It was Dr. Martha
Collier who eventually lifted me out my funk. She was the principal of Carver
Elementary, one of the two elementary schools out in Altgeld. The first time I
called her for an appointment, she didn’t ask too many questions.
“I can use any help I can get,” she said.
“See you at eight-thirty.”
The school, three
large brick structures that formed a horseshoe around a broad, pitted dirt lot,
was at the southern border of Altgeld. Inside, a security guard showed me to
the main office, where a sturdily built, middle-aged black woman in a blue suit
was talking to a taut and disheveled younger woman.
“You go home now and
get some rest,” Dr. Collier said, throwing her arm over the woman’s shoulder.
“I’m gonna make some calls and see if we can’t get this thing sorted out.” She
led the woman to the door, then turned to me. “You must be Obama. Come on in.
You want some coffee?”
Before I had a chance to reply, she had
turned to her secretary. “Get Mr. Obama here a cup of coffee.
Did those painters arrive yet?”
The
secretary shook her head, and Dr. Collier frowned. “Hold all calls,” she said
as I followed her into her office, “except for that good-for-nothing building
engineer. I want to tell him just what I think of his sorry ass.”
Her office was
sparsely furnished, the walls bare except for a few community service awards
and a poster of a young black boy that read “God Don’t Make No Junk.” Dr.
Collier pulled up a chair and said, “That girl just leaving my office, she’s
the mother of one of our kids. A junkie. Her boyfriend was arrested
last night and can’t make bail. So
tell me-what can your organization do for someone like her?”
The secretary came in with my coffee. “I was
hoping you’d have some suggestions,” I said.
“Short of tearing this whole place down and
giving people a chance to start over, I’m not sure.”
She had been a
teacher for two decades, a principal for ten years. She was accustomed to
skirmishes with superiors-once all-white, now mostly black-over supplies and
curriculum and hiring policies. Since coming to Carver, she’d set up a
child-parent center that brought teenage parents into the classroom to learn
with their children. “Most of the parents here want what’s best for their
child,” Dr. Collier explained. “They just don’t know how to provide it. So we
counsel them on nutrition, health care, how to handle stress. We teach the ones
who need it how to read so they can read to their child at home. Where we can,
we help them get their high school equivalency, or hire them as teaching
assistants.”
Dr. Collier took a sip of her coffee. “What we can’t do is change the
environment these girls and their babies go back to every day. Sooner or later,
the child leaves us, and the parents stop coming-” Her phone buzzed; the painter was here.
“I tell you what,
Obama,” Dr. Collier said, rising to her feet. “You come in and talk to our
parent group next week. Find out what’s on their mind. I’m not encouraging you,
now. But if the parents decide they want to raise some hell with you, I can’t
stop them, can I?”
She laughed
cheerfully and walked me into the hallway, where a wobbly line of five- and
six-year-olds was preparing to enter a classroom. A few of them waved and
smiled at us; a pair of boys toward the rear spun around and around, their arms
tight against their sides; a tiny little girl struggled to yank a sweater over
her head and got tangled up in the sleeves. As the teacher tried to direct them
up the stairs, I thought how happy and trusting they all seemed, that despite
the rocky arrivals many of them had gone throughdelivered prematurely, perhaps,
or delivered into addiction, most of them already smudged with the ragged air
of poverty-the joy they seemed to find in simple locomotion, the curiosity they
displayed toward every new face, seemed the equal of children anywhere. They
made me think back to those words of Regina’s, spoken years ago, in a different
time and place: It’s not about you.
“Beautiful, aren’t they?” Dr. Collier said. “They really are.”
“The change comes later. In about five years,
although it seems like it’s coming sooner all the time.” “What change is that?”
“When their eyes
stop laughing. Their throats can still make the sound, but if you look at their
eyes, you can see they’ve shut off something inside.”
I began spending
several hours a week with those children and their parents. The mothers were
all in their late teens or early twenties; most had spent their lives in
Altgeld, raised by teenage mothers themselves. They spoke without
self-consciousness about pregnancy at fourteen or fifteen, the dropping out of
school, the tenuous links to the fathers who slipped in and out of their lives.
