. Her cheekbones were still high, her eyes were alive with humor.

One unacknowledged consolation of struggling in the inner city is the lack of time one has to indulge romantic discontent. It was letting go of her children, more than losing her husband, that had caused the Reverend Doctor Mom to notice that she was alone.

Many Oklahoma City maps end where the Sooner Haven neighborhood begins. Pizza places won't deliver here, and local strip malls have been abandoned, their display windows given over to leaflets of undercapitalized entrepreneurs ("Nile Princess Home Braidz 4 Less"). The neighborhood feels connected to the world around it mainly on Sunday mornings, when residents who have moved up and out return to its churches to pray. Nonetheless, the community is an apt setting for a test of whether the government can persuade low-income citizens to marry.

Using federal money to raise the marriage rate among the poor -- the House recently approved a three-hundred-million-dollar White House plan to help states experiment towards this goal -- is an effort to complete what the Administration considers the unfinished business of the 1996 federal welfare-reform law. And Oklahoma turns out to be a quintessential post-welfare state. In the past eight years, its public-assistance rolls dropped ninety-one percent -- among the country's most substantial declines -- but widespread work hasn't brought widespread economic security. Median household income remains among the lowest in the country, and out-of-wedlock childbearing rates are among the country's highest. While a considerable amount of social-science data suggest that two-parent families are good for children, marriage promoters also see matrimony as a means of decreasing crime and welfare dependence in neighborhoods like Sooner Haven. In a recent homage to Oklahoma's marriage-promotion pioneers, Wade Horn, the Bush Administration's marriage-promotion guru, wrote, "If marriage is good for communities, why should government be shy about promoting and strengthening it?"

The 2000 census recorded a decline in marriage rates across all demographic groups, but the least likely to marry are African-Americans, who are also increasingly over represented on national welfare rolls. As Orlando Patterson, of Harvard, a scholar of black marriage patterns, recently observed, African-Americans remain "among the most un-partnered and estranged individuals in the world."

Kim Henderson dreamed of a sunset wedding in a neighborhood park. Corean Brothers' fantasy was simpler still: she'd hire Oklahoma's fastest-talking preacher and hold matrimonial history's briefest reception, in order to get more swiftly to the honeymoon action. "It's been twelve years," she said, laughing. "I am a religious woman, but not a dead one." The two women were not especially concerned that their romantic ambitions could interest the government. Outsiders were always coming to Sooner Haven to sell opportunity, prying into the residents' business while doing so. Some of the people in the project believed that these help-brokers were counterfeit, that laws had been set in place to push blacks down while helping other minorities prosper. Over-the-clothesline conversation turned periodically to "the tax-free Asians" -- North Vietnamese who, according to rumor, were welcomed to America (after fighting and killing black G.I.s) and exempted from income taxes, which explained how they came to own all those nail salons. Corean and Kim weren't certain about the Asians, but they did believe in the existence of opportunity for black people, somewhere. And it was as likely to be found at Holy Temple Baptist Church as anywhere else.

They arrived at marriage class thirty minutes late but were enthusiastically welcomed. Despite door-to-door solicitation in Sooner Haven and announcements in neighboring churches and social-services agencies, the total turnout was five, not counting the church secretary, a Sooner Haven single mother who, in a barely audible voice, described her divorce as "living death." Kim and Corean chose seats at the far end of a long Formica table, near the exit.

The government's evangelist, Pastor George E. Young, was tall, with a gleaming pate and a cell phone holstered to his khakis. When he folded his arms across his chest after making a point, the women giggled at his resemblance to Mr. Clean. "I am not naive enough to think this class will stop you from having men over," he said as he distributed state-sponsored workbooks of what Oklahoma calls "empirically informed, empirically tested, regularly updated" information on how to make and keep a decent marriage. "What I am hoping is that, when the man does come over, you will have a different conversation."

The curriculum was rich with statistics and poll results, which Pastor Young displayed by overhead projector on a cracked cinder-block wall. What do couples fight about before marriage? (Money, jealousy, future in-laws.) What do couples fight about after marriage? (Money, communication, children, sex.) What percentage of married people feel unhappy in the relationship? (Most.) The data are bleak by design; the social scientists on whom Oklahoma relies believe that a crucial part of making and keeping a marriage is disabusing oneself of sentimental notions. Marriage is not sexual and emotional bliss between soul mates, they contend; it is a job requiring as much patience, self-sacrifice, discipline, and patience as any other.

The students found the statistics depressing and the flowcharts in the workbooks unfathomable, but Pastor Young was neither of those things, and in three days of class only one student dozed off, briefly, following a Crock-Pot lunch. Christ built his church upon a rock, Young told the students; a marriage requires a similarly unyielding foundation. Value the ability to fight decently and nonviolently, he said, because, "believe me, there will be storms."

Hence, a pillar of the course was a "speaker-listener" technique intended to promote calm, productive conflict resolution. To demonstrate, Young played a state-supplied video of couples working through the sort of conflicts that are seldom encountered in Sooner Haven. (Spouse hogs home computer. Spouse procrastinates about cleaning guest bedroom.) This cultural disconnect was perhaps predictable, as the curriculum used in Oklahoma was actually developed a quarter of a century ago for engaged or married couples. The curriculum's creators, the Colorado psychologists Scott Stanley and Howard Markman, say that their course encourages not just healthy marriages but individuals who are "less reliant on government services including welfare, health care, mental health care, and earning and saving more money." However, testing of the approach has been conducted only minimally in inner-city settings. Marriage education in places like Sooner Haven is, like marriage itself, a venture in optimism.

I'm not going to lie and say it's easy," Pastor Young, who is in his second marriage, told the class. "So I know some of you will wonder whether it's worth it. But when you know how it feels to go home at night, to have them there every night, to have them trusting you, and to know you trust them back…" For a moment, he seems to have lost his place in the lesson plan. "To find that person and have that feeling -- that is worth struggling toward, it's worth crying over. It is the worthiest of personal goals."

From this counseling, Pastor Young has come to share the belief of many marriage-initiative advocates: that men more than women need convincing on this point. Thus he sees it as an unhappy but unavoidable fact that women are this social policy's beasts of burden. Having already complied with social and economic pressures to work, poor women were now being asked to do something that their government had so far failed at: push their male counterparts into the cultural and economic mainstream.

Kim and Corean found the couples squabbling on the videos "kind of petty" but enjoyed practicing the problem-solving techniques that the couples demonstrated. Pairing off for role-playing, the students learned to refrain from saying to a man who disappointed them, "You're an oily, two-timing toad," and to say instead, "When you did x, in situation y, I felt z." They practiced swallowing their rage, articulating their grievances specifically and respectfully, recognizing when a fight might turn violent, and listening with open-minds to imaginary mates. Acting the part of a neglected wife and mother, Kim channeled her loneliness so convincingly that Pastor Young blinked back tears -- an achievement that left Kim beaming.

"But in real life I'm still back at the beginning," Kim said after the exercise. "I mean, how do you get to the point of even having a bad marriage, when every time you start to say the word 'love' he starts talking about basketball?"

"My thing is: how do you get a man to talk about marriage when you're pretty sure he's still sleeping with his baby's mother?" a nurse's aide asked, expressing a problem so familiar at Sooner Haven that it is known by the term "baby-mama drama." "And then how do you tell if he wants to marry you for the right reasons?" the nurse's aide went on. "When I wear my white uniform, guys around here know I'm working and chase me down the street to get their hands on my paycheck."

