MY TEN-YEAR-OLD FRIEND KRISTEN GAYLE TOLD ME ABOUT JULIE, who lives with her parents and four-year-old brother in a shack in a tunnel. Julie is eight years old with a brilliant smile and tired eyes. She looks much like other girls her age, but perhaps she is a little slimmer. She boasts, with a mischievous little smile, that she has more secrets than any girl at Public School 125. No one at school knows she lives in a tunnel, she whispers. They think she lives in Harlem’s Douglas Projects, but only her mail goes to that address where her mother’s friend keeps it for them.
The hardest part, she says, is not letting anyone close enough to want to play with her after school. But that’s not so difficult, she admits, because they already laugh at her clothes and sometimes at the way she smells. She says that it’s not that bad; she has her parents and her little brother to play with.
“Papa says this is best,” she explains earnestly. “We’re proving ourselves and how strong we are. When we get enough money, we’re going to move away from New York, and we’ll have our own little white house. I’m going to have my own room. Everything in it will be pink and pretty. Everything I wish for I’m going to have because I’ve been such a good girl. And I’ll grow up beautiful,” she says, her large brown eyes sparkling with that dream.
When she feels too alone and sad, she has an itch to tell her secret, but then she thinks how much she loves her parents and doesn’t want to be taken from them. She comes so close to telling, she says, drawing a deep breath, that she is ashamed. She thinks she’ll burst, just burst, but she keeps it in, she says and smiles.
Julie isn’t an American citizen. She and her family were born in Haiti and illegally entered the country in Miami. Paul, Julie’s father, brought the family to New York looking for his sister-in-law’s brother. When they arrived at his address, they learned he had just moved with his family to Minnesota. Neighbors allowed them to stay a few weeks, but then they moved to shelters and from there to the tunnels because of the constant fear they would be deported.
Paul does menial labor jobs while saving money to go to Minnesota. They do not seek welfare or other social services and go to soup kitchens only infrequently, to avoid drawing attention. For months Julie did not attend school, but her mother, who was once a teacher, insisted that she go. The family decided her education was worth the risk of exposure.
Julie’s world, to hear her tell it, is full of only good things. When she sees homeless people alone on the streets, she thinks how lucky she and her family are to have each other. When she hears children make cruel jokes about kids who live in shelters, she’s glad she has kept her secret. Someday, she says, her brother will be the president of the United States and will change things.
What things?
“The way people treat each other, and he’ll make sure everyone has a home, no matter where they come from. And,” she giggles, “he’ll make candy free.”
When next I seek out Julie and her family, I’m told they have moved to Minnesota.
CHILDREN ADAPT BETTER TO LIFE UNDERGROUND THAN ADULTS, ACcording to Harold Deamues of ADAPT (Association for Drug Abuse Prevention and Treatment), who found numerous children living with parents in tunnel communities. “They were running around like, you know, ‘this is my house, this is my doormat,’ like any other kid in his house. They were jumping off the walls. They get used to the roaches and rats as if they are pets. So I guess they are normal children until they get old enough to say, ‘What am I doing here? There’s more to life than this.’”
Before that self-awareness sets in, young children can become so secure in the darkness and so comfortable in their communities that the world aboveground, particularly crowds of people, is frightening.
Teresa, a young mother, meets me in Grand Central with her two young children. Even at rush hour they are easy to spot. The first words from four-year-old Dara is, “Mama, I’m scared.” Her little hand clutches Teresa’s finger more tightly, and the mother draws her closer to her leg. Her three-month-old son, Dwane, is snug at her breast.
They look as destitute as they are. Teresa, who is twenty-five, wears a blue cardigan ripped at the sleeve and missing a button. Dara is outgrowing her thin cloth jumper and is obviously unwashed. The baby is wrapped only in a white blanket, enough for the warm spring evening in the station, but perhaps not in a dank tunnel.
Despite their ragged appearance, no one seems to notice them. Yet Teresa feels everyone is looking at her and the children as if, she says, they are “mole people.”
“We try to be neat,” she says later, “but they can smell us. They know,” she whispers with a nod toward the crowd. “They know we be tunnel people.”
Teresa has tied back her hair neatly in a navy blue kerchief. Her face is young and clean but tired, her eyes unsure. She moves like a colt, an angular body with loose skin over sharp bones. Some movements are unsteady, ungainly, as if she is trying out each move. Her daughter, full of spirit and curiosity, sometimes appears stronger and more self-assured.
Teresa stops under the domed center of the terminal, looking upward as orange sunlight reaches through the windows, revealing a spring sunset.
“Been a long time since I’ve seen that,” she smiles, but quickly looks down protectively on her child.
We sit at McDonald’s as Dara eats, first her own food and then Teresa’s. Only after Dara insists she can’t take another bite does Teresa pick hungrily at the leftovers. Dwane won’t drink the milk. He’s not used to it, she explains, letting him gum and drool a French fry. Teresa normally chews his food. Baby food is as scarce as money in the tunnels, she says.
Teresa refuses to go to any outreach program for fear they will take her children, or worse, call her boyfriend who is the father of the children.
“I know what they say, and I know how it happens,” she says fiercely. “They would say they take the kids for only a day or two but really, you never get them back. I seen it before. I don’t trust no one with my babies.”
Teresa came to the tunnels after a month on the streets. She ran from her abusive boyfriend. “He hit Dara, flung her across the room. He hit me a lot. I love him so much that when he hit me, I think at least he cares. But when I saw the marks on my baby,” she shudders, “I had to leave.”
He came after her to her friends’ home, and not only beat her up but threatened to kill the friends as well. They asked her to leave, and she went on the streets. A tunnel dweller found her and the children in a cardboard box in freezing weather last winter and led her underground. She has been there ever since, living off the generosity of other tunnel people.
She wants to get out of the tunnels before Dara is old enough to remember them. “I don’t want her to remember this,” she looks down at her clothes. “I want her to know I always loved her and took good care of my children.”
But Dara knows things are different. “My mama used to be like a teddy bear,” she says, “all round and always laughing. Now she be all skinny,” she feigns disgust.
Teresa says she is saving money for bus fare to her sister-in-law’s home in the Midwest. I’m skeptical, but a week later I see her off at the bus station, en route to her mother, she says. A drug dealer worked a deal with the bus driver to get her free passage, and tunnel people gave her pocket money, she tells me.
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Roots