In her book Altars in the Street: A Neighborhood Fights to Survive, Melody Ermachild Chavis writes about the struggle of her interracial community to live through the plague of drugs and violence that afflicts many of America’s cities. The book is a personal memoir of her efforts, as a Buddhist and as a mother, to help revitalize her inner-city neighborhood.
— Andrew Snee
Sleeping alone in our bed one night when my husband, Stan, was away, I was awakened at 5 A.M. by a big wind. I put on my slippers and a robe and went into the kitchen. It was late November, and still dark at that hour of the morning. When I tried the kitchen light, I discovered the power was off. Looking outside, I saw the street lights were out. The wind was gusting so violently between our house and the apartment building next door, I was afraid the fir trees would blow down. I stood at the window, watching them toss and bend alarmingly.
Suddenly, a dangerous, acrid smell sent me running down the hall. My daughter had awakened, too, and she met me at the front door.
“Do you smell smoke?” she asked. “There’s a fire somewhere.” We ran outside in our nightclothes, my daughter barefoot. Trash was scooting across the pavement and pushing up against the buildings in jumbled piles.
When we reached the middle of the street, we could see flames filling the downstairs windows of a house half a block up. The fire was in the ground-floor apartment where Ruth lived with her husband, Michael, and three children, Dondi, Jamal, and Amina. We heard sirens approaching. Just then a man I didn’t know stopped his pickup truck in the street and jumped out. The three of us ran toward the fire. The flames and smoke were too fierce for me or my daughter to go any closer, but the good Samaritan found a board and fearlessly began to break the front windows.
We saw a firetruck coming, but the Samaritan’s pickup was blocking its way. The firetruck’s driver blared his horn. My daughter ran to the pickup and steered while a young man pushed it aside. The fire engine drove up, and firemen rushed out.
We stood together while the scene developed, like something you might see on television: Firemen pulled hoses while people watched, helpless, some screaming. More firetrucks and ambulances arrived. In seconds, water had turned the flames to dirty smoke. The Samaritan sat on the curb, his face black with soot, coughing, while a fireman pressed a plastic oxygen mask to his face. Everything was confusion, people running and shouting.
I kept my distance, standing alone in my slippers, wrapping my robe tightly around me, staying far out of the way across the street behind a firetruck, trying to escape the smoke, which was gusting everywhere. I thought about going back home; there was nothing I could do.
Then a young fireman came walking quickly toward me, a small bundle cradled close to his chest. He shifted it to one arm to open the door of the firetruck, and I saw that he held the charred, lifeless body of a small child. No part of the baby was left unburned. Her almost fleshless legs flopped as the fireman lifted her onto the front seat.
The young fireman slammed the door fast, and I understood that no one was supposed to see what I had seen. He was hiding the baby’s body from her parents and the crowd. For a moment the fireman rested his head against the truck door, the brim of his hat touching the metal. Then he ran back across the street.
I bent over, close to fainting. I hadn’t wanted to see. I wanted something to take the image away. But I knew it was something I would carry, always. I was almost sure the dead child was Amina, Ruth’s adorable toddler.
The young fireman walked to an ambulance that was pulling up and spoke to the driver. He gestured toward the truck and shook his head, meaning, “Don’t take her away now, while people are still here.”
More ambulances came and took away the Samaritan, Ruth’s husband, Michael, and her little boy, Jamal. People were saying that when the power had gone off, Ruth had lit a candle so she could see to tend to the baby. The flame had caught some curtains on fire. Now the baby was dead.
I couldn’t see Ruth’s oldest, Dondi, but I assumed he was all right, since no one had said anything about him. The wind had died down, leaving behind the blackened, water-soaked apartment and trash-strewn street. The morning had turned out cold and sunny, and most of Alma Street’s residents were still outside, talking in small groups.
Ruth was sitting on a low wall in front of the apartment building next door to the fire-damaged house. Several black women were around her, holding and comforting her. I walked over and stood for a moment outside the circle of women. Ruth was rocking back and forth, sobbing, tears streaming down her face, saying, “My baby, my baby.”
Like her, I knew what it is to give birth to a child, but now Ruth had crossed over to another place. She was living every mother’s greatest fear.
Ruth looked at me and repeated, “My baby, my baby.”
The woman sitting next to Ruth turned to me and scowled. She looked me up and down and saw not my shock, not my mother’s grief, but my pale skin. “What does this have to do with you?” she demanded. “You leave her alone.” And she raised her arm protectively across Ruth’s body.
It was as if she had slapped me across the face, only I was numb already, and didn’t fully feel the blow. I looked past her arm and into Ruth’s eyes.
