go nowhere. Shoot! She wanted me to do this, wanted me to do that. I was like a puppy anyway. I waited on her. I’d do certain things that she wanted me to do, getting pickles and ice cream. I didn’t mind at all. I was glad, man!” Note that Byron’s description of the relationship before and after conception stands in sharp contrast. Shari, once just another girl Byron found himself with, suddenly became “all I want”—a potential marriage partner, and Byron was her willing servant.
A “REAL” RELATIONSHIP
Getting a job and settling down are part of a deeper metamorphosis triggered by news of a pregnancy. Suddenly, what was mere “togetherness” is becoming transformed into something more: the “real relationship” that building a family requires, as the stories of Will Donnelly and Jack Day show. Will and Jack were raised in nearly all-white enclaves at opposite ends of the city—Will in Northern Liberties just west of Fishtown and Jack in Elmwood Park, located just below Byron’s Kingsessing neighborhood in Southwest Philly. Both come from lower middle-class white families—Will’s stepfather owns a used-car lot, while Jack’s father works as a cop. In childhood, both saw their neighborhoods change almost overnight from white to black, though Will’s family stayed while Jack’s fled. Both dropped out of school to help support their pregnant girlfriends, Will at sixteen and Jack at twenty-one. Finally, both experienced relational transformation after conceiving children within haphazard unions and encouraged their girlfriends to go ahead and have the babies. Rather than cutting and running at the news of a pregnancy, or denying paternity, the news galvanized both of these tenuous unions into something that looked more like a “real relationship.”
Will now lives in the Fairhill section of North Philadelphia, has four children by the same woman, and works as a part-time mechanic and a boxing instructor. Fairhill is a beleaguered section of the city just two neighborhoods north of his childhood home. Its only real claim to fame is that the Fairhill cemetery contains the remains of several famous Philadelphians, including Quaker abolitionist and proponent of women’s rights Lucretia Mott, and Robert Purvis, the unofficial “president” of the Underground Railroad. Fairhill is overwhelmingly poor—more than 50 percent—and largely Hispanic and black; only 2 percent of the neighborhoods’ residents are white. Yet Will, like the handful of other whites living there, says he was drawn by the cheap home prices—the median value for owner-occupied units is fifteen thousand dollars less than in the cheapest majority-white neighborhood in the city—which allowed Will to purchase the apartment where he lives despite marginal employment.25
Will recounts his relationship with Lori this way: “I had just come out of a juvenile institution. I think I just turned seventeen . . . and I started going with her friend. And then one day she came around and we started talking, then I went with her and left her friend, and me and her got together and started having kids together and then we got closer and closer. Then we started living together.” Will’s story, like Byron’s, reveals a typical sequence of events: attraction and a moderate level of couple cohesion produce a pregnancy that is taken to term. For Will and most others, it is at this point that the real relationship commences. Getting “closer and closer” and then “living together” are things Will and his peers often accomplish only after they conceive children and not before.
Jack went through eighth grade at Mary Mother of Peace Catholic School in the heart of Southwest Philly, a Polish and Irish residential quarter organized around a cluster of Catholic parishes that developed during the first half of the twentieth century. In 1985 two Elmwood Park families broke the unspoken neighborhood code by selling their homes to the “wrong” buyers, one to a black family and the other to an interracial couple. Local whites rioted and Wilson Goode, the city’s first black mayor, declared a state of emergency in an effort to quell the violence, but to little avail. Ultimately, though, the white-hot protest of residents like Jack’s parents could not prevent the neighborhood’s transformation: between 1990 and 2000 the white population was cut in half, with corresponding increases in nonwhites. Jack’s father, the Philadelphia police officer, and his mother, who worked for the school district, fled north along with other white civil servants from the southwest side, moving to the working-class enclave of Manayunk, with its tiny row homes perched precariously on steep streets reaching up to the bluffs above the Schuylkill River.
Jack rebelled at the move and was kicked out of the prestigious Roman Catholic High in his freshman year for cutting class, exhibiting a belligerent attitude toward authority figures, and bullying other students. His parents felt they had no choice but to enroll him in what they viewed as a second-best educational option, the local public school, Roxborough High. Given the relative ease of the classes, he breezed through with almost all As. Penn State was his next stop, the “party school” where he spent three years studying journalism and “polishing my drinking up to a fine art.” Like Will, Jack’s baby’s mother was just a “girl” he met by chance on a weekend visit home. “My grades weren’t great, but I was getting through. I was going back home every other weekend. . . . Met some girls, and in turn met my baby’s mother. Shortly afterwards, she became pregnant, so I quit school, got a job to support her.”
Jack elaborates, “I was coming home one day, and I was pulling up to my driveway, and my next-door neighbor, Michael, was out front with this guy and a girl, and he says, ‘What are you doing tonight?’ And I go, ‘Nothing.’ ‘Why don’t you hang out with us . . .?’ After a couple of drinks I told her that I thought she was gorgeous.” Marie was working at an eyeglass manufacturing plant when she happened upon Jack in the driveway. She was also a new bride of four months but was contemplating leaving her husband. “She was unhappy at the house where she was. She kind of married this guy—her words: ‘I never really liked him in the first place, but I wanted to get out of the house and have a baby and start a whole new life. . . .’ Then we met, and the next day we moved in together,” Jack recalls, of the move to a tiny apartment financed by Marie’s wages. According to Jack, Marie’s family is, “I hate to say this—kind of a lower-class white trash.” Jack comes from an “educated” family and is proud of the increase in status he provided her at the time. “I pulled her out of that situation.”
Eager to spend as much time as possible with Marie, Jack began leaving State College each Friday for the three-hour drive east. After three months of this arrangement, Marie turned up pregnant. We ask whether they’d discussed having children beforehand. “No, that was a subject we never talked about,” Jack replies. “But I knew she wanted to get pregnant because she didn’t want to use any protection.” For Jack, Marie’s failure to employ birth control is the equivalent of a bullhorn broadcasting her maternal desire and no direct conversation is necessary to establish that fact. When asked to describe how he felt about this, Jack simply says, “I was OK.” The two decided to terminate this pregnancy due to their ages—both were twenty at the time—but another pregnancy almost immediately followed. This time, both were adamantly opposed to an abortion. Jack then dropped out of college.
“We were made for each other,” Jack crows, recalling this time, evidencing more than the usual level of romantic feeling. Yet he admits, “I don’t think we’d agreed that we were going to stay together forever.” Marie had never bothered to get a divorce from her husband, yet once they decided to carry the pregnancy to term, Jack and Marie were firmly a couple who “though never married in the eyes of the law” nonetheless thought of themselves as a family.
ATTRACTION, AFFILIATION, CONCEPTION, BIRTH, AND BEYOND
For the middle class, pregnancy is usually the outgrowth of a relationship, not its impetus. It is a reflection of a couple’s decision to commit to each other, not the cause for commitment. On Philadelphia’s affluent Main Line or in well-heeled New Jersey suburbs like Cherry Hill and Haddonfield, shotgun marriage is largely a thing of the past.26 Unplanned pregnancies that occur before marriage are typically avoided or terminated. And while poor men like Byron often become fathers in their early twenties, their middle-class counterparts typically put off parenthood until their late twenties and beyond, and then almost always within the context