"You have to ask to be treated as you deserve," Pastor Young said. "If you don't demand respect from the males, you won't get it."

"Here's what troubles me," Corean said, as another transparency lit up the wall. "Look at all those couples who say they're stable but not happy. I am enjoying these exercises, and I agree our society has too much divorce, but it doesn't seem right to me that a woman should stick with a man when she's miserable, or settle for one who doesn't make her happy. Why isn't it better to be alone?"

"Two parents means two paychecks," Kim said, frowning. On a ledger, as a pooling of resources, marriage made sense. But Kim's experience with males, like that of the other women in the class, pointed toward a more complicated calculation. None of the women were on welfare, and all were determined not to be. And while they wanted men for companionship, sex, and the sort of honest, intimate conversation they were enjoying in marriage class, they weren't entirely sure men were useful to their efforts at self-improvement. All but one of the women in the room had grown up without a father in the home. At least two had been sexually abused in the first ten years of their lives. Those who had children had been left by the children's fathers. Three had been beaten by men they had loved, and two had been involved with violent criminals. In short, it required an imaginative leap to believe that a committed relationship with a man would rescue a woman from poverty. At Sooner Haven, relationships with men were often what stopped an ambitious woman from escaping.

As an urban preacher, Pastor Young grasped this paradox better than the developers of the curriculum he delivered, so he was not shattered when the first tangible result of his marriage instruction was the termination of what had been the most enduring relationship in the group. The nurse's aide, riding to the second day's class with Corean and Kim, passed her unemployed boyfriend's house and noticed another woman's car parked outside. Following an antic period of discovery, and with the encouragement of her classmates, the nurse sent the boyfriend of two years packing.

"Matthew 19:30 tells us the first will be the last and the last will be the first," Pastor Young said on the final day, as phone numbers were exchanged and sugar cookies were spirited into pocketbooks for later. "You think you are last now, you may be last in the eyes of the world, but if you only believe and live that you are worthy to be who you are, you will be first. You will eke out some respect and happiness from this life." He closed his bible and sighed.

"I wish I could get more men into this room, instead of asking you all to go out and be the messengers for what a meaningful, committed relationship might be," he went on. "But for now it's up to you to go out and teach the men."

Waiting at the bus stop on a withering August afternoon, Kim Henderson shook the front of her white blouse, in the vain hope of keeping sweat stains at bay. She wanted to look nice, as she was bound for one of Oklahoma City's upmarket shopping malls. After her retirement from burglar-alarm telemarketing, she had papered the mall's boutiques with job applications. But while attending marriage class her phone was cut off, owing to an outstanding fifty-nine-dollar bill. Since there was now no way for prospective employers to reach her, and since she had no money to buy toilet paper, let alone pay her phone bill, she had decided to take a bus to the mall and go from shop to shop, asking if anyone had tried to call her about a job.

The mall was a long ride from Sooner Haven. Derrick owned a Pontiac Grand Am that he might have let her use, but Kim hadn't seen or heard from him in ten days. She thought he might be working at a construction site outside Oklahoma City, or might be preoccupied with his baby son. "Derrick's a good person," she said determinedly. "And just because I'm not sure of the reason doesn't mean he doesn't have one."

When a bus turned down her street, she stepped off the curb, but the bus did not slow down. Half an hour later, a second bus cruised by her outstretched, dollar-waving hand. It is an unhappy fact of Oklahoma City life that bus drivers bypass would-be riders in very poor neighborhoods, and blacks in less poor ones. Kim's grandmother, who had died the previous year, bequeathed Kim an aged blue Oldsmobile. But Kim had passed the car on to her mother, who lives in Arkansas. "She's sixty and had to walk all this way to the school cafeteria where her job is at," Kim explained. Recently, several of her girlfriends had applied to a program at the Oklahoma City human-services office, which gave them five hundred dollars to get a car for work. Her friends are eligible for such aide because they are single mothers. Childless Kim must rely on buses.

Kim has tried to develop constructive ways of venting her frustration. She had kept a journal until a relative discovered it and passed it around. She tried to talk into an imaginary tape recorder, but that made her feel crazy. Lately, she had settled on the "weird but hopefully less pathetic" technique of translating her anxieties and hopes into unmetered, blues songs. "Help may not come just when I want it to," she sang to the street, "but when it comes it might not be too late."

After an hour, a bus pulled over. It took her to the center-city bus depot, which is situated in front of the country jail. Waiting for a transfer bus under a billboard for Crawley 24-Hour Bail Bonds, Kim was propositioned by a man wheeling a baby carriage and smoking a Black & Mild cigar. Kim cut him off in mid-fantasy. "Don't you know me? I'm Frank's daughter, which makes you my cousin. And you know Frank would kill you for this."

The cousin with the carriage peeled away, and another suitor stepped forward. When she told the new guy that she had a boyfriend, he laughed, and said, "Well, then, he must not love you, honey, if he be making you take the damn bus."

"Like flies to apple pies," Corean liked to say of Kim's ability to attract male interest, but Kim's options usually fell short of marriage-class standards. This was a hitch in the uplift-by-marriage method which even Pastor Young understood. "Kim wants to get out of her situation by working, going to school, maybe getting married," he said once, when Kim was out of earshot. "But she lives in an isolated neighborhood where most of the males have abandoned hope in schools, legit jobs, the system. The way they tell it to me, they see three ways to get out of the ghetto: through professional sports, through rapping, and through crime." Half of Oklahoma's black men are out of the labor force, according to the 2000 census. In the neighborhoods around Sooner Haven, the figure is higher still.

An older man in an orange jumpsuit was now standing before Kim, balancing a broom on his shoulder. "Now, for my part, I believe you have a beautiful face and a nice body," he said. "Are you over eighteen? I'll be getting out of the halfway house in several months and I'd like to buy you a steak."

Kim sometimes laughed about being a "creep magnet," but Derrick's unexplained absence had lately sapped her humor. Her father had repeatedly pulled vanishing acts, too -- into drink and into prison. For most of her life, Kim's mother had compensated, watching her little girl's back as best she could, but two years ago her mother left Oklahoma City to work in Arkansas.

Before Kim adopted her normal-lady plan, she had had a crew of girlfriends with whom she could share her thoughts on love and men. When the connecting bus arrived at the center-city depot, one of them –Amanda -- was on it. Amanda's T-shirt said, in large type, "I promise to be a good girl," and, in small type, "if you promise to be a bad boy." Seeing Kim, she reached into a tight back pocket and produced a photograph of a newborn. "Ashley -- I had her six weeks ago Saturday."

Kim's eyes darted to her friend's flat belly. "I know," Amanda said proudly, "I didn't gain any weight with her at all. Now, get this: When my time came, I was seven centimeters dilated and didn't have nobody with me, and still they kicked me out of St. Anthony Hospital, because they claimed my Medicaid card didn't clear. I had to go clear cross the city to Mercy hospital by myself -- dag, I thought I would never make it. Funny, my Medicaid card cleared there."

Kim wants to have two children, but only when she's married and has financial stability. This plan struck some of her acquaintances as foolish; they thought only white women waited until they were too old to keep up with a toddler. Kim believed that, at twenty-two, she still had time. But in lonely stretches like this one her hunger for the companionship of a baby grew so acute that she borrowed acquaintances' children, took them to Wal-Mart, and had photographs taken of them in her arms.

"Now my new boyfriend wants me to have his baby, too," Amanda was saying when the bus pulled into Penn Square Mall.

