Doing Time on the Outside: Incarceration and Family Life in Urban America

Chapter 6. Falling Apart: Thelma & David

Chapter 6 Falling Apart: Thelma & David Thelma is sixty-two. While she never married, she had ‹ve children by a man who, though she doesn’t like to talk about it, had a wife and another family with whom he spent most of his time and on whom he spent nearly all of his money. Although the two families never spoke to one another, their long-term affair was in many ways an open secret, as in the early years they attended the same church where Thelma’s father was minister. While her children describe their youth as hardscrabble living, often without enough food or clothing to go around, Thelma remembers the family church more than anything else. All my kids were baptized and belonged to the church, all of them. And my son, David, he was a usher in the church, a junior usher. All his sisters had a group, they sang. I sang with a group for thirty-six years, though I’m stopping now. And his father had a group, the Gospel Singers, a gospel group. And they went to Sunday school and church every Sunday. The bus picked them up at the roadside school, and when they came back, I was ready to go to church. All my children belong to the church. My father was the preacher, and my mother was the organist at the church at the age of six until she died. While most of her children moved away, her youngest two, her daughter Rachel and her son David, stayed in the District and helped to care for her as she got older. David is a young-looking man in his mid-thirties. His father abandoned his mother soon after he was born, so David remembers seeing his father only brie›y, he says, “maybe eight times in my whole life.” He used to drive up to his father’s house and park in the convenience Doing Time on the Outside 66 store across the street, watching his father’s legitimate family, wondering what life was like for his father’s other sons and daughters. David says that he wants to be there for his own children, to provide for them, so they can grow up knowing they have what he didn’t, a father who cared. Because I think that had my father been there to at least try to do more, that a lot of that stress that Mother had to bear, the responsibility, it would’ve been less of a burden. She could’ve did a lot of other things with her life. And so that’s why it’s just like, since that I’ve been gone, things are real hard for her. See, in my father’s absence, my mother had to do everything. But at some point I got tired of asking my mother to do this and do that. Because as you see her do so much for you for so long, and her taking everything that she get, trying to pay rent. She male female incarcerated most affected deceased primary household secondary household romantic marriage separated divorced Thelma David Sandra Davida Tonique Charles Carla Cathleen Fig. 8. Thelma and David’s family worked six days a week. Traveling from D.C. to Spring‹eld, Virginia, everyday, getting so to the point now, she don’t have—she working six days a week, but she don’t have nothing for herself. She taking her drawers, raggedy drawers, putting them back on the sewing machine, stitching them up just to put them back on just so we will have something to wear. But then it came a point in, like junior high . . . I said, “Damn. I got to help my mother.” I mean things got so bad for my mother, she started defecating on herself. Bowels breaking, she putting too much pressure on herself. At some point I say, man, “Fuck this, man.” I started getting with these little dealers—at the time they was older than me, but they was still young—hanging out, where I wasn’t doing it at ‹rst. Once I started hanging out and somebody showed me $20,000 in cash. “Where you get it from?” He said, “Shit, I got this in a matter of minutes.” That’s all it took. David’s claim that he got involved in drug dealing to help out his mother is a theme that...