of her colleagues as they left a client’s apartment. Inglewood, where Gwen lived, had its own share of troubles. But here, it felt like there were no rules at all. You always had to be on guard working in this neighborhood. You had to be prepared for the worst.
And yet, that was exactly why Gwen liked working in Watts—because the kids here had so much stacked against them. When she kept a young boy from joining a gang; when a girl she worked with made it to college, Gwen felt a huge sense of triumph and vindication. She’d had a rocky road herself when it came to school and family. No one had really expected anything from her, and no one expected anything good from the kids she helped. They were kids that other people thought expendable.
She turned onto a street that led into the housing project where Robert and his family had lived. It was a labyrinth of two-story bungalows that might have once been green. As always, she was struck by the desolation. On the dead grass between the units were old sinks and barbecue grills, piles of rusted bike and auto parts. Laundry waved from clothes lines, colorful items that stood out against the gray sky, like flags hung in surrender. A few proud residents struggled mightily against their surroundings—their entryways were swept clean, with maybe a potted plant or two—but this couldn’t make up for the heavy gates over the doors, the paint flaking off the walls, the chunks of roof that collapsed with each rain. Once she had to stop for a legless woman in a wheelchair. Twice she slammed her brakes to avoid a loose dog. There were kids everywhere—youths circling on bikes, toddlers sitting on stoops with their mothers or grandmothers, a group of middle school kids throwing around a football. A dozen little ones waited in line for the single swing on an otherwise broken play set.
Gwen wove her way through the development, looking but not stopping when she passed the row where Robert had lived. Once he had been one of those kids, sitting on his stoop. Now he was gone, and she couldn’t bear to look for very long at the place where he should have been, but wasn’t.
Gwen loved her job, but lately she’d been feeling overwhelmed. It seemed like no matter what they did, no matter how many kids they helped, there were always others, so many others, who couldn’t be reached. It was like trying to rescue people from a flood or tsunami—you might be able to pluck one or two out of the swirling waters, but hundreds more got swept away right in front of you.
And the neighborhood itself didn’t help. In this community, it was hard for Gwen and her colleagues to preach about the promised land of college and a well-paying career, to instill that kind of faith, when no one in most of these kids’ everyday experience had ever laid eyes on it or breathed its different air. There was no way a kid could walk into that school, or through Gwen’s office building, or down these streets, and feel anything but second-rate. Now Gwen was starting to feel that way too.
Just as she turned into her parking lot, her cell phone rang. She picked it up and saw the caller ID—Alene Richardson—and let it ring one more time before she answered.
“Hi, Mom.”
“Oh, hello, Gwen,” her mother said, sounding distracted, as if Gwen had been the one to call her. “Are you at work?”
“Yes.” Where else would she be?
“Good, good. I was just calling to remind you that Dana’s birthday is on Friday.”
“Yes, Mom, I know. I sent her a card today.”
“Oh, wonderful! Thank you. You know how lonely your sister gets up there at school. It’s good for her to hear from her family.”
Gwen tried to quell her irritation. Her sister, she knew, was just fine. Twelve years younger than Gwen, she was now a first-year student at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Dana had been raised in a totally different era of their mother’s life. She’d grown up in the house in Ladera Heights that had just been a stopping point for Gwen; had been lavished with clothes and trips and extracurricular activities; had been part of Jack & Jill, a young women’s leadership group at church, the AKAs at Berkeley. Now, at twenty-four, Dana’s birthday was still celebrated with as much fanfare as if she were a child. Yet there had been years in Gwen’s own childhood, when she lived with her great-aunt, that Alene had forgotten Gwen’s birthday altogether.
“I’m not going to be able to call her on Friday, though, Mom,” Gwen said. “But I mentioned that in the card.”
“Why not?”
“I’m going on my backpacking trip this weekend. Remember?”
A tense silence. Then a sigh. “Yes, now I recall. You’re really going to do that, Gwendolyn?”
“Yes, Mother, I’m really going to do that.”
“It just sounds so . . . uncivilized. I mean, how will you bathe? How will you . . . use the restroom? Where will you sleep—on the ground?”
Gwen didn’t answer, partly because she wondered these things herself. She stared out past the fence that enclosed the property and over toward the railroad tracks, where a mangy brown dog picked hungrily through a mountain of trash.
“I just don’t know how you got this idea in the first place,” Alene continued. “It’s not the kind of thing we’ve ever done.”
Gwen thought wryly that her mother had little idea of what she’d done, but she kept this observation to herself. “Chris and Terry Nelson went on backpacking trips every summer,” she said, remembering her mother’s neighbors.
“Yes, but they’re boys,” Alene replied. She didn’t add—although Gwen knew she thought—and white. “And speaking of boys, are there any men going with you?”
“Yes, three men.”
“Couldn’t one of them carry your things?”
“No, Mom. They’ll have their own backpacks.”
“Well I don’t know what kind of man would let a woman carry so much weight.”
She stayed silent, waiting for her mother to launch into a lecture about Gwen’s nonexistent love life, but she didn’t.
“And is a hotel too expensive?” Alene asked. “Is that why you’re sleeping outside?”
“It’s not that. We want to be outdoors.”
“I really wish you’d do something that would pay you a decent salary.”
And here we go, Gwen thought. Out of nowhere. “I like my job, Mom.”
“You’ve done your part giving back, don’t you think? I just worry about you in that dangerous area, with all those desperate people. You could always go to business school at night, you know. Or even law school. Stuart and I could help you.”
“Thanks. Listen, I have to go. I’ll give you a call before I leave.” Gwen hung up, took a deep breath, and got out of the car.
She never failed to rile her, Gwen’s mother. In the space of five minutes, Alene had managed to denigrate both the white people whose unclean habits Gwen appeared to be emulating, and the black and Latino kids with whom she worked.
Gwen was born when her mother was seventeen. Although no one ever talked about it, it was believed that her father had been the vice-principal at Alene’s school. Alene had dropped out, fallen into the grip of alcohol and God knew what else, and eventually disappeared, so from the time Gwen was three until just after she turned twelve, she had lived with her great-aunt Emmaline in Inglewood. It was Emmaline, a retired mail carrier, who’d come up with Gwen’s name, in honor of the famous poet. And it was Emmaline who’d passed on family stories—of Gwen’s great-grandfather who’d left Alabama for Chicago in the early 1900s; of her ancestor Phillis, who’d escaped from slavery in Tennessee and fled up to Ohio, where she’d given birth to Emmaline’s grandmother. For much of her childhood Gwen only saw her mother two or three times a year, and sometimes not at all.
When Emmaline passed away, Gwen lived with two foster families—first the Grandersons, a black family in Culver City, and then