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
