Brad Parks - Eyes of the Innocent

Over the next hour or so, it all came out-sometimes in a torrent, other times in a tumble. It was one of those interviews that could have doubled as a therapy session. Sweet Thang nodded at all the right times, shushed when she needed to, supported Akilah’s every emotional need.

I was just the guy with the pen, furiously taking notes.

As I suspected, Akilah Harris’s twenty-four years on this planet had seldom been easy. Her father was never really in the picture. She said she was four when her mother died of a drug overdose. Akilah didn’t know what drug and didn’t provide many details. But I suppose, to a four-year-old, none of that would have been especially significant.

She had been taken in by an aunt who lived in the Baxter Terrace Public Housing Project, a grim collection of low-rise brick buildings not far from Interstate 280. It was not exactly what you would call a kid-friendly environment.

Akilah explained how she had gotten pregnant for the first time when she was sixteen, and the aunt-who was very religious and therefore very ashamed-basically disowned her. She dropped out of school to support herself and the child. With no other relatives in the area, she stayed with a succession of friends in Baxter Terrace. Then the baby died of a heart defect when it was less than six months old.

Akilah got pregnant again when she was eighteen, which is how she got Alonzo; then again when she was twenty, which is how Antoine came to be. Akilah didn’t say anything about the father, which was hardly unusual. Dads didn’t always stick around in that part of town.

Really, it seemed like Akilah had only caught one break in her young life. She managed to find a decent job. She said it was at University Hospital, and it “paid good”-which probably meant she was pulling down $30,000 a year, including overtime. That didn’t go very far in most parts of Northern New Jersey, one of the most expensive areas of the country to live in. But to a kid from Baxter Terrace, it could still feel like a lot of money.

And, naturally, the first thing she wanted to do was get the hell out of Baxter Terrace.

But that’s where things got complicated. About four years ago, not long after Antoine was born, she got connected with a guy-she was kind of vague about the details-who, in turn, connected her with another guy-she described him as “a Puerto Rican guy”-who, in turn, ushered poor, orphaned Akilah Harris into her very own home.

“It was a chance to raise my children somewhere else besides Baxter Terrace,” she said. “I had to do it.”

For a while, it worked out fine. Then, suddenly, she couldn’t afford it anymore. Sweet Thang-a guileless creature with the kind of naivete that only the young possess-asked a few follow-up questions about how such a thing could even be possible and seemed genuinely confused. I would have to explain it to her later. Akilah Harris had gotten slammed with a pernicious form of subprime mortgage.

People hear the term “subprime” and get confused, because the “sub” makes it sound like it’s some kind of good deal. It’s not. The “prime” refers not to the rate but to your status as a borrower. If you’ve got five years of perfect credit and a steady job, you qualify for a prime mortgage at a reasonable rate. Being subprime meant that something about you was less than perfect and you were going to get charged a rate that only barely failed to qualify as loan-sharking.

Except, of course, they didn’t start out that way. Many of the subprime loans that floated around the ghetto a few years back had had introductory rates far below what the permanent rate would be. It made an otherwise unaffordable house suddenly fall into just about anyone’s price range. For a while. Then-surprise! — the real rate kicked in. Just like that, you went from 4 percent interest to 12 percent interest and your monthly payment doubled overnight.

The Puerto Rican man probably told Akilah-and countless other dupes-not to worry about the interest rate reset. After all, it would only take a year or two before they had enough equity in the house to refinance to a regular loan.

And that was true-as long as credit remained easy and the housing market stayed supernova hot. For a while, it did. I had written about Newark neighborhoods where the average home price, driven primarily by real estate speculators, was doubling every two years.

The only problem is, nothing like that lasts forever. When the global credit crunch hit and the easy money stopped flowing, the bubble that was Newark’s real estate market experienced a big, messy burst. And people like Akilah Harris, who were led to believe the good times would never end, were finished. The foreclosures came in huge waves.

Some people figured out pretty quickly their days among the landed gentry were over and accepted it graciously, slinking back to the apartments from which they came with their credit scores in shambles. Others tried to do short sales or loan workouts, hoping to emerge with the shirts on their backs-and often nothing more.

And then, every once in a while, there’s a real hardhead, like Akilah. She was so determined to hang on to her house-in the face of a financial reality that dictated otherwise-she got herself another job. It was a second-shift job cleaning floors at a pallet-making company.

She just couldn’t find any second-shift child care-not for anything she could afford, anyway. And with her mother dead and her aunt refusing to be part of her life, she had no family to leave her sons with. So each day, she worked at the hospital from 7 A.M. to 3 P.M., picked up the boys from daycare, brought them home, and put them in her bedroom with the TV on.

She left them snacks. And then she locked the door “so they couldn’t get in no trouble.”

Which is why, when that fire started at 9 P.M., they had no hope of escape.

* * *

Akilah finished up the details of how the previous evening unfolded for her. None of her neighbors knew she worked a second job or where it was, so no one from the fire department-or the police department or child protective services-had been able to notify her about what had happened. She was just walking back from work a little after 1 A.M. when she saw all the fire trucks and cop cars still jamming her street.

A neighbor collared her before she could get to her house, explained what happened, and convinced her she would be arrested for child endangerment if the cops found her. Akilah spent the night weeping on the neighbor’s floor. When she awoke in the morning, the authorities had finally left. She went back to her house to collect some of the things that hadn’t been destroyed in the fire and get some items for her boys’ funeral.

That’s when we found her.

“I know I should have just let the police take me, but I just wanted to spend a little bit of time in the house,” she said. “I just felt like, I don’t know, like it was the only place I could be close to my boys. I knew I hadn’t been there for them in life so I wanted to be there for them in death. Maybe that sounds stupid, but that’s what I was thinking.”

Akilah sighed.

“So that’s my sad story,” she said.

It was, I had to admit, an extraordinary interview. I couldn’t believe she had shared so much with such brutal candor. Most people couldn’t be that honest with themselves, much less with two strangers.

At the same time, she was an orphaned only child who worked sixteen-hour days and didn’t seem to have a soul in the world she could count on. She was probably just desperate for someone to listen.

And in two newspaper reporters, she had found a more than receptive audience. Sweet Thang had been mopping tears off her own face for most of the last hour. My eyes were dry, though I felt like my insides had been cleaned out by a canal dredger.