“Melody, my baby is dead,” Ruth said.
“I know, darling. I’m sorry,” I said. I couldn’t reach Ruth to touch her, so I walked back home.
At the hospital later that week, Michael and Jamal were in the same room, their beds pushed close together. Michael’s hands were bandaged. He showed me, taped to the wall, the letters written by the firemen who had tried, as Michael had, to save Amina. “Dear Michael, you are a brave man,” one fireman had written.
Jamal’s burns were worse, and his face and arms and hands were pink and coated with gray salve. It was hard to look at him, remembering his round, pert face, his smooth kindergartner’s skin. But his eyes were as beautiful as ever, and he offered a shy smile for the soft toy otter I brought. He and I played animal lotto, he pointing to the cards and I turning them over. We matched all the baby animals to their mothers.
Ruth lay curled on her side in a chair next to the window, crying as if she would never stop. She seemed in far more danger, somehow, than Jamal or Michael. She could hardly speak. She just looked at me. “Oh, Melody,” she said, and laid her head back down.
How can I comfort her? I wondered. I thought about people I had met at a Buddhist hospice who said that the task is just to be with a suffering person as she is. All I could do was sit beside Ruth and press my hand on her back between her shoulder blades.
For years, my friend Hiram and I had been able to talk honestly across the black-white racial divide. Hiram hadn’t gone outside the morning of the fire, but he had heard about it, of course, and had seen the soot stains that flared from the windows of the burned apartment. Sitting in his wheelchair in his dimly lit kitchen, Hiram listened to me tell the story of the woman who had pushed me away from comforting Ruth.
“I know racism isn’t about white people’s hurt feelings,” I said, “but that hurt.”
“Well,” he said slowly, “for some, color is everything. Maybe especially at a time like that, when a person is upset.”
“I guess it’s a teaching for me,” I said, “about how painful it is not to be seen for who you are.”
“That happens to her every day,” Hiram said. He sighed. “Can you imagine how hurt she must be, for her to treat you that way at that time?”
I nodded sadly.
“The way things are going,” I said, “I can’t imagine what it’s going to take to heal that hurt.”
I was in my garden pulling crab grass out from under my hedge when I heard Arletta’s shrill voice suddenly rise above the voices of the other people drinking on the lawn of the squatter house across the street.
“A-pol-ogize!” she screeched. “A-pol-ogize right now!”
I peeked between the bushes. Arletta’s two-year-old son, Troy, was blubbering and pulling away from her as she tugged and jerked him by the hand, forcing him to face old Royal, who was sitting on the grass, drunk out of his mind.
“You tell Royal you’re sorry for what you said, right now!”
Royal, leaning back on his elbows, cradling his bottle in one hand, didn’t look like he needed an apology from a baby.
He’s two, I thought. Two is never having to say you’re sorry.
Without putting down her malt liquor or letting go of Troy, Arletta managed to free one hand, which she swung back and then down onto Troy’s diapered bottom, sending his little legs and tiny shoes swinging forward with the force of the blow. Troy’s blubbering turned abruptly into a scream, and then a prolonged wail.
Old Mrs. Burley’s drug-dealer nephew, Wilber, was in the drinking group, too, and he called out helpfully to Arletta, “Make him shut up!”
I dropped back down on my hands and knees, breathing hard, sending air out through my nose in gusts. I saw myself racing out my garden gate, crossing the street, and grabbing Arletta. She was about my size, and I imagined taking her by surprise, seizing her by her small shoulders, and shaking her, yelling the whole time, “Apologize! Apologize, Arletta!” until she gave in and got down on her knees and said to Troy, “I’m sorry.”
But instead I just pulled and pulled on the crab grass, hearing my own mother’s out-of-control voice. She had done the same to me, starting out with yelling, then swiftly following up with a slap or a kick or worse. And she, too, had been full of hypocrisy. I hadn’t been allowed to say “bad” words, even though when she flew into rages she would call me a “shit-assed little bastard” and a “piss-ass brat.” Once, when I was five, I experimented with telling my mother to “shut up,” and she washed my mouth out with soap.
After I learned to meditate, I could sometimes hear her voice running like a tape in my mind, and I wrote down a list of the angry phrases I could recall. Some were enigmatic admonishments like “You’ve got another think coming!” and “I’m telling you in no uncertain terms!” that must have come down from my grandmother and great-grandmother, to land on my tongue-lashed ears.
What are “uncertain terms”? I would wonder.
