Dreams from My Father - Barack Obama [88]
We drove in silence to our final meeting, with the administrator of a local branch of the Mayor’s Office of Employment and Training, or MET, which helped refer the unemployed to training programs throughout the city. We had trouble finding the place—it turned out to be a forty-five-minute drive from Altgeld, on a back street in Vrdolyak’s ward—and by the time we arrived the administrator was gone. Her assistant didn’t know when she would be back but handed us a pile of glossy brochures.
“This ain’t no help at all,” Shirley said as she started for the door. “We might as well have stayed home.”
Mona noticed I was lingering in the office. “What’s he looking at?” she asked Angela.
I showed them the back of one of the brochures. It contained a list of all the MET programs in the city. None of them were south of Ninety-fifth.
“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