They told me about working the system, which involved mostly waiting: waiting
to see 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 parents, she was
married, to a young man who worked as a store clerk by day but was training to
be a minister; they didn’t associate with people outside their church.
All this made her
something of a misfit in the group, and I wasn’t sure she’d be tough enough to
deal with the CHA. But when I got back to the office that day, my secretary
passed on the message that Sadie had already set up the appointment with Mr.
Anderson and had called all the other parents to let them know. The following
morning, I found Sadie standing out in front of the Altgeld management office,
looking like an orphan, alone in the clammy mist.
“Don’t look like anybody else is showing up,
does it, Mr. Obama?” she said, looking at her watch.
“Call me Barack,” I
said. “Listen, do you still want to go through with this? If you’re not
comfortable, we can reschedule the meeting until we have some other parents.”
“I don’t know. Do you think I can get in
trouble?”
“I think you’ve got
the right to information that could affect your health. But that doesn’t mean
Mr. Anderson is gonna think so. I’ll stand behind you, and so will the other
parents, but you need to do what makes sense for you.”
Sadie pulled her overcoat tightly around
herself and looked again at her watch. “We shouldn’t keep Mr.
Anderson waiting,” she said, and
plunged through the door.
From the expression
on Mr. Anderson’s face when we walked into his office, it was clear that I
hadn’t been expected. He offered us a seat and asked us if we wanted some
coffee.
“No thank you,”
Sadie said. “I really appreciate you seeing us on such short notice.” With her
coat still on, she pulled out the legal notice and set it carefully on Mr.
Anderson’s desk. “Some of the parents at the school saw this in the paper, and
we were worried…well, we wondered if this asbestos maybe was in our
apartments.”
Mr. Anderson glanced
at the notice, then set it aside. “This is nothing to worry about, Mrs. Evans,”
he said. “We’re just doing renovation on this building, and after the
contractors tore up one of the walls, they found asbestos on the pipes. It’s
just being removed as a precautionary measure.”
“Well…shouldn’t the
same thing, the same precautionary measures, I mean, be taken in our
apartments? I mean, isn’t there asbestos there, too?”
The trap was laid,
and Mr. Anderson’s eyes met mine. A cover-up would generate as much publicity
as the asbestos, I had told myself. Publicity would make my job easier. And
yet, as I watched Mr. Anderson shift around in his seat, trying to take measure
of the situation, there was a part of me that wanted to warn him off. I had the
unsettling feeling that his soul was familiar to me, that of an older man who feels
betrayed by life-a look I had seen so often in my grandfather’s eyes. I wanted
to somehow let Mr. Anderson know that I understood his dilemma, wanted to tell
him that if he would just explain that the problems in Altgeld preceded him and
admit that he, too, needed help, then some measure of salvation might alight in
the room.
Instead, I said
nothing, and Mr. Anderson turned away. “No, Mrs. Evans,” he said to Sadie.
“There’s no asbestos in the residential units. We’ve tested them thoroughly.”
“Well,
that’s a relief,” Sadie said. “Thank you. Thank you very much.” She rose, shook
Mr. Anderson’s hand, and started for the door. I was just about to say
something when she turned back toward the project manager.
“Oh,
I’m sorry,” she said. “I forgot to ask you something. The other parents…well,
they’d like to see a copy of these tests you took. The results, I mean. You
know, just so we can make everybody feel their kids are safe.”
“I…the records are
all at the downtown office,” Mr. Anderson stammered. “Filed away, you
understand.”
“Do you think you can get us a copy by next
week?”
“Yes, well…of course. I’ll see what I can do. Next week.” When we got outside, I told Sadie she had
done well.
“Do you think he’s telling the truth?”
“I don’t know. We’ll find out soon enough.”
A week passed. Sadie
called Mr. Anderson’s office: She was told that the results would take another
week to produce. Two weeks passed, and Sadie’s calls went unreturned. We tried
to reach Mrs. Reece, then the CHA district manager, then sent a letter to the
executive director of the CHA with a copy to the mayor’s office. No response.
“What do we do now?” Bernadette asked.
“We go downtown. If they won’t come to us,
we’ll go to them.”