When she yelled words I couldn’t understand, all I knew was that she was dangerously angry. But years later, looking at my list, I saw that a lot of my mother’s threats were twisted out of her Christian-fundamentalist girlhood: “I’ll knock you to high heaven!” “I’ll knock you to kingdom come!” “You’re going to pay holy hell!” How can heaven and the kingdom of God be places to which a child is knocked? How can hell be holy?
One of the phrases on my list was “I’m going to beat the living daylights out of you.” Looking at those words, I didn’t like the beating part, but I liked the idea of “living daylights.” Are “the living daylights” enlightenment? I wondered. Are they the human spirit? If so, they can’t be beaten out. The living daylights can be dimmed, but they can never be extinguished.
I thought about the times I’d yelled at my kids, and I couldn’t remember ever apologizing to them. I’d started out as a young single mother knowing that I didn’t want to talk to my own children the way my mother had talked to me, but it had taken me years to learn a better way.
A roommate had helped me by threatening to move out if I didn’t stop yelling at my kids. I was standing tensely at the stove in our crowded apartment, heating beans and flipping tortillas on the griddle with my fingers, getting ready to feed Rosemary, who was perched at the kitchen table. Rosemary sassed me — I can’t remember what she said — and I not only yelled at her, I threw a taco across the kitchen in her general direction. My roommate walked in just in time to see the beans and lettuce scatter under the legs of Rosemary’s chair, as she burst into tears.
“Don’t ever do anything like that again,” my roommate said, “or I’m leaving.”
“I didn’t mean to hit her with it,” I said defensively. I hadn’t “meant” anything: that taco had flown out of my hand as if by its own volition. At least I hadn’t thrown the frying pan, as my mother might have done.
Trying to change, I used to wonder, Is it possible that this cycle of violence is going to stop with me?
Still weeding and trying to remember, I thought I probably had apologized to my roommate, but I couldn’t remember telling Rosemary I was sorry. It’s not too late, I thought. She’s only thirty.
Gradually, my breathing returned to normal as I filled my wheelbarrow with weeds. Troy’s crying subsided, too. I emptied the wheelbarrow onto my compost heap and then, pulling my gloves off, walked out my garden gate and strolled, as if I had nothing better to do, over to the group on the lawn.
Royal and Arletta looked up with their smeary, malt-liquor smiles. “How are you all today?” I said, with a geeky, fake smile. “It’s such a pretty day.”
Everyone answered, “Uh-huh,” and, “Sure is,” except Wilber, who was giving me one of those prison-yard stares. I ignored him.
“I think I’ll walk up to the flea market,” I fibbed, and blathered on for a while, and then I said what I had thought to say in my garden, once I had finally composed my mind: “Arletta, I think this little boy Troy of yours must be one of the most beautiful children anywhere around here.”
We both stood regarding him, such a small person, such a busy person, climbing up onto the curb and down. Indeed, he was a pretty child.
“Yes, he is,” she said proudly, and smiled.
Over the years, I hardly noticed when I shifted from trying to make the drug addicts go away to trying to take care of them — at least the few I knew.
On any given day, when I came home, Ruth was likely to be outside, acting out her full-blown crack psychosis in the street. Ruth would “go off,” as we said — wailing, screaming, or rolling around, breaking bottles or hitting people. Most such episodes ended with the arrival of the police. They would stand around, notebooks out, trying to figure out what was going on, confused by several overwrought people telling their stories at once.
Sometimes Mahalia would come, or someone else from the Department of Mental Health. If they thought Ruth was “a danger to herself or others,” they would capture her and drive her away for forty-eight hours of observation, where she would come to her senses enough to be let out again. If Ruth broke the law — by smashing a window, for example — she would go to jail for a couple of nights, and then come back.
Frequently, she missed court hearings she was supposed to show up for; warrants were issued, and then she would get out on bail again. She never did anything criminal enough to send her to prison.
“All of the fruitless back-and-forth costs so much,” Mahalia would say. “Ten times what long-term residential care would cost.”
We were stuck with Ruth, she was one of ours, and we dealt with her as a medieval village coped with its madwoman. Most people just watched apprehensively out their windows, or crossed the street when they saw her coming down the sidewalk. People were kind enough to Ruth, but a few screamed at her and hit her back. Some offered her a beer. The teenagers, friends of her son Dondi, avoided Ruth, but were never cruel to her.
My computer held half a dozen files about Ruth: letters I’d written to judges asking them to sentence her to treatment, letters to treatment facilities, trying to get her in. More than once, Shyaam, the social worker assigned to our block, coaxed Ruth into going with him to the county’s only emergency residential-treatment facility, where she could have stayed for two weeks; but she didn’t have to stay, so she came right back, sometimes within two hours. She was simply too far gone on drugs to make any attempt at self-preservation.
