Ties That Bind
Adrian Nicole LeBlanc spent eleven years in the Bronx chronicling one extended family’s struggles with urban poverty. She felt right at home.
Adrian Nicole LeBlanc was two years out of Leominster High School when the suicides began. It was February 1984. Fourteen-year-old Jeffrey Bernier shot himself after school with his father’s .357 Colt revolver. By March of the following year, ten more teenagers in the working-class town northwest of Boston had taken their own lives, raising the teenage suicide rate in Leominster to ten times the national average and prompting supporters of a rival high school football team to wear T-shirts that read, “Kill Leominster Before They Kill Themselves.”
The next year, LeBlanc, a senior at Smith College, began writing about the suicides in a course taught by Mark Kramer, now director of the Nieman Program on Narrative Journalism at Harvard. She continued working on the piece through the spring semester when the class was taught by Tracy Kidder. The following December, the story was published in Daniel Okrent’s now defunct New England Monthly, alongside works by Barry Werth and Susan Orlean. It was a virtuoso piece of journalism, drawing an intense portrait of teenage culture against a backdrop of depression, alcohol, and drugs.
Back home, the local newspaper ran a photo of LeBlanc next to the headline LEOMINSTER FEELS BETRAYED.
Eighteen years later, LeBlanc, now forty, is recounting the story to an auditorium of ninth graders in the Bronx. She says what struck her most about the experience wasn’t the lash of the local paper or the hate mail sent to her parents. “What I thought was so interesting was that it wasn’t the teenagers in the story who were upset — it was the townspeople who didn’t know what was going on and didn’t want to believe it.”
LeBlanc is back in the Bronx this day to speak about her book Random Family, a work that follows several members of an extended Puerto Rican family in the South Bronx as they struggle in an environment of urban poverty. As she did in the Leominster suicide piece, LeBlanc writes about what is uncomfortable to accept but ultimately irresponsible to ignore. She spent eleven years reporting for the book, which passed through six editors and two publishing houses before its release in February 2003. Since then, Random Family has been reprinted five times in hardback and twice in paper, and was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award.
The book is imbued with LeBlanc’s intense observations; it draws upon skills acquired during an exceptional education at Smith, Oxford, and Yale; but it is, in many ways, informed most deeply by her own roots in Leominster.
Random Family began as a small project. Richard Todd, who had been LeBlanc’s editor at New England Monthly, gave her a book contract at Houghton-Mifflin in 1992 after reading an article she had written for The Village Voice about the trial of a young drug dealer in the Bronx called Boy George. The book was to be a profile of an inner-city entrepreneur who, by the age of twenty, grossed a half-million dollars a week in heroin sales, read Yachting Magazine, and gave gold Rolexes and diamond-encrusted belt buckles to his top employees at Christmas. Boy George spoke openly to LeBlanc during his trial on the condition that if he was acquitted she could not use any of the material. If she broke the agreement, he told her, he would kill her.
Boy George was sentenced to life without parole. LeBlanc continued to report from the Bronx. At the trial she had met one of Boy George’s girlfriends, Jessica, who would soon herself be sent to federal prison on charges related to Boy George’s heroin business. Jessica introduced LeBlanc to her family and friends — people whose everyday struggles would soon eclipse LeBlanc’s interest in the flash of Boy George. She was particularly drawn to a young woman named Coco, the sometime girlfriend of Jessica’s half-brother, Cesar, and the woman around whom the book would eventually revolve. It was Todd who first noticed LeBlanc’s shifting interest and encouraged her to follow it. “She wrote what she felt most strongly about,” he says. “And it was clear that she was seeing things that people hadn’t seen.”
Three years into the project, Todd left Houghton Mifflin and LeBlanc was assigned another editor. When that editor left, she was assigned a third. In April 1998, LeBlanc received a letter saying that if she didn’t deliver the book in six months it would be dropped. In October it was.
Though LeBlanc was barely staying financially afloat herself, she knew that what she was learning in the Bronx could not be understood more quickly. Time allowed her to recognize the cycles. Sometimes it was the monthly cycle of a family that had pork chops for dinner in the first days after receiving its welfare check but by the end of the month was eating rice flavored with ketchup. Other times it was the generational cycle of women who had suffered childhood sexual abuse trying to avert the same fate for their daughters with an equal measure of vigilance and pessimism. The years gave LeBlanc the perspective to know that a young man’s bumping into his estranged father in prison was not an extraordinary coincidence but a likely bet in a neighborhood in which so many men rotated in and out of the criminal justice system. In the small vignettes hidden from public view, LeBlanc saw a larger story. “I knew at moments the deep importance of what I was witnessing.”
