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TWO

Thank You, Jesus

“Guess what?” Charlene called to her young nephew Andre as he burst through the front door and bounded up the stairs to his room. Fifteen-year-old Andre and his older brother, as well as his two younger half sisters, mother, and stepfather, were all living with his Aunt Charlene, the seven-member extended family jam-packed into one of the fourteen-foot-wide, shotgun-style row homes that populate much of Camden. In 1970 the Green family had followed the path of so many other African American families in the migration up the coast from their home in Rocky Mount, North Carolina. Ever since, Andre’s mother and her sisters have often offered one another shelter during hard times. In fact, Andre cannot remember a time when he hasn’t shared quarters with some combination of grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. “What?” he replied cautiously, noting the disapproving tone in Charlene’s voice. “You know your old girlfriend?” Andre pictured Sonya in his mind and recalled their on-again-off-again relationship with mixed emotions, impatient now with the way his aunt was drawing out the drama. “Yeah, what about her?” As if unable to hold back the news a second longer, Charlene blurted out just two words: “She pregnant!”

This was indeed a surprise, a shock really, not only to Andre but soon to everyone who heard the news. Andre was the exception to the other kids in the neighborhood—a serious, church-going boy who made the grades in school, stayed off the streets, and carried himself “like a young man,” he tells us later while recreating the scene. “I was always a gentleman type. I was never a gangster type with my pant hanging down and all that.” As the information about Sonya registered, Andre gathered as much shock, disappointment, and anger into his voice as he could muster and shouted, “Oh, man!” before stomping off to his room and slamming the door for added effect. But, as he tells us with a sly chuckle, it was all a performance for his aunt’s benefit. “I was just doing that as a front around her. When I went to my room I was like, ‘Yes! Thank you, Jesus!’ Boy, I was jumping around, couldn’t tell me nothing! I was happy!” He grins, recalling the moment. “When my aunt and them came around me I be sitting there like, ‘Ah, man, what I’m a do?’ But meanwhile, on the inside I was happy.”

What prompted such enthusiasm in a boy just starting high school? Andre says simply, “Because that was me. I always wanted my own child. People didn’t understand me. They like, ‘How you gonna take care of this baby? This baby is going to be born in poverty’ and all this stuff. That’s what they was saying.” But Andre shrugged off these negative assessments. “To them it was a mistake, you know. My daughter wasn’t no mistake to me!” He adds, pointing proudly to the sleeping child, Jalissa, “My daughter, she is the bomb!”

Andre makes clear he is no “hit and run” father for whom children are mere trophies of sexual prowess. “I want to be a real father to my kids. I want to not only make a baby but I want to take care of my baby. I want to be there.” He is dedicated to ensuring that Jalissa will grow up “with stuff that I didn’t have,” especially “love from her father. I didn’t have that. She’s got a father that’s there for her, that she knows, that she loves, that she calls ‘da da.’ Oh, she knows her da da!”

Andre is determined not to be like his own father and uncles who are, in his words, “dogs.” “They will create their kids—and they got kids all over the place—but they never really took care of them or spent time with them.” Andre points to four boys around his own age that he’s run into by chance—half brothers he didn’t know existed. He spied the first boy while walking through the neighborhood on the way to visit his cousin. Noting the striking resemblance to himself, Andre asked who his father was. The name the boy offered was the same as Andre’s own father’s. Not long afterward, Andre and his mother were at the grocery store, “and this boy was helping us bag. I said, ‘Mom, that boy look just like one of my dad’s kids.’ I ask him what his dad’s name is. What he say? My dad! I asked him how old he is and he said he was around the same age as me and my younger brother!” Several months later a fight in the schoolyard that pitted Andre and his younger brother against two other boys landed all four in the principal’s office. The school called in Andre’s paternal grandmother—the only adult on the emergency contact list who answered the phone—as part of the disciplinary process, which led to the following scene: “She came to the door and the other boys was like, ‘Grandma!’ And we was like, ‘Grandma?’ And she was like, ‘Ya’ll are brothers.’ We was like, ‘Brothers?’” After these experiences, Andre started to wonder, “Dag, how many kids do my dad got?” Contemptuous of his father’s behavior, Andre vowed to do right by his kids when he became a father. “I started saying, ‘If I ever have a child I refuse to let my child go without a father. I want to be there for my child, for her to know that she or he has a father that she can come to, and I’ll be there when she needs me.’ It’s just like I was inspired by my dad treating me wrong to take care of my kid.”