The manager of a store that sells jelly beans in ninety-nine flavors said, "Kim Henderson -- yes, I remember your name. You had a good application, but we couldn't get through on the phone, so we hired someone else."

If we had wanted an interview, the managers at Trendz and American Eagle and nine other stores said, we would have called you.

"But after I left my application my phone got cut-off. That's why I came today. I was an assistant manager at Subway."

If we decide we want you, the managers said, we'll call you.

The mall smelled of cinnamon buns, reminding Kim that she hadn't eaten. At one store, she reached for the manager's hand and begged, "The person who comes all this way just to see if you've called, that's a person who is going to work her behind off for you when you hire her." She then learned that the job required her to work until 9 P.M. There is no regular bus service to Sooner Haven or its environs after dark.

"I feel like an ant," Kim said, leaving the fourteenth store. "A little ant that bus drivers and supervisors can't see." A ten-dollar bill fell from the purse of a middle-aged shopper walking ahead of her. Kim scooped it up and returned it to the woman, lowering her lashes to hide the fact that her eyes had filled with tears. "If I don't get a job soon, I don't know what I'll do." Kim broke down outside a boutique called the Buckle, which sells sun hats and turquoise-encrusted belts. On her earlier visit, she had steered clear of the store, along with J. Crew, because she thought that her clothes might be too ghetto. Blowing her nose, she glanced inside. "Maybe if I pretend that I did apply there, and the staff thinks they lost my application, they'll be nice to me."

The gambit worked. A supervisor couldn't find Kim's name in a loose-leaf binder of rejected applications, gave Kim two-minutes to summarize her qualifications, and then scheduled a phone interview with the manager for that night at eight o'clock. Kim recited Corean's number. When she returned to the bus stop outside the mall, the heat still blasted, but she bounced on and off the curbside like an overwound toy. "The ant has an interview!" she sang.

A slim white woman emerged from Dillard's department store with four shopping bags, a Burberry satchel, and, dangling from her wrist, a silver peace-sign charm. Kim suddenly grew still. "I'd like to be elegant someday, too," she said quietly. "But if I ever did get a healthy, wealthy life, I wonder if my children would grow up looking down on people like me."

When a bus that would have taken her home accelerated past, Kim practiced answers to potential interview questions: "I have a genuine interest in fashion and have been working a cash register since I was fourteen." When the next bus cruised by, she tried a trick that she'd recently invented to manage depression, recalling in detail the happiest days of her life. "Here's one I like -- my mom's birthday, in April, 1990. We had nothing to eat, we were suffering at the time, and the thing to know about my mom is that the only pleasure she ever really had in life was bingo -- Lucky Star Casino, Will Rogers Bingo Hall, she played everywhere, and sometimes took me along to play a card, too. One of those places had a special deal for regulars -- you play free on every Wednesday in the month of your birthday. She went out, and when she came back we were going to bed. She rustled us up and told us to open the door. She'd played U-Pick-Em and won twenty-five hundred dollars in cash and a big old stereo, which was sitting there outside. All eight of us busted out crying. Back then, we thought a hundred dollars was everything, so with twenty-five hundred dollars we could hardly imagine it, we thought we were millionaires. I got a pink-and-blue winter parka, and jeans from the old Fifty-Percent-Off Store. Mom bought some serious groceries and then gave us each ten dollars to spend however we wanted. I went to the 7-Eleven and bought Good & Plenty."

Another bus was coming through the shopping plaza. Kim stepped forward, signaling furiously. When it swerved around her, she sank to the curb. The bus was not only the seventh one to pass her that day; it was the last bus to Sooner Haven until morning. In terms of landmass, Oklahoma City is the third-largest metropolis in America, and she was a five-hour walk from home.

A pretty woman in a tear-and-sweat-soaked blouse will eventually be noticed by somebody. A Chevy Impala pulled over, driven by a black woman not much older than Kim. "I know, I used to have to take the bus, too," said the driver, who, as it turned out, was an assistant supervisor at a gift store in the mall. "I'll drive you home." She went past the alabaster state capitol and into the northeast quadrant, where Sooner Haven is situated, and where TV crews were covering a shooting from the parking lot of a carryout called Leo's BBQ. "It as bad as they say around here?" the woman asked Kim when they reached the project's gates.

"If you go outside and try to be known, you're going to have trouble," said Kim, her optimism not yet flattened by the Buckle manager, who would not keep her appointment. "But if you live all low and invisible you'll more than likely be O.K."

One fall morning, Corean accompanied her youngest son, Fella, who is eighteen, to parent-teacher day at his magnet school. Fella, suffering from a football injury, limped along in a knee brace. Even so, he could outpace a mother in toe-strangling second-hand shoes. A few paces behind her son, Corean watched a group of lithe classmates embrace him, fretting over his readiness for next week's game. Corean is the rare mother of an Oklahoma high-school footballer who doesn't know what position her boy plays. But in a drawer by her bed she has every standardized-test score he's brought home since preschool.

When Corean reached the school entrance, the girls had dispersed, and her son, looking stricken, was being marched down the hall by an apple-cheeked teacher. "Who-o-o-o," the teacher called out, "is the mother of this spectacular child?"

Other mothers turned to look as the instructor caught Corean in an armlock. "I have been waiting to meet you, Mrs. Brothers. I love your kid, and the smarts aren't the half of it. You've raised one way-cool human being."

A pleasure to teach, a treasure to know: in every classroom Corean entered, she received happy news about her son. Alerted to forthcoming assignments on Gilgamesh and "Silas Marner," clutching a quiz marked 97, Corean retreated as soon as politeness allowed. She was still not entirely at home in school. Her father, an epileptic and an alcoholic, had disappeared when she was six, abandoning a wife and ten children in a Florida shanty without electricity or running water. When she was in seventh grade, her mother had the first of a series of strokes. A year later, Corean quit school and became, at fourteen, a laborer in orange groves and snap bean fields. In those days, she ate so much red dirt and Argo starch that she acquired a taste for them. (She came to tolerate fatback pork, too, but not the consequent tapeworms that dangled pinkly from one's nose.) She had failed to fulfill one promise she made to herself then -- that her children would be speared the experience of poverty. But saw to it that each of them received the education that she had pined for.

Once, Fella was mistaken for a gangbanger, and his blue bandana for a cocky display of Crip colors. Such underestimations crushed Corean; they just made Fella work harder at his calculus. Intent on being a doctor, he was stricter with himself than his teachers tended to be -- an independence that Corean generally admired. But, returning home to Sooner Haven from parent-teacher day, she felt a shadow slip across her sense of satisfaction. Did a boy become self-reliant because the people who could have helped him didn't?

Fella was an A student at a good math-and-science high school, and a state champion in church oratory. Corean had hoped that his achievement would bring him scholarships and a first-rate college education. But as Pastor Young, a former high-school basketball player, observed from his pulpit, colleges recruit inner-city boys with athletic talent, not inner-city boys with good grades. (The vast majority of black students at selective colleges are from middle- or upper-class families.) Fella wasn't big enough to be a serious college football player. "It's fun, I like it," he said. "But the human brain, the science of it -- that's what amazes me." He was already a third of his way through his senior year, however, and had yet to be advised about college by overworked guidance counselors, whose numbers had been reduced by a state budget crisis. "I don't know about any colleges, really," Fella said, "though if I don't get scholarships I can't blame anyone but me. They say the money's out there. I just can't say for sure where it is."

