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dollar bills.
    Such was the case with the Old Fourth Ward. When the neighborhood was first built, whites lived in most of the area, especially up on the northern end of Randolph Street. In the 1920s, blacks following factory jobs moved down on the opposite end, near Auburn Avenue. To keep the boundaries clear, whites changed the name of their end of Randolph to Glen Iris Drive. When blacks kept coming, white folks hauled tail out of town. Blacks moved into the fine Queen Anne cottages, bungalows and shotgun houses and claimed the place for themselves. The main drag on Auburn Avenue eventually came to be widely known as “the richest Negro street in the world.”
    In time, though, the ward suffered as black tax dollars were steered to the white areas in Atlanta. City neglect and more integration gradually siphoned middle-class blacks from the neighborhood. As the single-family homes, duplexes and apartment buildings fell into disrepair, the Old Fourth Ward declined.
    In the late ’80s, a smattering of blacks began trickling back. By the time Barlowe Reed showed up, twitchy and desperate, a decade later, blacks had begun a sturdy push to revive the ward.
    Barlowe moved onto Randolph Street. Randolph was a classic street, with sidewalks that people actually used each day, and modest yards and even some driveways leading to cozy houses owned by families with long ties to the ward.
    Through generations, they worshipped at churches, frequented bars, celebrated births and mourned deaths; they raised children who sprouted tall and were sent off to colleges and wars and penitentiaries; they fed their dogs, attended parties and wept at weddings—all in a swatch of land spanning less than one square mile.
    With the few pesky crack and liquor houses operating, the ward remained a work in progress. Still, in his years living there, Barlowe had found it to be a fine retreat. In fact, it was more than a retreat. It had become a need. It was the kind of place where a man could get genuine conversation and a sincere smile.
    These were his people; these weren’t the pretenders, the self-absorbed buppies, puffed-up over fancy houses and big-shot careers. These were his people. He liked talking with them, exchanging notions about life and the world. And their dreams; he especially liked hearing them talk about their dreams. Their dreams were simple and straightforward, like his own: They wanted to get along in life and do all right.
    For Barlowe, there was something else special—something mythical—about living in the Old Fourth Ward. In Atlanta, where Martin Luther King sits in glory on the right hand of God, the neighborhood boasted a prominent claim to M.L.K. He was born there; his birth home and tomb were there, preserved for the stream of tourists who came daily in double-decker buses and Bermuda shorts to gawk, snap pictures and reflect on “The Dream.”
    Living amid all that rich history and driving past King’s crypt on his way to and from work every day inspired in Barlowe a sense of hope sometimes.
    Now hope was the thing he clung to as he sat in the living room, meeting with William Crawford.
    â€œHow much money you got saved?” the old man asked.
    â€œWell—” Barlowe had exactly $138 in his bank account. With his shaky credit, no mortgage banker in his right mind would extend him a loan. But he had read in the papers that you could sometimes lease a house with the intention to buy.
    â€œYou got enough for a good down payment?”
    Whas a good down payment? Barlowe had to be careful. If there was a way to cheat a man in this world, then a man would be cheated, and William Crawford was just the one to do the cheating.
    â€œWell. Right now I’m startin mostly with an idea, and then I thought, dependin on what you said, I’d work from there.”
    â€œAn idea? An idea won’t get you nothing but another idea. You need money, cash, to make anything happen in this