Babylon Sisters Read Online Free PDF

Anthony’s of Padua and all manner of Baptists, Methodists, Muslims, and mystics in between.
    The Mall West End, crowded with shoppers any day of the week, has an array of nail shops, dollar stores, discount books, clothes on a budget, and a dizzying range of athletic-shoe outlets. Across from the mall, the new Krispy Kreme doughnut shop has relocated to a spiffy new facility with the added temptation of a truly dangerous-to-the-waistline drive-through. New condos are going up across from the mass transit station, and the omnipresent, ever-charming street vendors now do a booming business with nearly as many residents as train riders. A few blocks away, the Atlanta University Center adds five thousand college students to the mixture in a way that guarantees a pizza joint will stay open, a sandwich shop will thrive, and a smattering of Jamaican and Chinese take-out places will always have a line on Saturday night.
    The streets are free of litter and loiterers. Buildings and landscaping are neat and well kept. Streetlights shine unbroken and potholes are nonexistent. Walking by the twenty-four-hour beauty salon on my way to the West End News, I could see two stylists working with clients in side-by-side chairs. All four women were laughing and talking as easily as if they’d been in somebody’s kitchen on Saturday afternoon, heating their hot combs in the stove, telling the stories that women tell when they’re safe and happy and there’re no men around.
    Next door, the florist who closes at midnight was putting the finishing touches on the bouquet that would be featured in tomorrow’s front window. It was a wild profusion of tropical blooms, heavy on the shop’s signature birds-of-paradise and sure to be snapped up by a romantic with a sense of adventure. There is only one word to describe West End’s nighttime streets: peaceful. That’s what makes this neighborhood different. But it wasn’t always this way.
    A few years ago it went through a period of economic transition that left it fragmented and newly vulnerable to the same crimes that plague poor communities from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C. Rape, robbery, street crime, domestic violence, and child abuse were rampant, and then crack came and the situation became almost intolerable.
    My father had died by then, and my mother wasn’t sure it was safe for us to stay in our house without him. For a long time, things just slid from bad to worse. Then suddenly, inexplicably, the bodies of black women began showing up in neighborhood Dumpsters, behind vacant homes, in the trunks of abandoned cars. A little girl was murdered by two crackheads who stole her lunch money. Finally, a young mother was raped and killed on her way home from the grocery store and her body left on the railroad tracks. Her funeral was crowded with mourners, and when her brother collapsed in despair over his baby sister’s casket, he was led away by one Mr. Blue Hamilton, who was heard reassuring his friend that this crime would not go unpunished.
    And it didn’t. A series of tips led to the identification of the man responsible for the murders, and he was arrested. When the court released him on a technicality, despite overwhelming evidence that he was guilty and without remorse, the neighborhood prepared for the worst, but two days after he returned home, the man disappeared and was never seen again.
    That was how Blue Hamilton became a neighborhood legend and the unofficial patron saint of southwest Atlanta. He had transformed our ordinary African-American urban community into a peaceful, crime-free zone where women could walk unmolested any hour of the day, and the crack houses had been replaced by carefully tended gardens and community playgrounds. It was the safest eight or ten square miles in Atlanta. On the streets Blue controlled, going out after dark was as safe as going out at high noon. Some people argued with his methods and called him a gangster, but I remember what it was like