Once, Shyaam was driving the teenagers, including Ruth’s son Dondi, back from a field trip. Louis had gone along on the trip with his son, and he told me what had happened:
“We pull up and, oh, shit, there’s Ruth down on the ground in the middle of the street and two cops are over her, wrestling around, trying to get cuffs on her. Nobody in the van says a word. Dondi looked like, ‘Scotty, beam me up now.’ He didn’t know where to look. He just jumped out of the van and ran off around the corner. What a shame, seeing your mother like that, in front of all the other kids.”
I told Mahalia the story and she said, “That’s a perfect example of how futile it is to provide for children without meeting the whole family’s needs.”
Ruth knew I was writing letters about her. I’d ask her sometimes, “Do you want me to write to the judge for you?” and she would say yes.
“Help me, Melody. You have to help me.”
Once, she screamed at me from half a block away, “I love you, Melody! You’re the only white person I ever loved!”
This was a dubious honor because on other days she felt betrayed by me and my letters, and was likely to yell, “I hate you, Melody! I hate Shyaam and Mahalia, too!”
After a while, I didn’t write any more letters; there was no place left to send them. If old-style mental hospitals had still been open, Ruth would have been in one, drugged or tied to a bed or undergoing shock treatments to her already burning brain. As it was, she was loose on the open ward of our street.
At night, Ruth roamed the neighborhood, prey for the predators. Sometimes her deep voice outside the window would wake me. Ruth, my dreaming mind would say, and then I would awaken with a sinking heart, listening for her voice again. Once, unable to go back to sleep, I wrapped myself in a blanket and sat on the couch looking out at the night sky, yellow from the sulfurous street lights reflected against the low-lying clouds, waiting to see if I could catch a glimpse of Ruth.
I watched the drug-addicted wraiths slip by outside, and thought about the “hungry ghosts” in Buddhism. “They live in a realm of perpetual craving,” my Buddhist teacher, Eric, had said, showing the class a painting of the Tibetan Wheel of Life depicting the six realms of existence we all experience. “In the Realm of the Hungry Ghosts,” Eric had said, “the beings have protruding bellies and gaping mouths, but their throats are too narrow to allow more than tiny bites to pass. They can never be satisfied.”
Watching the hungry ghosts wandering on the other side of the window glass, I worried about my sister Naomi. I wanted Naomi to be different than she was, but the decision to change could only be made by her. I knew she had to find something larger than herself to hold her safe before she could fill the void inside her with something other than alcohol.
When I sat meditating, I often felt my own self-loathing. I could hear a voice inside berating me for my failings, mad at me for saying something stupid, or dissatisfied with me for not meditating more. I knew I filled my own hungry belly with mindless, spirited activity while Naomi filled hers with spirits. In my unawareness I gave away my life hour by hour, abandoning myself just as surely as Naomi forsook herself by drinking. What must it be like, I wondered, for addicts to look at the empty bottle, the used syringe, the crumbs of the whole cake eaten?
For long periods, Ruth’s children were living with relatives or in foster care, and Ruth cried the loss of her children up and down the street. Sometimes she came over to me on the sidewalk and talked about her dead baby.
“My baby Amina’s in heaven, Melody,” she would say, big tears rolling down her strong-jawed face. She would start out hugging me and end up hanging on me with her full weight. She was so much taller than me that holding her up hurt the small of my back, and I would have to press her upright again. I would put my hand on her chest and push, saying, “Let me rub your heart.”
I was doing that one morning, and she was standing very still with her eyes closed, letting me, when suddenly she opened her eyes and looked into mine and said, in her old voice, her normal voice, “I feel like my chest has been cut open and my heart is on fire.”
Another time, I met her on the sidewalk just about supper time. “How are you doing, Ruth?” I asked, but she didn’t answer. She seemed so far away, her eyes unfocused and wandering. The setting sun lit her coppery skin and hair. She was looking past me, over my shoulder, when an expression of wonder moved softly into her eyes.
“Look!” she whispered, and took my arm and turned me so that I could see the sky on fire in the west with a rose-and-gold autumn sunset.
“Altars in the Street” is excerpted from Altars in the Street. © 1997 by Melody Ermachild Chavis. It appears here by permission of Bell Tower Books, an imprint of Crown Publishing. A portion of this excerpt originally appeared in Turning Wheel: The Journal of the Buddhist Peace Fellowship.
