Mary Dorman felt a flash of personal triumph sitting in the audience at the Polish Community Center, waiting for Mayor Spallone’s inauguration to begin. She had bought a new suit for the momentous occasion. Hank’s swearing-in ceremony was open to the public, and there were a thousand people in the hall on this first Tuesday of 1990. The section where Mary was seated was by invitation only. As soon as she sat down, she carefully tucked the engraved card into her purse. It was a keeper.
Mary had worked hard so that Hank Spallone might be mayor. Just as the housing fight was her first experience as a protester, Hank’s run for office was her first experience as a campaigner. She did all the ritual steps of a newcomer to the electoral dance: distributing flyers, attending rallies. This being Yonkers, she did some more unusual things, too. She became part of the group that followed Nick Wasicsko throughout the east side, rattling him at every stop.
This being Yonkers, it also didn’t take long before the euphoria over Hank’s victory began to sour. Like Nick two years earlier, Hank had campaigned with a legal appeal pending, and shortly after the election he had toned down his rhetoric.
“We will abide by the decision of the Supreme Court,” he said the morning after election day, when asked about the pending court decision. “That is what law is about, that is what we are about. We’ve had our fight. We will get our decision and we’ll work together to go forward.”
Words like these, with their echo of earlier words from a previous mayor-elect, infuriated some of Spallone’s core supporters. At a council meeting days before the inauguration, Jack O’Toole, the head of the Save Yonkers Federation, took the floor and attacked the man he had spent months working to elect. “The people elected you to fight and act,” he said. “The people are getting upset. The natives are getting restless.”
Mary was not yet one of those who were restless. She still believed in Hank Spallone, had believed in him completely since she first heard him speak in the days after the riotous meeting at Saunders High School. His was the voice that drew her to the cause. Over the year that followed, his had become the voice that represented the cause. And by the time he ran for mayor, the transposition was complete. To Mary Dorman, Hank Spallone was the cause.
She knew a lot about the Supreme Court appeal, because she made it her business to know a lot about everything that affected Spallone. The case of Henry G. Spallone vs. United States of America and Yonkers Branch–National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, she knew, raised the question of whether a legislator could be fined for not voting as a judge directed him to. The Constitution protected members of Congress from coercion and prosecution for their votes, a protection known as the “doctrine of legislative immunity.” Over the years, lower appeals courts have extended that right to include local legislators, too. But until Spallone vs. U.S. the question had never made it to the Supreme Court.
Mary pored over the pages of analysis in the newspaper the day before the actual hearing and, though confused at first, managed to sort out the arguments in the case. Attorneys for the councilmen would argue that there had been less extreme ways to enforce the housing plan available to Judge Sand, like establishing an independent commission to override the council. The attorney for the government would argue that legislative immunity did not apply in this case because the legislators had already agreed to comply with the order and then backed out. The questions the justices were being asked to decide were these: Did Sand tamper dangerously with the separation of powers by telling the councilmen how to vote? Would a decision in favor of the councilmen mean chaos can reign and elected officials can break promises to obey court orders?
Mary wasn’t clear where she stood on the subject of legislative immunity, but she was quite certain where she stood on the subject of Hank Spallone. Even if some of the others had reneged on their agreement, she thought, Hank should get his money back because he had refused to vote for the consent decree in the first place so he had never reneged on anything. The decision might not come for months, and now Hank was indisputably changing his tone, but Mary was not disillusioned. Her only disappointment was in how some of her Save Yonkers compatriots were acting. They were hearing “compliance” and “concession” when Hank was not saying either of those things. All he was saying was “wait and see.” That approach was not a concession, Mary thought, if you are certain you will win.
Hank’s talk of law and patience, she believed, was not moderation but growth. Now that he was the mayor, he was trying to act like the mayor. She had noticed that he had begun to talk about himself in the third person: “Mr. Spallone never supported that consent decree”; “Hank Spallone hasn’t changed his position one iota.” Many powerful people, she noticed, liked to do that. And he certainly seemed like a mayor as he was sworn in at the packed Polish Community Center. He spoke without a text, linking the future of Yonkers to the future of Eastern Europe, which was in the throes of transforming itself after the fall of Communism.
At the end of his speech, he presented the center with commemorative street signs. One read “Lech Walesa Drive,” and the other read “Solidarity Square.”
“Perhaps it will be the thing that binds this council and this city—for what it says is Solidarity—and I would hope that this represents our city,” he said.
When the Supreme Court decision came down, eight days after the inauguration, it was welcome news. The justices overturned the councilmen’s contempt fines, by a vote of 5 to 4. The majority opinion was narrowly written—it did not rule out contempt fines altogether, but ruled that Judge Sand had acted too quickly against the councilmen in this particular instance and should have allowed a “reasonable” time to see if crippling municipal fines forced them into compliance. The justices completely sidestepped the question of whether the fines violated free speech and legislative immunity.