When her older children were finishing high school, Corean had sensed a similar lack of official attention to their futures, and knew less than Fella about how to counter it. Those children were now employed and independent, and, except for the oldest, her rebel son, who held down two jobs as a nursing-home aide -- were strong in the church. But Shandy, twenty, who is a receptionist and writes plays in her free time, had recently dropped out of community college, unable, on her salary, to cover the tuition. Dana, twenty-five years old and very bright, had managed to get an associate's degree at Oklahoma State University and now worked the desk at a local Hertz Rent-A-Car. When Corean fell behind on her phone or electricity bills, Dana would be at her door, waving a check. But Dana's plan of saving enough money to complete her B.A. and go to law school seemed to be perpetually deferred. The help that her children needed now, to become the people Corean believed they might be, seemed beyond the ken of a low-income, eighth-grade-dropout single mother.

When she was eighteen, Corean left fruit-picking for the Job Corps, a Great Society program for the poor which had an opening in Oklahoma City. She became a certified nurse's aide. She also met a funny, conscientious man who worked on a loading dock. She did what the Holy Temple pastor was now recommending, and married. Over the years, she emptied bedpans in a nursing home and cleaned houses for the affluent, but her earnings -- forty-five dollars a day for housekeeping -- didn't cover day-care costs. Eventually, she became a stay-at-home mother. Then her husband, who had become a truck driver for Frito-Lay, declared bankruptcy. "Financially, he was struggling, and with the kids I could only take day work," Corean said. "He was angry at me for not pulling my weight, income-wise, while I believed the kids needed me at home. The fights just tore us apart."

Occasionally, for memory's sake, she drives by a brick house on an elm-lined street three miles from Sooner Haven, where her family spent its happiest years. A basketball hoops rises from a square of concrete in the back yard, and lace curtains hang in the window of the bedroom where, one night, her husband beat her. "Black as I am," she remembered, "I was blue."

When she cleaned houses in one of Oklahoma City's better neighborhoods, Corean had studied the ways that rich women argued with their husbands -- how they had raised their eyebrows and voices instead of their fists. After the beating, she told her husband to leave. "I still loved him, and once I secured my physical safety I hoped we could work through the anger, try to talk about reconciliation," she said. But almost as soon as her husband left he began dating. "At the divorce hearing, the judge said to me, 'You didn't bother to get a lawyer?' But I had five kids, aged four to fifteen, and I had four hundred dollars in rent, and food and water and electricity and the phone and whatnot. My husband did have a lawyer, a good one, so what happened happened, and off I went to Sooner Haven, where my kids, who love their father, were angry at me for a very long time."

In those days, the Sooner Haven complex was crowded. Now, with the older kids gone and Fella staying late for football practice every weekday, it felt unnervingly roomy. Corean was pleased when Dana came by after work. Over dinner, they discussed a college classmate of Dana's who had announced her engagement, then they turned to Corean's dating prospects. As she had little discretionary income, Corean's most regular outings were walks she took in a nearby city park. On one of those walks, she had struck up a conversation with an educated man who owned a lawn-care business. But he seemed to lose interest when he picked her up several days later for a dinner date. "I think he was shook up when he realized I lived in the projects," she said. Still, it was a date, something she'd never got from the singles gatherings she'd attended at her church for a decade. Often, not one male was in attendance.

"There's a short supply, no question," Dana said, "and a shorter supply for women who aren't going to let the man be the master, shut their mouths, and do what he tells them to do. But I'm not going to settle. I do believe that somewhere in this great big world God has someone in mind for me, someone wonderful who won't cheat on me. But, in the meantime, I've got plans for my life. If he's not bringing anything to the table, then he's just bringing me down." Her voice grew teasing. "But you, Reverend Doctor, you're getting old. You gotta get on it, make your moo-oove."

"Well, it used to be all I had to say was 'Five kids' and most men would turn tail and run," Corean replied. "But now I'm exploring my options, don't you worry." She looked down at her hands. "But when you do find a man it's still a game of chance. I thought I was being careful the first time, but that didn't protect me from getting hurt."

Later that night, Corean shut off all the lights in the house except the one she needed to fold the laundry she'd taken in from her clothesline. In fact, she did know a decent man who wanted to marry her. He had given her a papier-mâché jewelry box and a ceramic rhinoceros, which sat on her dresser, but there was a reason she hadn't mentioned him to Dana.

Corean believed in maintaining appearances. "People may be looking for an excuse to write you off," she'd warned her children. "Don't give them the curse words or dirty clothes to help them do it." Corean knew exactly how those children would react when they learned that Reverend Doctor Mom, while doing charity work at a faraway prison, had had her head turned by a three-time felon.

"Have my eyebrows grown out too scrungy?" Kim asked Derrick, as she dressed for work one autumn morning. Derrick placed his water glass on the cardboard box marked "Fragile -- Eggs" and stared into her heart-shaped face. "They don't look so rough," he concluded after a moment. Kim exhaled; brow waxing and other vanities were not in her monthly budget.

Kim had recently obtained another telemarketing gig, a job whose chief requisite was the ability to absorb a gale force of customer hostility and whose chief benefit, by Kim's lights, was that she could get to it without taking the bus. Instead, every weekday, a colleague named Tiphani dropped her newborn at day care near Sooner Haven and then picked up Kim. In a cavernous warehouse in the northwest section of the city, they worked the phones from 3 P.M. to 11 P.M., after which Tiphani drove Kim home.

Kim's task was to persuade people in California and Ohio and New York to switch their local phone service to A.T. & T. She was not actually employed by A. T. & T. Her employer was an A.T. & T. subcontractor that paid two hundred dollars a week to start. But Tiphani said that after they memorized A.T. & T.'s catalogue of products -- call waiting, call forwarding, and so on -- they'd have an edge on other people who wanted a job at the bona-fide A.T. & T. In the meantime, Kim found the work preferable to frightening old people into buying home security, and preferable as well to the offer that she'd received recently, while walking down the street, "to play pool and do adult activities" under the auspices of a neighborhood fixture called Da Pimp.

Some women Kim knew posed for pornographers, or slept with men in exchange for money, clothes, and diapers. But the run-in with Da Pimp reminded Kim of why escaping the city's underworld was worth a stress ulcer. She had grown up around gangbangers, warrant dodgers, and woman beaters. "When I was young, I loved school so much I cried when I couldn't go on weekends," she said. "School, and not my crazy home, was the only place I could find peace."

But in the legit world Kim kept botching things. In the six weeks between leaving her burglar-alarm job and taking the new one, she had applied for emergency food stamps and been denied. Corean eventually accompanied her to the welfare office and pleaded her case, successfully, but in the meantime Kim bounced several checks to Wal-Mart. Oklahoma penalties for bad checks are stiff, and are a politically popular income-generator for the District Attorney's office. For writing a twelve-dollar-and-eighteen-cent check, she now faced a hundred-and-fourteen-dollar penalty, including "victim restitution" to Wal-Mart and a fee to the D.A. And then there were two more bounced checks, and, as the letter from the D.A. said, if she didn't come up with four hundred and ninety-five dollars and fifty-three cents in ten days she could face a year-long jail sentence.

Corean pointed out that the District Attorney's wife, a plastic surgeon and former Miss Oklahoma, had just pleaded guilty to illegally obtaining narcotics, for which she received community service and permission to resume doing nose jobs. But Kim, who had seen her own father and brother face less forbearing jurist, did not anticipate lenient treatment.

