Dash follows Rosa’s day-to-day struggles and traces her family history; what he finds is fascinating and heartbreaking. Rosa Lee’s grandparents carry their bottom-rung social status and their sense of racially-limited options with them to Washington, D.C., where they seek to escape the harsh life of North Carolina sharecroppers. Uneducated and unskilled, menial labor and domestic work are their only means of survival and the grandparents pass this emphasis on to their children. The cycle continues as Rosetta, Rosa Lee’s mother, “educates” her daughter by preparing her to survive the only way she’s ever known, teaching her to wash, cook and clean. Dash thus follows an unbroken line of poverty up from the South into the vastly different circumstances of Rosa Lee’s life in the inner city.

Rosa Lee refuses the path of domestic work because she is unwilling and afraid to be at the whims of white employers. Then, acting in part out of adolescent rebellion, she becomes pregnant with her first child, Bobby, at fourteen. She has another, Ronnie, at fifteen, and then marries at sixteen. The marriage lasts only four months. In all, she has eight children by six different men. She begins shoplifting as a way to have nice things she can’t afford. Her first contact with drugs is also the result of needing money. Of her eight children, two —Eric and Alvin—somehow escape their mother’s legacy; all the others follow her into drug dependence (Rosa Lee is a heroin addict), criminality, poverty, and in the case of her eldest son and daughter, the contraction of HIV. Her oldest son, Bobby, dies of it. Finally, in 1995, so does Rosa.

In all this horror, Dash’s book shows the mystery of sin and responsibility as it works its way through generations. That Rosa Lee and her family were sinned against is evident in Dash’s tracing of the family’s roots (the discovery, for instance, that Rosa Lee’s older sister was conceived when her sharecropper mother was raped by a white overseer). Yet equally clear is that Rosa Lee also bears responsibility for her choices. As our understanding of Rosa Lee as a human being deepens, the inevitable questions come. We interviewed Leon Dash and asked him some of these questions.

Did your greatest shock come over Rosa involving her own children in crime?

Well, I was familiar with the oldest child in an underclass family becoming part of the parents’ criminal activity, or providing money for the family by some illegal means with no questions asked by the parents. But all of Rosa Lee’s children were brought into her criminal activity. It was for what she always called “survival.” Rosa, for instance, would buy a brick of marijuana and her children, right on down to the youngest, would sit around the kitchen table and cut this brick into what is called “dime bags.”

And you found this to be true of other families, this passing on of criminal behavior?

Yes. It’s part of the Urban Institute’s definition of the underclass, that the criminal behavior is generational.

But you say Rosa Lee would call this her way to survive. Did her government assistance fall short?

I knew from a past project I had done on teen pregnancy that welfare assistance is not enough to cover the necessities of life. I had seen firsthand that these families on welfare would regularly have no food in the house by the end of the month. This was also true for Rosa Lee and her family.

If the government made you poverty czar with full authority to change things from the ground up, what would be the first thing you would change?

Education is the single most important thing. It has not been working and this is not just a blip in history. Rosa Lee went to school in the 1940s. She, her children, grandchildren, and now her great-grandchildren have not gotten an education that would help them. Three of her five grandchildren can’t read. Rosa Lee dropped out of school in the seventh grade because she was pregnant. But pregnancy aside, could she do seventh grade work? No. She couldn’t even read. The problem is that the educational system is approaching children from the inner city in a conventional manner, attempting to teach these kids as if they were kids from middle-class schools. The educators refuse to deal with the real educational difficulties these kids bring with them to school.

How would you deal with it?

First, you can’t put a teacher in a classroom with thirty aggressive, attacking, and profane kids and expect that teacher to teach. You have this middle-class teacher in with these kind of kids and they just drive her nuts. So, instead, have only five kids with a teacher. You must provide a situation where learning can actually happen and not just a teacher being the sergeant administering discipline and keeping order. And I mean this has to happen starting in kindergarten, not just junior high or high school.

But when I talk about these kind of things, people get very upset. They say it is unfair to send a disproportionate amount of their tax dollars to go to support these underclass kids. Why should they? What I try to say to these people is that you’re going to pay for it in other ways—in prisons, in police, welfare, or even by having your car hijacked.

The poverty czar then would need to appeal to self-interest to see his reforms through?

If this poverty czar proposes these kind of educational reforms, he’ll probably have to resign before he’s out of office. He will become a lightning rod for these issues people are angry about. It’s like talking about religion or politics; opinions about this are really charged with emotion. People don’t want to pay more taxes than they have to; they want to have more money for themselves. So a poverty czar would just have to know he’ll never make it to the end of his term. The best he could do is raise these issues and get things moving in the right direction. But, of course, what we really need is the political will to deal with these kind of underclass issues. Right now we don’t have that. We need to have people in politics who are willing to sacrifice their careers to deal with these issues.

Compassion could give us this political will, but how are we going to be inspired to this kind of compassion, especially in this time of politically scapegoating the poor?