The next day we
planned our action. Another letter to the CHA executive director was drafted,
informing him that we would appear at his office in two days to demand an
answer to the asbestos question. A short press release was issued. The children
of Carver were sent home with a flyer pinned to their jackets urging their
parents to join us. Sadie, Linda, and Bernadette spent most of the evening
calling their neighbors.
But when the day of
reckoning arrived, I counted only eight heads in the yellow bus parked in front
of the school. Bernadette and I stood in the parking lot trying to recruit
other parents as they came to pick up their children. They said they had
doctors’ appointments or couldn’t find baby-sitters. Some didn’t bother with
excuses, walking past us as if we were panhandlers. When Angela, Mona, and
Shirley arrived to see how things were shaping up, I insisted they ride with us
to lend moral support. Everyone looked depressed, everyone except Tyrone and
Jewel, who were busy making faces at Mr. Lucas, the only father in the group.
Dr. Collier came up beside me.
“I guess this is it,” I said.
“Better than I expected,” she said. “Obama’s Army.” “Right.”
“Good luck,” she said, and clapped me on the
back.
The bus rolled past
the old incinerator and the Ryerson Steel plant, through Jackson Park, and then
onto Lake Shore Drive. As we approached downtown, I passed out a script for the
action and asked everyone to read it over carefully. Waiting for them to
finish, I noticed that Mr. Lucas had a deep frown carved into his forehead. He
was a short, gentle man with a bit of a stutter; he did odd jobs around Altgeld
and helped out the mother of his children whenever he could. I came up beside
him and asked if something was wrong.
“I don’t read so good,” he said quietly.
We both looked down at the page of crowded
type.
“That’s okay.” I
walked to the front of the bus. “Listen up, everybody! We’re going to go over
the script together to make sure we’ve got it straight. What do we want?”
“A
meeting with the director!”
“Where?”
“In Altgeld!”
“What if they say they’ll give us an answer
later?”
“We want an answer now!”
“What if they do something we don’t expect?”
“We caucus!”
“Crackers!” Tyrone shouted.
The
CHA office was in a stout gray building in the center of the Loop. We filed off
the bus, entered the lobby, and mashed onto the elevator. On the fourth floor,
we entered a brightly lit lobby where a receptionist sat behind an imposing
desk.
“Can I help you?” she said, scarcely glancing
up from her magazine.
“We’d like to see the director, please,” Sadie said. “Do you have an appointment?” “He…” Sadie turned to me.
“He knows we’re coming,” I said.
“Well, he’s not in the office right now.”
Sadie said, “Could you please check with his
deputy?”
The receptionist looked up with an icy stare,
but we stood our ground. “Have a seat,” she said finally.
The parents sat
down, and everyone fell into silence. Shirley started to light a cigarette, but
Angela elbowed her in the ribs.
“We’re supposed to be concerned about health,
remember?”
“It’s too late for
me, girl,” Shirley muttered, but the pack went back into her purse. A group of
men in suits and ties came out of the door behind the receptionist’s desk and
gave our contingent the once-over as they walked to the elevator. Linda
whispered something to Bernadette; Bernadette whispered back.
“What’s everybody whispering for?” I asked
loudly.
The children giggled. Bernadette said, “I feel
like I’m waiting to see the principal or something.”
“You hear that,
everybody,” I said. “They build these big offices to make you feel intimidated.
Just remember that this is a public authority. Folks who work here are
responsible to you.”
“Excuse me,” the
receptionist said to us, her voice rising to match mine. “I’ve been told that
the director will not be able to see you today. You should report any problems
you have to Mr. Anderson out in Altgeld.”
“Look, we’ve already
seen Mr. Anderson,” Bernadette said. “If the director’s not here, we’d like to
see his deputy.”
“I’m sorry but that’s not possible. If you
don’t leave right now, I’ll have to call Security.”
At that moment, the
elevator doors opened and several TV film crews came in, along with various
reporters. “Is this the protest about asbestos?” one of the reporters asked me.
I pointed to Sadie. “She’s the spokesperson.”
The TV crews began
to set up, and the reporters took out their notebooks. Sadie excused herself
and dragged me aside.