Mary read every word of the analysis in the newspaper. All the articles said that while the decision was a victory for the councilmen, it would have no effect on the housing order itself, which had already been upheld on appeal. Even Chief Justice William Rehnquist, who wrote the majority opinion, was careful to say: “The issue before us is relatively narrow. There can be no question about the liability of the city of Yonkers for racial discrimination…” It did not sound to Mary like this was the opening that Hank had promised, but rather than question her faith in him, she turned her doubts onto herself. Maybe she was reading it wrong, she thought. Maybe this was something she couldn’t understand.
She was reassured by the fact that Hank had seen the decision as something to celebrate. On hearing the news he had ordered a case of pink Korbel Brut champagne and a six-foot-long hero sandwich for an impromptu party at City Hall. “I don’t think this is the end,” he said, raising his champagne glass for a toast. “I think this is the beginning.” And if Hank Spallone believed that, then Mary Dorman believed it, too.
Billie was in her fourth month of pregnancy, dreaming of happily ever after, when John was arrested. She tied a new silk scarf around her head, buttoned one of his old colorful shirts around her expanding middle, and went to see him in a foul-smelling visitors’ room at Rikers Island, where he explained that none of this was his fault.
It all started several months earlier, he said, dropping his sexy, sweet-talking voice almost to a whisper. Soon after he and Billie had gotten together, he said, he went out one night with his good friend Stash. His purpose for the evening was to escape from Billie, who needed too much from him: “I needed to get away.” He was the victim here. Somehow Billie was the villain.
He and Stash found their way south, to the Bronx, “like usual,” he said, where “we was partying and we went to the clubs.” At one of those clubs, he said, “Stash introduced me to another guy, who I really didn’t know, but I trusted Stash, I trusted his judgment.
“Then we were coming back and it starts to rain. I say, ‘We can take the train,’ but the other guys don’t want to. These girls come by in a car and Stash tells them to stop. So they did and we started talking and they said they could give us a lift.”
Stash’s no-name friend sat in front with two of the girls, while Stash and John sat in back with two others.
“We’re all laughing and stuff. So they ask for our names and telephone numbers and I give them mine. Not my real name. Just Hot. But I give the real number.”
Unbeknownst to him, he said, his friends did not do the same.
“Then, a little bit later,” John continued, warming up to his story, “Stash’s friend, he tries to rob one of the girls and they’re all screaming. I’m like ‘what’s going on here?’ We all took off and I thought that was the end of it. But I guess one of them went to the cops and I’m the only one they could find, cause I’m the only one whose real number they had. Now they’re charging me with Robbery Two.”
His excuses were so earnest, so detailed, that even he seemed to believe them. His voice was so confident, so smooth, that Billie chose to believe his story, too.
John plea-bargained for a one-year sentence, of which he would serve eight months. He told Billie that her visit to him in jail made him realize that they were meant to be a couple.
“My friends turned on me, the cops scared me, and you believed me,” he said.
Billie promised she would wait for him. John promised he would change.
When Norma O’Neal and Pat Williams argue, they do so in the clipped shorthand reserved only for friends who have known each other for years. Pat is Norma’s best friend. They met in 1983, when they were both working at the Lillian Vernon warehouse, and Norma regularly heard “Pat Williams” being paged over the intercom. One day Norma happened to meet the woman whose name was so familiar. “Oh, you’re Pat Williams,” Norma said, deadpan. “I’ve heard a lot about you.”
A few others in Norma’s circle would describe themselves as her best friend, but failing eyesight is a profound measure of friendship, and in the months after Norma lost her vision she learned who her truest friends were. There were her children, of course, along with Phyllis David, who came over to read the mail every afternoon. Pat Williams was there to do almost everything else. When Norma had no choice but to quit her job, Pat helped her apply for disability. When the disability application was denied, Pat walked the three miles from her own house to Schlobohm, to help Norma decipher the denial and fill out the application again. When Norma’s income dropped from the $335 a week she earned as a night health aide, to the $189 a month she received on welfare, Pat always seemed to be around with extra groceries, or extra cash. Norma protested, but Pat didn’t listen. She figured Norma would do the same for her.
This loyalty, this connection, gave Pat the right to speak her mind. And what was on her mind one January morning was the upcoming housing march. She had heard at church that a pro-housing protest—“a black people’s march”—was planned on the east side. Pat was going, and she wanted Norma to come along too.
“It’s time people here fought their own fight instead of letting the courts and the lawyers do it all,” Pat said. “How come the only people talking about this are white? How come all the faces you see on the news about this are white? They don’t want us living over there, well, they don’t know us. They’ve never seen us. And whose fault is that? It will be your fault if you just stay over here and do nothing.”
Norma shook her head, then pushed an errant strand of steel gray hair from her face. “It won’t make anyone want anyone, it’ll just make it worse. Just leave things alone.”
“You’re afraid,” Pat said. It was part observation, part accusation.
“Afraid of making trouble that doesn’t need to be made.”
“Well I don’t scare easily,” Pat said. “We should let people see we’re the same as them. That we want what they want.”
“They’ll see that we want what they have,” said Norma. “They’ll see what they want to see.”
