The Best American Newspaper Narratives of 2012

Breaking Free

Breaking Free The Washington Post December 9, 2012, Suburban Edition By Anne Hull Week after week, the mailman climbed the steep hill of Shenango Street to the house with the busted porch steps. "Dear Miss Rouzzo," the letters began, or "Dear Tabitha Rouzzo." The college catalogues barely fit in the mailbox. They stuck out like gift-wrapped presents against white aluminum siding gone dingy from decades of wear. On the porch were three new Linen Breeze decorative candles—a nice try, thought the actual Tabitha Rouzzo, who came walking up the hill every afternoon with her mind on the mailbox. The 11th-grader seldom brought anyone home, and when she did she would sort of draw in a breath and say, "Well, here it is." Her Victoria's Secret bag was crammed with track clothes and school papers. At 17, with dark hair and dark eyes, she was a version of the actress Anne Hathaway if Anne Hathaway had stars tattooed on her hip, chipped blue nail polish and lived two blocks from the projects. 102 TheBestAmericanNewspaperNarrativesof2012 Tabi shared the rental house with her mother and sometimes her mother's boyfriend. Her four older siblings were grown. None of them had graduated from high school. They wore headsets and hairnets to jobs that were so futureless that getting pregnant at 20 seemed an enriching diversion . Born too late to witness the blue-collar stability that had once been possible, they occupied the bottom of the U.S. economy. "I'm running from everything they are," she said. The question was whether Tabi could outrun the odds against her. She knew that colleges sent out millions of letters to 11th-graders who took the Princeton Review prep course. The whole Dear Tabitha campaign was about as personal as fliers from Tire Express. But nearing the end of her junior year of high school, without a single item of value to secure her future—not even a $50 U.S. savings bond from a departed relative—the mail was all she had. So she sweated it out the old-fashioned way, joining Spanish Club, Chess Club, Bible Club, Art Club and the track team, where she may have been the worst pole-vaulter in the Pennsylvania-Ohio border region. On Wednesday nights, she was at church waving her praise hands in the air, and on Friday night, it was a school production of No, No, Nanette. With no working vehicle at home, she had to walk most places. You could see her hoofing across the industrial landscape, her pink bag slung over her shoulder. Tabi kept the college mail upstairs in her bedroom. She wrote back to 22 schools that offered biochemistry programs. Her goal was to be a forensic scientist in North Carolina. "It seems nice," Tabi said, though she had never been. She had never flown on an airplane. Her laptop was a secondhand PC she bought from a guy for $60. Her bedroom window overlooked a field strewn with Filet-O-Fish wrappers and Keystone Ice empties and, lower in the valley, the stacks at Ellwood Quality Steels chugging smoke. The Washington Post 103 Long before the recession, New Castle was a place of vanishing opportunity . It was 50 miles from Pittsburgh but felt farther, and while Steelers banners hung from awnings, the hard hat was a remnant of the past. Retail and food service jobs now outnumbered manufacturing jobs in the county. The top three employers were the hospital, state government and Liberty Mutual Insurance Company. Number seven was Wal-Mart, where Tabi's older brother worked in dairy until he was fired for stealing an energy drink. Tabi heard stories about the olden days. She came from welders and ceramic production workers. But, to Tabi, the sprawling Shenango China factory where her grandfather and great-grandfather worked was just a boarded-up place on the way to Wal-Mart. Her New Castle was the one that existed now: white, working class, with poverty that had deepened into the second and third generations. Nearly three-fourths of the students in Tabi's school qualified for free or reducedprice lunches, and one-third of New Castle families with children younger than 18 had incomes beneath the poverty level. During the 2012 election, the campaigns of President Obama and Mitt Romney visited Pennsylvania a combined 38 times. With Ohio next door, the candidates and their wives barnstormed the...