NYC Book Club Conversation With Adrian Nicole LeBlanc
On April 30, Gotham Gazette held a NYC Book Club online chat with Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, author of Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx.
Gotham
Gazette: How did you first meet Coco, Jessica and the other
people you feature in Random Family? Adrian Nicole
LeBlanc: Jessica through Boy George, And Coco through Jessica.
Coco introduced me to many family and friends. I met Boy George in the
courtroom at his trial. GG: When did you realize that
the story of Random Family was a story you wanted to tell?
AL: Immediately. I was completely absorbed.
GG: For the online visitors who may not have completed your
book, can you tell them what Random Family is about?
AL: It's about many issues--urban poverty, prisons,
racism--but I think of it as two love stories, and the lives of two
girls coming of age, and their families. GG: In your
author’s note, you say that you were present for much of what is
described in Random Family. What was it like being a part of
these women’s lives for the ten years you spent researching the
book, staying with them, going on prison visits? AL: It
was an exciting, challenging, and often baffling experience for me. What
I love about reporting is the deep immersion into worlds that challenge
my thinking--that assure me of my ignorance, and require me to think and
feel specifically. I should add that it was also very saddening.
GG: What moments were the most difficult, could you describe
one or two of them for us? AL: Many moments were
difficult. One example might be the day I accompanied Coco to collect
her children from Ramapo Camp. Their experience was in some ways, I
think, threatening to her, despite her profound hope and love for them.
But it was hard to watch the children's excitement collapse in their
sensitivity to her struggle with being on the sidelines of their
experience. GG: Did you want to step in at times, and
help out or give advice? AL: Rarely. It became clear
immediately that I was the one who needed teaching and guidance on the
world I was entering. One sure thing about poverty is people who are
surviving it have tried just about everything to make their lives
better, and that they are great improvisers and smarter than I ever
could be. To give advice assumes you know something someone else
doesn't. It wasn't the case. I was learning from them. And they were
extraordinary teachers. GG: What were some of the most
important things you learned? AL: I think they are
lessons that will continue for the rest of my life. But some of what I
know I learned now include the stamina poverty requires, and that
damaging circumstances do damage. I learned also that conversations that
reduce economic injustice to personal choice issues are not only
distracting from the real work that needs to be done, but unjust
themselves. GG: What do you mean by "personal choice
issues"? AL: Much of the public conversation reduces
structural issues--transportation problems, health impairment, day care
issues--to judgments such as "lack of motivation" or "lack of will."
GG: You said that you weren't tempted to give advice, but
were you tempted to help out financially? AL: I didn't
have much money myself. But money is a great distraction in source
connections, and quality journalists don't get into it.
GG: Did they ever ask you to help out? AL:
Extremely rarely. A few times, strangers did, but not the principals.
GG: You must have gotten to know South Bronx very well
during the time you were reporting. How has it changed, or stayed the
same since you first started working on Random Family? AL:
I only got to know a few neighborhoods somewhat well. There seem to
be many changes, though. GG: What are some of the most
striking? AL: The decline of the outdoor drug market.
There has also been a fair amount of building--single family homes, for
example. Although nowhere near the demand. Melissa
McNamara: Hi Ms. LeBlanc...I'm wondering what the reaction has
been from the girls' families to the book's publication. And, did you
know from the start that your reporting would turn into a book?
AL: I didn't know that it would turn into a book initially.
Overall, the response has been positive. GG: Can you tell
us what any of the main protagonists said? Coco, for example?
AL: She was somewhat relieved that some of her experience
--her early years--would be available to her children from an outside
source, because some of it was so painful to her. GG: Did
Cesar read the book? What did he think? AL: Yes. He read
it in one long day and night. He was glad to learn about his daughters'
lives in the free world, because he has been in prison. He also told me
that he learned about his family through my perspective on some of what
had happened to him. We continue to have long debates and discussions
about the issues raised in the book both personally and professionally.
GG: Your book shows how many obstacles there are for poor
people– You write, "When you were poor, you had to have luck and
do nearly everything absolutely right. In a life as vulnerable to
outside forces as Coco’s and her two little girls’, the
consequences of even the most mundane act of kindness could be severe.
The $10 loan to a neighbor might mean no bus fare, which might mean a
missed appointment, which might lead to a two-week loss of WIC." –
yet you don’t make any policy recommendations, or analysis in
Random Family. Why did you decide to leave this out? AL:
I feel that the things we need to do are so obvious. Youth programs,
quality day care, transportation subsidies, safe housing--all of these
things work and we know it. It's not rocket science. What I think is
missing from the conversation--if there is still one nationally--is the
assumption of the deep and complex humanity of poor people. And I'm a
story teller. Not a policy analyst. GG: How did the
Rockefeller drug laws affect the subjects of Random Family?
AL: Interestingly, in retrospect, I think this is a book that
documents the early impact of those laws. The only reason the young
people were employed in the trade was because young people dodged the
laws, at first, and older drug dealers responded by hiring underage
kids. The damage is extensive, and both obvious and subtle. I guess my
answer would be, trainwrecked so many lives. GG: Can you
give us some examples of how this happened to people in your book?