The conversation in Norma’s living room was a small-scale version of one going on in much of the minority community in Yonkers during the weeks since Hank Spallone became mayor. The question at the center of those conversations was phrased with varying degrees of political correctness, but the heart of the issue was this: Where were the blacks? Where were all the people of color? For years, Yonkers had been convulsed with protests, but they were almost all protests against the housing. City council meetings were filled with angry faces, but nearly all of those faces were white.
Their absence was part of a deliberate strategy. From the first days of the court case, the NAACP had decided to take what it considered the high road, urging its members to stay quiet and work the courts, not the streets. It would not help the cause, they believed, to have angry black people confronting angry white people on the news every night. The strategy worked in that it did prevent direct confrontation. But it was a success with side effects, the supporters of the housing being so quiet that they seemed not to exist. Nick cursed them silently at meetings, feeling he had been left out there alone to fight someone else’s battle. Mary, in turn, saw their absence as evidence that minority residents of the west side agreed with her and did not want the new housing, either.
Over the years, there were rumbles of complaint on the west side, from people who argued that it was demeaning to ask blacks to contain their anger so that white people wouldn’t be frightened. But those rumbles were kept in check, and the strategy of restraint was held in place as long as there was someone else who seemed to be fighting the fight for them. But by January of 1990, there was no one else. Nick Wasicsko, whose main message had been compliance, had been voted out of office, replaced by the defiant Hank Spallone. For the first time, an appeals court—the Supreme Court—had turned against the judge. Public sentiment is a fluid, unpredictable thing, and what is unheard-of one day may be unstoppable the next. Soon after the Supreme Court ruling there was talk on the west side of marches and sit-ins. It was contagious talk. Talk like there had never been before.
Pat Williams went to the Messiah Baptist church on Sunday, and listened as the Reverend Darryl George invited his four-hundred-member congregation to march on the east side. The route, he said, was a secret, because others might try to stop it. It was time, he said, “to bring down the wall of racism in Yonkers.” The march was just the beginning of a new visibility for “people of color and conscience,” who would no longer remain passive. “Previously we have been silent and done nothing,” he said. “We’ve allowed the court to speak for us. Now we’re saying there’s a higher court—a moral court. Enough is enough. This is a new beginning.”
The most controversial part of George’s announcement was not the march, but who he had invited along on the march. The Reverend Al Sharpton and the lawyer Alton Mattox would be there, he said, and they would bring busloads of supporters from outside Yonkers. They would also bring outside attention, because controversy and publicity followed the two men everywhere. Sharpton and Mattox were both advisers to Tawana Brawley, the black teenager whose claims that she had been sexually assaulted by a group of white men made international headlines and was later found by a grand jury to have been a hoax. The New York state attorney general Robert Abrams called Sharpton “deplorable, disgraceful, reprehensible, irresponsible,” but George saw their reputations, their visibility, as part of their value to the cause.
“We have been catching hell,” he said. “Now we will raise hell.”
Said Sharpton, who held a news conference to spread the word: “This ain’t a one-night stand, this is a marriage, and we’re going to find the baddest honeymoon suite on the east side and engage in social intercourse.”
The announcement of the march brought the conversation into the open throughout the minority communities of Yonkers. Fighting back had been something that no one would talk about. Now it was what everyone was talking about. The debate became loud and public, urgent and everywhere, and the divisions in the community were following familiar faultlines.
“It goes back to the classic case of Malcolm X saying ‘You hit me and I’ll hit you back,’ while King said, ‘You hit me and I’ll turn the other cheek,’” said Herman Keith, a Westchester Country legislator and the first black elected official in Yonkers.
Norma agreed with Martin Luther King. Pat sided with Malcolm X. Pat joined the march. Norma stayed home.
There were nearly four hundred people, mostly blacks and Hispanics, gathered outside the Messiah Baptist Church early on Saturday morning. At the appointed hour, the milling crowd coalesced into a parade, with Sharpton, George, and Mattox in the lead. It was more a stroll than a walk, and there was none of the drama and violence that marked decades of other civil rights marches, none of the water cannons of Selma, or the attack dogs of Birmingham. Nothing like all those scenes engraved in Pat’s mind since childhood. In fact, the one hundred police officers in full riot gear far outnumbered the bystanders along the route. It was as if east Yonkers had chosen to ignore them completely.
Two hours later, the marchers neared School 4 on Trenchard Street, a trip of 3.4 miles. Although the destination was supposed to be a secret, School 4 was the obvious choice for this rally. The mammoth brick building, once proud, now boarded up and crumbling, had long been the symbolic heart of the anti-housing fight. It was already slated for demolition when Judge Sand issued his order, and Oscar Newman made it one of the first sites on his list for the new townhouses. The neighborhood fought back fiercely, full of new love for the weed-infested, graffiti-covered structure, insisting they would not be a true neighborhood without it. They conveniently ignored the fact that it was ugly—built, in the architectural style of the industrial revolution, to look like a factory.
They had it placed on the National Register of Historic Places, only to learn that that did not automatically save it from destruction. They drew up plans that would transform it into a community recreation center. Local protesters even cut the lawn and held a birthday party for the 104-year-old building, complete with ice cream and cake.
So what better place to make a pro-housing statement than at School 4? As the marchers neared the doomed building, their energy and their enthusiasm increased. “Guess what?” they chanted, gleefully. “We’re moving in.”
