Number of words: 389

Fathers were not a thing commonly possessed by members of The Tribe, but even that’s not so outright as it might appear. I know it’s a platitude about what all the interpretations call the matriarchal Negro society or culture. For one thing, it’s not unique in that respect, and for another I’m not certain how much difference it makes. The district had figures to show that about 85 percent of the families of GW were fatherless. However, these figures were presented to us at a teachers’ meeting after school which was presided over by someone from the Welfare Department downtown, and it was also from the Welfare that the figures came. I remember little about the meeting itself except that the teachers joined the Welfare in expressing their outrage about all the county welfare money going to support certain undeserving people from Arizona, Texas or wherever, all of whom only came to California and specifically this very city because they knew the welfare rates were high. My own outrage came from the fact that the meeting lasted until almost six o’clock. The point is, families don’t get much welfare money if there is some big able-bodied dad around the place, so that it’s just possible that out of all those officially fatherless families there may have been a few who just neglected to mention Dad at all, or forgot to report that he was out to sea or working in San Pedro or somewhere, coming home only weekends like quite a number of dads anywhere you go. With rents as high as they were, jobs scarce and layoffs frequent, no one was going to miss out on that welfare money, which was going to go for those aforementioned potato chips and transistors. Remember, it wasn’t as if they could just move to another part of town where rents were reasonable. So the figures couldn’t be trusted and were certainly much too high. It was something like the old A-to-II quandary again, really; I mean, the Welfare certainly knew this, and so they knew the figures weren’t accurate, but they still published the figures, still acted on them, and in the end probably believed them officially, since, I guess, those were the only figures they had. 

Excerpted from pages 57-58 of ‘The way it spozed to be’ by James Herndon