Kim was guzzling Hawaiian Punch to soothe her ulcer, but at least Derrick had reappeared. Back in the summer, she suspected he was keeping her from his friends and family. Now he introduced her warmly, saying, "This ain't my girl. This is my woman." He came over with candles when her gas and electricity were cut off. And when his toddler son took his first steps they were toward Kim.

Corean worried about how hard Kim was falling. "Maybe you don't get the love you need from your family, then you grow up and go out all desperate to find it," she said. "And if and when you don't find the right thing you try to tell yourself the wrong thing is right." But Kim was mindful of Pastor Young's advice -- "It's up to you to go out and teach the men" -- and she began to express her wish for commitment. "I don't want to pressure you," she said to Derrick, "but I care about you so much and feel serious about this relationship."

"I know, baby," he invariably replied, but she didn't know what to do next to nudge things closer to a sunset wedding. The problem-solving techniques that she'd learned in marriage class did, however, help her to learn more about her would-be husband. Using the "When you do x, I feel y" technique in order to convey her frustration at his failure to help her resolve her problem with the courts and the world's largest retailer, she learned that his construction job paid two hundred and fifty dollars a week, and that he didn't think often about marriage. He thought more about how to pay for his son's food and diapers while avoiding the repossession of his Grand Am, which he'd bought before he lost a job as a supervisor at Coca-Cola, and which was crucial to keeping his new, less remunerative job, "building houses in the middle of nowhere."

She checked her watch. Tiphani should have arrived by now to take her to work, but the only cars in the parking lot were a Cutlass Supreme, whose vinyl top appeared to be suffering from multiple stab wounds, and a wheelless Toyota bearing the bumper sticker "Americans Kick Ass."

For Kim, given the bad-check problem, losing a day's pay would be financially disastrous. She tried to focus on a giveaway magazine called American Baby, which contained an article she loved: "They say here the five most important values to give your children are trust, patience, respect, empathy -- is that how you pronounce it? And then the last one, self-reliance. That's the one where you teach your child that he can't depend on hardly anyone for anything, because in the end they're probably going to let you down."

Suddenly, Tiphani hollered from the parking lot, and American Baby hit the floor. Kim bolted out of her rusted screen door, the most eager cold-caller in the city.

The visiting room at Great Plains Correctional Facility holds six plastic chairs, a wall painting of a leafy lane (prisoners pose for snapshots in front of it), and a slew of posted rules that remind Corean of the ones she enforced in her own home when her kids were adolescents. "Only handholding is allowed!" the signs say. "Any other form of contact and your visit will be terminated."

Great Plains sits on the prairie an hour's drive west of Oklahoma City, a journey that provided a workout for Corean's Dodge Shadow. But the family of Steven Bruner, the inmate whom Corean was now visiting, lived even farther away. Five years ago, they'd asked Corean, a family friend, to check in on him when they couldn't. Since then, her car had occasionally given up before it reached the facility, and more than once she had felt unwelcome in the white, working-class towns surrounding Great Plains. Still, on the nights before her visits, she would catch herself spreading skirts on her bed, wondering whether Steven would prefer the leopard-print or the pink one with the pleats.

In northeast Oklahoma City, the question "Where he away at?" is widely understood to mean, In what prison is he serving time? Nearly one in ten black men is a prison inmate -- one of the highest incarceration rates in the country. Steven, who started his criminal career at fifteen, had passed most of his adult life behind bars. Now he was thirty-eight, with maximum-security forearms and a broader range of reading interests than most other men Corean knew. Since his first imprisonment, educational and vocational programs for prisoners had been drastically curtailed, but he had availed himself of what remained, learning to inlay carpets with animal faces and craft ceramic knick-knacks. He visited the library three times a week, the maximum permitted. And, three years after Corean first began talking to him about her faith, he became, to her delight, a Christian.

Corean struggled to explain even to herself how a bleak room separated from the outside world by three layers of razor wire, two sturdy guards, motion detectors, and a phalanx of armed guards (one of them assigned to sit beside her and Steven) had become a place where she could relax. Steven couldn't help get Fella into college. He couldn't even hold her. Their conversations, given the presence of the guard, were often self-conscious and sometimes, given the limited range of events in their respective lives, outright boring. Still, Steven listened with unwearied attention, a luxury Corean hadn't known since her divorce: "Well, Steven, the mechanic looked at the car and did the fan with some black tape, but when he fixed the brakes he didn't bleed them, so they still jump all the way down to the floor. I'll take it when I have some change in my pocket. Anyway, I did try to fix the radio myself, took a pair of tweezers…"

"You don't have to take it in to get the brakes fixed. When you go home, get yourself some break fluid at the autoparts store, open the engine, and put it in the big round mouth."

"There's a lot of round things in that motor, you know darn well."

"There's a little screw on the side, and it's connected to the square -- look, take a photo of the engine, send it to me, and I'll show you what's what. You'll see, it ain't hard."

Corean stretched her legs, letting her foot graze the instep of his state-issue sneaker.

Corean still termed their relationship a friendship, and she had told him not to count on her, but it had been some time since she'd signed a letter to him the way she'd signed the first, "Cordially, Corean." Steven wore his desires on his chest. A fellow-inmate, using a piece of wire and some ingenuity, had tattooed there the words "Corean's Playground." Only after she'd seen the tattoo did she choose to learn the particulars of his sentence: assaulting an undercover police officer with a car, fifty years.

Steven confronted the difficulty of the relationship as visiting time drew to a close. "If you decide to wait for me, I worry that you're doing time, same as I am -- just marking off days -- and I don't know if that's right. I mean, I want you to…" He stopped and shook his head. "You know. But I'd be lying if I said I could make the argument on your end."

Back home, sitting outside in a plastic chair just like those at the prison, Corean took no pleasure in the spectacular red and yellow pansies growing in her garden. She was staring grimly through Sooner Haven's fence. She could see two of her young grandchildren standing in a yard across the busy street. She had been barred from seeing the children because their mother was once again feuding with Corean's son. The toddlers, oblivious of the commands of a woman who was minding them, were staring right back at Corean through the fence. Inside her house, Corean had bibs and placemats on which their names had been emblazoned, and Dr. Seuss books, and a tiny bucket and shovel for digging in the garden. But this evening they were fenced off from her, as Steven was. She figured that this was what people meant be a midlife crisis -- the sense that everything you wanted was just outside your reach.

Fella, home with the flu, sensed his mother's mood. A do-rag on his head and a black-and-white composition book in his hand, he came outside and plopped his large self on his mother's small lap. "Mommeee," he said, "I need your help with this speech." This spectacle prompted some little girls who were playing by the fence to shriek with laughter, and Corean couldn't help but laugh, too.

When she came home after prison, Fella unbuckled his mother's sandals, unasked, and pressed her swelling feet. After football practice or the late shift at the Taco Bueno, he often joined her in the house's one lighted room, where they compared their days until they drifted into sleep. Corean remembered how, when she was a child, hardship had turned members of her family against each other, and was grateful for her own family's closeness. But she also knew that single mothers could be seduced by it. Husbandless, they treated their Danas as confidantes and their Fellas as stand-in partners, and were shattered when those companions left them behind.

Eventually, Dana arrived for dinner, and conversation turned to Fella's college plans. He'd found a book and some pamphlets on scholarship options and discovered that in-state tuition could be covered by an Oklahoma program for poor children with good grades. He also saw that four years of college fees and books would leave his mother with nothing to live on, even if he avoided paying room and board by living at home.