“Niggers, get out,” someone shouted from the anonymity of an office building window, one of the first reactions the marchers had heard all day.
“We don’t want you here,” said another voice from a storefront doorway.
And, as the group turned left onto Trenchard Street and into the schoolyard, Pat clearly heard someone shout, “Go back to your own neighborhood.”
Pat did go back to her neighborhood, on one of the rented yellow school buses that were waiting to drive the marchers home to the west side. That evening, she sat in Norma’s living room telling her everything that happened during the day. “You should have been there,” Pat said. “We showed them we wouldn’t be kicked around.”
“Did you change any minds?” Norma asked.
“Probably not,” Pat said.
“When those buildings are built, black folks have to move into them,” Norma said. “You’ve just made it harder for them to do that. That’s all.”
Jaron James was an excited two-year-old, tugging his grandfather’s hand as they walked along the glass-strewn path toward Building Three at Schlobohm. Doreen stayed several paces behind them, marveling, as she so often did, at the untainted joy that her son felt at even the simplest moments in his life. She’d seen photographs of herself with that same gleeful grin, and she wondered when she’d lost that smile, and when Jaron would lose his.
Of all his favorite things, and there were many, visits from his grandfather topped the list. Warren James visited Schlobohm as often as he could. He said he was coming just to see Jaron, but Doreen knew he was still taking care of her, as well. He never lectured her on this life that she had chosen and never wondered aloud whether this independence of hers was all she’d expected it to be. He just brought his gifts, and his hugs. As he headed home after each visit, he would say, “You know where to find us if you need us,” or “Our door is always open.”
Doreen followed Warren and Jaron through the battered front door of her building, then caught up with them as her father was lifting her son so he could push the button for the temperamental elevator. As he touched back down on the ground, something caught Jaron’s ever-eager eye, and he reached over to pick up a broken crack vial from the concrete floor.
“No, Jaron, hot,” Doreen yelled. He knew from experience with the Schlobohm radiators that “hot” was something he should not touch. She grabbed the boy’s forearm and shook it forcefully, until the vial fell from his chubby hand, shattering at his feet. As it did, Doreen opened his palm and, using the only piece of fabric she could find, wiped his hand with the hem of her shirt, rubbing until the child began to cry.
“I’m sorry, Mommy’s sorry,” she said, knowing she was trying to clean away more than the taint of the vial.
The elevator doors opened and she guided Jaron inside.
“Filthy junkies, leaving their crap where decent people try to live,” she said as her father stepped in next to her. “Why do they need to be doing their shit around here?”
Warren James said nothing as the car lurched upward. Then, as it reached the seventh floor, Doreen’s floor, he said, “People talking about what other people are doing. And they’re doing the same thing.” He spoke quietly, almost a whisper, but his words had the force of an explosion.
There was no more mention of drugs that afternoon. Warren’s embrace was stiff as he hugged his daughter good-bye. “You know where to find us if you need us,” he said.
Doreen felt her parents’ disappointment in that hug. In the weeks that followed, although they still sent packages for Jaron, their visits became few and brief. She was lonely over the next few months. Her parents no longer trusted her. She, in turn, no longer trusted her sisters, because she was certain that one of them had squealed.
The sadness that already swallowed all her days grew deeper, and she needed more drugs to make it go away. Though her craving was greater, her ability to pay was not, since no one in her family would lend her money anymore. She borrowed from friends when she could, but mostly she “borrowed” from Jaron. One by one she broke her rules, deconstructing her imaginary fence that kept her from becoming one of “them.” Sometimes there was no milk in the house, and Jaron drank water. Sometimes she was not sure if she had remembered to feed him at all. He was not always asleep when she smoked. If he interrupted her, she shushed him, then sent him back to bed.
Every day, every moment, became part of a rapidly descending spiral. When she was high, she was not high enough; it did not feel as pure or as perfect as it had before. When she wasn’t high, she was sick. Nauseous, exhausted, and profoundly depressed, she moved even more slowly than usual.
One night, the worst night, she had smoked everything she had and still needed more. She ransacked her own few drawers, looking for money or a forgotten vial. Even a trace of crack dust mixed with gritty lint would do. As she searched, she thought of other ways she might pay for more drugs. She couldn’t steal. She wasn’t that desperate yet. She knew the dealers downstairs sometimes traded drugs for sex. Could she do that? Her body, already numb and deadened, was just something to escape from. Maybe she could.
Just then she came upon the tiny gold cross in Jaron’s room, the one she had exchanged for the engagement ring she never wore. It was the only thing of value in the house. She held it up by its chain and watched as it swayed slightly from side to side. What would it be worth? Ten vials? Fifteen vials? More? Then, with a life-changing snap, she let the necklace drop from her fingers, back into the drawer.
She had hit rock bottom. Crying and shaking, she went to the phone and called her parents.
“I need help,” she said, very quietly. “I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired. Mommy, please help me.”
Her parents drove over from New Jersey and brought their daughter home.
