So began the four years of observation that led to Tell Them Who I Am: The Lives of Homeless Women (339 pages. Free Press. $24.95), a book every bit as clearsighted and compassionate as “Tally’s Corner.” Naturally, it’s a heartbreaker–not least because most of these women hope for so little. Housing for them, says Liebow, “means ‘an efficiency apartment,’ ‘a cubby hole’.” As one woman put it, “If I had my own little room and my own TV…I could spend the rest of my life like that.” Liebow’s observations lead him to reject the fashionable notion that we encourage dependency by making things too easy for the poor. One woman of shaky mental balance, who seemed to be improving at a shelter, was given an ultimatum: provide written evidence within 48 hours that she had applied for public assistance or be put out. Bureaucratic runarounds made her miss the deadline, and, as Liebow bitterly puts it, “to help her help herself, Louise was expelled from the shelter [and soon] she was again on the street where she quickly reverted to her look and demeanor of the year before.”
“Tell Them Who I Am” is an implicit refutation of Janet Malcolm’s notion that the relationship of reporter to subject is necessarily exploitive: Liebow has managed to tell all about his subjects without selling them out. Indeed, he permits his subjects to argue with him in footnotes. “Shelter staff…were a major source of support,” he writes. “Elliot lives in a dream world,” one woman responds. “The way people in authority treated you sometimes, I thought they were just out to rob me of what little I had left of my self esteem.” Liebow would be horrified at the idea that his book is about anything but homeless women, but it’s also the inadvertent selfportrait of a decent man.
