Jason Ludke (Part 10)

Fragments of a future narrative

After returning to Tulsa from Milwaukee, I started studying the place I’d visited. I knew little about it going there, and wondered how Jason’s experience—with no money; as a Muslim—generalized across the city.

“Milwaukee ranks second in poverty level among the top 50 most-populated cities in the United States,” I read during an idle stretch at my day job. One-fifth of Milwaukee’s neighborhoods merit the extreme poverty classification.

I thought of Jason’s transitional housing in the Amani neighborhood, the kind of welcome it signaled as he tried—really for the first time, as an adult entering his fifth decade—to find a place for himself on the outside.

“I am working now at a halal restaurant,” he texted last April. “The pay suxks only 10 dollers a hour so a bit rough times on me,” plus “having no help from family makes it real difficult….” He knows poverty, probably as much as any Milwaukeean.

 His Muslim identity is harder to gauge. He’s read a lot; he seems a student of the faith. But he never, to my knowledge, was a regular at any mosque. He discovered the religion in solitary confinement, then pursued it largely online.

That sets him apart from local Muslim communities—which count some 15,000 members in southeastern Wisconsin. Precise population estimates are hard to obtain, given “fears that survey data might be used by government agencies such as the Department of Homeland Security to target Muslims for searches and detention.” 

These fears, at least, mirror Jason’s experience.