Theresa Johnson is a single mother who was abandoned by her unemployed husband soon after her daughter Hillary Johnson was born. They live in a cramped inner-city apartment within walking distance of Hillary’s school and a nearby luxury hotel where Theresa works in housekeeping. The city announces the eviction of their building as part of a wider redevelopment, and Theresa finds herself with nowhere to go. The ongoing displacement pushes them from one shelter to another, and they frequently sleep on the streets. Theresa leaves work early to search for a new place to stay, only to be fired the next day for leaving early. The cycle of instability continues as they drift from shelter to shelter, often lacking a stable home.
At one shelter, an outreach worker named Calvin Reed helps them locate a more stable place while Theresa receives welfare aid. The new home is filthy and infested with rats, yet it marks a temporary foothold for them. As they settle, their story intersects with a neighboring family, the Althea Watkins and Raymond Watkins. The Watkins are a poor African-American family who live in a house not much different from Theresa and Hillary’s. The father’s departure is starkly stated: he left long ago, saying he was “worth more to them gone than there” and he stops paying child support. The family relies on welfare to scrape by, routinely going hungry during the end of the month when benefits run low. Their son, Richard Watkins, hopes to break the cycle of poverty by becoming the first member of his family to graduate from high school. Chandra Watkins is part of this household and helps round out the there-and-now realities of their daily life, including the pressures that come with poverty.
The Watkins household faces its own precarious struggles, but Theresa’s situation grows even more dire when Hillary contracts lead poisoning while living in the housing project. Theresa is evicted after she complains to the Health Department about the conditions. In the hospital, Hillary’s doctor cautions that repeated exposure to lead poisoning can cause serious health and development problems. Because the family has moved between shelters, doctors are unable to trace the exact source of the poisoning, leaving Theresa unable to guarantee Hillary’s safety in any consistent setting.
Facing an impossible choice, Theresa consults the outreach worker and concludes that the only way for Hillary to have a healthy, normal life—away from poverty and danger—is to be given up. The plan is carefully considered and carried out in the park: Theresa takes Hillary there, and Mr. Reed and another social worker take Hillary away, leaving Theresa to face life alone. Before the departure, Theresa gives Hillary a heart necklace and tells her that whenever she looks at it, she should remember that she is loved. In the park, Theresa is left weeping, while Hillary’s voice can still be heard crying for her mother. The film closes with a stark, somber note about the choices poverty forces upon families, a reminder of the broader social context in which the story unfolds.
Before the credits, a statistic appears: 32.5 million people live in poverty in the United States, today; 13 million of them are children.