It was an understanding that few in the publishing industry shared. As LeBlanc shopped the book around to other publishing houses, editors continued to express interest in Boy George but were concerned that the everyday characters LeBlanc wanted to focus on were not sympathetic enough and that their story would be difficult to market. After being rejected by five publishers in three months, LeBlanc got a meeting with Nan Graham at Scribner. “She cared directly about the people,” LeBlanc remembers. “She asked about the characters by name. She assumed my pleasure in the reporting.”
Scribner gave LeBlanc a $20,000 advance with which she paid back her $20,000 advance to Houghton Mifflin.
LeBlanc was a curiosity at first in the Bronx. People in Coco’s neighborhood weren’t used to a journalist spending so much time there, especially when it wasn’t on the back of a crime or tragedy. “Kids in the neighborhood told me about shoot-outs from five years ago. They offered up every horror story they could remember. They’d say, ‘Isn’t that what you’re here for?’”
Neighbors in the Bronx were as perplexed as the editors in Manhattan as to why Coco was a story. At the time LeBlanc met her, Coco was five months pregnant and living in a city shelter with her two young daughters. Cesar, the father of her eldest child and the child she was carrying, was in an upstate prison serving nine to eighteen years for manslaughter. Coco was unemployed, living on $250 a month in welfare payments, and hoping to qualify for public housing. She was what people in her neighborhood would call ordinary.
But it was Coco’s ordinariness that interested LeBlanc. Boy George’s success was an anomaly, even among drug dealers. Coco, however, represented many who, even at their most industrious, could not better the situation they were in. “Since there were few real options for mobility,” LeBlanc wrote, “people in Coco’s world measured improvement in microscopic increments of better-than-whatever-was-worse.” It was a subtle value system that LeBlanc’s relentless reporting allowed her to penetrate.
Thick and fed was better than thin and hungry. Family fights indoors — even if everyone could hear them — were better than taking private business to the street. Heroin was bad, but crack was worse. A girl who had four kids by two boys was better than a girl who had four by three. A boy who dealt drugs and helped his mom and kids was better than a boy who was greedy and spent the income on himself; the same went for girls and their welfare checks.
LeBlanc accompanied Coco to medical clinics. To welfare recertification appointments. To the workshops at the shelter that taught her how to budget her money, even though by the time she received her $125 welfare check she was usually $110 in debt. LeBlanc’s own finances were equally precarious. She traveled back and forth from the Bronx to her rent-stabilized apartment in downtown Manhattan. There were months she couldn’t make the payment on her phone bill, and would have to block the incoming collect calls from prisons. She applied for grants and received sixteen of them. She got a fellowship from the Knight Foundation, which allowed her go to Yale Law School for a year and study criminal law and sentencing guidelines. She wrote magazine articles. She received encouragement from her family and friends, but by the seventh year of reporting she realized she would have to go into debt to finish the book. From the time LeBlanc received her book contract from Houghton Mifflin and paid her agent to the time the book was delivered to Scribner, the money from her advance broke down to $36 a week.
Mark Kramer remembers LeBlanc at Smith College as restless, self-deprecating, and intense. He also remembers her as one of the two or three best students he has had. A writing sample she submitted as a sophomore to get into a competitive seminar he was teaching, was, he says, astonishing — a scene in which an awkward young woman arrives late to a big lecture class. The scene most nearly evokes LeBlanc’s own entry into Smith.
Though she had been a popular cheerleader and president of her high school class, nothing in LeBlanc’s background prepared her for Smith, where dinner on Thursdays was served on china by candlelight. “I’ll never forget walking around the first week with this feathered hair and this incredible accent and I just knew everything was wrong,” she says. “The food was different. The standard of beauty was different. Intelligence was valued over being nice.” Many of the people LeBlanc had grown up with and many in her family were employed in the local plastics factories of Leominster. LeBlanc’s father had worked in a chemical plant before rising to become a union organizer. Smith College was only seventy miles from Leominster but it contained a world of privilege that LeBlanc had not encountered before. It was soon apparent to LeBlanc that the reverse was also true — that the culture of the working class she came from, and from which she drew immense pride, did not register with those more privileged. “It was clear that in the eyes of a lot of people my experience was invisible and irrelevant.” It was a situation that would continue to remind LeBlanc of a question James Baldwin asked in Evidence of Things Not Seen — What does it mean to be defined by a person’s relief to not be you?
