The Myth Of The Welfare Queen
Book Review, January 1997

One day, as Odessa rested at home, worrying about (her daughter) Brenda and the children, the phone rang. It was Jim (her five-year-old grandson). "Grandma," he said. "We hungry. Mama said she be back in a jiffy, but she ain't back." When Odessa got there she was staggered by what she saw. The children were smeared with filth. The house reeked of urine. She cleaned up the children, gave them some food, and sat down to wait for Brenda.

When Brenda walked through the front door, high on crack, Odessa told her she was taking the children away. Brenda dialed 911. Two officers arrived. The cops questioned the children and looked around the house. They told Brenda she had two choices: the child welfare people or Grandma. And that is how Odessa, at age 48, became a mother all over again. It is also how she ended up back on welfare long after she thought she was through with welfare forever.

The Myth of the Welfare Queen is a powerful rebuttal of the specter that's been wielded by those who have worked to dismantle the welfare system: the welfare scammer. Ironically, it was not a Republican administration but Bill Clinton who dealt that system its most lethal blow. On August 22, 1996 Clinton signed the 'welfare reform act,' thereby eliminating 13 million people, including 8 million children, from the AFDC rolls. Author David Zucchino writes, "...few of the Senators and congressmen who voted for the welfare bill had ever met a person on welfare, and even fewer had attempted to find out precisely what welfare recipients did with their government checks."

Pulitzer Prize-winning Zucchino spent six months doing exactly that. "If there were any Cadillac-driving, champagne-sipping, penthouse-living welfare queens in North Philadelphia," Zucchino writes, "I didn't find them." After reading his compelling, well-researched, highly readable account, the reader is convinced that if such abuses were the norm, Zucchino would have uncovered them. "What I found instead was a thriving subculture of destitute women, abandoned by their men and left to fend for themselves and their children, with welfare and food stamps their only dependable source of income."

In the course of reporting on the life of welfare recipient Odessa Williams, Zucchino traces the modern history of the African-American people. Williams, legal guardian of her four grandchildren, began working in the fields of Georgia when she was five years old. Along with five million other African-Americans who left the South between 1940 and 1970 in search of work in Northern factories, Williams' mother Bertha moved to North Philadelphia in 1950-"arriving just in time to stand helplessly by as the American urban manufacturing economy collapsed." When the available migrant farm labor-and her body-gave out, Bertha became the first Boone to go on welfare. She wouldn't be the last. After her husband left her with eight children and no job, Odessa signed up for public assistance in 1967, receiving $75 a week. When she re-applied nearly 30 years later, Odessa was shocked to be allotted only $25 more for the support of her four grandchildren.

The heart of The Myth of the Welfare Queen is Odessa Boone's day-to-day struggle to raise her grandchildren on $400 a month in a neighborhood with the highest murder rate in Philadelphia-123 per 100,000 people. (The national average is 9.5 per 100,000.) The book also follows Odessa's neighbor, welfare mother and homeless activist Cheri Honkala, who organizes a tent city on an abandoned lot and leads demonstrations to protest social service cuts. Through the lens of these two women's' lives, David Zucchino provides a good look at a situation most of us would rather not see: the cruel abandonment and abuse of America's poorest women by the system that was established to serve them. As Zucchino himself describes it, "This book is the story of survival of single mothers during the dying days of the American welfare state." For any reader of conscience, it will also serve as a call to awareness, and action.