“I don’t wanna talk in front of no cameras.”
“Why’s that?”
“I don’t know. I never been on TV before.”
“You’ll be fine.”
In a few minutes the
cameras were rolling, and Sadie, her voice quavering slightly, held her first
press conference. As she started to field questions, a woman in a red suit and
heavy mascara rushed into the reception area. She smiled tightly at Sadie,
introducing herself as the director’s assistant, Ms. Broadnax. “I’m so sorry
that the director isn’t here,” Ms. Broadnax said. “If you’ll just come this
way, I’m sure we can clear up this whole matter.”
“Is there asbestos in all CHA units?” a
reporter shouted.
“Will the director meet with the parents?”
“We’re interested in
the best possible outcome for the residents,” Ms. Broadnax shouted over her
shoulder. We followed her into a large room where several gloomy officials were
already seated around a conference table. Ms. Broadnax remarked on how cute the
children were and offered everyone coffee and doughnuts.
“We don’t need doughnuts,” Linda said. “We
need answers.”
And that was it.
Without a word from me, the parents found out that no tests had been done and
obtained a promise that testing would start by the end of the day. They
negotiated a meeting with the director, collected a handful of business cards,
and thanked Ms. Broadnax for her time. The date of the meeting was announced to
the press before we crammed back into the elevator to meet our bus. Out on the
street, Linda insisted that I treat everybody, including the bus driver, to
caramel popcorn. As the bus pulled away, I tried to conduct an evaluation,
pointing out the importance of preparation, how everyone had worked as a team.
“Did you see that woman’s face when she saw
the cameras?”
“What about her
acting all nice to the kids? Just trying to cozy up to us so we wouldn’t ask no
questions.”
“Wasn’t Sadie terrific? You did us proud,
Sadie.”
“I got to call my cousin to make sure she
gets her VCR set up. We gonna be on TV.”
I tried to stop everybody from talking at
once, but Mona tugged on my shirt. “Give it up, Barack. Here.”
She handed me a bag of popcorn.
“Eat.”
I took
a seat beside her. Mr. Lucas hoisted the children up onto his lap for the view
of Buckingham Fountain. As I chewed on the gooey popcorn, looking out at the
lake, calm and turquoise now, I tried to recall a more contented moment.
I changed as a
result of that bus trip, in a fundamental way. It was the sort of change that’s
important not because it alters your concrete circumstances in some way
(wealth, security, fame) but because it hints at what might be possible and
therefore spurs you on, beyond the immediate exhilaration, beyond any
subsequent disappointments, to retrieve that thing that you once, ever so
briefly, held in your hand. That bus ride kept me going, I think. Maybe it
still does.
The
publicity was nice, of course. The evening after we got back from the CHA
office, Sadie’s face was all over the television. The press, smelling blood,
discovered that another South Side project contained pipes lined with rotting
asbestos. Aldermen began calling for immediate hearings. Lawyers called about a
class-action suit.
But it was away from
all that, as we prepared for our meeting with the CHA director, that I began to
see something wonderful happening. The parents began talking about ideas for
future campaigns. New parents got involved. The block-by-block canvass we’d
planned earlier was put into effect, with Linda and her swollen belly waddling
door-to-door to collect complaint forms; Mr. Lucas, unable to read the forms
himself, explaining to neighbors how to fill them out properly. Even those
who’d opposed our efforts began to come around: Mrs. Reece agreed to cosponsor
the event, and Reverend Johnson allowed some of his members to make an
announcement at Sunday service. It was as though Sadie’s small, honest step had
broken into a reservoir of hope, allowing people in Altgeld to reclaim a power
they had had all along.
The meeting was to
be held in Our Lady’s gymnasium, the only building in Altgeld that could
accommodate the three hundred people we hoped would turn up. The leaders
arrived an hour early, and we went over our demands one last time-that a panel
of residents work with CHA to assure containment of asbestos, and that CHA
establish a firm timetable for making repairs. As we discussed a few
last-minute details, Henry, the maintenance man, waved me over to the public
address system. “What’s the matter?”
“System’s dead. A short or something.”