When Corean imagined Fella at college, she saw him as being relaxed. "I don't see him fretting over how his mom can pay the phone bill -- I see him free to study, and having enough change to take a girl out to lunch if he likes," she said. When Fella pictured himself at college, he dreamed of a dorm, not a tiny bedroom in Sooner Haven. And after reviewing his scholarship options he decided it would behoove him to unearth some Native American roots.

In the neighborhood, the "Indian option" was an opportunity discussed with as much avidity as marriage. Cherokee, Shawnee, and Kickapoo reservations encircle Oklahoma City, and many city residents suspect that they are of mixed heritage. Those families which are able to document sufficient Native American blood can secure housing, health-care, and scholarship benefits far in excess of those available to families who are simply poor. "Benefits offered through official Native American status!" a video available from a Web site called Blackindians.com trumpets. Corean and her children knew several people who had pursued those benefits.

When Corean was young, her older siblings had told her that her high cheekbones were the Cherokee legacy of their father. Her paternal grandmother had thrilled Corean's siblings by demonstrating that she could sit on her hair. "Black hair just doesn't grow that long," Corean said. But to prove the rumor and secure Fella a scholarship required producing ancestral birth certificates to which tribal codes had been affixed. Corean's father had taken his family history with him when he vanished; all she really knew was that he was born in a southwest-Georgia peanut-farming town and died in another, four-miles away. Still, as housekeeping work paid so poorly and no economically advantageous marriage was in the offing, this avenue of opportunity tempted her, and possessed an irony she appreciated. "I feel bad to say this," she told Fella and Dana, "but my father might be more help to this family dead than he ever was alive."

As the dinner dishes were washed and put away, Corean's children dropped the Indian option and began chiding their mother about her strictness. "No playing cards in the house, having to come in for family prayers and singing every night, not even a phone call from a boy until we turned sixteen -- you were so mean when I was a teenager, it was pathetic," Dana said, wringing out a dish towel. "By the time I was seventeen, I was so itching to get away from you I bought my own tissue and soap and stored it in a box beneath my bed. And, when I finally did get my own place, me and the preacher's daughter went and got ourselves a bottle of Bacardi and we cut up, I can assure you."

Corean said what she always said in the face of her children's mock recriminations: "When I see the Lord, I'm telling Him, look, if I messed up, I messed up trying." And that was the thing about the Indian idea. It reminded a make-do woman that there was usually something else to try.

"They're all telling me, 'I'm here for you, we love you, I'll never let you go, our baby,' but it's too late," went a poem that Kim had written and placed in her cardboard box. "My feet is slowly walking the sand under the water." Her "Fragile -- Eggs" depository now rested beside a concave orange-brown couch in the small home where her father, disabled by a stroke after leaving prison, lived. Kim was "in hiding" there, fearing that she would be arrested on the bad-check-writing charge. She still went to work every day, even when her friend Tiphani quit, forcing Kim back onto the bus. But the D.A.'s office knew that Kim lived in Sooner Haven. She gave up her unit and moved in with her father, three miles away.

Before leaving Sooner Haven, she had received results of her general-equivalency exam. She'd aced everything except math. A teacher at a local community college had offered to help her master the math and apply for college. But the tutoring conflicted with Kim's telemarketing hours, which were non-negotiable. "Still, I've come this far, I'm not going to give up," she said. She now owed around nine hundred dollars in fines from the bounced checks. Increasingly fearful of doing jail time, she had decided to take out a loan from "a guy named Dave, whose whole business is helping people who have hot-check charges against them."

Kim still wanted to be Derrick's wife, and he had agreed to move in with her when they had the means for an apartment. Marriage class had helped her grasp the work involved in achieving a deeper level of commitment; in addition, it reinforced her sense that the child she longed for should have two parents. But steady proximity to Derrick had also given her a sense of how married life would and wouldn't change her general circumstances. Her father's couch was too narrow for two, so when she slept with Derrick now it was at his mother's apartment, where he was living to save money. "He goes to work in the early morning, I get home after midnight, and sometimes we both work six or seven days a week because of his son and my debts. So even when we coordinate our schedules we're tired. We play this video game called Tetris and go to sleep."

Some nights while Kim was trying to pitch A.T. & T.'s services to residents of Long Beach or Dayton or Scarsdale, the computers connected her to women who, she suspected, were struggling even harder than she was to get by -- women who didn't want to switch phone carriers, who just wanted to keep another voice on the line. Sometimes Kim's supervisor listened in, and he would cut off the call. But when he wasn't listening Kim asked the women about their jobs, the men who disappointed them, the bills they couldn't pay. She learned the callers' names, gave them her own, promised to stay in touch.

One frigid morning, Corean's daughter Shandy, who was weak from mononucleosis, drove Corean to the Oklahoma City Greyhound sta

It felt odd not to have a child in tow. "This is the future," she said. "I best get used to it." The strangeness was tempered by the fact that on the Greyhound people treated her with more respect than she was used to getting in the project -- even when, in the Ozarks, drug-enforcement dogs were unleashed on the passengers' luggage. One bus driver reserved the front seat -- farthest from the toilet smells -- for Corean and an enormous pink church hat with dotted-swiss netting which she carried along with her Bible. "It's obvious you're a lady," he said. At the edge of the Mississippi delta, another driver pulled to the side of the road and held her elbow as she climbed stiffly off the bus. A minute later, she returned triumphant, brandishing a six-and-a-half-foot stalk of sugarcane. She hadn't seen cane since she was a child in the fields.

"People are quite friendly and interesting when you get out into the world," she said, feeling almost regretful when the bus pulled up to a secondhand furniture store ("No Cash, No Credit, No Problem") that doubled as the bus depot of Sylvester, Georgia.

W.E.B. Du Bois, in "The Souls of Black Folk," called this part of southwest Georgia "perhaps the richest slave kingdom the modern world ever knew." As the proprietor of the furniture store watched her things, Corean set out on foot through the shabby downtown toward the county courthouse. The entrance hall, lined with framed portraits of white civic leaders, was being mopped by a black female prison crew, one of whom directed her to the public-records office. There, she was no longer the first lady of the cross-country Greyhound bus. A records search showed that her father had no birth certificate, let alone a tribal number. "Lotta poor folks just had their babies in the woods and didn't tell no one," a young black clerk tried to console her, directing her to the Corinthian-columned public library across the street. In the genealogy room there, two elderly white couples were paging through books like "Men of Mark in Georgia" and tapping intently into a stretch of new computers. "Before this, we were in Salt Lake City, doing the Mormon Church records," one of the men said to the other. "We have it nailed down to 1830." The burning numbness in her arm had kept Corean awake for two nights. She sat at a table before a pile of thick brown books, trying to make sense of twentieth-century county censuses. Decade after decade, her father's family -- her family -- had not been counted. Corean got a second wind in the evening when she called home to check on Fella. "Harvard, Yale, I don't know about them. I guess those are places for the extremely wealthy," she said. "But if we could pay for the best school in Oklahoma, and then medical school…"

The next day, Corean gave a man fifteen dollars to drive her to Albany, Georgia, just west of Sylvester. Her father had gone there after he left his wife and children in the citrus fields, and had died there in 1981. If he was an Indian, she reasoned, some deed or public filing might have noted his tribe. Approaching the courthouse, she met a black man in a cowboy hat who was emerging from a new BMW. He turned out to be a Cherokee chief, a successful exerciser of the Indian option, which she took to be an excellent omen.