By the spring of 1990, Alma realized it was time to bring her children back to Schlobohm. Just as there was no one moment when she had decided to flee Yonkers in the first place, there was no single event that led to this decision, either. Instead it was the feeling that, as the months continued to pass, Virgilio and Leyda seemed farther and farther away.
She was not there when Leyda was bitten by a neighbor’s dog, then hid the bite from everyone for a week until the wound turned angry and red and infected. “Don’t tell your mom,” the neighbor said, and Leyda didn’t, fearing that Alma would be angry. Finally a family friend noticed and Leyda went to the hospital for antibiotics.
Nor was she there when Virgilio was helping a pal tinker with the old truck that seemed to be perched permanently on blocks in front of his house. One day, in a rare attempt to start the rolling junk heap, Virgilio and a group of friends tried to push it, and one of the right wheels rolled over Virgilio’s left foot. He slid a good distance with the wheel on top of his instep, and this time there was no wait before he went to the hospital. When he told Alma about the accident, she questioned the sense of pushing trucks that don’t work.
“Everyone’s always getting hurt over here,” he answered. “All there is to do for fun is bad things.”
What troubled Alma more than the growing recklessness of her children was their growing fear. Over time they became afraid of the house, certain that it was haunted by the ghost of an old man who died there one night while rocking in his rocking chair. There were several rocking chairs in Alma’s house on Calle J-l, and Virgilio swore that they often started to rock on their own. One night, as he was getting undressed for bed, “the windows started closing by themselves,” he told Alma. “I had my pants down to my knees and I just ran out of the house. I had my shirt on, and my underwear. People were looking at me.” He ran to his grandmother’s house, where he spent the night.
Alma believed that Virgilio was not just telling stories—he really saw these things. Maybe his mind was playing tricks on him because he wanted to leave. Maybe the house really was haunted, and the eerie happenings were a sign that it was time for him to leave. But if the children were going to be in danger where they lived, and if they were going to be afraid of where they lived, then they might as well be in danger and afraid closer to her. Increasingly often during her sleepless hours in the middle of the night Alma would think of the years when she was still in Santo Domingo, waiting to join her mother in the United States. “I’ve been blaming my mother for so long for leaving me behind,” she decided. “I can’t do the same thing. We are a family. We’re four. We have to be together.”
The family of four moved back to Yonkers in May of 1990, after Leyda and Virgilio finished their school semesters. Alma, exhausted from three years of worry and guilt, slept for the better part of three days. While she slept, the children made themselves hamburgers, which were an unaffordable luxury on the island, and took long bubbly baths, because the peach house only had a shower. They elbowed each other for space in the small apartment, squabbling the way only siblings can, readjusting to being together. By the time Alma awoke, they were complaining that they wanted to go “back home.”
But Alma knew what her children couldn’t—there was no “back home.” Many things had become clearer to her over the years since she first moved her family to Santo Domingo, and the hardest to accept was that she really didn’t have a home. For a long time she had believed that when life became unbearable in Yonkers, she could always escape into her past, back to the island of her childhood. But she had tried that, and she had failed. The dream had evaporated at her touch. Santo Domingo was not the answer to her problem. Did that mean that there was no answer?
John Billie Santos III was just a few weeks old when Billie Rowan brought him to Rikers Island to meet his father. Billie’s mother tried to talk her out of the visit, asking “Why are you bringing a baby to that disgusting place?” But Billie couldn’t wait to present her son to her man.
So she took two buses to the subway, then took the subway to the Queens Plaza station. She waited in the cold for the bright orange bus to Rikers, then spilled the contents of her bag and her pockets onto a table in the huge, drab waiting room. Once the guards determined that she was not carrying contraband, she was allowed to board another bus, a blue one, labeled CIFM. That took her to the Correctional Institute for Men, one of ten separate jails on the island, and the one where John was doing his time.
The entire trip took more than three hours, and by the time she found a seat in the windowless communal visiting room, she was almost as cranky as her baby. Many long minutes passed before John appeared, and she tried to examine her makeup in the glare from a barred window, while giving herself a silent lecture to keep her feelings to herself. She had to be the way John wanted her to be.
Their relationship during the months he had been in prison was far better than it had been when he was at home. They wrote letters almost daily, long, romantic professions of love, and John’s words had the same overwhelming effect on paper as they had in person. After her sonogram, Billie spilled the beans that the baby was a boy. At first John was angry—he had wanted it to be a surprise—but soon he was proud, and he now had a reason to “settle down, go back to school, go to college. I want to devote myself to my family.”
It was Billie’s idea to give the baby both their names, a symbol of the fact that they were forever connected because of him. John argued that carrying the name of his own father had been a burden, one he didn’t want to place on his son, but he eventually agreed.
Finally John was escorted into the visiting room, looking as she pictured him when she read his letters. He was dressed in his prison-issue work pants and work shirt. He had a scar on his cheek, a badge earned during a knife fight shortly after he arrived. The rules said she could not hug him, and she could not hand him anything—except their son.
John lifted Johnny from Billie’s arms, and gazed at him. Billie tried to concentrate on that gaze, and to ignore the other families, the screaming children, the guards by the doors, and the clock on the wall.
