“This is it,” I said.
“What?”
“We just found ourselves an issue.”
As soon as we got back to the Gardens, we drafted a letter to Ms. Cynthia Alvarez, the city-wide director of MET.
Two weeks later, she agreed to meet with us out in the Gardens. Determined not to repeat my mistakes, I drove both
myself and the leadership to exhaustion: preparing a script for the meeting, pushing hard for the other churches to send
their people, developing a clear demand-a job intake and training center in the Far South Side-that we thought MET
could deliver.
Two weeks of preparation and yet, the night of the meeting, my stomach was tied up in knots. At six forty-five only
three people had shown up: a young woman with a baby who was drooling onto her tiny jumper, an older woman who
carefully folded a stack of cookies into a napkin that she then stuffed into her purse, and a drunken man who
immediately slouched into a light slumber in a back-row seat. As the minutes ticked away, I imagined once again the
empty chairs, the official’s change of mind at the last minute, the look of disappointment on the leadership’s faces-the
deathly smell of failure.
Then, at two minutes before seven, people began to trickle in. Will and Mary brought a group from West Pullman;
then Shirley’s children and grandchildren walked in, filling up an entire row of seats; then other Altgeld residents who
owed Angela or Shirley or Mona a favor. There were close to a hundred people in the room by the time Ms. Alvarez
showed up-a large imperious, Mexican-American woman with two young white men in suits trailing behind her.
“I didn’t even know this was out here,” I heard one of the aides whisper to the other as they walked through the door. I
asked him if I could take his coat, and he shook his head nervously.
“No, no...I’ll, uh...I’ll just hang on to mine, thanks.”
The leadership acquitted themselves well that night. Angela laid out the issue for the crowd and explained to Ms.
Alvarez what we expected from her. When Ms. Alvarez avoided giving a definite response, Mona jumped in and
pushed for a yes-or-no answer. And when Ms. Alvarez finally promised to have a MET intake center in the area within
six months, the crowd broke into hearty applause. The only glitch came about halfway through the meeting, when the
drunk in the back stood up and began shouting that he needed a job. Immediately, Shirley walked over to the man and
whispered something in his ear that caused him to drop back into his seat.
“What did you tell him?” I asked Shirley later.
“You’re too young to know.”
The meeting was over in an hour-Ms. Alvarez and her aides sped off in a big blue car, and people went up to shake
Mona’s and Angela’s hands. In the evaluation, the women were all smiles.
“You did a terrific job, Barack,” Angela said, giving me a big hug.
“Hey, didn’t I promise we were gonna make something happen?”
“He sure enough did,” Mona said with a wink.
I told them that I’d leave them alone for at least a couple of days, and went out to my car feeling slightly light-headed.
I can do this job, I said to myself. Have this whole damn town organized by the time we’re through. I lit a cigarette and,