Samples
A Better Place to Grow Up (Chapter 7)
"WE'RE ONE BIG COMMUNITY"
A community activist, fifth-grader and developer have different daily struggles but share a common goal: building a brighter future in Murphy Park
Chapter 7
To hell and back
Marlene Hodges had said she wouldn't do it this year. It's too much trouble, and no one wants to help.
Ah, what the heck. She did it anyway.
She couldn't let Halloween pass without a party for the neighborhood. Even so, the preparation is making her cranky. Every year she has put out a call to parents to volunteer. Every year, only a few respond. In fact, many parents never show up. They send their children, though, as if the party is merely some sort of once-a-year extended day-care program.
"I'm trying to make everyone feel like we're one big community here," Hodges says. She speaks in an exasperated tone that suggests the finish line is nowhere in sight.
Hodges is a community coordinator for COVAM, an organization established to give tenants in the Carr Square Village, O'Fallon Place and Murphy Park areas near downtown a say in what happens throughout their neighborhoods. COVAM helped choose Ann Meese as principal at Jefferson Elementary School. It works with police on security issues. And it acts as intermediary between tenants and management.
Hodges is the third generation of her family to grow up in the neighborhood -- her grandparents moved into Carr Square after World War II when it became the city's first public housing complex.
When she was a child, Hodges remembers, the streets teemed with children. They started pickup basketball games. They played volleyball over the clotheslines between the buildings. Everyone watched out for each other's kids, most especially Hodges' mom, known to everyone as Miss Loretta.
Miss Loretta sometimes worked three jobs. But she was never too tired to welcome the children into her home, to feed them, to dry some tears or to scold them if they were being bad.
Hodges says the close-knit community began to fray during the Vietnam War in the 1960s. Several young men who went off to war did not return. Some who did come back looked haunted, confused. They wondered why they couldn't find jobs after serving their country. Many turned to drugs and crime.
"People were dying and getting killed for every reason imaginable," Hodges recalls. "You stepped on my shoes. You looked at me the wrong way. You looked at my lady too hard."
Hodges remembers one of her friends, Richard Phoenix, dying at her feet in 1975. Phoenix had been shot on a parking lot at Carr Square. Hodges ran out from a friend's apartment to find him bleeding on the pavement with a bullet wound to his head.
The police couldn't end the killings. In fact, some residents considered police the enemy. Hodges recalls what happened when police arrested one of her friends. Instead of taking him to the police station, she said, they drove him to the riverfront, beat him, took his shoes and clothes and told him to walk home.
Just five years ago, an officer fatally shot a fleeing robbery suspect after chasing him into Carr Square. The officer, Heriberto "Eddie" Sanchez, said the suspect, Garland Carter, 17, was armed. Carter's family and friends said a gun had been planted on Carter after the shooting.
A grand jury refused to indict Sanchez. He later resigned under pressure from Chief Ron Henderson.
The relationship between police and residents has turned better since then.
Officers Darren Hill and Jermaine Jackson are on hand for the Halloween party. They're keeping an eye on some teen-agers hanging out on the periphery. But everyone seems relaxed. There hasn't been a shooting in the neighborhood since last April, the only homicide to occur in 1999.
Hodges finds herself constantly pingponging between hope and frustration over the prospects for her neighborhood and, for that matter, herself. She knows too many mothers are raising their children alone. Hodges is a single mother. Sometimes she wonders how on earth she let that happen.
Too many residents depend on welfare. For a time, Hodges received welfare, too, when she got laid off from her job at Sigma Aldrich Corp. Hodges knows lots of residents who are among the last hired, first fired. It leaves them frustrated, depressed -- as if all they can do is tread water.
Too many residents have thrown in the towel; given up on the idea that the American dream is as much theirs as anyone else's. Sometimes Hodges feels that way, too. But not always.
Her favorite movie is "To Hell and Back," the sometimes corny World War II drama starring Audie Murphy. In the early scenes, Murphy trips over his equipment and asks stupid questions. The grizzled GIs laugh at him. But he keeps charging up the hill, braving enemy fire. One day Murphy looks back and finds his comrades are no longer laughing. They're following. Hodges gets misty-eyed every time she watches it.
Tonight at the Halloween party, Hodges feels frustrated.
Though she hasn't complained, volunteers from a do-gooder organization have all but taken over the event. For some reason they're insisting on calling it a Harvest Festival. They've asked if the media will be on hand to cover their good work. They want to distribute their limited supply of candy only to students from Jefferson School, not to anyone else.
"They even brought their own security," Hodges says, rolling her eyes. Outsiders, she says, don't understand the neighborhood.
But as events go, this is a dandy. Lots of games to engage the children, lots of laughter, no fights, and, as it turns out, plenty of candy for everyone.
By dusk, Hodges' mood has brightened considerably. "It's working out OK," she says with a smile.
Still, she can't help but wonder: Where are the parents? When will she be able to turn around and find them charging up the hill behind her?