Once her sugarcane had been scanned by a metal detector and scrutinized by a puzzled security squad, she set up shop in the county office of public records. Around her, young couples on lunch breaks were applying for marriage licenses. Corean bore down on a drawer of black plastic microfilm canisters. She queried clerks who consulted databases, after which she paged through land records and worn manila files. And after several hours she realized only this: that her father had no records of deeds, no liens, no civil or criminal suits, no taxes owed nor businesses owned. Whether black or Indian, the man had been destitute enough, and law-abiding enough, to leave no trace in public record.

She asked a secretary for the local phone book. Her family's surname was Smith, and as she scanned the pages she found a given name, Daisy, that sounded familiar. She phoned, and soon an old car arrived at the courthouse to take her to the pink cinder-block home of Miss Daisy, a woman she'd never met, who turned out to be her father's only sister.

There were four generations of women in Daisy's house. A seven-week-old girl, born to a single mother, slept between a toddler wearing a T-shirt that said "Just Be Glad I'm Not Your Child." Daisy, a birdlike octogenarian, sat on a plaid recliner surrounded by Ragu spaghetti-sauce jars filled with tobacco-flecked spit. She had recently suffered a stroke, and was attended by a visiting speech therapist. "You can hardly swallow, Miss Daisy. Spit out the chaw so we can do this." When the therapist moved between Daisy and an NBC soap opera called "Passions," Daisy extended a wasted arm and tapped the woman out of the way.

Corean sat uneasily on the edge of the couch, asking questions about her father and the grandma who could sit on her hair. The younger women had also grown up believing they were part Cherokee, but they, too, had no proof. It was only when Corean was leaving that she noticed on a shelf behind the television a leatherette family Bible as worn as her own. Forgetting her manners, she seized it. In the centerfold she found what she suspected: a family tree filled out by a meticulous hand. One name differed from the others.

"Anyone know this Suzanna Sunbeam?" Corean's voice was hoarse, the way it got when she prayed too extravagantly on Sundays. The women shook their heads.

"Aaaaaz-uh," croaked the old woman, her eyes fixed on the TV screen. She didn't say anything else until "Passions" broke for a commercial. Then she said, "Suzanna was the Indian Girl."

Corean clapped her hands, elated. "I knew it would be in the family Bible," she said. "I felt it!" But after a series of hugs among newfound relatives, themselves enamored of the Indian option, Corean returned to the family Bible and registered that Suzanna Sunbeam was not her father's mother but her grandmother's mother, which meant there wasn't enough Indian blood in Corean's son Fella to do his doctor dreams a lick of good.

The signage in the Albany bus station where Corean fanned herself late that night was much as it had been in 1961, when the station was a staging area of the civil-rights movement. Probably then, as now, men kicked cardboard boxes of worldly goods across the station's greasy floor. But now the people in the station, waiting and working and scrawling "Lil Bit wuz here" on the historic bathroom wall, were black. Waiting for the bus, Corean opened her Bible. "And when we obey Him, every path He leads us on is fragrant with loving kindness." Eventually, the belly of a Greyhound opened to receive a stalk of sugarcane destined for furtive planting in Sooner Haven.

When she returned to Oklahoma, Corean applied to be a guinea pig in a pharmaceutical trial, to earn thirteen hundred dollars for Fella's tuition. After a physical, the testers rejected her, saying she was too ill and tired. Shortly afterward, she discovered that the mother of two of her grandchildren was living in a house where people with guns came and went. Corean hurried the toddlers back to Sooner Haven and did her best to raise them, despite losing financial help from Dana, who had been laid off from her longtime job. In the spring, Fella graduated with honors and found work moving furniture at a warehouse. He would stay in Oklahoma City for college.

One afternoon, Kim stopped to visit. She had paid off her bad-check charges and earned an award for being the third–most-productive salesperson in her office -- just before the prospect of a National Do Not Call Registry led her employer to cut its workforce in half. Worried, she had applied for another job, as an aide to the homebound elderly. "It's only six dollars an hour, and no commissions," she said, "but some money is better than none." She and Derrick now shared a small apartment with a lockbox in a closet, for saving dimes and quarters. "This year," they told each other, "we're going to make something of ourselves."

Corean also saw Pastor Young, who was conducting another marriage seminar at Sooner Haven, and preaching to a larger crowd. "We're learning how to do this as we go, but we're getting there," he said. One day soon, he predicted, the training would produce its first wedding.

It could be Kim's, Corean thought. She suspected that it wouldn't be her own. Lately, she had been pulling back from Steven -- "fading out," as he put it. "Anyway, when he's released, who knows if he will even want me," she said sadly. "Who knows what a person wants when he has choices." She still attended the mostly female singles meetings at her church, trying to heed what her kids said about not hiding her light under a bushel. But she was more broke than ever, the toddlers were exhausting, and the brakes on her car had given out. So most days she stayed inside the fence.

The Black Gender Gap

Cecille Isidro — Sat, 01 Feb 2003 00:00:00 -0500

Ten years ago shoe-leather urbanologists found their primary source material in the late-night crack market. Today they're better off rising early and divesting themselves of $1.10 in pocket change to ride the U8 bus, a leading economic indicator of the American inner city. The U8, which serves the easternmost corner of Washington, D.C., is what's known in public-transport parlance as a circuit bus. Its African-American riders are among the most isolated of the urban poor: those who not only can't afford private transportation but can't afford to live near efficient versions of the public kind. These men and women rely instead on buses that wend from one remote housing project to another, collecting riders who are eventually deposited at some central location from which they can take subways or straight-line buses to where the jobs are.

Every weekday at dawn the U8 offers its passengers the predictable dystopian ghetto vista: a drug-treatment clinic, its parking lot aglint with spent needles; a mini-mart with a sign on its door begging, "PLEASE!!! No ski masks allowed!!!!" Only the view inside the U8 is novel and promising. Wearing secondhand suits, often accessorized by fold-up strollers, the U8's riders are the sleepy embodiment of what may be the greatest social-policy achievement in recent U.S. history: the upward mobility of what many not long ago deemed a permanent underclass.

From a peak of 5.1 million families in 1994, welfare rolls have dropped to 2 million, while the poverty rate for African-American children has hit an all-time low. African-American teenage childbearing has declined, and the median annual income for African-American households has surpassed $27,000, reaching the highest level ever recorded. The U8's hundreds of daily riders suggest how firmly the idea of work has taken root even in public-housing communities where a decade ago 90 percent of residents lived primarily on government support.

Only when we break down the numbers by sex do these soothing data bare the domestic-policy challenge that has to be seriously engaged. Something vital is missing on America's U8s: black males.

In the most generous gloss, the 1996 federal welfare-reform act aimed to do more than promote work and reduce the tax burden of welfare payments. Explicitly and ambitiously, it endeavored to strengthen historically fragile low-income families. Last year, declaring the task of getting people to work well under way, the President and congressional Republicans put the promotion of marriage atop their social-policy agenda. But even as they spoke, welfare reform's inroads on poverty were opening a chasm between the status and prospects of black women and those of the men they might marry.

A grim home economics: In the 1990s the employment of young black females dramatically increased, despite the fact that many of those working women were single mothers. Meanwhile, the employment of their less-encumbered male counterparts stagnated, even in a period of unprecedented economic expansion. Today black women are more likely to work than white or Hispanic women, whereas black men are less likely than their counterparts. Among non-college-educated young blacks the gender gap is starker. Findings by the social scientists Paul Offner and Harry Holzer, published recently by the Brookings Institution, indicate that whereas young non-college-educated Hispanic males now work at about the same rate as their white counterparts, the rate for African-Americans is a staggering 30 percentage points lower. In fact, fully half of these young black men are unemployed or not in the labor force -- and these figures don't even include men in jail. A ten-day census of early-morning ridership on the U8 last autumn tallied 2.7 women for every man.

