About five years ago, the State of Maryland had a public advertising campaign about child support enforcement. Almost everywhere you would look, buses would drive by with posters on the side bearing a picture of a chicken wearing tennis shoes. “What do you call a man who makes a baby and flies the coop?” was the message. Around the same time, I remember talking to a West Indian friend living in Baltimore. His impression of local american black men wasn’t too high, and he liked that imagery. He’d always refer to men we knew who seemed particularly irresponsible or thoughtless as “chickens in tennis shoes”.

Right about that same time, Nonchalant’s song “5 o’Clock in the Morning” was all over the radio, with more or less the same message: black men’s irresponsibility is jeopardizing the future of the entire race. “Your people’s gettin skinny cause you want your pockets fatter.”

This impression is pretty general in a lot of ways: while the struggles that Black men face are well-known and well-publicized, the impression that Black men are at the same time responsible for many of today’s social problems is equally widespread. It fit with the agenda of certain modern-day feminists, it fit the agenda of white neo-liberal reformers (Daniel Patrick Moynihan comes to mind, who in 1967 blamed the black inner-city uprisings on the decline of the patriarchal family, rather than hundreds of years of oppression). Even black nationalists, though they have been much more sympathetic to the struggles black men face daily, echo these criticisms… because after all, everyone knows the family is the base of a strong nation. (Of course, like most any problem in the city, whites deal with child support issues just like blacks, but the way public policy discussion goes, urban problems are always “Black” problems.) The question still remains: who speaks for the men?

Ralph Johnson’s latest novel Child Support! answers that question in part. While undoubtedly well-known in his own circles, Baltimore’s answer to Iceberg Slim hasn’t reached the wider audience I feel he deserves. His previous books, A Ghetto Love Story and Born to Hustle, evoked Slim in his ruthless depiction of working and hustling Black people, his attention to the crucial details of speech and dialect, and his appreciation for the beauty and human motivations of his characters. While his subject matter is still vintage Iceberg - I found myself amazed on reading Child Support! at how perfectly he captures some real specific West Baltimore speech patterns and slang - his philosophical motivation comes off like a slightly less militant Ishmael Reed. Like Reed, Johnson is tireless in attacking and attempting to undermine the various cultural manipulations that pit Black men and women at odds with each other and keep them from uniting against the power structure that keeps both down. But Child Support! goes beyond most of Reed’s work in its basic impartiality; his honest portrayal of the situation many men face in dealing with child support never crosses the admittedly vague line into “misogyny”. Both men and women are shown as victims of a culture that expect them to build a traditional nuclear family to bring up a child in a world where all the underpinnings of that family structure don’t hold up any more.

The back cover notes to Child Support! brag “The story is being talked about on every corner in America, now read it here for the first time”. True enough, the central plot line of the book is a story we’ve all heard before: a boy and his high school sweetheart accidentally end up pregnant, they thought they could stay together always but end up growing apart, he thinks he’s doing what he can for his kid, she thinks otherwise… in the end she ends up “taking his ass downtown.” That phrase in and of itself is revealing, and Johnson wastes no opportunity to explore its meaning. Women in the book constantly remark to each other, if you can’t get money out of your baby’s father, get the white man to do it for you. “He don’t play around.”

And as you’d expect, the book is full to overflowing with stories illustrating every aspect of the tragedy families face at the hands of the child support game today. From the woman who tries to explain to her son why his daddy didn’t come by to take him out today to - shit you not! - the former NBA prospect who gives up sports and turns to armed robbery when his baby’s mother tries to extort insane sums of money from him, its all in there.

And while a lot of men with some justification claim that the whole system of child support and the entire city bureaucracy that enforces it is set up to hold them down for benefit of the women who are oppressing them, that explanation doesn’t really ring 100% true, and Johnson doesn’t let it go that easily. Of course there are conniving bitches who scam the system for some easy money at the expense of their one-time lovers, but then there’s plenty of honest women who really feel like they can’t depend on their baby’s father to help raise their child. On the other side of the game, there’s men who are just flakes and only come around when they want to, and only give the mother what they feel like giving, then there’s men who out of a sense of self-righteousness - it wasn’t my decision to have this baby! - refuse to pay, and then of course there are the men who don’t even know there’s a child support order out on them till they get locked up.

That the system is unfair for a lot of individuals going through it is true of course, but the real tragedy runs so much deeper than that, and this is the overarching theme of Child Support!. What does it mean that thousands of ‘family lives’ are occurring mediated by an office downtown. The problem isn’t that kids grow up with “no fathers” - that wouldn’t necessarily be so much of a problem, so long as the female mother figures in their life were strong enough to teach them what they need to know - the problem is that tens of thousands of kids are growing up with “Mr. Charlie” as a father figure. What’s worse, the men in their lives who may want to play a role in their son’s life are being kicked to the side. When your “father” is an office downtown that sees people’s lives as dollar amounts on forms of paper to fill out, how you supposed to grow up and know how to relate to people?

At points, the writing in Child Support! could be stronger. Ralph Johnson’s dedication to catching to spoken flair of language works surprisingly well in dialogue, and in capturing the substance of his characters’ thoughts, but at times the style can be jarring to read, especially in descriptions. And a couple of scenes in the novel sound like they were written with completely different characters in mind, and forced into the story, leaving the impression that one of the central characters in the book suddenly shows a new side of his personality for a few pages, then without explanation slips back into himself again. But for the most part the novel is well enough paced that a couple of minor lapses don’t bother the reader at all. Johnson has what it takes to be a major talent - each of his books I’ve read would play well as a film and be better than 90% of the shit Hollywood puts out - and its about time Baltimore had a serious writer to be proud of.

And probably more importantly, he has a real ear to the street, to what everyday people are talking about, and does a solid job of capturing those discussions, adding a few suggestions (but never the Springer’s final word), and bringing them back to people to build off. This is the style of cultural politics we see as most crucial for building community self-empowerment — more than the “high politics” of Democratic councilmen, nationalist scholars, and socialist organizers put together.

Child Support! is available at Everyone's Place (1356 W. North Ave.) and other bookstores around the city.