Forever by Judith Gould

dweller.
    Especially a lone black female ghetto
dweller.
    Vinette Jones walked briskly through the
public housing project as if she couldn't wait to escape. Her
nut-brown fingers clutched her tan vinyl handbag, a reminder that
it might be snatched out of her hands at any moment. She had lived
here nine years - nine years too long - and had found out the hard
way that anything was possible.
    Vinette Jones was only twenty-three years
old, but she looked thirty-five. Her skin was as cocoa brown as
that of her African forebears, her tightly kinked hair was
close-cropped, and her bearing was straight and proud. Tall, she
was almost gaunt, and just missed being handsome. Nevertheless, she
radiated a steely strength and a quiet, don't-fuck-with-me
resolve.
    Walking with her shoulders squared, she kept
her eyes straight ahead, careful to look neither to the left nor
the right, determined to witness nothing that might be dangerous to
her health and well-being. Not that she needed to look around to
see what was going on. The same things as always. Crack dealing,
crack buying, and crack smoking - that and stolen property changing
hands and wolfpacks of teens roaming, keeping their deceptively
lazy eyes peeled for easy prey.
    The ugly project of dirty apartment blocks
was one vast supermarket.
    In place of groceries there were drugs. And
in place of checkout clerks there was an army of pushers and
dealers. The customers they served were of all ages: anywhere
between seven and seventy.
    Random killings had become commonplace;
stray bullets nothing out of the ordinary.
    It was no place to live, this project, at
least not for human beings. This ugly sprawling blight was more
militarised war zone than home. There was nothing to nourish the
soul in these filthy grey blocks devoid of grass and trees, where
windows were either gaping black holes, squares of plywood, or had
glass cracked like cobwebs; where the facing on the buildings was
crumbling, and cracks scarred both the inside and outside walls.
Abandon all hope, ye who enter here! That was the message the
project conveyed; that was the way it would be until the day this
festering pile of rubble was razed.
    Vinette heard crack vials crunch underfoot;
in her peripheral vision, she saw hundreds . . . thousands ... of
the empty, scattered containers glittering in the gutters and on
the hard-packed, grassless ground.
    She felt a knot tighten in her stomach. This
was no place to raise a child. Especially not a child like her own
Jowanda.
    Jowanda.
    Tiny, mahogany-skinned, innocent Jowanda.
Premature child of her womb, flesh of her flesh.
    Thinking about her brought an automatic
smile to Vinette's lips. And, as always when she thought about
Jowanda, the smile faded just as quickly as it had come.
    Her black eyes misted over. Jowanda. Born
when she herself had been strung out on shit. When she'd lived with
Vernon, the no-good bum who'd turned her on to drugs, had got her
pregnant, and then run off when she'd been in her eighth month.
    Jowanda, born in the delivery room of the
CRY Hospital for Unwed Mothers. Where, right before giving birth,
Vinette had had a visit from that nice grandmotherly lady who
worked at the D.C. affiliate of the CRY Orphanage - and where, for
fifty dollars cash, she'd signed yet-to-be-born Jowanda over.
    'We'll take very good care of her, and once
you've straightened your life out and want her back, you only have
to come in,' the nice lady had told her gently. 'You can have her
back any time.'
    Somehow, the act of selling her baby was
what eventually reached something deep inside Vinette, and with it
had begun the long road to recovery. It had taken her three
interminable years. How she'd suffered! First the DTs and the
indescribable craving. The clinics and constant therapy. Slipping
and going back on the shit. Then finding Jesus and finally
overcoming her drug dependency for good. To him that overcometh
will 1 give to eat of the tree of life, it said in the