When their hour was over, Billie bundled up the baby and got back on the blue bus. She made her whole complicated trip in reverse, arriving at Schlobohm near dinnertime. The visit had been draining, but not depressing. Eight months, she reasoned, was not a long time. John obviously loved his son, meaning he must love her, too. He would be home soon, and her life could take the shape she had originally planned.
Doreen kept her handbag in her lap and her eyes on the door while waiting for the meeting to begin. She was here in this over-air-conditioned community room only because she had promised Sheila she would come.
During the months Doreen had spent back home in New Jersey, her sisters also re-entered her life. Barbara, who was closest in age to Doreen, had taken the role of friend and confidante. Sheila, the oldest, was like a third parent, there to point out where Doreen had gone wrong, and always eager to step in and make it right. It took a long time before Warren and Pearl James could trust Doreen, and one of their first steps toward that goal was allowing her to spend time back in Yonkers with Sheila. One of Sheila’s many plans for Doreen’s life included this meeting, of the Resident Empowerment Association Developing Yonkers, known as READY.
Sheila, who had always been more energetic than Doreen, was one of the founders of READY. When the rest of James family had moved out of Yonkers twelve years earlier, Sheila had been lucky enough to qualify for an apartment in the Dunbar Houses, the only public-housing project in Runyon Heights, the black middle-class neighborhood on the east side. One of her neighbors there was Sadie Young Jefferson, president of the Dunbar tenant council. A stern, dynamic, determined woman, who was partial to no-nonsense dresses and sensible shoes, Sadie raised seven children in Yonkers public housing, and she knew well that Dunbar was the best. But instead of counting her blessings and crossing her fingers, she decided that residents of the other projects deserved housing as good as hers. “If this can be maintained this way, then all of them should be maintained in the same way,” she said.
Sadie had been unimpressed and angered by the 1988 battle to bring public housing to the east side. Angry because “they say they’re not prejudiced. Wrong. They’re prejudiced.” And unimpressed because she did not think that blacks should only consider their homes acceptable if they were near the homes of whites. The solution, she thought, was not to move people across town where they weren’t wanted. The solution would be to give them power on their own side of town.
“If we’re going to live plantation style,” she preached to Sheila, “then we can run our own plantation.”
During the previous year, while Doreen was losing herself to crack, Sheila was immersing herself in the ways of public housing and in the gospel of Sadie Young Jefferson. She traveled to Washington, D.C. with Sadie, to the massive public information library in the headquarters of HUD, and they emerged twelve hours later with suitcases full of information on tenants’ rights. With Sadie she learned how to calculate the rent they owed to Municipal Housing—30 percent of their monthly household income, less certain complicated deductions—and found that each had been receiving a rent bill that was wrong. They talked of tenant patrols, and on-site day care, and in-house screening committees that would keep the undesirables out in the first place.
Sadie, whose many careers had included grant-writing for social service programs, applied for and received private money to help fund her grand dreams. The National Center for Neighborhood Enterprises gave READY $5,000, which it used to hire lawyers and incorporate itself. Then, a philanthropic group that funds nascent causes provided $100,000 for office space and tenant training programs, and READY became a reality.
Doreen found herself in one of those offices attending one of those programs because she was trying to prove to her parents that she could be trustworthy and responsible. If she spent more time with Sheila, the “mature one,” then maybe her sister’s internal compass would guide her, as well. The meetings were a means to an end, a way to gain the confidence of her family. No one was more surprised than Doreen when she began to look forward to Sadie’s teachings, and to gain confidence in herself.
Under Sadie’s watch, these sessions were rallies more than lessons, about rebuilding yourself as much as rebuilding public housing. She did not lecture at the front of the room, she chanted, and as the event took on the character of a revival meeting, the audience began to call out in agreement as she spoke.
“They say we are ‘tenants,’” Sadie declared. “We are not tenants, we are residents, a community.”
“Amen, sister,” someone said.
“Calling the projects ‘projects,’” Sadie went on, “I recall projects being science projects. We are not a project. We are, I would think, a complex or a development.”
“You say it, girl.”
“Low income,” she shouted, “does not mean low class!”
“They think that all the people in public housing are low, that all we want to do is lay around and smoke drugs,” Sadie said. Her voice became low and angry. “I live in public housing. I’m nothing like they’re describing. People in public housing are decent, educated, talented, everything that everybody else is—we just happen to make less money so we need lower rent.”
It was a most unusual kind of twelve-step program. Sitting in her uncomfortable folding chair, meeting after meeting, Doreen wanted to be everything Sadie said she could be. Soon afterward, she went to her parents and said she was ready to take control of her own life again. She wanted to move back into Schlobohm.
Slowly, very slowly, a proud house was emerging from the whirlwind of renovation at 175 Yonkers Avenue.
When Nick and Nay first bought the house, they knew it needed “some work.” After they moved in, they realized there wasn’t a single part of the house that didn’t need work. The cost of a professional contractor was out of the question, and Nick’s only knowledge of construction was that he “knew enough not to pick up a hammer,” so most of the overhaul was done by Nick’s brother, Michael, who was an electrician by trade and had spent a summer between high school and college working as a carpenter. He had learned a lot during that summer, he assured Nick, and his most deeply ingrained lesson was “it’s too easy to hurt yourself doing this,” which is why he switched to electrical work, instead. But the one summer of experience, along with many nights watching This Old House on PBS, made him certain he could handle the job.