Fast forward two years. Jalissa is seventeen months old, and Andre is more involved with her than ever. In fact, Andre’s mother now has custody. Andre had visited Jalissa one afternoon when she was still an infant and had immediately seen that things were not right. “I happened to go over there one day, and she was lying on the couch. But I could have sworn that it was a doll baby ’cause she was real skinny and her head was big. Her head was big ’cause her body wasn’t at its right weight with her head. And I was like, ‘Oh no.’ I was like, ‘Where’s my baby?’ They was like, ‘Right there!’ I was like, ‘Where?’ They was like, ‘Right there on the couch.’ I said, ‘Give me my baby!’ I took her to the hospital and everything.” The hospital’s social worker reported Jalissa’s condition to the Department of Children and Families, who levied a charge of child neglect and removed the child from Sonya’s care. At Andre’s prompting, his mother went to court to seek custody.

In a tragic and ironic turn of events, just after Andre intervened to rescue Jalissa from Sonya’s neglect, his older brother Charlie was killed for coming between a child and his father. “Charlie had a girlfriend,” Andre tells us, “and he was taking care of her and her son. The son wasn’t his and the father found out that my brother was being a father to the little boy. He shot Charlie in the back.” Andre’s mother has struggled for years with a drug addiction (one reason why Andre, his mother, and his brother and sisters are doubled up with his aunt Charlene), and while she had managed to get clean before the shooting, Charlie’s murder has driven her back to her old habit. While his mother struggles for sobriety, Andre has dropped out of school to care for Jalissa. By all accounts, he is performing the role well. “Every time I take her to church, people say, ‘Oh Andre, you’re doing a beautiful job. That baby is gorgeous. You’re taking care of her; you’re doing her hair nice and stuff.’ I say, ‘Thank you.’ They’re like, ‘Andre I’m very proud of you’ and stuff like that. It feels good.”

When we moved into East Camden and began to study the lives of inner-city fathers, we were eager to learn how they reacted to the news of a pregnancy. Did they “hit” and then “run” like the stereotype exemplified by Timothy McSeed, or did they grit their teeth and determine to face up to their impending responsibilities? Both of our guesses proved wrong; most greeted the news with happiness, and some, like Andre, even with downright delight. But the “happy” reaction, and the complex realities that prompt it, is molded by men’s often-troubled childhoods and the challenging neighborhood environments in which they came of age. If one listens carefully enough, the happy reaction speaks volumes about these men’s highest hopes and deepest desires, and how these will animate men’s subsequent efforts.

Andre was one of the first young men we spoke with after arriving in Camden. We were stunned by his story. We had to ask ourselves whether this guy was for real. Although Andre had not set out to become a father—his liaison with Sonya was a brief and mostly unhappy one—when he hears the news of her pregnancy he is overjoyed. His mother and aunt are not so thrilled. After all, Andre is still in high school, has no job, lives in a neighborhood full of violence and crime, and has long since broken up with the girl who is about to become the mother of his child. Most Americans would probably agree with Andre’s elders that raising a baby under these circumstances is a profound mistake. Yet young men like Andre have their own reasons for welcoming these children into the world.

In our conversations with each father, we explored the story behind how he became a dad, some for the first time like Andre, and some for the second, third, or even the sixth time. We asked each father about every pregnancy he claimed responsibility for. We wanted to know if he had wanted to have a child right then, if and when he had used contraception, and if he had talked about having a baby with the woman he was with at the time. We asked him to think back to the moment when he first heard about the pregnancy and to describe what went through his mind. And we inquired about the reactions of both his and the mother’s family, as well as any advice these kin gave.

