Random Family is incredibly gripping, totally readable and utterly depressing. For more than a decade, author Adrian Nicole LeBlanc immersed herself in the lives of a group of Puerto Ricans living in the Bronx tenements.
Much like In Cold Blood, Random Family is a work of non-fiction that reads like a novel. Two women make up the central focus for LeBlanc – Jessica, whose dreams of escaping poverty lead her straight into the arms of the neighborhood’s drug kingpin, and Coco, a teen mother of five whose boyfriend is serving a life sentence in federal prison for murder.
Although the story centers on these two, their lives aren’t remarkable in the world as reported by LeBlanc. Nearly every girl in the neighborhood starts having children within months of their first period. Most of the young mothers have a husband, boyfriend or brother doing time. Every 1-bedroom apartment is home to dozens of family members and surrounded by violent crime. And all women in the book have been sexually abused as children, only to grow up to be slapped around or worse by their partners.
But LeBlanc doesn’t proselytize in Random Family. There are no critiques of social programs or the various government bureaucracies that support them. It’s just straight reporting of daily life, an important narrative choice given that most of the central characters in the book have no time to debate the politics of poverty. They have to live with the consequences.
Which is not to suggest the book isn’t frustrating. As a reader, I could understand how money gets tight, making it impossible to live anywhere but in crowded, dangerous neighborhoods. I could understand how the desire to escape poverty would lead young women to date cash-rich thugs or drop out of school to work. But I could not understand why girl after girl knowingly got pregnant at the age of 14. It’s not as if they didn’t know the basics of sex and its consequences – their own teenage mothers informed them early on. And it’s not as though saying no costs any money.
I also felt righteous anger with Coco, who doesn’t learn that her 7-year-old daughter has been raped until she’s diagnosed with genital warts. In fact, Coco, a sex abuse victim herself, barely tries to figure out who assaulted her child because her apartment has a revolving door, with family, friends and neighbors coming in and out at all hours. While the inherent risks of the neighborhood are higher and money for appropriate child care non-existent, shutting your door and limiting visitors to people you know seems a pretty basic precaution.
But then again, I’m not a high-school dropout with five kids whose primary daily concern is trying to figure out how to eat and pay rent with just a few hundred dollars a week. And that’s the point. If anything, Random Family does force you to take a look at someone else’s life, and experience the world as they do – a world where deprivation and abuse are just another part of a long day’s work.
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