Set aside the profound emotional implications of this gender gap -- the loneliness of newly working women struggling to raise children by themselves; the resentment of men watching female contemporaries succeed, with considerable government assistance, in jobs at which they themselves have failed or from which they've been displaced by women. The greater poignancy comes as social science increasingly ratifies a conservative cliche: for children a two-parent household is the most effective anti-poverty program we know. Three out of four white children are born to such households. Only one in three black children is.

The children of single parents are more likely to be abused, become sick, use drugs, commit crimes, be imprisoned, and have out-of-wedlock children -- the litany, from decades of longitudinal study, is familiar. Clearly, two-parent households have the potential to create the continuity-rich context in which children's intellectual and emotional qualities may take wing. Yet the grave predicament of the contemporary black male, and its fundamental connection to the fate of black children, has managed to slip quietly through two distinct cracks: the one between competing special-interest blocs of the poverty industry, and the one between the hardened ideological categories of right and left.

Paul Offner has felt a chill from both directions. A Princeton-trained social scientist, Offner is best known in public-welfare circles for a radical career choice. In 1995 he decided to road-test some of the policy prescriptions he had devised while working as a senior aide to Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan and as the chief health-and-welfare counselor to the Senate Finance Committee. Offner accepted a job administering what was then one of America's most dysfunctional urban bureaucracies: Mayor Marion Barry's District of Columbia Medicaid office, whose cost overruns had left Washington near bankruptcy. While stabilizing costs and constructing one of the country's most inclusive health-coverage programs for the poor and the working class, Offner was struck by how the funding patterns of what he calls the welfare-industrial complex contribute to the neglect of black men. "The emotional testimony at congressional hearings on welfare reform is inevitably going to be about day care, or welfare time limits, or definitions of activities that qualify as work," he says, "because women and children are the social-services constituency -- the individuals with whom the government and the nonprofits interact. Men are barely on the screen, except as deadbeat dads. But if you go into families' homes" -- Offner is a veteran volunteer tutor of Southeast D.C. schoolchildren -- "you can't help thinking about how much difference a decent father could make in how a child behaves and develops."

The best contemporary social science on nonworking black males tends to wrestle with causality: Why did so many black men abandon the labor force in the first place? Does the legacy of slavery, which gravely distorted kin and work relationships, weigh more heavily on males than on females? Which came first, and matters more, the decline in the manufacturing sector or the rise in black men's incarceration rates?

If there is less rigorous discussion about how, now, to create opportunity for black males, it may be because the political utility of such a debate is uncertain. Drawing acute distinctions between the deserving and the undeserving poor, the political right resists heavy investment in a child-abandoning, work-resistant, lawbreaking population. Buttressing the right's position is the fact that previous federally funded efforts to put young black males to work have produced few appreciable results. The left, meanwhile, is reluctant to advocate for men in the face of the considerable needs of women -- such as the need for better child-care options than the typically stultifying urban centers to which welfare reform's next generation has been entrusted.

Yet there is artifice in the notion that black men and women are pitted against each other in a fight for a limited pool of public aid. After all, the plight of the poor black male translates into the plight of the ludicrously overfreighted poor black female. (Black women now earn 96 percent of what white women earn, but that's still on average only $15,000 a year. Surely they could also use the 70 percent of white male income that black men earn: $20,000.) On the U8 one morning the most animated discussion among young mothers concerned the much anticipated release of a painkiller called Bayer Back and Body. A working, child-nurturing partner would certainly be a stronger anodyne, but the R&D isn't there. Offner notes that whereas he can secure plenty of public and private funding for research on health care, the extensive studies of the poor black male population that he's doing with Harry Holzer have been self-financed.

For those willing to write off a generation or two of children and fathers, a case can be made for policy passivity. The current rift between black men and women may be simply a transitional trauma in the process of birthing a better culture. It's also possible that black women will solve some of their problems by marrying in larger numbers outside their race. But at this moment in history new developments inside and outside the inner city may provide new opportunities for social policy to reach the young black male.

The level of promise can easily be overstated. First, it's harder to help poor black men get jobs than poor black women, in part because many employers perceive women to be more trainable, a better employment risk. Second, as the Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson persuasively contends, employment does not necessarily make black men more likely to marry. (Whether this is because of slavery's legacy or because the decently employed black male has so many romantic options that he may not be inclined to choose just one is a live sociological question.) Still, inside ghettos the market for crack has significantly weakened in recent years, and no equally profitable illicit product has yet replaced it. Thus the appeal of "the honest eight" -- the legitimate job -- may be quietly increasing among men, along with the appeal of a breadwinning woman. And outside ghettos, more demonstrably, there's a rich new body of knowledge, gleaned from welfare reform, about how to bring the seemingly unemployable into the economic mainstream.

It's worth recalling that for decades the government failed miserably in a series of schemes to encourage welfare mothers to work. But in the 1990s rigorous evaluations of local welfare-to-work programs provided a detailed blueprint from which the current law was constructed. That new law contained a vital acknowledgment: rectifying disincentives and adjusting outlooks among the poor costs more in the short run than issuing welfare checks. Since 1996 we've been willing to pay that short-term cost in behalf of low-income women. Unfortunately, most poor black men lack the singular qualification that made their female counterparts the object of sustained intellection and public money: consumption of taxpayers' dollars in the form of monthly welfare checks.

What if unemployed fathers who owed child support were mandated to participate in work-related activities or community service? What if they then received stipends while learning skills or searching for jobs with the assistance of community-based programs that have established a track record in helping women? Program evaluations tentatively find that intense, employment-oriented programs for disadvantaged fathers increase the likelihood of their working, paying child support, and -- for the most estranged fathers -- becoming more involved with their kids. Although the 1996 law allows states to spend welfare-reform money on such programs, a 2000 survey found that most states chose not to mandate them. And in the states that were willing to invest in men, stiff remedies for their disadvantages consistently lost out to soft, milky ones. Thus today poor noncustodial fathers can easily avail themselves of any number of group-therapy-like programs to inculcate responsible fatherhood. But if those fathers take the government hint, find a job, and actually marry the similarly encouraged mothers of their children, the newlyweds will face a significant increase in their tax burden because of the way the Earned Income Tax Credit is structured. As both the old and new welfare systems have demonstrated, financial incentives can change family patterns. But for fathers many of those incentives still run in the wrong direction.

The left used to argue that a narrow population neglected would erupt into a wide public threat. This is perhaps the moment to invoke the specter of long, hot summers and armed, envenomed men. But in truth inner-city women, not outsiders, are the ones who will bear -- are bearing -- the brunt of the black gender gap.

Nonetheless, and beyond all expectation, many of those women have managed to hold up their end of the new social contract. As they raise the next generation, a generation that of course includes males, it is perhaps not just intimate family ties but larger civic ones that merit re-examination. Low-income men who have dropped out of the labor force obviously lack the innocence and promise of, say, the dozens of tiny riders on the U8, clinging like limpets to mothers who will shortly deliver them to Kiddies Kollege, All My Children, and the other bleak federally funded nurseries clustering around the U8's points of debarkation. But for better or worse, the long-term well-being of those children -- and of their country -- depends less on their day care than on their fathers.