REACTIONS TO THE NEWS

Men’s responses ran the gamut—from vehement and panicked denials of paternity to loud shouts of joy—when they first heard about the pregnancy.¹ Only a handful outright rejected the news. A pervasive sexual mistrust—the conviction that women couldn’t be trusted to be faithful—featured large among men who responded this way.² Another handful said they were either shaken or scared or didn’t quite know what to think when they heard about the pregnancy.³ Craig, a black twenty-eight-year-old day laborer was just fifteen, like Andre, and had recently been kicked out of the tenth grade at Camden High when he learned that his girlfriend was pregnant. We ask if he had felt ready to become a father. “No, no, I am not going to sit here and lie to you. No, I was not ready at all.” Craig then says, “When can you actually say that you are ready to have a child at a young age?” Lee, a black forty-two-year-old, part-time construction worker was already twenty-four when his girlfriend conceived. Thinking back, he says his first reaction was, “Run!” explaining, “I didn’t have no job!” Several others say they were unsure how to respond because the woman in question kept changing her story about who the father was.

For one pregnancy in five, men say they responded by “accepting” the news, a generally positive reaction but one tempered with a sobering realization of their new responsibilities. When Marie told Jack, the thirty-three-year-old white father we met in chapter 1, that she was expecting he says he was “excited.” Yet, he admits, “I was a little scared.” When we asked what had him worried, Jack replied, “Responsibility. Staying home all the time instead of hanging out with my friends, the financial costs—diapers, diapers, diapers. Formula! Ow! But I was looking forward to having a little baby running around my house. That’s what I focused on.” Jack took the news in stride, dropped out of college, and got a job. Alex, age thirty-six, was raised in Camden by the oldest of his six siblings; when he was three his mother died and his father abandoned the family. This black father of three was eighteen when he learned his girlfriend was pregnant the first time. Alex’s initial emotion—delight—was quickly overtaken by a second: an almost overpowering sense of duty to his unborn child. “The first thing that hit my mind was, I did not want to be like my dad. This is the summer between the eleventh and twelfth grade, and I said, ‘look ain’t no sense in me going back to school. I need a job.’”

Unadulterated happiness—even joy—was by far the most common reaction though; more than half of all pregnancies were welcomed in this way without reservation.⁴ Byron Jones, age forty-six, whom we met in the previous chapter, is clear about his response to the news: “Shoot! I was happy, man!” Thirty-nine-year-old Amin Jenkins, also from chapter 1, says that during a brief interlude in his late teens when he was not incarcerated, he fathered a son with a woman he was not even together with at the time. Nonetheless, he tells us, he reacted with considerable enthusiasm to the news that this mere acquaintance was pregnant with his child. “Even though I was not in love, I wanted a son.” Many fathers were surprised that we would even ask them this question. “I was glad! It was no major obstacle!” says thirty-three-year-old Steven, a black father of three who works as a casual laborer for a city contractor, describing his reaction to the news that he was going to become a father at age twenty, as if the answer to our question was so apparent that it could be assumed.

In story after story, happy reactions abound. Thirty-six-year-old Omar, perhaps the most troubled, violent, and criminally involved man we spoke with—a black hustler who had even pimped out the mother of his three children—was also puzzled by our query. He exclaimed, “I was happy! All the other girls killed my babies. They had abortions. I said, ‘She’s my first—I’m gonna give her everything.’” Joe, a white forty-five-year-old father of four who drives a horse and carriage for tourists, says simply of his reaction to the news that his first child was on the way, “I wanted a son, and I had a son!”

Forty-six-year-old Roger (who manages a thrift store), twenty-six-year-old Little E. (who works at a butcher shop in the Italian market), and Ozzy, age thirty-five, who does odd jobs and collects SSI (or “disability”) for mental-health problems—all white men—each claim a strong underlying desire to have a child that was galvanized by the news. “I always wanted one!” Roger tells us, to explain his ecstatic reaction. Calvin, who combines maintenance work with occasional jobs with a moving company, was twenty-five when his first child was conceived. He recalls a similar response: “I loved it. I love kids!” This white forty-five-year-old now has five children.

