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Ghetto days
Adrian Nicole LeBlanc’s Random Family
BY JULIA HANNA

Random Family:
Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx
By Adrian Nicole LeBlanc. Scribner, 416 pages, $25.


What with recent headlines warning of threats from abroad, the daily battles taking place in our poorest, most crime-ridden neighborhoods have become all too easy to push aside. But though these struggles seem small in scale when compared to the menace of dirty bombs and biological warfare, they pose an equal, if not greater, danger to the future stability of the United States. Adrian Nicole LeBlanc puts that truth front and center in a book that has enough scope and heart to encompass the tumultuous lives it depicts. She also demonstrates a clear-eyed perspective earned over 10 years of field research. LeBlanc hung out on neighborhood streets, sat through court trials, and accompanied her subjects on jail visits and interminable waits at social agencies. The result is authoritative but never superior; she uses her access to depict the effects of poverty, ignorance, drugs, and sexual abuse in riveting detail, but she doesn’t pretend her experiences have given her any answers.

We meet Jessica and Coco as teenagers in the mid 1980s and see them get pregnant and drop out of school, following in the footsteps of their mothers, Lourdes and Foxy. The pair are much more than walking case studies, however. Describing Jessica’s elaborate preparations for a simple trip to the store, LeBlanc writes, " Chance was opportunity in the ghetto, and you had to be prepared for anything. " And later, " She flirted easily with girls and boys, men and women, alike. Jessica appeared to have no boundaries, as though she were the country of sex itself. " Coco " wasn’t a church girl and she wasn’t much of a schoolgirl, either, but she wasn’t raised by the street. She was a friendly around-the-way girl who fancied herself tougher than she could ever be. "

There’s a necessary economy to LeBlanc’s style as she follows the two girls’ dizzying swirl of relationships. Coco falls in love with Cesar, Jessica’s brother and an aspiring thug. They have a daughter, Mercedes, but when Cesar is locked up for his involvement in a shooting, Coco has another daughter, Nikki, by a neighborhood boy named Kodak. After Cesar’s release, he and Coco have yet another daughter, Nautica, before he’s sent to jail for yet another shootout; this time, he accidentally kills one of his best friends in the confusion. Cesar threatens Coco to make her stay true, but before long she gives birth to a dangerously premature girl; the father, Wishman, shows little interest in the baby’s welfare. In search of a safer, more stable environment for her family, Coco moves upstate to Troy with Frankie, a small-time drug dealer with whom she has a son, LaMonté.

Jessica falls for a criminal too, but Boy George is in the big leagues compared with Cesar: he rakes in more than $100,000 a week dealing his " Obsession " brand of heroin. When he picked Jessica up for their first date, her mother recalls, " George pulled up in a car that was like the ocean. " He fills her family’s cupboards with food and takes Jessica, Cesar, and Coco on a lavish getaway to the Poconos. He also keeps other women, including a wife in Puerto Rico, and periodically beats and verbally abuses Jessica. When George is arrested, Jessica is implicated as well; he gets life, she’s sentenced to 10 years.

LeBlanc’s intimacy with Jessica, Coco, and their extended, " random " families reveals a foreign culture with its own subtle laws of behavior. Parents pit their children against each other to toughen them up, and they laugh when toddlers curse or mimic the sexually suggestive moves of adults. " A fog of despair so pervaded the ghetto that the smallest gesture of rebellion could seem like a bold, piercing light, " LeBlanc explains. " Bad, said with fond exasperation, was almost always a compliment. " Gender lines are established at an early age: " Boys roamed. Girls stayed inside and cooked and baby-sat. Girls had responsibilities. Boys had bikes. "

Although there aren’t many bright spots in Random Family, the book is far from grim. In addition to offering an unblinking view of poverty, LeBlanc portrays the people who live with its consequences in all their complexity. They’re resourceful, generous, wise, cruel, loyal, exasperating, and vulnerable by turns, and their resilience and will to survive are a source of unexpected inspiration for anyone jaded by the clichés and bleak statistics surrounding this overlooked corner of American society.

Adrian Nicole LeBlanc reads at the Harvard Book Store, 1256 Massachusetts Avenue in Harvard Square, on Wednesday, March 12 at 6 p.m. Call (617) 661-1515.

Issue Date: February 27 - March 6, 2003
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