AL: It's intricate. But one way in might be the way that drug
selling traversed their day-to-day lives in ways that created
assumptions about the future. So, for example, some young men worked as
dealers to help get drugs to their moms, so their moms wouldn't publicly
humiliate themselves by trying to get drugs in other ways. It's a bleak,
boring, deadly business. Richard Price captures it perfectly in
Clockers and some of his other books. GG: Are
there other books out there that you would recommend - in terms of
policy analysis, as well? AL: Alex Kotlowitz's There
Are No Children Here. Jonathan Kozol. Robert Cole's work, especially
Children of Crisis. Susan Sheehan. William Finnegan's Cold New
World. There are so many. Cristina Rathbone. GG: In
Random Family, you write that Coco’s case worker at the
Thorpe House wanted to tell her "Get away from your family." Family, for
Coco, also means her extended "random family," Cesar’s mother and
his sister Jessica, and her children. Do you agree with the caseworker,
or admire Coco for always giving so much of the little she had?
AL: I understand both, and the conflict seems irresolvable.
It bumps into the perversion of poverty--to have to choose between
saving oneself and loving one's family. What an impossible choice!
GG: In her New York Times review of your book, Margaret
Talbot wrote, "In truth, you wouldn't want every book about poverty to
be like LeBlanc's. As good as it is at foiling simple-minded or overly
optimistic social reform schemes, there's a kind of Dreiserian fatalism
about it. Its very dedication to portraying the multiplicity of hurdles,
the bewildering entanglement of personal failure and structural
inequality that marks lives like Coco's, allows a kind of exhaustion to
creep in, not so much in the reader as in the would-be policy maker."
Do you think that people who read Random Family might be too overwhelmed
by all of the problems to try to change things? AL: It's
hard to empathize with the sentiment that less information--because it's
painful--is better. If Coco and her children are LIVING this, I think
the least we can do is read about it. To educate ourselves.
GG: What do you think we should do with that education?
AL: Become active about a world we all share.
GG: Are you optimistic that things can change?
AL: Absolutely. We have the knowledge. What we lack is
political will. Paul: Do you believe the situation
described in Random Family has gotten better or worse since you
began the book? To what extent has welfare reform policy helped or hurt
that situation? AL: Mainly worse. Welfare reform has
helped some of the moms-- by expanding the boundaries of their
experiences in some ways-- but a terrific burden of parenting
responsibilities have fallen on the children. Because of low minimum
wage work that requires parents to work long, long hours. And because
there are no youth programs and decent day care to supplement the
absence of parents for those hours. Paul: Can you
elaborate? I thought the statistics for teenage pregancy and welfare
dependency improved over the course of the 1990's. AL:
They have. But I am responding to the impact of the policies on those
young people who are still part of an intergenerational cycle.
GG: Is the situation of poverty and poor families in New York
City very different from other cities? AL: I can't answer
that very intelligently. Even within NYC, this is one area. I'm sure the
broader struggle is the same. GG: After witnessing
Coco’s struggles with bureaucracy, what do you think about state
and city social services programs? What should be changed?
AL: They need better staff training, and much more staff
support. These are hard, high burn-out jobs, often staffed by folks
barely out of poverty themselves. But one thing needed desperately is a
coordination of services. Much like what we're seeing in cancer
treatment-- breast cancer centers, for example, where all kinds of
specialists team up for patient care. Same model would be useful in
social services. Right now, agencies tend to respond to specific needs,
largely on an emergency basis. And these are chronic, long-term needs.
GG: Why is that? Is it that the funding is not there?
AL: What funding? The budget cuts have been profound.
GG: Which budget cuts in particular do you find
pernicious? AL: What ones aren't? ALL afterschool
programming? Counselors? Alternative schools are closing down. No
substantive help for kids at risk, yet funding for criminal justice
remains firm. It's short-sighted, and profoundly punitive. To not have
money for a youth job program, yet to spend $30,000 on kids in junveile
hall. GG: The Bloomberg administration says they have a
$3.8 billion gap not of their own making. What can they do instead?
AL: I don't know what they can do instead, but I know if
public eduation continues to be marginalized, we are deciding much more
than budget cuts. Paul: Could I interject a question
about the process of writing Random Family? Approximately how
much of your time was physically spent with the characters over the
decade of the story? Were there comparable non-fiction books that
influenced you (I'm thinking of Alex Kotlowitz's book about a family in
the Cabrini project, for example). AL: Alex Kotlowitz
remains a great inspiration to me. The balance between reporting and
writing varied enormously. Sometimes I had weeks for the field work,
while at other times I had to report elsewhere to make a living as a
journalist. The writing tended to happen in spurts. But the real writing
of the final version that went into several revisions, I think happened
in an intense period of writing that took about a total of 18 months.
GG: What has happened in the lives of the characters of
Random Family after the point where your book leaves off?
AL: Folks are working. Cesar and Boy George remain
incarcerated. GG: Will the book have any impact on their
lives? AL: I hope so. I know that just knowing them has
changed and enlivened mine.

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