Tangri, S. S., & Browne, J. M. (1999). Climbing out of the pit: From the Black middle class to homeless and (almost) back again. In M. Romero & Abigail J. Stewart (Eds.) Women's untold stories: Breaking silence, talking back, voicing complexity. New York: Routledge, (125-141)
1.	“Homelessness arises from no single factor, but is instead perpetuated by pivotal interactions between external social and economic conditions and personal vulnerabilities. In the United States, there are four major events that trigger homelessness:
	a.	family breakup (true of one-third of homeless persons);
	b.	eviction (applies to a third of homeless persons);
	c.	job loss (true for 29 percent of homeless persons
	d.	relocation (true for 24 percent of homeless persons.
2.	“Laura was not a ‘latchkey child and enjoyed the luxury of having a stay-at-home parent at a time when high proportions of African American mothers were in the labor force. . .
3.	In high school Laura developed an interest in animal psychology and had her sights set on college. Her grandmother had hoped schools would be desegregated in time for her to go to go to a nearby ‘white’ school, but they weren’t and she went instead to a ‘Black’ school . .
4.	“’I think I first started not liking myself as a female in junior high school. We had to take an aptitude test. This was to help us decide whether to go into the academic track, business, or—I don’t’ remember the other one.
5.	My highest score was in the mechanical aptitude and the math side. I remember my female counselor looking at my scores and shaking her head and said ‘I don’t know what to tell you to do, maybe you could learn how to sew.’ And I can still remember how I felt.’
6..	“Instead of rebelling against the gender norms that she felt diminished her, she tried to live by them. She was an avid student and attended a Georgetown University college preparatory program during two summers and a semester. This helped her get four scholarships upon graduation from high school. Her grandparents were set on her going to college.
7..	Instead, she fell in love and, much to their chagrin, married a white man 3 months before she graduated from high school at age seventeen. She had her first child, a son, later that year. Her daughter was born 3 years later, in November 1968. Although her family encouraged her to continue her education, Laura had to go to work.
8.	But with a high school diploma and no work experience, opportunities were limited. Her first job was at a soda fountain at a drugstore. Later she worked in various positions from an apprentice lens grinder with an optician, to running an offset printing press in a government office”
9.	“The lifestyle she and her husband had built became more and more expensive to maintain, because her husband simply did not keep up his end. The responsibility of maintaining it was more and more on Laura’s shoulders. So she began working the night shift because it paid more.
10.	Her husband reacted to this by becoming involved with a younger woman, but he did not lesson the financial burden on her. Laura coped with both problems by working more: She had one full-time job, one part-time job, and was also attending school while raising her two children . . .”
11.	“ . . . her daughter’s premarital pregnancy triggered her first nervous breakdown: ‘And there was nothing I could do . . . . You know, it was too late to get an abortion. I couldn’t fix it . . . . I didn’t know what to do to fix it. . . . It was out of my hands. I guess I just went into the hospital for a rest . . . “
12.	By the time she had turned 41 her husband had become increasingly belligerent, flaunting a girlfriend in front of her. Her son moved in with them after returning from a military stint in Germany and was abusing alcohol and possibly other drugs.
13.	Her daughter ceded custody of her out-of-wedlock son to Laura and Laura’s husband when the boy was 5 months old. Too many things were going wrong that she couldn’t fix. . . . . Her world crashed: her beloved grandmother died in March; her favorite uncle died in May; her husband left her in July”
14.	“While she was in the psychiatric ward this time (in June 1990), her home was auctioned off because the mortgage wasn’t being paid.” She spent a few nights at various friends houses and then started her life in various homeless shelters. She eventually entered the Dorothy Day Shelter where she stayed for just over a year. . .”
15.	“In this account of Laura’s path to homelessness we see in vivid detail the meaning of Burt’s (1992) statement that homelessness results from pivotal interactions between external conditions and personal vulnerabilities. Perhaps the absence of any one factor—her daughter’s pregnancy, her husband’s infidelity, her son’s suicide attempts, or her shame about any of these, or the unwitting collusion of a nonattending phsician and unaware pharmicist that kept her supplied with tranquilizers could have spared her from descending into ‘the pit’”
16.	For Laura, her survival and departure from homelessness occurred from her struggles to remain fully human while homeless and to reclaim her identity and self-esteem. She reversed her slide into helplessness and passivity. Her naturally assertive personality—buried under years of marital ‘adaptation’-began to assert itself.
17.	She consulted lawyers (who worked on a pro bono basis or were from Legal Services) about her divorce, her disability suit against the federal agency where she’d been fired, and about getting herself qualified for Medicare. She sought out services and self-help groups including AA groups, group therapy, Emotions Anonymous, daily Mass at church, and visiting social service agencies.
18.	“But it was in the Lesbian group, where she finally experienced empowerment and was able, at last to stick with the program. . . . ‘I think about four women came over to me after the meeting at St. Mary’s and said to me, “We’ll love you until you can love yourself.” I felt, well gee, I didn’t know I was lovable, because I didn’t love myself.’ . . .
19.	Laura’s account of discovering Lesbians does not resemble any of the familiar master narratives about ‘coming out.’ It centers much more on discovering community than on sexuality” This aided her growth into a self she could love and aided her transformation from being “socially defined” to “self-defined.”
20.	“Within 3 years after leaving the shelter (in 1992), Laura won her disability case, got into a subsidized apartment, won back custody of her grandson, completed her AA degree at Montgomery County College, entered the BA program at the University of Maryland with a double major in psychology and computer science and started volunteering at the Whitman Walker Clinic at the Passages Conference.
21.	She also testified before the state legislature on homelessness and has been invited by several organizations to speak on the topic. She thinks she may want to become a WebMaster”.
22.	Discussion. “The path from middle-class security to homelessness and back is not unique to Laura, but often it is overlooked. Why is that?
23.	And why is the master narrative constructed as it is? . . . The construction of a master narrative serves a social purpose. . . This narrative helps to keep people ‘in line,’ in lives that help maintain an illusion of social order and justice.
24.	A narrative like that also provides a priori assumptions that undergird the politics and policies of homelessness. If homeless people are without homes because of their psychological, intellectual, and characterological flaws, then their thinking and perceptions about homelessness can be discounted. They need not participate in the public dialogue about finding solutions to homelessness, and their priorities or perspectives would not carry any weight if they were heard. Thus, policies on homelessness can be formulated from the perspective of those who are not homeless. . .”