“So we don’t have a microphone?”
“Not outta here.
Gonna have to make do with this thing here.” He pointed to a solitary
amplifier, the size of a small suitcase, with a loose microphone that hung by a
single, frayed cord. Sadie and Linda came up beside me and stared down at the
primitive box.
“You’re joking,” Linda said.
I tapped on the
mike. “It’ll be okay. You guys will just have to speak up.” Then, looking down
at the amp again, I said, “Try not to let the director hog the microphone,
though. He’ll end up talking for hours. Just hold it up to him after you’ve
asked the questions. You know, like Oprah.”
“If nobody comes,” Sadie said, looking at her
watch, “we won’t need no mike.”
People came. From
all across the Gardens, people came-senior citizens, teenagers, tots. By seven
o’clock five hundred people had arrived; by seven-fifteen, seven hundred. TV
crews began setting up cameras, and the local politicians on hand asked us for
a chance to warm up the crowd. Marty, who had come to watch the event, could
barely contain himself.
“You’ve really got something here, Barack.
These people are ready to move.”
There was just one
problem: The director still hadn’t arrived. Ms. Broadnax said he was caught in
traffic, so we decided to go ahead with the first part of the agenda. By the
time the preliminaries were over, it was almost eight. I could hear people
starting to grumble, fanning themselves in the hot, airless gym. Near the door,
I saw Marty trying to lead the crowd in a chant. I pulled him aside.
“What are you doing?”
“You’re losing people. You have to do
something to keep them fired up.”
“Sit down, will you please.”
I was
about to cut our losses and go ahead with Ms. Broadnax when a murmur rose from
the back of the gym and the director walked through the door surrounded by a
number of aides. He was a dapper black man of medium build, in his early
forties. Straightening his tie, he grimly made his way to the front of the
room.
“Welcome,” Sadie said into the mike. “We’ve
got a whole bunch of people who want to talk to you.” The crowd applauded; we heard a few
catcalls. The TV lights switched on.
“We’re here tonight,”
Sadie said, “to talk about a problem that threatens the health of our children.
But before we talk about asbestos, we need to deal with problems we live with
every day. Linda?”
Sadie handed the
microphone to Linda, who turned to the director and pointed to the stack of
complaint forms.
“Mr. Director. All
of us in Altgeld don’t expect miracles. But we do expect basic services. That’s
all, just the basics. Now these people here have gone out of their way to fill
out, real neat-like, all the things they keep asking the CHA to fix but don’t
never get fixed. So our question is, will you agree here tonight, in front of
all these residents, to work with us to make these repairs?”
The next moments are
blurry in my memory. As I remember it, Linda leaned over to get the director’s
response, but when he reached for the microphone, Linda pulled it back.
“A yes-or-no answer,
please,” Linda said. The director said something about responding in his own
fashion and again reached for the mike. Again, Linda pulled it back, only this
time there was the slightest hint of mockery in the gesture, the movement of a
child who’s goading a sibling with an ice-cream cone. I tried to wave at Linda
to forget what I’d said before and give up the microphone, but I was standing
too far in the rear for her to see me. Meanwhile, the director had gotten his
hand on the cord, and for a moment a struggle ensued between the distinguished
official and the pregnant young woman in stretch pants and blouse. Behind them,
Sadie stood motionless, her face shining, her eyes wide. The crowd, not clear
on what was happening, began shouting, some at the director, others at Linda.
Then…pandemonium.
The director released his grip and headed for the exit. Like some single-celled
creature, people near the door lurched after him, and he broke into a near
trot. I ran myself, and by the time I had fought my way outside, the director
had secured himself in his limousine while a swell of people surrounded the
car, some pressing their faces against the tinted glass, others laughing, still
others cursing, most just standing about in confusion. Slowly the limo lurched
forward, an inch at a time, until a path onto the road opened up and the car
sped away, lumping over the cratered street, running over a curb, vanishing
from sight.
I walked back toward
the gymnasium in a daze, against the current of people now going home. Near the
door, a small circle was gathered around a young man in a brown leather jacket
whom I recognized as an aide to the alderman.
