May 4, 1997

The Permanently Poor

By SUSAN JACOBY

Getting a job, two very different books agree, is a slow way out of poverty, and perhaps no way at all

MYTH OF THE WELFARE QUEEN

By David Zucchino.

366 pp. New York:

Scribner. $25.



MAKING ENDS MEET

How Single Mothers Survive Welfare and Low-Wage Work.

By Kathryn Edin and Laura Lein.

305 pp. New York:

Russell Sage Foundation.

Cloth, $42.50. Paper, $19.95.





n ''The Glory of Byzantium,'' a spectacular exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, an unforgettable icon depicts a procession of struggling souls trying to climb a ladder to heaven but always in danger of falling off into the clutches of gleeful demons. That image haunted me throughout David Zucchino's meticulous chronicle of the perilous lives of Odessa Williams, her eight adult children and numerous grandchildren. Mrs. Williams, 56, is one of two welfare mothers whose experiences are recorded in ''Myth of the Welfare Queen.'' Mr. Zucchino, the foreign editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting from South Africa, approached his domestic assignment among the poor of North Philadelphia in the spirit of a correspondent who recognized that he was basically a stranger to an alienated population within his own country.

''Making Ends Meet,'' which compares the survival strategies of welfare mothers with those of the ''working poor,'' provides an equally disturbing statistical portrait of the kind of women whose individual lives are explored by Mr. Zucchino. The economic analysis, prepared for the Russell Sage Foundation by Kathryn Edin, an assistant professor of sociology at Rutgers University, and Laura Lein, a researcher in the School of Social Work at the University of Texas, Austin, is based on interviews with 379 mothers who receive welfare or work at low-wage jobs.

The message of both books is unequivocal: the porous barrier between welfare and work bears little resemblance to the middle-class image of a job -- any job -- as the first rung on a ladder leading out of poverty. Unfortunately, Mr. Zucchino dilutes the point by alternating between the Williams family and Cheri Honkala, a savvy welfare rights advocate known for such enterprises as setting up a tent encampment for the homeless on the grounds of the Liberty Bell. Ms. Honkala, 32, who has only one child and is off welfare by the end of the book (she makes several hundred dollars a night as a topless dancer), is clearly atypical -- in her choices and their availability.

Mrs. Williams, born in rural Georgia into a world of few choices, was chopping cotton and pulling string beans in the fields at age 5. She became one of millions of blacks who left the South in the 1950's at precisely the point when Northern cities began their long economic decline. When the Marriott Corporation announced recently that it would hire 550 workers for a new hotel, 10,000 applicants lined up in freezing weather. Implicit in Mr. Zucchino's account is the question of how the end of ''welfare as we know it'' can provide work for the 9,450 who couldn't be hired.

The Russell Sage Foundation researchers found that mothers with paying jobs spent twice as much a month as welfare mothers on expenses like day care and transportation and on formerly subsidized housing and medical costs. Nevertheless, many women continued to shift back and forth between welfare and work, hoping against hope to find a job leading to a career ladder rather than a wall.

Odessa Williams's 39-year-old daughter Joyce had worked for 10 years as a nurse's aide before she injured her back lifting a patient and turned to welfare. Then she enrolled in a medical data-processing training program. While she was in class, a son and a nephew began playing with matches, set fire to a mattress and seriously damaged her house. Joyce's 19-year-old daughter Iesha (already the mother of three) had fallen asleep in front of the television set while she was supposed to be watching the children. Joyce did manage to graduate from the training program, but the computerized medical job never materialized. After finding another job that paid $7.50 an hour -- but left her poorer after paying for transportation -- she went back on welfare.

The absence of rational calculation, regarding everything from fire safety to birth control, is the hallmark of lives described by Mr. Zucchino as being ''utterly dominated by subsistence concerns.'' Yet new welfare restrictions -- especially the denial of benefits for children born while a mother is already receiving public aid -- are based on the assumption that poor women will make the rational decision that further childbearing is not in their best interest.

Odessa Williams receives approximately $1,382 a month, including welfare and Social Security disability, for her family of five (she has assumed responsibility for the four children of her crack-addicted daughter Brenda). She acquires basic household goods by methodically scrounging through trash. Recently she began preparing for Christmas by assuming the $58-a-month payments for a ''Hooked on Phonics'' set of audiotapes and books. And every month, she puts aside more money for other children's gifts. It is easy to see why Mr. Zucchino grew so fond of this devoted matriarch. Mrs. Williams desperately wants her grandchildren to learn, but her own education is too deficient for her to understand that visits to a public library might be just as effective as an expensive set of gimmicks promoted on television.

What is the point of yet another investigation into the lives of people whose problems sound so complex as to be irremediable? Leon Dash of The Washington Post, whose splendid 1996 book ''Rosa Lee'' chronicled the experience of a welfare family far more disordered than the Williamses, has argued that ''we must agree on what the facts are, regardless of our political viewpoints, before we can offer those trapped in poverty a way out.'' ''Myth of the Welfare Queen'' and ''Making Ends Meet'' raise the disturbing further question of whether the bottom of the ladder can even be seen, much less reached, from the deepest part of the abyss.