Katherine S. Newman - No Shame in My Game: The Working Poor in the Inner City

S OME OF MY BEST IDEAS have come to me while riding around in the backseat of New York City cabs. The drivers themselves are often the source of inspiration, but the seeds of this particular volume were planted while gazing out the window of a yellow cab as it tried to weave its way through central Harlem on an early Monday morning in 1989. I was on my way from my home on Harlem's far west side to La Guardia Airport, headed for a meeting, and late as usual. No one crosses Manhattan on 125th Street at eight on a workday morning expecting a fast ride. This trip was proving no exception. It took nearly forty minutes to crawl twenty blocks, but since I was still half asleep it didn't matter.

The car's slow creep gave me time to ponder a fast-approaching deadline. I had promised to write a paper for a conference on urban poverty at Northwestern University that was to focus especially on jobless neighborhoods. Mulling over what I might contribute, I was staring out the window at the streets of central Harlem, a ghetto not unlike the inner-city enclaves my colleagues were describing as locked in downward spirals of unemployment and despair.

Mired in traffic, my cab passed slowly down the main thoroughfare of Harlem, inching past one bus stop after another. Standing at the bus shelters were lines of men and women dressed for work, holding the hands of their children on their way to day care and the local schools. Black men in mechanic's overalls, women in suits-drinking coffee from Dunkin Donuts cups, reading the New York Post, fussing with their children's backpacks-tapped their feet on the ground, waiting for the buses trying to maneuver toward them, caught in the same maddening traffic. The portals of the subways were swallowing up hordes of commuters who had given up on the buses. Meanwhile, people walking purposefully to work were moving down the sidewalks, flowing around the bus shelters, avoiding the outstretched arm of the occasional beggar, and ignoring the insistent calls of the street vendors selling clothing and videotapes from tables set up along the edge of the sidewalk. It was Monday morning in Harlem, and as far as the eye could see, thousands of people were on their way to work.

The driver finally gave up on the main boulevard and turned off onto a parallel street, hoping to gain some advantage. Here the shops of 125th Street gave way to burned-out, bombed-out brownstones, once Harlem's pride and joy, now decorated with graffiti and littered with crack vials. Stairs and stoops were broken down, windows were covered in iron bars. At least one building on every block was boarded up altogether, plastered with large notices announcing evictions or health hazards. 126th Street looks the part of the hard, broken-down ghetto. Yet upstairs, in dozens of second-floor windows, hand-lettered signs advertise the Pentecostal churches within. I had walked through this neighborhood on the occasional Sunday. Little girls in patent-leather shoes and their best pink coats could be seen on their way to services, stepping gingerly over the drunks passed out on the sidewalk and the broken glass sprayed in the gutters. These storefront churches have a lively following. Harlem Pentecostalists still host bigtent preachers who roll into town to spread the gospel on summer nights, and open-air crowds in the hundreds gather underneath awnings erected over parking lots to hear the traveling ministers, just as their grandparents did in the southern towns from which so many of Harlem's older residents hail.