LeBlanc would excel at Smith academically. She graduated in 1986 with a degree in sociology and went on to Oxford University where she received a Master’s of Philosophy and Modern Literature. Her gratitude for her education has never foundered. Neither has her understanding of the arbitrariness of her fortune. “Smith was the first place I received the really beautiful things that come with privilege, but it was such a hard process to figure out how to take it in and still retain the awareness that it wasn’t fair that I was there while twenty other girls from my high school who should have been there weren’t.” It’s an awareness she would bring to Random Family, and one that would drive her to define the characters not by what they lacked but in the complexity of who they were. “I thought if I could capture their humanity — which includes them as imperfect, maddening, mysterious, lovable, dizzying people — people would understand, ‘Hey, there is a life here and it matters and you should pay attention to it because, in the most human ways, it’s not so different from yours.’”
The velocity at which Random Family moves conceals the effort that went into writing it. “It’s not just a document,” says Tracy Kidder. “But it has a feeling of a document which is deliberate and artful.” It is a saturated work, distilled from LeBlanc’s exhaustive reporting. After the sixth year, LeBlanc stopped recording interviews because she could no longer stay on top of transcribing the tapes. She organized her notes in files that filled thirty milk crates in her apartment. There were biography files, portrait files, sibling files, euphemisms-for-drugs files. Files that organized characters by the prison they were in or the neighborhood where they lived. There were files of legal documents, prison correspondence, and photographs. As LeBlanc moved through the writing, she taped index cards to her wall identifying key themes — “Place is identity” or “Love is a place to go.”
Alice Truax, who edited an early excerpt from Random Family for The New Yorker and continued to work with LeBlanc through the completion of the book, says one of the challenges was in constructing a narrative in which there was never going to be any closure, and in which there was little bright news. “The advantage of a disaster is that it comes and goes. It has a narrative implicitly, but it also goes, things get better. A tornado hits a town, a bunch of people are killed, but there is an end to it,” she says. “But of course there are many terrible things that happen that don’t function in this way.”
LeBlanc was winding down her work for Random Family when she learned her father had lung cancer. A month later she returned to Leominster to be with him for the duration of his illness. Her father, Adrian, for whom she was named, and to whom she has always been very close, was now bedridden in the home LeBlanc grew up in. When the first advance copy of Random Family arrived the following year, his eyesight was too weakened by medication to read the book himself and so LeBlanc read to him her favorite section — an early passage in the book when a teenage Coco enters the story.
Two months later, LeBlanc’s father died. In their last weeks together, she remembers asking him, “Dad, is there anything you want to tell me? Any questions?” His reply surprised and saddened her: “You know, there is something I’ve always wanted to know. College. What was it like?”
A high school friend of LeBlanc’s organized the book launch party for Random Family, which was held in a restaurant in Leominster. The mayor came. The superintendent of schools came. LeBlanc’s family was there, as were her childhood teachers and friends. Nobody was interested in hearing LeBlanc read from the book, even though they bought out all the copies that were there and someone had to go to the local Barnes & Noble to get more. They were just happy that she had done it.
Through the difficulties of completing Random Family, LeBlanc says she was carried by a deep belief in the importance of what she was doing and a great satisfaction in putting to meaningful use the skills she acquired during her education. “Especially since, in the acquisition of those skills, I think I disappeared for a while.”
At the close of Random Family, Coco is living upstate in Troy, trying to make a new start in conditions little more favorable than those in the Bronx. Cesar is still in prison. The daughter Jessica had as a teenager is now herself a pregnant teenager. There is no conclusion. No expository writing. LeBlanc allows the characters to leave the book as they entered, in their full humanity, struggling with situations in which they have little control and fewer options. “There’s no afterword that says if these problems move you, here’s what you do,” says Mark Kramer. “But within a day or two of reading it — before one’s old comfortable mindset sets back in — if readers were given a questionnaire and asked about their theories on the urban poor and what to do about it, you would see some amazingly open and trusting answers. And you might even see some despairing answers. And answers that say we must pay more attention and find out.”
Enjoy this piece? Consider a CJR trial subscription.
