Altars In The Street
Book Review, March 1997

The South Berkeley neighborhood of Lorin, whose inner life is profiled in this compelling front-line report, is unique in some ways. For one thing, it’s truly racially integrated–a rarity in most American cities. I’s in Berkeley, so its fate is shaped by the vagaries of that city’s often confused, if well-intentioned politics. And, it’s probably the poorest and most crack-infested neighborhood in town.

But in most ways Lorin could be any poor neighborhood in any American city, and it’s this fact that makes Altars In The Street a must-read for anyone concerned with the future of American cities–in other words, the future of America. Over the sixteen years that Melody Ermachild Chavis, a private investigator and Buddhist activist, spent raising her children and grandchildren there, Lorin spun out in the same downward spiral that has devastated most inner city neighborhoods: while addiction, poverty, joblessness, homelessness, crime, and violence escalated, funding for social services, housing, education, and youth programs–and along with it, the hope, family cohesiveness, and safety of its residents–plummeted.

Along with her mostly elderly, mostly African-American neighbors, Chavis despaired as their neighborhood became a killing field in the drug war. They saw mothers losing their children to crack; they saw many of those children grow up to become dealers, addicts, and thieves–or their victims. They saw neighborhood stores closing; vacant buildings trashed and burned. They found used syringes in their gardens and blood stains on their sidewalks. They were kept awake at night by the constant traffic of the crack trade and by regular bursts of gun fire.

Finally, Chavis and her neighbors did what many besieged inner city residents do: they formed a committee to take their community back. Working with neighborhood kids, the police, and city officials, the committee achieved some successes. After a five-year reign of terror, two dealers was arrested and eventually jailed. A lawsuit got the dealers’ runners evicted from the apartment building that served as crack headquarters; eventually the apartment building was sold and fixed up and the drug trade moved a block away to the corner store.

Buy your liquor and your crack in one convenient location," a committee member said about this "victory." Author Chavis is appropriately troubled by the kinds of solutions yielded by community action that addresses only the symptoms, not the causes, of inner-city decay. Moving a crack concession a block away; turning drug dealers into inmates, drug runners into homeless people, and crack babies into foster children offer limited, temporary relief at best. Besides, in a neighborhood like Chavis’, solving one problem only leads to the uncovering of another.

Chavis writes about her participation in a neighborhood meeting. ""Someday, this is going to be over," I said. "We’ll be saying, remember the crack time, how it was back then? And we’ll shake our heads and laugh a little sadly. But it’ll be over." "That’s like saying television will end," Louis the bus driver said. "It’s been invented here's no going back.

Altars in the Street ends with Chavis and her husband–fearful after threats are made against them, exhausted and discouraged–deciding to leave Lorin. "I imagined Malcolm X coming into the room to tell me, "A small number of people can spark a change,"" Chavis writes. "I know that’s true," my mind said." "But maybe not here, not now.

"Buddhism., teaching me compassion and nonjudgment, had up to now helped me to stay, trying harder. Now, Buddhism talked to me about the wisdom of knowing when to go. All right. I give up."

This ending leaves the reader with more questions than answers–questions that are only touched upon, not always satisfyingly probed. Throughout the book Chavis reflects sporadically on the difficulties of being a non-African American woman organizing in a predominantly African-American neighborhood, and a middle-class woman organizing among the destitute poor. Chavis’ ability to leave Lorin in the midst of its worst crisis raises the specter of the race and class differences between her and her neighbors, and threatens to diminish her credibility. Still, Altars In The Street is a mighty first book, a text for our troubled times.