James says that he planned it all out. This white forty-year-old father of four has his own home business assembling computers. Although he was only nineteen at the time his first child was conceived, he claims, “I wanted to have a kid. I wanted to get my girlfriend pregnant and have a baby. Nobody made me that way—that is me, how I came up. I was a working kid. I thought I made a lot of money. I was ready for it.” At the time, he suspected that his girlfriend was having sex with several other men on the side, yet he says, “When I found out she was pregnant everything changed. I was like, ‘I don’t care if she is cheating,’ and at first I was so happy.”

WERE THE PREGNANCIES PLANNED?

Taken together, the happy and accepting reactions to a pregnancy comprise over three-quarters of all responses (see table 2 in the appendix). At least some of the men who were happy at the news thought that they were “ready to become a dad,” as James had, or said they had “always wanted” kids. Yet recall that Andre Green had clearly not set out to have a baby with Sonya. Nonetheless, when faced with the opportunity to embrace a pregnancy, he seizes it with both hands.

A critical ingredient to our story’s arc—high hopes, yet often failed ambitions in relation to fatherhood—is the fact that precious few pregnancies are either actively avoided or explicitly planned. We asked each father to tell us the whole story around each conception, whether he had talked about the possibility of children with his partner beforehand and whether either he or she was using any birth control at the time. We then sorted fathers’ answers into four categories: “planned,” “semiplanned,” “accidental,” and “just not thinking at the time” (see table 3 in the appendix).⁵ Planned pregnancies—cases in which men said they wanted to have a baby at the time and had talked with their partner about it—account for only 15 percent of the total.⁶

Accidental pregnancies—where the couple actively avoids a pregnancy (with birth control) or believes they can’t conceive due to infertility—are as rare as planned pregnancies. Note though that both condoms and the pill are highly effective at preventing pregnancy; thus “accidents” due to contraceptive failure are likely the user’s failure and not the product’s.⁷ When William, a twenty-five-year-old African American father of four who works as a dietary aide at a nursing home, is asked about the conception of his oldest child, he responds, “My girlfriend told me she was taking birth control pills every day faithfully. Somehow she just got pregnant. I don’t see how. I told her I didn’t want none, not yet, and she said she ain’t want none neither.”

Bruce is a white forty-five-year-old father of twins who occasionally finds jobs through a temp agency. Even though he didn’t particularly want children, he didn’t “believe” in safe sex either, because “every time I had any kind of relationship, there is no babies born.” Imagine Bruce’s surprise when after only two months with Debbie, she announced, “I am seven weeks pregnant!” Forty-two years old at the time, Bruce responded with disbelief—“I am shooting blanks!” he exclaimed. “You can’t be pregnant!” The argument was settled when they went for a DNA test. “That was when she found out,” says Bruce, “that I was the father and she was the mother.”

When accidental pregnancy occurs, discussions of abortion often follow. Although some of these pregnancies are terminated, disagreement among the couple often forestalls abortion.⁸ Intriguingly, these men are more likely to oppose than advocate for ending the pregnancy in these circumstances. Taken together, the planned and accidental pregnancies account for only 30 percent of the total. Just over a third are somewhere in between; we call these “semiplanned.” We asked Michael, a forty-one-year-old African American father of an adult son and a four-month-old daughter, whether the conception of his oldest child, at the age of eighteen, was planned. He responded, “Semiplanned. We didn’t sit down and say we wanted to have a baby. It just happened.” “Did you think she might get pregnant?” we asked. “Yeah, but I didn’t care. It was good. I was still a young man. I wasn’t wearing no protection, so it happened.” Men like Michael feel fatherhood’s pull to some degree but haven’t seriously discussed this desire with the woman they are with at the time. Although these men say they were well aware that unprotected sex would lead eventually to a pregnancy, they didn’t seem daunted by the fact (see table 4 in the appendix).

