Dreams from My Father - Barack Obama [111]
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