Birthing the Inner City

I read a lot of depressing articles these days about children growing up in U.S. ghettos. But Jeanne Schinto's Children of Men (Persea Books, 1991, $19.95, cloth) is the first novel I've come across in which the voice of an inner-city teen-ager narrates her own story, blasting away stereotypes yet confirming brutal realities in the process. While Children of Men is not an autobiographical novel, Schinto did grow up in an inner-city Washington, D.C. neighborhood similar to the one portrayed in the book, and the stories of narrator Cathy Ashwell have the ring of lived--or closely observed--truths.

Cathy is a double outcast--a white girl in an all-black neighborhood within sight of the "greenish-silver" capitol dome. One of a large hillbilly clan, she is a compelling character, believable in her quirkiness, who speaks to the reader like a friend ("Did you hate gym like I did?"). Both her toughness and her fear--and the dangers that surround her--come through every word. School is where boys sexually harrass Cathy; the streets are where drug dealers beat passersby to death with chains and pimps eye her from doorways, calculating her worth.

Home for Cathy is a rickety island of safety, and Schinto brings "123 Tennessee Avenue" alive through coarse details--what the family eats for supper, which foods were bought and which shoplifted, how tight sleeping arrangements shift to accommodate an extra body. Every Ashwell is a well-drawn character, each trying in their own way (through crime, prostitution, or hard work) to break out of poverty.

Cathy's struggle is a long one. After her mother leaves the family, Cathy, 16, drops out of school, muttering, "I'll be my own mother now." With no skills, capable of dreams but not plans, she looks to the only place she can think of for security--a man--and begins the cycle of having babies she can't support. Her alliance with one man ends when his criminal associates assault her; a second man molests her while she is in labor, but Cathy can see no way of being a "real person" on her own.

As Cathy's son begins to act out the violence of the neighborhood, perpetuating the cycle, the reader feels overcome with despair--until Cathy acts. In what at first seems a self-destructive gesture, she scatters her family, reunites with her mother, and begins the slow process of birthing herself.

Having been dragged through the violence and humiliation of Cathy's life, the reader feels the tremendous step it is when she finally seeks job training and learns to support herself. "Our first birth isn't good enough. We all of us, men and women both, have to be born twice or we aren't born at all," Cathy concludes.

Children of Men is a fantastic read, full of solid characters, jolting events, and jazzy metaphors (Cathy's brother and sister-in-law, who opt for respectable poverty, are "a pair of chopsticks, poked and prodded, picking up the littlest piece of life"). Beyond that, it is an awesome birth narrative in a setting many seem to have given up on--America's inner city.

Naomi Thiers was a free-lance writer in Washington, D.C. when this review appeared. Her book of poetry, Only the Raw Hands Are Heaven, was published by Washington Writers Publishing House.