In sum, while a handful of pregnancies are either clearly intended or unintended, many are “semiplanned” or somewhere in between. Yet a rather large number—nearly four in ten—are not on this continuum at all. In these cases men say they were “just not thinking” about the consequences of their actions when conception occurred. Like those in the semiplanned situation, these men say they had no lack of familiarity with the birds and the bees but admit to using condoms only occasionally if at all. They also admit they knew or suspected that their girlfriends were not using birth control, though few say they had bothered to ask. Thomas, for example, is a white twenty-seven-year-old father who says he has worked at practically every type of fast-food franchise in Philadelphia. His first child was conceived when he’d been with Laurie, whom he met at a party, for only six months. Thomas claims he never even considered the fact that she might get pregnant, though he knew she wasn’t consistently taking the pill: “She was missing it,” he says. “We talked about it for just maybe a minute or a half an hour. We said, ‘Let’s have a baby.’ It wasn’t serious—just one of them things, you know?” When asked how he reacted to the news, Thomas recalls, “I was confused, like I wasn’t sure I wanted a child. But I didn’t want an abortion. No, I was against that. It’s not right. If you get pregnant, you get pregnant—you know what I’m saying? And not out of careless sex, ’cause if you don’t want to get pregnant you know what to do.”⁹

Yet what is striking is that relatively few men who conceived while “just not thinking” denied paternity, and none who acknowledged responsibility said that they didn’t want to have the child. Furthermore, nearly all expressed a determination to be actively involved in their child’s life.¹⁰ Bart, for example, a white twenty-seven-year-old who processes orders in a warehouse, has only a tenuous relationship with his two oldest children by a prior partner. He describes his response to his new girlfriend’s pregnancy in this way: “I said to myself, ‘I want to be there for the pregnancy. I want to be there through everything—when she goes to the doctor, when she has the baby, to wake up with the baby in the middle of the night.’”

As we’ve hinted at, though one might suppose that the degree to which the pregnancies were planned or actively avoided would heavily influence men’s reactions to the news of a conception, the correlation is far from perfect. While those with planned and semiplanned pregnancies almost universally welcome the news, those who are “just not thinking” when conception occurs still respond positively—with either happiness or acceptance—more than six times out of ten. Even more amazing, about a third of those who had been explicitly opposed to having children and were taking measures to prevent conception were either happy or accepting when the pregnancy was announced. What are we to make of the surprisingly positive nature of men’s responses?¹¹

Perhaps the men who most eagerly embrace the news of a pregnancy are simply those who are in the best life circumstances. To see if this is so, we turn to the stories of Ozzy and Terrell, who, like Andre Green, were especially enthusiastic. Ozzy, who collects SSI and does odd jobs, is a thirty-five-year-old white father of one. He was twenty-seven when he met Dawn one night on South Street, a strip of loud bars, live music venues, and tattoo parlors, and thus the favorite congregating spot for many of Philadelphia’s working-class youth. Ozzy was out with a group of his friends and Dawn was with her friends, and after the collective laughing, teasing, and flirting was over, the two ended up exchanging phone numbers. Four months later Dawn was pregnant.

There were bigger problems though, aside from the fact that they had known each other such a short time. The first was that Ozzy was an unemployed high school dropout who still lived at home and had developed a problem with a variety of substances, including alcohol, Xanax, Valium, cocaine, and marijuana. The second was that Dawn was only sixteen years old. “I lied to her about my age,” Ozzy admits. “I told her that I was like twenty. Then after a couple of months I started to like her a lot so I told her the truth.” Despite his problems, Ozzy was thrilled—without reservation—by the news of Dawn’s pregnancy. “I always wanted to have a kid,” he told us. “But before I met Dawn I never really found the right person to have one with.”

Terrell, a black nineteen-year-old supermarket stock clerk, was just seventeen when he heard the news about the conception of his oldest child. But this came as no surprise to him, as he had lobbied hard for his girlfriend to have a baby. He had just begun his sophomore year at West Philadelphia High School when he met Clarice, a friend of his cousin’s. “I come home from school one day, and I saw her sitting on the porch. Ever since that day I’ve been liking her. I had it in my mind that I’d get her.”

