Show Me a Hero: A Tale of Murder, Suicide, Race, and Redemption by Lisa Belkin

Author:Lisa Belkin
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Md, Nj, Political Science / Public Policy / Social Services & Welfare, P, De, Ny, Political Science / Public Policy / City Planning & Urban Development, History / United States / State & Local / Middle Atlantic (Dc, Political Science / Civil Rights, History / United States / 20th Century
ISBN: 9780316391351
Publisher: Back Bay Books
Published: 2015-09-02T04:00:00+00:00

Part Two

The Rebuilding

1992

The Lottery

By twos and threes, with fingers crossed and lucky charms palmed, hundreds of people stepped from the darkness of School Street and into the bright, warm gym. As they entered the crowded room, they squinted in the fluorescent lights, then scanned the endless rows of folding chairs in the slim chance of finding a seat.

They had not expected that there would be a crowd. The thunderstorm alone should have been enough to keep everyone at home, especially at a place like School Street. No one goes out at night on School Street, just as no one goes out at night in any of the other housing projects in Yonkers—not if they can help it.

But what was being offered in the gym on this night was a powerful draw, so the room was filled, and the crowd was still coming. Six police officers were positioned along one wall, appearing to expect trouble. While the children ran through the aisles, staging sword fights with closed umbrellas, their parents were distracted by the battered metal and Plexiglas drum on the stage at the front of the gym. It was, literally, a bingo drum. Peter Smith, the head of the Municipal Housing Authority, had borrowed it from the Polish Community Center, two long blocks away.

Standing on the stage, feeding 220 names into the bingo drum, Smith was unnerved by all the eyes upon him and sobered by how fitting this contraption was to his task. It was a toy, and he was using it to play with people’s lives. He knew he could not use a computer. The people in this room, justifiably suspicious of anything they could not see, would have no faith in a computer lottery. But still, the symbolism of the bingo drum weighed heavy on him. Wasn’t this in keeping with the capricious nature of the entire housing case, which had been brought because some lawyers somewhere had chosen to concentrate on Yonkers? Didn’t it reflect the random, inadequate nature of the solution: five thousand residents of public housing in the city, and, after all the years of turmoil, a first round of only seventy-one townhouses? And, certainly, there could be no more perfect way to symbolize the two-steps-behind-the-times feel of Yonkers. Any other city, Peter thought, would have figured out a way to avoid such a circus. Other cities would never have gotten themselves into this mess in the first place.

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