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from her husband anyway, money or anything else. She was alone when she had to shove three of her kids into a bush to hide from a shoot-out between two speeding cars. She was alone when she had to confront a drunk mother about her teenage son trying to strangle my sister Mary to death when she was five. She was alone when her kids came home with stories of being chased down and beaten for being white in a mostly black neighborhood. And she was alone when she ran through the project banging on neighbors’ doors, frantically trying to breathe life back into the mouth of her baby, already dead in her arms.
    Grandpa was the one Ma turned to when she did need a man, and she’d have to be desperate for help because the two of them didn’t get along. Grandpa always said, “Didn’t I tell you?” or else, “You made your bed, now lie in it.” Ma and Grandpa had brought Patrick to the emergency room of Children’s Hospital the night before his death. Patrick was having trouble breathing and Ma thought he had a croup. Ma had no health insurance, and Medicaid was a year away. The hospital turned the baby away. Ma says that the hospital had filled its quota of what were called “charity cases,” and didn’t need to take any more that night. They said it wasn’t an emergency case. The next day Davey, the oldest in the family, found Patrick not moving in the crib, lying still and blue. The coroner said he’d died of pneumonia and should have been in a hospital. Ma later asked a lawyer about suing the hospital for neglect, but the lawyer said there was no case—the hospitals weren’t required to admit welfare babies with no insurance.
    Ma says that when you lose a baby, it’s the worst feeling in the world because a baby depends on its mother for everything, and so ultimately it’s always the mother’s fault. I suppose that’s why she ran around with a dead baby in her arms—a baby that hadn’t been allowed into the hospital, in a housing project that ambulances wouldn’t come to. It was her baby, her fault, and she was going to do whatever she could do as a mother, which at that point wasn’t much.
    My family hated Columbia Point Project, and hated living in our apartment even worse after Patrick’s death. In the mid-1960s it was one of the higher crime areas in the city, a neighborhood of tall yellow brick buildings with elevators that often didn’t work. Even when they were working, Ma says you’d take the stairs up seven flights to avoid being beaten and robbed on the elevator. And rats infested the hallways.
    Davey always told me how he used his lunch box as a weapon to and from school, ready to smash anyone in the head who’d attack him or his younger brothers and sisters. Johnnie, the second oldest, tells me he’d be sent down to the Beehive corner store for milk and bread, only to be robbed repeatedly of the money Ma had given him for groceries. When Frankie was five, a gang of teenagers circled him and turned him upside down to shake all the coins bulging from his pockets for penny candy. Mary and Joe, the twins, used to pass one teenage girl in the courtyard who made them pull down their pants in order to get by. Drug dealings and shootings were becoming more common on hot summer evenings, so Ma started to call the kids into the house early in the afternoon.
    Besides the usual fights and bullying in the project, the whole family remembers the tension of being part of a white minority in a mostly black development. Ma was always being called “that crazy white bitch” after going after some of the black mothers who’d watched their teenagers chase down and beat my brothers. While most of the project was made up of black families, Monticello Ave. was still about half white. The white teenagers organized gangs to protect their turf from the black gangs, and were admired by the white adults for their ability to