“Amen,” several of the men repeat in whispers that overlap each other like the small waves slapping the river edge.
Above New York, white stars pierce the sky. Everything appears too sharp and dramatic in the sparkling cold, including the quiet when the screams abruptly stop. A small animal, probably a rat, shuffles through the dried leaves at the corner of the tunnel’s mouth, but the world seems less hostile in the quiet.
Then the baby cries a strong, demanding bleat. The men look at the ground or at nothing, seemingly unmoved. They were familiar with death in the tunnels. Birth was something new.
“Should we go in?” asks Fred. His heavy-lidded eyes make him look dimly criminal and threatening, an effect he deliberately enhances on the street. Now, even while standing innocently outside a manger scene, he looks as guilty as a thief.
“Naw,” Butch says. “Wait for Ronda.”
A woman’s figure walks almost bouncing out of the tunnel’s mouth.
“It’s a boy!” Ronda announces, her eyes tired but lively. “Sally’s fine.”
The group moves from the December night toward the underground home of Sally and Tim, their blank expressions thawing into avuncular pride.
“Man, our first tunnel baby! Man!” exults Butch, shaking his head and smiling brightly. He leans over and smacks Shorty on the top of his head. “Shorty, man, you was a mess, brother,” he says, smiling more broadly.
“You weren’t no calm chicken neither,” says Fred, elbowing Butch as tension releases into exaggerated bonhomie.
The men gather wood as they walk deeper into the tunnel, adding it to the campfire they had left when Sally’s screams became too near and personal. The flames leap and warmth returns with swigs from a bottle of Thunderbird that is passed around, and the men spend the last of the night expressing wonder and even awe at the idea that a baby has joined their community.
Sally and Tim live in the tunnel for a week after the birth, but when I return a couple of weeks later, Ronda says that Sally, a white woman in her late twenties, and Tim, a black man in his early forties, have gone back to Brooklyn. Sally is living with her sister, Ronda says, while Tim looks for work.
The baby was fine, but the tunnel community is glad they have gone.
“We’ll miss them and all that,” says Shorty, “but this ain’t no place for a baby. A tunnel ain’t no place for a baby.”
Butch is most pleased that the couple left.
“It’s too much responsibility having a baby,” he says. “We always had to think about getting things for it, and making sure it was warm. I told Tim he had no business keeping his wife and baby underground. He was risking all of us. People up top were gonna start hearing the baby cry, and you know, if the cops came down and found it, they’d find a reason to arrest us all and shut down the tunnel.”
Tim was reluctant to leave. “He liked it here,” Butch says. “He didn’t like to ask no one for help.” Tim apparently wanted to raise the child in the tunnels, but the community threatened to alert the authorities.
“We would’ve told someone sooner or later,” says Juan. “No baby could live down here with us.”
Most of the homeless who attended the baby’s birth have no intention of visiting Tim and Sally. Other underground communities are close-knit, but this one is more akin to being homeless on the streets, accepting the passing, fragile nature of relationships, willing to allow people to float in and out of their lives. Some also deliberately insulate themselves against disappointment in others by staying aloof.
Shorty, not yet callused in this way, hopes to keep in touch with the tunnel baby. “Sure, I’ll see Little Shorty,” he beams at the thought of his namesake. “They’ll bring him down to visit his uncles.” He entertains an idea fleetingly. “Maybe I’ll pass him on the street one day.”
“Naw,” says Butch. “Little Butch is better off staying away. He wouldn’t want to see your ugly face, anyway,” he grins.
Everyone seems to name the baby after himself except for Ronda, who refers to the child as Joey—”because he looks like a little kangaroo,” she explains. Eventually they accept that he is Little Tim.
A BIRTH UNDERGROUND IS A RARITY. PREGNANT WOMEN ARE USUally urged by the tunnel homeless to get proper care. If they refuse to go, authorities are usually informed where to find them, particularly if the women are addicts unable to care for themselves.
Nell, who is thirty-one years old, has been wandering in the tunnels for days, stoned and asking for money for food. Her body is emaciated, but she is hugely pregnant. She doesn’t know it.
“I don’t know why I’m hungry all the time,” she says, looking vacantly to the side. “It ain’t drugs. I don’t do no drugs no more. I’ve gone straight,” she says unconvincingly.
I ask if she is pregnant, and she looks at me, confused.
“You mean a baby?” she asks, muddled. “Naw, it ain’t that. My belly’s always been big. Maybe though,” she adds as the thought sinks in. “Ain’t bled for a while.”
She turns out to be seven months pregnant. Her baby is born in a hospital, trembling, addicted to crack cocaine.
Some expectant mothers in the tunnels are ignorant of how to care for themselves. One refuses juice and even food at a soup kitchen several times before a worker suggests she needs it for the child.
“Really?” she asks, clearly delighted at the prospect of eating again. “I thought I shouldn’t eat.”
The kitchen stays quiet for several minutes. “She didn’t know she could eat,” a homeless man at another table explains to a friend in a whisper. Soon everyone nods their understanding. No one laughs.
LITTLE TIM WAS TAKEN FROM THE TUNNELS BUT MANY CHILDREN ARE brought into them. Their parents are not abusive or even negligent. They often want only to preserve their families, preferring the tunnels to losing their children. These parents refuse shelters because there, they say, the children are taken from them by the Health and Human Services Department. For this reason, many homeless parents are as wary of social workers as they would be of secret police. They remind me at times of dissidents in Moscow I knew when I was a child living there in the seventies, who would say nothing of substance when they might be overheard. Underground children usually have only one parent, the mother, who says she uses the tunnels only as temporary shelter until she can send the children to relatives or decide whether to put them in foster care or up for adoption.
Underground communities in which children live semipermanently, like J.C.’s community under Grand Central, are extremely secretive about their young ones.
J.C. told me initially that his community had no children, but when he allows me to visit it, I encounter several. “I didn’t lie,” he insists. “There are not children here. You can’t be a child down here.” After a moment, he adds, “We have adults as young as five.”
J.C. and the mayor of his community refuse to say how many children live with them. On a visit, I counted at least four, but speaking to them is almost impossible. An adult is always present and intervenes by sending the children to play or standing directly between them and me.
OF ALL THE PEOPLE I MET IN THE TUNNEL, THE CHILDREN GAVE ME the most hope. Many of them seemed healthy and happy, undeterred and unaware of the implications of their environment.
Actually, it was their absence that made me upset, the evidence of their existence before I ever met them. I am still haunted by doll’s eyes that I saw on my first trip into the tunnels with Sergeant Henry. I don’t recall their color, but I will never forget their stare in a hastily abandoned recess above the train tracks that had served as home for a homeless family. She lay on the floor, her dirt-smudged face half-hidden behind well-stroked hair, lonely and deserted.