Terrell was surprisingly sure of himself, seeing as how seventeen-year-old Clarice was pregnant with another man’s child at the time. Meanwhile, he was doing poorly in school and cutting classes regularly. After he violated a contract that required attending a certain number of days per month, the school finally kicked him out. It was when Terrell was “sitting at home with nothing to do” that he began to “get with” Clarice, who had just broken up with her newborn’s father. The first thing he did was to try and convince her to get pregnant by him right away, despite the fact that he had just left high school and had no job or any prospects of one. “I wanted a son so bad. I saw all these guys with kids, especially with boys,” Terrell explains. “I always wanted a son, especially when they start walking.” Clarice was understandably reluctant, but Terrell was persistent. “She came around to it, came to her senses,” he says with satisfaction. “We sat down and had a long talk about it. Two months later she was pregnant.”

Ecstatic that he was about to become a father, Terrell immediately signed up for Job Corps after hearing the news. After spending several months in Pittsburgh acquiring some of the skills of the construction trade—drywall and plaster work—Terrell quit and returned to Philadelphia to witness the birth of his son. Several months later, just as he was adjusting to being the father of a newborn, Clarice had some additional news for him: she was pregnant again, this time with twins.

What the stories of Ozzy and Terrell reveal is that men’s willingness to embrace, or occasionally even pursue, pregnancy does not always, or even usually, hinge on their life circumstances. In fact, it is often men in some of the worst and most desperate situations who are also the happiest when learning of a pregnancy. Why would this be so? How would the prospect of bringing a child into the world under these circumstances be an appealing one?

The answer lies in the way men answered one important question: “What would your life be like without your children?” One might expect that men would complain about lives derailed, schooling foregone, and job opportunities forsaken. Yet we heard very few tales about sacrificed opportunities or complaints about child support and the like. Overall, children are seen not as millstones but as life preservers, saviors, redeemers, and the strength of the sentiment behind these fathers’ words makes them all the more remarkable.¹²

Kervan, a black twenty-one-year-old who had been working construction but has just finished bartending school, says that without his kid, “I’d probably be in jail.” Quick, who is black, twenty-four, and a student at the Community College of Philadelphia, says, “I’d be dead, because of the simple fact that it wasn’t until Brianna was born that I actually started to chill out.” Apple, a black twenty-seven-year-old who washes dishes six days a week at Jim’s Steaks, a hoagie shop on South Street, says, “I guess after I got caught up in the bad life, as far as jail, the kids helped me keep my head up, look forward. I got something to live for. Kids give you something to live for.” Lee, who was just laid off from an optical lab and is currently working odd jobs to get by, is an African American forty-two-year-old father. He says, “Without the kids I’d probably be a dog. I hope not with AIDS.” Thirty-seven-year-old Seven, the black on-and-off house painter, tells us, “I couldn’t imagine being without them because when I am spending time with my kids it is like, now that is love. That is unconditional love. It is like a drug that you got to have.”

For these men the imagined alternative to becoming a dad is not a college degree or a job as a CPA, it is incarceration, death, rehab, “the bad life,” “a dog with AIDS.” Kids, on the other hand, are something to live for, to fight for, “a drug that you got to have.” Self is a twenty-one-year-old African American who is certified as a home health aide but can only get part-time work at a nightclub. He recalls, “What influenced me to have children was that I felt alone. It’s a good feeling to always know that I have somebody to relate to. A child at that. Somebody that’s going to look up to me, to learn from me and things like that.”

White metal finisher and part-time construction worker Alex, age twenty-two, says that without his children, “I would be out getting high because I would not have anything. I would have my girlfriend but my baby is the most important thing in my life right now.” Will Donnelly is white, twenty-four, and works part-time as a mechanic. He teaches boxing on the side at the Joe Frazier gym.¹³ He says, “I think I’d probably be in jail. My little brother is in jail, and I figure without kids, whatever he was doing I’m sure I would have been doing it with him.” A white building superintendent and jack-of-all-trades, Bill is thirty-eight, and white carriage-driver Joe is now forty-five; both offer particularly poignant responses. Bill says, “I’d still be out there. I’d still be fucking off, drugs and all. I think about my kids and there’s just this hope I have now of getting a good relationship with them.” Joe responds, “Man, I wouldn’t even know how to answer that, they are such a big part of my life. I would probably be in jail down on Eighth and Race.”

