Down And Out And No Place to Go

By Thomas McCarroll/Newark

Newark, New Jersey. The name had a ring of hope to it. At least, that's what Cornell and Minnie Wolf thought 34 years ago when they boarded the "Southern Comfort Special" in Albany, Ga., bound for Newark and a better life. Cornell, a hulking, powerful man who never got past the third grade, had toiled on the "bossman's" plantation picking beans, peanuts and cotton from can't-see in the morning until can't-see at night. Like thousands of Southern blacks, he had heard stories about those high-paying Northern jobs, those red brick Northern houses, and at 22 decided to take his 19-year-old wife and their three children to the land where everything seemed possible.

He got work in a slaughterhouse, then switched to a job at a leather- processing factory. It was punishing work, and it meant a three-mile walk to and from the plant, but Cornell hardly missed a day. Though his family grew to include 13 children, he managed to keep them all clothed, warm and fed. They never took public aid. "You were ashamed to be on welfare then," recalls Minnie, who sometimes worked as a domestic. "There was a stigma attached to it." They lived in the central ward of Newark, among stable families headed by bus drivers, sanitation workers and teachers. If Cornell wasn't around when any of his seven boys and six girls needed disciplining, one of the neighbors would handle it. The community was one large extended family.

But today the Wolf family, like its adopted city, is in an advanced state of decline. Along with thousands of other families in dying inner cities, the Wolfs have become mired in a morass of welfare, crime and self-destruction. In a generation, they have descended from proud working class to demoralized underclass. Nine of the 13 children have never held a meaningful job, nor do they care to. Only one of the boys finished high school. Two of the girls became teenage mothers and live on welfare. One of the girls lived a fast life that came to a crashing end at 22.

The downward spiral of the Wolf family is linked to the disintegration of Newark's most impoverished neighborhoods. Twenty years ago the city had 9,000 businesses and more than 200,000 jobs; today it has less than half that many businesses and 120,000 jobs. The population, which was more than 80% white and totaled 430,000 in 1950, has shrunk to 330,000, 65% black. Although thousands of hardworking black families remain, nearly a third of the residents depend on public assistance. In some neighborhoods more than three-quarters of the families are on the dole, many for the third or fourth generation. Newark has few rivals in percentage of substandard housing and, though only the 48th largest U.S. city, ranks fourth in incidence of murders. In many ways, Newark has never really recovered from the 1967 riots.

The Wolf family's decline began with the first batch of boys. The father, raised in the rhythms of a small-town farm, did not cotton on to the fast, wily ways of the city streets in which his sons got their education. It didn't help that he had moved the family into the Scudder Homes public housing project, a towering development built as a way station for the working poor, which quickly became a home for the permanent poor, most of whom were on welfare. Minnie remembers her husband roaring, loud enough for the neighbors to hear, "Am I the only fool working in this building?" When Cornell died of a stroke in 1980 at the age of 47, the solitary example he set for his family disappeared.

Cobb and Cornell Jr. both dropped out of school in the tenth grade, joined a street gang and developed gorilla-size heroin habits, which they supported with felonies. Cobb hooked up with a major heroin-dealing operation in Newark called the Country Boys and did well, becoming a street-corner drug prince. Before his death Cornell Sr. had voiced his disapproval, but turned a blind eye because the money helped keep the family from going hungry. In the end both boys were arrested. Cornell spent a year in prison and Cobb got off with five years' probation. He found Islam, changed his name to Khalid Ahmad, and announced that he was finished with the drug trade.

Kenneth, 28, followed in his big brothers' footsteps, dropping out of * school and winding up at New Jersey's Annandale penitentiary for armed robbery at 22. Since returning home in 1982, he has fathered a child and married, but has been unable to find suitable work. Cheap liquor has replaced drugs, and he drinks steadily, morning, noon and night.

Every day, all along Prince Street, cars pull up to curbside vendors and the hawking begins. "Hits," shouts a youth peddling uppers and downers. "Dimes, dimes," yells another, selling $10 vials of crack. They are "clocking": they work for a set number of hours as middlemen for big-time drug dealers. And that is how Darryl, 24, spends his days. Darryl, who uses drugs as well as sells them, has already had several brushes with the law. But, he says, "I would be crazy to trade this for McDonald's. The minimum wage doesn't support my life-style."

The Wolf women seem to be caught in the same undertow that has dragged down the men. The first three girls, Patricia, 35, Theresa, 31, and Renee, 27, all finished high school, but today only the eldest, who is divorced and works as a secretary, gets by without a welfare check. Theresa and Renee have three daughters between them; Renee is unmarried, and Theresa's husband is unemployed. "We make bad choices ((in men))," explains the tall, slender Patricia, "because we have so little to choose from."

But the choices made by the next two Wolf daughters have been even more tragic. Loretta, 23, has never held on to a job and depends on welfare to support her four-year-old son. According to her family, she has a heroin habit, was arrested for possession and distribution, and is awaiting trial. Her sister Lovette, nicknamed "Betsy," was also a drug abuser; she lived a short life in the fast lane. Betsy had her first child at 16 and a second by a different father at 19. She wore the hippest threads, went to the trendiest places, and consumed drugs as casually as most people eat hamburgers. Crack. Marijuana. Codeine. One afternoon this past April, the youngest of the sisters, Kemya, found her 22-year-old sister sitting fully clothed on the toilet, stone cold. To this day Minnie Wolf insists that Betsy did not die of a drug overdose. She says it was asthma.

If the first wave of Wolf children has fared poorly, the three still in their teens show no signs of doing better. The stories of Anthony, 19, Kemya, 16, and Myndell, the baby, 14, all have a disturbing sameness. None of them are interested in school; all are drawn to the street. They don't read % newspapers or much of anything else. When asked what places like Selma, Birmingham and Greensboro mean to them, they are dumbfounded.

Anthony isn't clocking yet, but says he's considering it. He wants a pocketful of cash like the drug dealers have. He envies their "fly" cars and the pretty women who admire them. "Even if I worked hard and got a car, I can't get the women without the drugs," he insists. "Nowadays you're not 'down' unless you're doing drugs or selling drugs."

Kemya, a pint-size sprite no more than 5 ft. tall, dropped out of school because she didn't see the point of it. "I don't see a connection between being in school and life after school." Kemy, as her friends call her, was smoking cigarettes at eleven and marijuana at twelve. She lost her virginity early. She says she doesn't use birth control and doesn't worry about getting pregnant. The youngest, Myndell, already has a taste for street life. He likes to dress sharp and pressed his mother until she bought him a $200 bomber jacket. Not long afterward, some neighborhood thugs relieved him of it at gunpoint.

Among all the Wolf sons only one seems to have escaped the ghetto's destructiveness. Gregory, 26, graduated from high school. He now goes to college and works at a school for emotionally disturbed children. Yet there is a distance between Gregory and his siblings, and he does not appear to be a role model for any of his brothers and sisters.

Minnie can't explain why her children have gone wrong. She feels powerless to prevent Kemya from going out with drug dealers or the boys from sidewalk hustling. For her, unlike her children, the streets are foreign territory. "I think we lost control at some point," she says, as though trying to recall something in the distant past. "I don't exactly know when, but somehow we lost control over the kids."