the social worker, waiting at the currency exchange to cash their welfare checks, waiting for the bus that would take
them to the nearest supermarket, five miles away, just to buy diapers on sale.
They had mastered the tools of survival in their tightly bound world and made no apologies for it. They weren’t
cynical, though; that surprised me. They still had ambitions. There were girls like Linda and Bernadette Lowry, two
sisters Dr. Collier had helped get high school equivalencies. Bernadette was now taking classes at the community
college; Linda, pregnant again, stayed at home to look after Bernadette’s son, Tyrone, and her own daughter, Jewel-but
she said she’d be going to college, too, once her new baby was born. After that they would both find jobs, they said-in
food management, maybe, or as secretaries. Then they would move out of Altgeld. In Linda’s apartment one day, they
showed me an album they kept full of clippings from Better Homes and Gardens. They pointed to the bright white
kitchens and hardwood floors, and told me they would have such a home one day. Tyrone would take swimming
lessons, they said; Jewel would dance ballet.
Sometimes, listening to such innocent dreams, I would find myself fighting off the urge to gather up these girls and
their babies in my arms, to hold them all tight and never let go. The girls would sense that impulse, I think, and Linda,
with her dark, striking beauty, would smile at Bernadette and ask me why I wasn’t already married.
“Haven’t found the right woman, I guess,” I would say.
And Bernadette would slap Linda on the arm, saying, “Stop it! You making Mr. Obama blush.” And they would both
start to laugh, and I would realize that in my own way, I must have seemed as innocent to them as they both seemed to
me.
My plan for the parents was simple. We didn’t yet have the power to change state welfare policy, or create local jobs,
or bring substantially more money into the schools. But what we could do was begin to improve basic services in
Altgeld-get the toilets fixed, the heaters working, the windows repaired. A few victories there, and I imagined the
parents forming the nucleus of a genuinely independent tenants’ organization. With that strategy in mind, I passed out a
set of complaint forms at the next full parents’ meeting, asking everyone to canvass the block where they lived. They
agreed to the plan, but when the meeting was over, one of the parents, a woman named Sadie Evans, approached me
holding a small newspaper clipping.
“I saw this in the paper yesterday, Mr. Obama,” Sadie said. “I don’t know if it means anything, but I wanted to see
what you thought.”
It was a legal notice, in small print, run in the classified section. It said that the CHA was soliciting bids from
qualified contractors to remove asbestos from Altgeld’s management office. I asked the parents if any of them had been
notified about potential asbestos exposure. They shook their heads.
“You think it’s in our apartments?” Linda asked.
“I don’t know. But we can find out. Who wants to call Mr. Anderson over at the management office?”
I glanced around the room, but no hands went up. “Come on, somebody. I can’t make the call. I don’t live here.”
Finally Sadie raised her hand. “I’ll do it,” she said.
Sadie wouldn’t have been my first choice. She was a small, slight woman with a squeaky voice that made her seem
painfully shy. She wore knee-length dresses and carried a leather-bound Bible wherever she went. Unlike the other
barré
(Barré)
#1