We ask Lacey Jones, a black forty-two-year-old who cooks at Jessie’s Soul-on-a-Roll in North Philadelphia, “How did you see your future before you became a father?” “I didn’t have no future,” he replies. “I didn’t care. I lived for the moment.” We ask, “Did you think you would live to see forty-two?” “No. Nobody did,” Lacey admits, and then adds, “Nobody expected me to be there to see seventeen.” Lacey now lives with his fiancée and her daughter plus the nine-year-old child whom he gained custody of a year ago. He gets up at 5 a.m. to ensure he’s on time for his 7 a.m. shift, works forty hours a week, never touches anything stronger than beer, and spends most of his leisure time with family—visiting with his eighteen-year-old daughter and her kids, offering advice to his seventeen-year-old son, or spending time with his fiancée and the two little girls who live in his household. “I spend as much time as I can with my family,” he says with satisfaction.

His life wasn’t always this way, though. The two oldest children—only nine months apart—were conceived on the heels of his release from prison at age twenty-three, after his murder conviction was overturned on a technicality.¹⁴ Both women lived on his mother’s block, and “it was back and forth. I’d mess with her for a minute. I’d go mess with the other one for a minute. Once one got on my nerves, I went with the other.” In both cases, Lacey says, he was “just not thinking” when conception occurred. By age twenty-four he was incarcerated again for robbery. He began seeing the mother of his nine-year-old while in prison, where, somehow, she got pregnant; Lacey wasn’t released until the child was five. Lacey treasures all his kids, but especially the youngest, because she offers him the opportunity to watch one of his children grow up. When asked what his life would be like if he didn’t have children, he says, “I can’t imagine that one. I really can’t. I can’t imagine it. ’Cause my life without them, it would be empty. It would be empty. That’s what kept me going in prison, knowing that I had to come out and be there for them.”

How can men like Lacey even consider bringing a baby into the world when their lives are so chaotic, their relationships so fragile, and their means of support so unstable? Don’t they understand that these are not good situations for a child to be born into? We asked each father what they thought was the best time and circumstances to become a dad. Ironically, almost every response pointed to standards that the men themselves had not met when they had their first child. Andre Green is a good case in point. He counsels that men should become fathers “when they are older and married. Just wait till they get older and married.” Monte, a white twenty-one-year-old with three children already says one should be twenty-five and established before thinking about children. “You know, some people like to go to college, so that’s four years. Finish them four years of college, and then look for a job, take a job, and get some money out of that job. Then if you have a kid you’ll be able to take care of that kid.” William, white and twenty-seven, is the father of an eleven-year-old. “We were fourteen, fifteen years old,” William says, referring to the period when he and his child’s mother conceived. “You don’t have a kid that young. I believe if you’re going to have a kid, wait until at least you’re twenty-three, twenty-four years old. Because then you’re done with high school; you can go to college; you can do what you want. And then you can get yourself situated and have the kid, you know what I’m saying?”

Most men at least pay lip service to the norm that the ideal age to begin having children is in one’s late twenties or early thirties (though one put it as high as thirty-seven), because by that time one is done with school, established in the workforce, and settled down. Not until this stage, fathers claim, are men prepared for the responsibilities of fatherhood. A few even say that one should be married first, and should wait until several years after the wedding (past the “jittery years” of marriage, according to one who had some experience in that department).

Hill, a thirty-year-old black father with a four-year-old child, tells us, “I would say thirty because, at least for men, between thirteen and thirty years of age the world is like a playground—you don’t really know what you want to do, you just want to see how much you can do, how much you can get away with.” Thomas is a white father of a nine- and six-year-old and is currently in a halfway house finishing out a prison sentence. He is one of ten siblings, each of whom have the same mother but different fathers, and has been to jail five times in his twenty-eight years. At first Thomas refuses to give a precise age, saying only that it’s when “you’re ready to settle down.” He continues, “You’ll just get tired of partying, and even if you don’t party you want to slow your life down a little bit. Instead of going out to dinner you just want to sit home and watch the news. You know, just settle. Actually, right now would be the ideal time for me to become a father. I’m twenty-eight. Yeah, right now would probably be good, ’cause I’m done with the fast life.”

