embarking on another and more lengthy prison stint, this time on multiple charges including burglary and aggravated assault. He wouldn’t see the outside again until twenty-seven.
Amin’s behavior seemed inexplicable to his poor but respectable three-generation South Philadelphia family, ruled by a strict grandmother with high expectations—the one who helped raise the kids and “steer us right” while his mother worked long hours keeping house for well-off Jewish families in West Philadelphia. This prodigal son’s older siblings embraced and even exceeded their grandmother’s goals, staying out of serious trouble, finishing school, getting married, and going on to lead middle-class lives. The sister he’s closest to because they share the same father pretty much stayed on the straight and narrow too; now she holds a coveted state job.
But Amin is the youngest and the only boy. For him the neighborhood—the racially charged Grays Ferry on the westernmost border of South Philadelphia—took a special toll.3 In the mid-1960s his mother, Betty Jenkins, had been one of the first blacks to move into the hardscrabble working-class Irish community. With her mother and two oldest daughters in tow, Betty took up residence in Tasker Homes, a federal low-income housing development built for white war workers in the 1930s that, three decades later, had just begun accepting black applicants. Amin came of age there in the late eighties and by that time both the housing project and the surrounding neighborhood had taken a nosedive. Amin describes Grays Ferry as a “very, very rough community. Very racist, prejudiced. When you grow up in an environment such as that, it does have a tendency to affect and to infect your attitude and your disposition.”
In this community everyone from peers to the police seemed intent on scapegoating black boys like Amin: for the declining economic fortunes of its industrial workers; for the deteriorating streetscapes; for the mounting racial tension; for the plunging property values and epidemic white flight. An enormous animosity toward whites who, in his view, were always ready to “start something” with the neighborhood’s black residents and a bottomless anger toward authority figures were the contaminants that turned to poison in Amin’s teenage years. Engaging in a little self-analysis, he says that it was these dispositions piled on top of the aching sense of abandonment he felt when his father simply drifted away that explained his compelling desire to find trouble whenever the opportunity arose. Not until age twenty-six, in Houtzdale Prison, located in a remote area of western Pennsylvania, did Amin find the space for reflection that led to redemption. “The last eleven months of my prison term was when I began to realize that I was wasting time,” he explains. “I had to do better things with my life.”
After his release Amin moved back in with his mother, who was still living in the now nearly all-black Tasker Homes. To prove the sincerity of his jailhouse conversion, Amin immediately hit the streets looking for work and eventually landed his first real job stocking shelves at Rite Aid. Determined to do even more to ensure he could “take a different course in life,” he enrolled in evening classes at the Community College of Philadelphia to earn certification as a dietary assistant, a career choice inspired by his twenty-three-cent-a-day job in the prison kitchen. This coursework eventually qualified him for a position in the dietary department at the University of Pennsylvania hospital, just across the Schuylkill River from Grays Ferry.
Flush for the first time with real wages, Amin then made another positive move. He and his mother decided to pool their resources and trade life in public housing for home ownership. Over a year’s time, the two managed to put away five thousand dollars. Thanks to a special program offered by a community-development corporation, this was sufficient down payment for a mortgage on a renovated row house in the Strawberry Mansion section of North Philadelphia. Soon, Amin and his mother were fitting the key into the lock of their own home and marveling at the freshly painted walls, gleaming wood floors, and the kitchen equipped with brand new appliances.
Amin’s new world was the 2900 block of Diamond Street, just east of Fairmount Park and a few streets away from the historically significant “Mansion Row” running the length of the 3200 block. There the traces of the neighborhood’s nineteenth-century heyday as a wealthy Jewish streetcar suburb are most evident, albeit in dilapidated form. On Amin’s own block, the decrepit “mansions” with their turrets and pillars give way to solid, spacious three-story brownstones, some with dusty red or white metal awnings. It is a relatively good block, unbroken by the gaps of vacant lots that lend a bombed-out look to most others in the neighborhood. In Strawberry Mansion, lots cleared of some of the most flagrantly neglected and structurally unsound structures in the city nearly exceed those with residences. This is not to say that the 2900 block doesn’t have “vacancies”—as passersby, we can’t help but notice as light reflects off the broken window glass that leaves several abandoned structures exposed to the elements.
Although Strawberry Mansion was well away from the peers that had led Amin astray in the past, “out of the frying pan and into the fire” is how many outside observers would see his first concrete step toward upward mobility. While there is no Grays Ferry–style racial tension here—the neighborhood is 98 percent black—there is little else to commend it: sky-high poverty, unemployment and crime, failing schools, abysmally low property values, and, other than the massive church and synagogue structures that anchor nearly every other block, almost no amenities.4 Nonetheless, Amin viewed the move as an astonishing achievement and incontrovertible evidence that the prodigal son had returned home.
About this time, buoyed with newfound optimism about his future, Amin began to take notice of Antoinette, a coworker who was signaling her attraction to him. Flattered by the attention, he reciprocated. “She was attracted to me when I first saw her, and I made my approach,” he recalls. We ask Amin to tell us how he and Antoinette met and what led to having a child together. His reply is noticeably succinct. “We began to socialize and communicate and then from there we began to affiliate and at some point in time we became intimate and my son was born.”
In just a few words or a single sentence, inner-city fathers like Amin can often summarize what passes for courtship of the women who become their children’s mothers. Perhaps this is because everything usually happens so fast: in Amin’s case it was only fifteen months’ time before “attraction” had led to “affiliation,” then to an intimacy that resulted in conception. Nine months later Antoine entered the world. Amin’s relationship with Antoinette is the most significant adult bond he has ever had outside of his tie to his mother, yet he, like most others we spoke to, uses vague, even bureaucratic language to describe his relationship in the period before pregnancy. In these accounts “affiliation”—a term indicating that a couple is “together”—often takes the place of other expected words like love or commitment.
Typically though, the two are definitely “together” by the time a child is conceived; Amin assures us that this was the case for him and Antoinette when Antoine was conceived. In fact, he can more or less pinpoint exactly when the two moved from “socializing” to togetherness. As men like Amin define it, this state is halfway between what middle-class youth refer to as a “hookup”—sex with no commitment—and a “real relationship.” In the hookup phase, many men claim they use condoms quite consistently, and women in these communities confirm these assertions.5 But once the couple moves to “the next level” of togetherness, condoms, defined more as disease prevention than birth control, are left in the nightstand drawer. Indeed, if both partners have “tested clean” from STDs, men who continue to use condoms might as well be calling their female partner a “cheater” or a “whore.”
Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas’s in-depth conversations with single mothers in many of these same neighborhoods suggest that women may overinterpret this signal and define what men deem mere togetherness as something more. It is perhaps because of this that their vigilance with regard to the pill, patch, or the shot so often falters once this level of couple cohesion has been achieved. Most—though by no means all—pregnancies brought to term among the men we spoke with across the Philadelphia metropolitan area were conceived in the context of bonds that, in their view, at least meet the minimum criteria
