When I left off of my last post, insightful reader, I told you about how my dilemma of living in Dora’s house as a “live-in companion” was unraveling. As I said previously, I had to have my mother move in to the house with Dora and myself to assist me with Dora’s care. It turned out Dora’s condition was far more fragile than her son had lead us to believe. She was in the throws of advanced dementia/ Alzheimer disease, she started out with a fractured back, then broke her hip while I was there, she was almost completely deaf. Also just before I started living with her she had fallen down and gotten a concussion from picking up a skunk that she mistook for a cat. The startled animal scratched her, thank God it didn’t spray her because that would have been an even worse mess. I think even the skunk realized that she wasn’t all there. Then when the skunk scratched her and jumped out of her arms she lost her balance, and fell resulting in a concussion. Dora was in pretty bad shape, but if you asked her son about her condition he would evade the subject, or state callously, “She is fine, there is nothing wrong with her.”
It finally got to the point where my mother and I realized that we were doing so much for Dora that we had actually become live-in 24 hour a day medical caregivers for Dora. It was now becoming all too disturbingly apparent that Dora’s son was basically cheating us out of slave labor to provide for his mother’s care. It was also becoming apparent that no matter how sick Dora was her son would never pay anyone to properly care for her. He was basically just a stingy vile person who I learned from neighbors that grew up with him spent his whole life cheating others in business and in private life to get to where he was. So unfortunately the neighbors were not all that surprised when they found out that Dora’s son was abusing her and enslaving/ imprisoning us. They stated that Dora’s son had been a weasel from childhood and saw the whole world as there to service him. They even said that they were surprised that he even made the effort to find anyone to look after her at all. Well when they said that I let them know that it wasn’t her son who brought us in to look after her, but a combination of his niece and daughter who pressured him into bringing someone to look after her. They encouraged my mother and I to do the best that we could until a better option could become available. My mother and I started to realize that the only other “better” option for us if we were to continue to stay there was for us to be paid as caregivers since that is what we were. We realized that we had never been tenants, but that we had been caregivers from the beginning and that Dora’s son was hoping that we would be too stupid to figure that out.
When we told Dora’s son that we needed to be paid as caregivers you would have thought that he had been shot in the leg from the way he jumped and recoiled. We went on to tell him that we wouldn’t even charge him the full market rate for care-giving so that he would be more willing to pay us for the proper care of his mother. See we couldn’t even leave the house to get our own jobs, we even had to ask her son for time to go shopping. Our bills were not getting paid, we did not have an outside social life, so as you can see we really were being imprisoned. What was Dora’s son’s reply, he looked shocked and enraged and spat at us that if we tried to get him to pay us he would evict us. This was my first experience with eviction as a weapon of retaliation, or as I like to call it, “weaponized eviction“. I was soon to learn as my mother and I continued to live here in Placer County that it had a reputation for corrupt citizens, courts, sheriffs, and corruption in general, even though it was promoted as an oasis of conservative and family values. I have to admit that there is a high level of conservatism and family values here in Placer County, but those elements are eclipsed by the shocking and persistent presence of methamphetamine addicts and homelessness, and corruption in general. Please let me state at this juncture that I have nothing against homeless people. My mother and I were homeless for and extended period of time in part due to what she and I went through that I am describing in this post. However as I have said repeatedly to other citizens of Placer County who are willing to listen, I feel that there are forces at work behind the scenes in this county that encourage a conspicuous class of homeless and addicts when more could be done to alleviate the problem. But I will deal more with these issues in future posts.
Dora’s son backed my mother and I into a corner with the ultimatum that he gave us stating that he would evict us if we asked for pay for work we were performing on daily basis for Dora. I was shocked, he was acting like we were cheating him by asking him for pay we deserved and had rightfully earned. But as I stated before, I found out the hard way about the tendency toward trickery in this county, that trickery was almost cultural norm here in Placer county. When her son yelled that he would evict us I retorted to him that if he took us to court I would show the judge all the proof/ documentation of his neglect and endangerment of his mother. That didn’t seem to phase him. In his estimation of himself he was a crafty man with a skip-tracing business so he was sure the court would be on his side against these two single transient women who just about dropped on his step out of no where. Remember he viewed all people as losers/ criminals even though he was the biggest loser criminal of them all.