EMBRACING FATHERHOOD

The portrait of low-income fathers that emerges from these responses is striking—many clearly have a thirst for fatherhood, though they might not discover it until their partner delivers the news that she has conceived. Despite the fact that most are in very tough circumstances and believe strongly that situations like theirs aren’t the kind to bring a child into, a large majority still respond positively to the pregnancy. How do they resolve the dissonance between their desire for fatherhood and strong cultural norms—norms that they themselves seem to espouse—about the proper conditions for having children?

On the one hand, these men often show surprising optimism about the future. Yet at the same time, their narratives reveal deep uncertainty about the probability that their circumstances are going to get better with time. When one’s future is so uncertain, it can be hard to muster the self-restraint required to put off having a child. Sure, he may not be in the best situation right now, but given the nature of life at the bottom rung of the ladder, when will that be? And how long would the good times last anyway? Byron Jones, from the last chapter, articulated this point when we asked him his thoughts on the ideal time to become a father. He replied, “When you are financially able to take care of the children. And that’s when, nowadays? I have no idea, because, when is it? I mean, shoot, for the average guy stable employment don’t last long. You might work this week and be out the next week, you know?”

Another dynamic helps resolve the tension men might otherwise feel over having children in these circumstances. Recall that most pregnancies are either semiplanned or happened because the men were “just not thinking about” contraception at the time. Were they simply assuming that their partners were “taking care of it” in some way? For some, this is clearly the case. Kanye is a twenty-eight-year-old African American father of at least two children and is currently receiving General Assistance. He had his first child in high school when he was sixteen and the child’s mother was fifteen. “A guy grows up thinking if he is intimate with a female, she is supposed to be on birth control.”

Yet most men admit they had no reason to assume that their girlfriends were taking precautions, and they still failed to initiate a conversation with their partner about the possibility of pregnancy. Consider the case of Jones, a white twenty-year-old working two part-time jobs, and his former girlfriend Jessie. One evening before their now one-year-old daughter was conceived, Jones and Jessie had been walking together down the aisles at Wal-Mart, browsing through racks of baby clothes and accessories. Jessie had taken the opportunity to almost casually inform Jones that she had stopped taking her birth control pills nearly two months earlier. Although he was surprised, Jones took the news in stride and told us later that he didn’t think it was “really any big thing. Like I wasn’t saying, ‘Uh-oh, better get back on the pill.’ And we totally knew the consequences, I mean, there’s no doubt about that. I don’t need sex education; I know how it works.” Jones summed up their outlook this way, “We were fully aware, but I guess you could say we weren’t really worried about it.”

From these and many other accounts, it seems that low-income couples often practice a kind of “don’t ask, don’t tell” approach to birth control. From parallel conversations with mothers in these neighborhoods, Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas learned that a woman often stops taking birth control because she wants kids and lacks sufficient incentive to wait.¹⁵ A man may want a child badly too, at least eventually. But each wants a child for his or her own purposes—the desire often has little to do with their relationship with each other. And neither party usually seriously discusses their desires openly until a pregnancy occurs—he prefers instead to let her take control over whether or not birth control is used. He typically continues to relinquish control once the pregnancy is confirmed, as he almost always places responsibility for the next set of decisions on her.

Men rarely counsel their partners to have an abortion—this usually occurs only when a woman is very young or still in school. While most fathers we spoke with believe abortion is wrong, even those who are strongly morally opposed are typically careful to say that because she is the one bearing the child and giving birth, the woman has the ultimate say. While this sounds quite progressive, there is often another logic in play. Because she is the one who chooses to stop using birth control and then decides whether to bring the pregnancy to term, she also bears the ultimate responsibility for those choices; the buck stops with her. By stumbling into fatherhood without explicitly planning to do so, men’s sense of responsibility for bringing a child into the world in even wildly imperfect circumstances is significantly diminished. He can always say, “Well, I didn’t set out to become a father, it just happened. She wasn’t taking birth control, and when she got pregnant it was really her decision to have the baby.”

WHAT HAPPINESS MEANS