Precious few men are consciously courting a woman they believe will be a long-term partner around the time that pregnancy issues a one-way ticket to fatherhood. Indeed, there is little evidence that many were even attempting to discriminate much among possible partners based on who they felt would be the most suitable mother to their child.22
COMING UP PREGNANT
Given their haphazard origins, these relationships might well have been short-lived had it not been for an unplanned conception. As the stories of Byron Jones, Will Donnelly, and Jack Day will illustrate, pregnancy, and not a shared history, similar tastes, or common goals, is what typically galvanizes partnerships in the low-income neighborhoods of Philadelphia and Camden, though this is not always the case. An unplanned pregnancy and the decision to carry it to term transforms relationships of mere “togetherness” into something more.
Byron Jones was born in rural South Carolina, but his parents moved to Philadelphia when he turned three. He was raised in “The Bottom,” the local nickname for Mantua, the working-class West Philadelphia neighborhood that black southern migrants began flocking to in the 1920s. His mother was only fifteen when she gave birth to Byron’s sister, and his father was just a shade older. His parents married soon after and had five more children together, Byron right in the middle. While his father labored for a Jewish factory owner in the neighborhood (given racist unions and mill owners, holding a factory job was a rare accomplishment for a black man in Philadelphia at this time), his mother worked as a domestic for a wealthy Jewish family living nearby, whose matriarch took a shine to young Byron. Each summer she paid his way to the leafy Golden Slipper Summer Camp, where he marveled at its gleaming lake, heated swimming pool, and pristine playing fields. Byron grins as he recalls that part of his childhood. “Golden Slipper Camp—I’ll never forget it—all the way up in the Poconos. The majority of the blacks that was there, their families worked for the Jews ’cause it was a Jewish camp.”
While at camp during the summer between fifth and sixth grade, Byron learned that his father had died of a terminal illness, and the news had a seismic impact.23 “I didn’t know he was really that sick! They sent me up to summer camp, and the next thing I know he’s dead. I was just starting to get to know him,” Byron says of the man who worked long hours to ensure his family’s survival. “I started getting in more trouble when he passed. I felt like he abandoned me.”
A widow with six dependents, Byron’s thirty-two-year-old mother returned home to her family in South Carolina. “I had a good childhood,” Byron insists, expressing especially fond memories of the three middle-school years he spent down South among extended family: the sound of the ax as his grandmother chopped wood in the backyard and the sizzling of greens fried on a woodstove, Sundays spent sweating for hours in an “old, hot country church” with no air-conditioning, church “suppers” that lasted all day long, and trips of several hours to his uncle’s place even deeper into the up-country of the South Carolina piedmont. The adults in his life there were uniformly strict. “Every child had responsibilities, and the parents made sure we fulfilled them. You had to get your job done, or you would get your tail cut,” Byron says before adding wryly, “There wasn’t no child abuse back then!”
Trouble didn’t find Byron while he attended school down South. His teachers ruled their classrooms with an iron hand, and he thrived within this structure. “There wasn’t any such thing as getting suspended or getting a note home. They beat your butt. They didn’t spare the rod,” Byron says in an approving tone. But once the family moved back to Philadelphia, Byron was assigned to Sulzberger Middle School for ninth grade, where chaos reigned. He began cutting class with increasing frequency, a practice that accelerated when he entered the tenth grade at West Philadelphia High. “I didn’t get into a lot of trouble until I came back up here for ninth grade when I played hooky. Then in tenth grade I started hanging out with a worse crowd. I started drinking.”
It is tempting to speculate about what might have been different had Byron’s mother decided to stay in the South, surrounded by this exacting but supportive extended family. Did the sudden separation from kin rekindle Byron’s feelings of paternal abandonment? Was it the fact that his mother now had to work several jobs to support the family and seemed to have no time or patience for her children? Perhaps it was simply the added temptations of city life. Reliving that return, Byron quips, “The city didn’t have that much brotherly love, as they call it—you know what I mean?”
After showing up drunk at school on several occasions, Byron was expelled from West Philly High. The School District of Philadelphia then transferred him to Bartram High, which was taking on increasing numbers of black students in Kingsessing, an area of the city experiencing rapid racial turnover. Like in Grays Ferry, racial tensions in Kingsessing were palpable. It should be said, though, that Byron didn’t get into any really serious trouble during these years—he drank a little too much and at the wrong times, he once stole the tires off a car to put wheels on the junker of a friend, he went joyriding when an absentminded motorist left his keys in the door of his car, and he got into a knockdown, drag-out fight with four other youth in a convenience store—all of them intoxicated. But after the convenience store altercation (which earned him a night in jail), the antics of Byron’s peers escalated further. Byron was convinced he needed to get out of Philadelphia. With his mother’s blessing, he dropped out of Bartram in twelfth grade and joined the marines.
Discharged after four years of service, Byron took a job as a bookbinder, but the business soon closed. While searching for another job, he subsisted on revenue from an informal speakeasy he opened in the basement of the house he rented in Kingsessing, where he had gone to high school. It is there that he met Shari. “I had my little house. I used to sell a little wine, a little weed. She and one of her girlfriends, they’d come over. She was a lot younger than me. She said she was eighteen, but she wasn’t. When she came over to the house with her friend, me and my cousin was there, and I was like, ‘Dag. I like her, man!’”
Despite Byron’s initial attraction, he was “messing with” a number of other women and didn’t add Shari to his roster for a long time. Meanwhile, he found a job as a truck jockey for a suburban U-Haul franchise, servicing, delivering, and picking up trucks, and, after that business closed, as a caretaker at a downtown apartment building. After that job fell through—he was drinking too much to perform his duties reliably—he met his expenses through part-time cab work, putting in only enough hours to pay the bills and support the alcohol habit nurtured by four years in the military. He was selling weed on the side, often to fares who assumed a black cab driver would know where to find it.
Byron can instantly recall the date that he and Shari first had sex—April 14—and the clear memory hints that he imbues the event with some significance. A couple of months later Shari was pregnant, and while he was twenty-five, she was only sixteen. In Byron’s section of the city, remaining fatherless for that long merits an explanation. Men like Byron with less than a high school education have more than an even chance of becoming a father before that age.24 “I waited until I was twenty-five years old before I had my first child, but I always wanted to be a father,” Byron says, careful to emphasize that delaying fatherhood longer than most of his friends was not due to lack of desire—he just hadn’t had the opportunity yet.
Upon hearing the news that the woman they are “with” is expecting, men such as Byron are suddenly transformed. This part-time cab driver and sometime weed dealer almost immediately secured a city job in the sanitation department and quickly worked his way up to what he viewed as an exalted post on the back of a garbage truck. “I was doing the right thing,” he brags. “After I found out I had that baby coming, shoot! I was giving up my money to her! You know what I mean?” In addition to working more, many feel a sudden urge to clean up their personal lives. Byron, for example, stopped “messing around with certain people,” meaning other girls. Suddenly, his relationship
