Mikey stretched out on the mattress, holding the flag at attention and staring at the ceiling.
On the day of her eviction court hearing, January 27, Doreen limped out of her house and found the bus stop. She had wrapped her head and put on white Velcro sneakers. The shoes felt like they belonged to someone else. Doreen went barefoot when she was inside, which was almost always. She had become as much of a permanent fixture in the apartment as the floorboards and doorframes. She hated the idea of taking a bus downtown to eviction court. Plus her foot was throbbing. The night before, the back door had fallen on it. It first fell on Ruby when she had attempted to prop it back up, pinning her to the ground. When Doreen tried to free her daughter, she slipped and the heavy door came down on her foot. It had swollen up plump and watery. The doctor on the phone had advised going to the ER; but Doreen refused. “I’m just gonna end up waiting all night in that room,” she said. Doreen didn’t trust doctors any more than her father had.14
Doreen watched the icy city roll past her bus window. She didn’t know how eviction court would go, so she allowed the new baby to occupy her mind. The thought of Natasha as a mother—fickle, youthful Natasha—made Doreen laugh. Doreen remembered when Patrice was born. They delivered her through a cesarean section because she was so big. Doreen had had to trade her baby clothes for bigger sizes. Natasha was big and C.J. too. So when Ruby came out weighing only six pounds, Doreen didn’t know how to handle her. “She made me mad. I couldn’t hold her.” Natasha had recently applied for W-2, and Doreen worried that it would affect her benefits and cut into the family’s food stamps. It would balance out if Natasha stayed in the house and helped pay the bills, but lately Malik had been asking Natasha if she wanted to move into his mother’s place in Brown Deer. Natasha swore there was no way she would, but Doreen sensed that she was seriously considering it.
Sherrena left later, answering her phone as she drove downtown. A woman on the other end was saying that, during her break, she had walked out of her ten-dollar-an-hour temp job at Landmark Credit Union. “Chelsea!” Sherrena yelled, her voice thick with disappointment. “I don’t think that was a good idea….I’m gonna talk with you about it when I come out of eviction court, but you know I’m gonna fuss at you, right?”
“I know,” Chelsea said.
“I’m on you. I’m killing you, Chelsea!”
Sherrena was trying to help Chelsea “get her credit together.” For $150, Sherrena offered to examine her credit report and use a technique called “rapid rescore” to improve her score. Clients like Chelsea got their money’s worth. Sherrena was a hard coach who worked for real results. She knew the value of a good credit score, especially when it came to selling her properties to her clients.
Sherrena had been dabbling in rent-to-own ventures. She would rent one of her more stable tenants a house for six months. During that time, Sherrena would attempt to rapid rescore the tenant’s credit. If successful, she would then help that tenant secure a loan for the price Sherrena was asking for the property. The Federal Housing Administration often required only a 3.5 percent down payment, which most working tenants could cover with their tax refund. Sherrena had seen some of her properties double in value during the housing bubble, and she knew the inflated assessments wouldn’t last forever. She was trying to sell a rent-to-own tenant one property for $90,000, a property she owned free and clear, having purchased it at a far lower price. Sherrena would reinvest the cash in more properties, and the new homeowner would inherit a massive debt. Sherrena would say that was better than not owning a house at all.
In years past, Sherrena had marketed her credit-repair-to-home-loan services to physically and mentally disabled people on SSI. “A whole bunch of those people came and bought houses. They ended up losing them, but the thing is they need to be policed a little bit more….Wasn’t nobody saying, ‘Johnny, pay your mortgage!’ They just may not have been mentally capable.” They say the foreclosure crisis started on Wall Street, with men in power ties trading toxic assets and engineering credit default swaps. But in the ghetto, all you needed