Nick and Nay spent their first weeks as homeowners living in their dining room, while Michael knocked down a circa-1960s wall that had been erected down the center of the living room. Together, Nick, Nay, Michael, and Michael’s girlfriend, Gail, spent endless evenings ripping ugly linoleum off the living room floors and exposing the wood underneath. There was a gap in the floor where the dividing wall had been, so Gail learned how to splice new pieces of oak to match the ones that had been there since 1890.
When the living room was finished, Nick and Nay moved into that larger space, and Michael moved on to the second floor, where he knocked down more walls, added insulation, hired a friend to put up new sheetrock, rewired the entire electrical system, and retiled the hall bathroom. Now Nick and Nay were able to expand their living space to include an actual bedroom. They had plans for a master bath, but that would have to wait.
The third floor was next, and Michael and Nick turned it into an apartment for their mother, with a bedroom, a living room, a bathroom, and a small kitchen. Increasingly skilled and confident, Michael made all the cabinets himself. While pounding a sledge-hammer through ancient plaster, Nick found a sepia-toned picture of the first owner of the house, along with a photo of the building itself back when it was part of a working farm. The link to the past made him feel all the more attached to his home. He spent hours in the reference room of the local library, poring over books of historic Yonkers houses, learning more of the erratic history of his city at the same time.
He was able to do these things because he really wasn’t doing much of anything else. The mortgage needed to be paid, so he was working part-time at John Jay College in Manhattan, teaching a course on the workings of local government. He also hosted a radio program on local WFAS-FM every Tuesday at 1:00 P.M., called Nick Wasicsko, Attorney at Law. He did these things despite his suspicions that he was the wrong man for each job. The only time he had spent in a courtroom recently was when he sat in the audience while the Supreme Court heard arguments in Spallone vs. United States. And his real expertise was not how government worked, but how it didn’t work.
Of course, government wasn’t working particularly smoothly for those who succeeded Nick in office, either. Hank Spallone was looking less like a street-smart operator and more like one of those hapless cartoon characters, the kind that frantically throws trash cans and old chairs into the path of the oncoming monster, but still the monster keeps coming. The new federal appeal Spallone had promised during his campaign was filed; in fact, several of them were, but they barely slowed the beast, as the courts refused to hear them. Then Spallone vowed that the council would not vote to transfer title to the five building sites to the developer. Judge Sand, who had learned a lot during August of 1988, didn’t bother to wait for the council to vote, but simply ordered Neil DeLuca, still “interim” city manager, to release the land. The next thing Spallone grabbed for was the building permit for the housing. The builder had been erroneously issued a “multifamily” permit, which carried stricter construction requirements than the correct “single-family” one. Spallone announced that the proper permit would not be reissued until land surveys and other studies were done. Sand shrugged with annoyance, then ordered that DeLuca reissue the permit. DeLuca complied. No one bothered to consult the mayor.
Within a year of his landslide election, Spallone was openly feuding with DeLuca and with the other members of the council, including those who were theoretically his allies. He was “incompetent,” they said, “an embarrassment,” “unable to work with anyone.” He was also under attack from those who elected him in the first place. The distrust that had sprouted shortly after Spallone’s election was more deeply rooted now, and Save Yonkers had publicly renounced its former hero. Spallone ejected Save Yonkers members from City Council meetings. Save Yonkers took out a half-page ad in the Herald Statesman accusing Spallone of “selling out.” After one particularly nasty council meeting, the mayor needed a police escort to leave City Hall, and things looked like 1988 all over again.
“We will not stop attacking him,” warned Jack O’Toole, the founder and head of Save Yonkers. “Spallone, as far as we’re concerned, will not be reelected mayor. The man is finished.”
Not surprisingly, Spallone began feeling trapped and besieged. “I’m not the only representative in this town,” he yelled back at Save Yonkers members. “Just maybe I need a little more support.”
Things got so bad that Nick actually felt sorry for his longtime nemesis. The sympathy was coupled with bemusement at the fact that while Nick could not get the housing built when he was mayor, Spallone could not keep the housing from being built. The inability of any mayor to accomplish much of anything, Nick knew, was a function of the way the government of Yonkers worked. The real power—the power to hire, fire, and spend money—still lay mostly with the city manager, except that he was appointed by, and could therefore be dismissed by, the members of the City Council. The end result was that no one was ever really in charge in Yonkers.
Ironically, Nick’s only major victory during his punishing term in office was to change the governing structure of Yonkers. The frustration and paralysis caused by the system had led him to appoint a Charter Revision Committee during his final year. The group proposed eliminating the city manager form of government and replacing it with a “strong mayor” system, a proposal that had been made by several other commissions over time, but that had never been approved by the voters. Under this incarnation of the plan, the job of city manager would be eliminated entirely, and the mayor would assume the role and the salary that had been the city manager’s. In addition, a new position of City Council president would be created to replace the job that had been done by the mayor.