“The whole thing was
put together by Vrdolyak, see,” he was telling the group. “You saw that white
man egging the folks on. They just trying to make Harold look bad.”
A few
feet away, I spotted Mrs. Reece and several of her lieutenants. “See what you
done!” she snapped at me. “This is what happens when you try and get these
young folks involved. Embarrassed the whole Gardens, on TV and everything.
White folks seeing us act like a bunch of niggers! Just like they expect.”
Inside, only a few
of the parents remained. Linda stood alone in one corner, sobbing. I came up
and put my arm around her shoulder.
“You okay?”
“I’m so
embarrassed,” she said, gulping down a sob. “I don’t know what happened,
Barack. With all the people…seems like I just always mess things up.”
“You didn’t mess
up,” I said. “If anybody messed up, it was me.” I called the others together
into a circle and tried to offer encouragement. The turnout was great, I said,
which meant people were willing to get involved. Most of the residents would
still support our effort. We would learn from our mistakes.
“And the director sure knows who we are now,”
Shirley said.
This last line drew some weak laughter. Sadie
said she had to get home; I told the group that I could take care of cleaning
up. As I watched Bernadette pick up Tyrone in one arm and carry his slumbering
weight across the gymnasium floor, I felt my stomach constrict. Dr. Collier
tapped me on the shoulder. “So who’s
gonna cheer you up?” she asked.
I shook my head.
“You take some chances, things are gonna blow
once in a while.”
“But the looks on their faces…”
“Don’t worry,” Dr.
Collier said. “They’re tough. Not as tough as they sound-none of us are,
including you. But they’ll get over it. Something like this is just part of
growing up. And sometimes growing up hurts.”
The fallout from the
meeting could have been worse. Because we had run so late, only one TV station
replayed the tug-of-war between Linda and the director. The morning paper noted
the frustration residents felt with CHA’s slow response to the asbestos problem,
as well as the director’s tardiness that evening. In fact, we could claim the
meeting as a victory of sorts, for the following week men dressed in moon-suits
and masks were seen all over the Gardens, sealing any asbestos that posed an
immediate threat. CHA also announced that it had asked the U.S. Department of
Housing and Urban Development for several million dollars in emergency cleanup
funds.
Such concessions
helped to lift the spirits of some of the parents, and after a few weeks of
licking our wounds, we started meeting again to make sure that CHA followed up
on its commitments. Still, in Altgeld at least, I couldn’t shake the feeling
that the window of possibility that had been pried open so briefly had slammed
shut once again. Linda, Bernadette, Mr. Lucas-they would all continue to work
with DCP, but only reluctantly, out of loyalty to me rather than to each other.
Other residents who had joined us during the weeks leading up to the meeting
dropped away. Mrs. Reece refused to speak to us anymore, and while few people
paid attention to her attacks on our methods and motives, the squabbling only
served to reinforce the suspicion among residents that no amount of activism
would alter their condition, except maybe to bring trouble that they didn’t
need.
A month or so after
the initial cleanup, we met with HUD to lobby for CHA’s budget request. In
addition to the emergency cleanup funds, CHA had asked the feds for over a
billion dollars to make basic repairs on projects all over the city. A tall,
dour white man from HUD went over the line items.
“Let me be blunt,”
he told us. “CHA has no chance of getting even half the appropriation it’s
requested. You can have the asbestos removed. Or you can have new plumbing and
roofing where it’s needed. But you can’t have both.”
“So you’re telling us that after all this, we
gonna be worse off than we was,” Bernadette said.
“Well, not exactly. But these are the budget
priorities coming out of Washington these days. I’m sorry.”
Bernadette hoisted Tyrone up on her lap.
“Tell that to him.”
Sadie didn’t join us
for that meeting. She had called me to say that she had decided to stop working
with DCP.
“My husband doesn’t
think it’s a good idea, me spending all this time instead of looking after my
own family. He says that the publicity went to my head…that I became prideful.”
I suggested that as long as her family lived
in the Gardens, she’d have to stay involved.
“Ain’t nothing gonna
change, Mr. Obama,” she said. “We just gonna concentrate on saving our money so
we can move outta here as fast as we can.”
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