I don’t know. Honestly I don’t. We need a charismatic leader, but we don’t have one. I just don’t know. I was giving a talk recently and a man stood up and said regarding Rosa Lee, “Why are you so sympathetic with this person?” He was one of the angry ones. I said that I didn’t really see myself as sympathetic. I mean, I had learned about how Rosa Lee had prostituted her eleven-year-old daughter, Patty. Who wouldn’t be repulsed by such a thing? Of course I’m not sympathetic to that. “But,” I said to him, “I guess I’m just not as eager to condemn her as you. I can’t judge her as harshly or easily as you.”

This man was one of the “haves” who cannot understand the “have nots,” who simply see people like Rosa Lee as morally reprehensible. These “haves” keep telling the “have nots” to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. I’m here to remind them, “Hey, these people don’t even have bootstraps! Give them a break!”

So the problem is that these “haves” don’t understand that if they grew up in the same circumstances from the time they were born, they might not be the person they are today?

Absolutely. I would not be who I am today had I grown up in Rosa Lee’s circumstances. There’s no way! And that’s what I try to remember and tell others, “Hey, there, but for the grace of God, go I.”

What main insight do you hope the average middle-class American would gain from reading your book?

That there is an underclass. That it is growing and it’s a problem for all of us.

What practical steps could the average middle-class American take to help with the problems of the underclass?

Mentor one child. Tutor one child. Alvin and Eric, the two of Rosa Lee’s children who made it out of poverty, both had mentors (Gartrell Franklin and Nancy McAllister) who helped them at crucial points in their lives.

If you could go back in time to when Rosa Lee was young, do you think that kind of intervention, mentoring, might have made her story come out differently?

It’s funny, Rosa Lee used to say to me, “Mr. Dash, I wish I would have known you when I was younger. You could have helped me.” But I would tell her that I didn’t think when she was a young woman she would have listened to me.

Could you give me an example of how Rosa Lee’s limited range of choices counter the simple solutions offered to her?

In Rosa Lee’s case, what jobs are available to her? She can’t read. There are few jobs for you if you can’t read. She can’t work at any kind of hard labor because she’s an older woman in poor health. So in a case like hers, simply moving someone off welfare will not guarantee he/she will get a job. People also don’t want to deal with the history behind this, the whole history of racism that has played its part in lives of those like Rosa Lee. Fifty-seven percent of the underclass are black.

An especially haunting moment comes when Rosa Lee remembers her grandfather who was a poor sharecropper from North Carolina. She recalls how he never laughed, and one day she asked him why. He says, “We had such a hard time down in them sticks I guess I just don’t see nothin’ to laugh about.” And Rosa Lee didn’t understand this answer.

Right. That shows how the effects of racism came down to Rosa Lee without her even understanding what happened to her. Her mother Rosetta raised her according to what she knew from growing up in the South, which meant if you were a black woman you learned to do domestic work to survive.

Does racism continue to play a part in the poverty of the inner cities?

Yes, it does. One explanation is that people see poverty as a minority problem. This I think is due to the fact that the main media are located in urban centers and the reporters are simply too lazy— quite honestly—too lazy to go out and show the other faces of poverty in rural areas. Although the majority of those in poverty are black, there is still a large population of whites who are in places like southern and western West Virginia, Kentucky, and also in the upper peninsula of Michigan. So then it’s difficult to get funding for all who qualify for programs like Headstart, which is a proven program, because people don’t want their money to go to what they see as a primarily minority problem.

You point out that as we become more of a technological society there are less and less jobs for low-skilled workers. As a result future generations such as Rosa Lee’s grandchildren and great-grandchildren, trapped in the cycle of poverty, will have even fewer opportunities. If there is no intervention in their lives, what do you see in the future for them?

I was quoting there from the Swedish sociologist, Gunnar Mydral. He predicted as far back as 1962, in a book called Challenge to Affluence, the emergence and growth of the underclass which we are seeing today. As far as what will happen in the future? The underclass, according to the Urban Institute, is growing at a rate of 8% (that was how fast it was growing at the 1990 census). Now some sociologists are beginning to refer to the underclass as an undercaste. That’s because they see the dividing line as so definite, they don’t see any way for movement out of that underclass. The divide is that great they don’t see any solutions to this division. So this trend is growing and it’s a problem that’s not just going to go away. Also you must remember that these people in the underclass—2.7 million in 1990—they don’t even appear in the unemployment statistics.

How is that?

They have never held a job long enough to be considered employed, or they have never been employed, so they aren’t considered unemployed. So this group is not even represented in these important statistics. They’re invisible.

Near the end of her life, Rosa Lee is received back into her childhood church with open arms. Do you see anything more that her church or churches in general could do for those in poverty?

Yes, I think especially mentoring and tutoring programs are important. They can show a child another way of life they might never see otherwise. Mentoring and tutoring are two tremendous ways to help.

First published in Cornerstone (ISSN 0275-2743), Vol. 26, Issue 111 (1997), p. 33-34
© 1997 Cornerstone Communications, Inc.
Electronic version may contain minor changes and corrections from printed version.