The proposal was on the ballot in November 1989, and while Nick Wasicsko was defeated, his strong mayor plan was approved. Spallone would be the last mayor to have a title but no clout. The strong mayor system would go into effect in January 1992, meaning the city’s first strong mayor would be elected in November 1991.
Hank Spallone clearly wanted to win that all-important election. Just as clearly, his chance was slipping away. In September of 1990, near the height of his arguments with Save Yonkers, he announced that he would run for reelection in one year and two months. “I’m coming out, I’m running,” he said to an audience of one hundred still-ardent supporters who had gathered at the Italian City Club. They were defectors from Save Yonkers, and they had formed their own smaller, but rabidly loyal group, called Concerned Citizens. Mary Dorman, still a fan of Spallone’s, was a member.
“Those people who think I’m such an easy turkey, come on then,” he shouted, as the Concerned Citizens gave him a standing ovation. “I’ll be campaigning tonight.”
If the early declaration was supposed to scare off challengers, it did not. To the contrary, it made Spallone look vulnerable. Other Yonkers politicians began thinking that they, too, would like to be the first strong mayor. By the end of the year the list of rumored candidates was nearing a dozen, and the talk at the house on the hill started to be less about remodeling and more about politics. “I’m a mayor in exile,” Nick would joke, increasingly often.
He did not make a definite decision. He was still too bruised and unsteady for that. But he took deep pride in the fact that the strong mayor plan was developed on his watch, and he liked flirting with the idea of running again. He also liked the fact that others were watching him closely while he did. During his time out of office, he had felt as if he were a ghost in his own city—a politician without a title is a man who does not exist. Politics, he was learning, had the power to break his heart, but it also gave it the power to beat.
As the renovations progressed on their house, Nick and Nay each found a favorite spot, one they would seek out when they needed solace or silence. For Nay, it was the mirrored exercise room adjacent to the master bedroom and next to what would one day be the master bath. For Nick, it was the living room in his mother’s third-floor apartment. Every morning, after Nay left for work, he would take his cup of coffee and his three newspapers, then climb the stairs to the spot where he most liked to think and to read. What he found most appealing about the room was the view. He could sit and sip his coffee and stare across town at the unobstructed clock tower of City Hall.
John Santos was released from prison on September 11,1990, eight months less one day after he had been arrested. He came home to Schlobohm and tried, for a while, to keep his promise to Billie. Trying hard to change, he worked two jobs, at a nearby grocery and at a men’s clothing store.
Billie had moved out of her mother’s apartment by then, and into Building Four, near Meeka and Mambo. John’s name was not on Billie’s lease. Officially, he still lived with his mother in Building One, but that was just a technicality. He and Billie talked about making their living arrangement permanent, just as they talked about getting married, but they never got around to doing either of those things. Billie refused to marry John until they had the money to do it right. She thought a white dress might look foolish, but she wanted something new and nice to wear, and she definitely wanted wedding rings. She had seen some in Getty Square for $109, and was determined to have them.
So money was the reason there was no wedding, or, maybe, there was another reason, too. The adventure Billie thought she would find with John had not turned out to be so exciting after all. He went to jail, she waited for him, and now they had this infant who kept them up at night and inside during the day. If she wanted humdrum and routine, she would have stayed in high school or kept her job bathing mentally handicapped children.
Whatever her frustrations, Billie had to admit that John was good with their boy. He was fiercely attached to little Johnny, willingly getting up to feed him in the middle of the night. John and Billie fought a lot, “regular fights about the usual stuff,” she described them, and often during those bouts Billie would storm out in anger and head for her mother’s. “Go ahead and leave,” John would scream after her. “The baby stays here with me.”
Between the fights they got along, and John soon decided that he wanted another baby.
“Let’s have a little girl,” he cooed.
Billie had her doubts, but she agreed. John could be very persuasive. When she told him she was pregnant, he promised, not for the first time, to stop hanging out and using drugs. (“I was sniffing a lot of coke,” he explained. “I did crack, too. Not freebase, we just used to mix it with other drugs, so I never considered myself really doing it.”)
Billie tried to feel happy, but found herself crying, instead. Near the end of her third month, she told John, “One is enough. I didn’t even want that one.”
He was furious. “What are you? Crazy?” he screamed. “What’s wrong with you—are you delirious?” His eyes became wild. It was the first time Billie was ever afraid of him.
“You’re gonna have this baby,” he said, “even if I’m going to have to lock you up in this closet and feed you under the door. You WILL have this baby.”
John never did lock Billie up. He did something even more effective. When she walked into her living room the following day, she found him lying ill on the floor, holding an empty bottle of Tylenol pills.
At first, she didn’t believe him.
“I need to go to the emergency room,” he said, his speech slurred.
“You’re faking,” she said. “I’m going to my mother’s house. See you later.”
When she did see him next, it was in the emergency room. “I’m sorry, I didn’t think you took the pills,” she said, sobbing.
He wiped away her tears.
“I want you to have the baby,” he said.
She promised she would.
Not until years later would he admit that he had been faking. He never actually swallowed any pills.