Jelly Roll: A Black Neighborhood in a Southern Mill Town

10. Leroy and Rose McCoy: The Welfare Elite

CHAPTER 10 Leroy and Rose McCoy The Welfare Elitel Driving up to the McCoy residence is like looking for the office at a junk yard. Set apart from the other houses on the street, its ample yard has become the graveyard for a white Fleetwood Cadillac , 1970 vintage, a mid-seventies golden Chrysler LeBaron, several battered pickup trucks, as well as a quantity of furnishings, overstuffed chairs, television sets and a washing machine. Playing among these ruins are perhaps a halfdozen children from diapers to near teens, who have in turn surrounded themselves with bicycles in assorted sizes and toys of every description. This is the largest welfare family in town, incorporating three generations with just the right credentials to maximize public support. Leroy McCoy, the patriarch of the family, is a rotund middle-aged man with graying beard and an ever-present baseball cap to cover his balding head. Like the town elders, he is an inveterate porch sitter. With a bowl of snacks at his side, he sits for hours yelling frequent directions and admonitions to the children at play. Many years ago he decided it wasn't in his nature or best interests to answer the six o'clock sawmill whistle every morning. Declaring himself retired at forty, he sent his wife off to EI Dorado to find work in a restaurant, lMany superficial details describing this family have been altered to protect their identity. 81 employment that she has kept to this day, while he pursued more creative outlets for his energy and wit. His next order of business was to advise the welfare office that his withdrawal from the work force was due to ill health (his obesity had, in fact, resulted in high blood pressure and an irregular heart rhythm), leaving his large family with only his wife's meager income. His household of eight children quickly qualified for maximum A.F.D.C. and food stamps, amounting to nearly $600 per month. Leroy liked to fish, and before long, always short of ready cash, he added a few nets to his fishing tackle and concentrated on catching large catfish and buffalo carp to sell around town. His cash business thrived and in no way interfered with his official "no visible means of support" designation at the welfare office. His family was delighted when Leroy had found work pulling in $100200 per week much of the year and established himself as a regular vendor in Calion, selling fish up and down the streets from the back of his pickup truck. In an expansive mood on his porch he often advised the less fortunate to give up their heavy labors and go in business with him. Meanwhile, his industrious wife, who had borne him no less than nine children from her early marriage at fourteen, was still young and vigorous enough to keep their large household together, doing almost all the cooking, washing, and cleaning single-handed. At the same time she held down a full-time job as a short-order cook uptown. Rose was remarkable, a handsome woman, large and robust with a sunny disposition that by all reckoning was sorely tried by a demanding home life. With such a melange of children in every stage of growth, her weekends were often spent in the emergency room at the hospital where everything from a runny nose to a broken arm was professionally cared for under the family's Medicaid qualifications. Undeterred by long hours at work, Rose seems always at the vital center of her household, which still includes five of her own children plus three of her children's children, all ofwhom were born out of wedlock to her teenage girls. Their house, relatively small, is literally packed to the walls with children: Rose's own minor children ranging in age from eight to sixteen years; and in addition, her daughters' three, aged two months to two and one-half years. The sixteen-year-old, Helen Jean, in circumstances common in Jelly Roll households, became pregnant by an unaccounted-for father, and chose not to have an abortion, giving birth and bringing the baby home to her mother, then returned to high school. Leroy comments, "they drop these little surprises on us like they was givin' us a Christmas present." Helen Jean, not a particularly attractive young girl, short and 82 overweight, nonetheless became sexually active and "popular" when she...