many were unprepared and bewildered when the sheriff came knocking. Some claimed never to have received notice or pointed out, accurately, that the notice did not announce a date or even a range of dates when the eviction would take place. The deputies would shrug. They figured the tenants were just playing the system, staying as long as they could. Dave’s assessment was subtler. He thought a kind of collective denial set in among tenants facing eviction, as if they were unable to accept or imagine that one day soon, two armed sheriff’s deputies would show up, order them out, and usher in a team of movers who would make it look like they had never lived there. Psychologists might agree with him, citing research showing that under conditions of scarcity people prioritize the now and lose sight of the future, often at great cost. Or they might quote How the Other Half Lives, published over a century ago: “There is nothing in the prospect of a sharp, unceasing battle for the bare necessities of life to encourage looking ahead, everything to discourage the effort….The evil day of reckoning is put off till a to-morrow that may never come. When it does come…it simply adds another hardship to a life measured from the cradle by such incidents.”3
Then there were cases that didn’t require any sort of psychological sophistication, cases where landlords purposefully conned or misled tenants.
Dave told Brontee, the rookie, to climb through a window of the baby-blue house and let them in. Inside, they found a Dell computer, a clean leather sofa, and new shoes lining the closets. Someone had left the television on. Dave pointed to the show playing on it and laughed. “Martha fucking Stewart!”
A few minutes later, an older-model Jaguar, forest green, pulled into the driveway. Four young black men hopped out.
“What is going on?” one asked.
“You’ve been foreclosed,” John replied, holding up the paper.
“What? We just paid rent this month! Lord, have mercy.”
One of the men marched straight into the house and quickly emerged cradling a shoebox. He held the box with both arms, the way a running back protects the football when the call is up the middle, then locked it in the Jaguar’s trunk.
The sheriff deputies stepped away to confer. “These people got screwed,” John told his partner. “The landlord took their rent but didn’t pay the mortgage.”
“Yeah, but John, this is a drug house,” the other deputy replied.
John raised his eyebrows, and the sheriffs started for the kitchen. Tim was there, assembling boxes.
“Tim, this a drug house?” John whispered.
Without a word, Tim pulled out a kitchen drawer, as if he had been in the house before. Inside were small Ziploc bags and razor blades. The deputies looked at each other. Sometimes in situations like this, when a landlord foreclosure caught tenants completely unawares, John would refuse to carry out the judge’s order that day, buying tenants more time. But he decided not to stop this one and not to ask to see what was in the shoebox.4 Narcotics wasn’t his beat, and he thought the faultless foreclosure was punishment enough.
The next stop was a “junk in.” The one after that was quick. The old black man didn’t have much. “Man, this makes no sense,” he kept saying as one of the movers dumped the contents of his bedroom dresser into a box. As Dave headed to the van for the next job, he pointed to the man’s pile of possessions, now slick with rain, and told John, “Some people paint on canvases. This is my art.” The pile at the next eviction was even more impressive. It included a half-eaten birthday cake and a balloon still perky with helium.
—
Larraine had grown up with two brothers and two sisters in a squat, yellow-brick public housing complex across the street from a baseball field in South Milwaukee. Her mother was an invalid, her body swollen on account of her thyroid. Her father was a window washer. Larraine remembered him bringing home bags of Ziegler Giant Bars, when he washed the windows of the candy factory, or armloads of fresh bread, when the day’s schedule took him to certain local restaurants. Larraine loved her childhood, especially her doting father. “We didn’t know we were poor,” she said.
Larraine had struggled in school. In tenth grade, she decided she’d had enough. “Everyone around me was making it but me.” She dropped out and began working as a seamstress for $1.50 an hour. She went to work at