Later that afternoon after Dora’s niece found out from her son that we demanded to be paid for the work we were doing she stopped by the house to give us a piece of her mind. She just about charged through the front door yelling, “I can’t believe you two are abusing my grandmother!” My mother and I both said, “What are you talking about, how are we abusing your grandmother?” Then she went on to say, “You two should work for my grandmother for free since you see that she is in need!” What Dora’s niece, Lori, refused to acknowledge is that we had been working for Dora for free for six months, and my mother and I were exhausted and behind on our bills. My mother and I were also completely isolated from the rest of humanity. But these are all examples of how Dora’s family functioned and felt about other people. Other people were just put on the earth to service them without compensation. I have to admit that the situation my mother and I were in seemed reminiscent to me of the experience our enslaved ancestors must have gone through with the families that “owned” them in the south. I hate to bring it up, but it did cross my mother’s and my mind that Dora’s son might have held a certain level of disdain and prejudice toward us since we were single black women, and his father was from Mississippi. On the other hand, Dora’s son might have just been bat-crap, in-bred stupid. I haven’t ruled either option out.
Well to cut a long story much shorter Dora’s son did start eviction proceedings. He was so beside himself with indignation that these two “transient” women were challenging and threatening him about the pay we deserved. He’d been getting away with it for so long, he never even considered that he’d be challenged on the right that he felt that he had to exploit others. So shortly after this incident the eviction papers were delivered to us. Now my mother and I were beside ourselves with shock and indignation realizing that there was no level too low for this man to drop to in order to get his way. And as if this wasn’t bad enough, Lori, Dora’s niece, showed up one afternoon to check on her grandmother, and to also let my mother and I know that we were getting what we deserved for not working for her grandmother for free. Then when Dora’s son arrived shortly after Lori, we heard Lori tell her uncle (Dora’s son) , ” Good, we’ll make them homeless, and they hate homeless people in Placer county so they’ll get what they deserve, because they are drug addicts.” So we found out Lori was a liar like her uncle. We were not drug addicts. We were just two women in a really bad situation.
A few weeks after this my mother and I went to landlord tenant court to fight for our right not to be evicted over asking for wages we had rightly worked for and deserved. Luckily we had several things on our side going into this battle. First of all my mother had extensive experience working in landlord tenant law when she worked for a non-profit agency that handled these issues in the 70’s. The time she spent employed there allowed her to gain experience dealing with all types of unlawful evictions. So she referred to her past experience as we went into this battle. Also to stack the deck even more in our favor, we made sure that we found a way to meet with an attorney at NorCal Legal services. This is a not for profit agency that provides low income people with access to legal counseling that they would not otherwise have access to. Just as a side note, I recommend that anybody reading this blog find out what local agencies in your area provide free services, such as legal counseling, just in case you find yourself in a similar situation to what my mother and I found ourselves in. In addition to asking NorCal Legal services for help, my mother and I also utilized the services of the local law library which happened to be very close to where we lived. Both the attorneys on staff at NorCal legal services and at the law library agreed that the court would probably rule this attempted eviction as retaliation, and therefore would not allow the eviction, but rule in our favor. But as a last ditch back-up measure, in case the court surprised us and ruled in Dora’s son’s favor. The attorneys recommended that we move out by the court date even if we had no place else to go, and take pictures of our vacated rooms as proof that we had moved, and bring them to court along with the keys to the house. However, before I forget and neglect to tell you reader, the number one piece of advice that my mother and both attorneys agreed on was that we definitely needed to show up in court for the eviction hearing to defend ourselves. Otherwise not showing up would be viewed as our guilt and inability to defend ourselves therefore would automatically lead to the judge approving the eviction. Then we would basically have no defense after that, we would have an eviction on our permanent record. This was a tense situation, but my mother and I with God’s help were definitely going to find a way to get through it.
To be continued in Starting Over Again Part Four.