PAIN, NO GAIN

By Jack E. White

The debate over welfare reform has divided Americans between those who consider recipients to be hapless victims and those who see them as shiftless parasites. Washington Post reporter Leon Dash's Rosa Lee: A Mother and Her Family in Urban America (HarperCollins; 279 pages; $23) gives both sides powerful evidence to support their position. It will also leave fair-minded readers in both camps equally discomfited.

Based on a 1994 series that won Dash the Pulitzer Prize, Rosa Lee is an unflinching portrait of underclass pathology in Washington's ghetto. The protagonist, Rosa Lee Cunningham, was a 57-year-old chronic welfare recipient, petty thief, drug addict and prostitute who died from aids earlier this year. Her worst failing may have been passing along her self-destructive traits to most of her offspring; she was even capable of recruiting one of her daughters into prostitution at age 11. Of her eight children by six different fathers, only two managed to escape to the mainstream world, through the intervention of teachers and social workers. But to Cunningham, stealing, whoring and using drugs were merely survival. Daughter of an abusive mother, and a mother herself at 14, Cunningham almost inevitably never learned to read or write, much less acquire the skills--or personal habits--that would have enabled her to hold a job.

Unlike such other recent works on the underclass conundrum as William Julius Wilson's When Work Disappears, Rosa Lee proffers neither theories nor proposals. Instead, Dash allows Cunningham's life story to speak for itself in all its depressing complexity. Cunningham's case was extreme even by the standards of the underclass, but it speaks volumes about the devastating combination of circumstance and personal flaws that condemns them to misery. By refusing to be judgmental, Dash illuminates the simplistic limitations on the far ends of the welfare debate. It is a problem, he strongly implies, for which neither side has a real remedy.

--By Jack E. White