Free Chains Around the Grass by Naomi Ragen

of small Black boys guarded the main entrance with sticks, barring Sara’s way or challenging her to pee down the elevator shaft, until their mother appeared with menacing wooden switches and herded them home.
    The original flow of tenants—respectable blue collar workers, retirees, struggling small businessmen—was joined by a trickle, and then a steady stream, and finally a deluge of large welfare families from the Bronx, Harlem and Puerto Rico, turning the original tenants into castaways, helplessly stranded on a rocky promontory in the center of a vast ocean not of their choosing.
    There was prejudice against the newcomers—yes. But mostly, fear and resentment. The first tenants had come from the decaying core of the city’s heartland, neighborhoods in Brooklyn, the Bronx and Queens, places where the owners of small, family-owned grocery stores had been bloodied and robbed; where it had become an act of courage or foolishness to walk out of the house after dark. They’d come because they honestly believed in the benevolence of the great city who had offered them these new homes by the sea with rents they could afford with dignity. They’d believed that the projects had been built for them, to right a wrong, to protect and care for them. And now they felt the great swell of horror at their betrayal; without their knowledge or consent, the festering inner core they had ?ed had been brought to them.
    Most of all, they felt ashamed. How had it happened that they’d fallen so low, without even having felt the wind at their back, or the precipice, or the one silent step forward that had brought them down?
    Only Sara took the change in stride easily. She watched with admiration the older Black girls in their amazing games of double Dutch jump rope, trying to join in, tangling her feet until she was hooted, and mocked and pushed out of the way. She tried to talk to the beautiful, dark-eyed Puerto Rican girls with their shining braids, or the sweet, fat, dark-skinned babies that crawled naked through the halls. Mostly, she wound up smiling helplessly when they answered her in the rapid staccato language she couldn’t understand.
    Used to the safe, child-friendly streets of Jersey, she was constantly pushing to go outside. Ruth, afraid, kept holding back. “Later,” she would say. “Later, I’ll take you to the park.” But then she would forget, or get caught up in housework or making dinner. Often, Sara snuck out by herself, holding her breath in delight and shivering with pleasurable adventurousness. Ruth, at her wits’ end, compromised. She could go by herself if she stood near the benches so that Ruth could look out the window and check on her.
    Sara tried. She’d sit for a while, closing her eyes and feeling the sunlight kiss her face, breathing in the new mown grass. She would dance along the bench, or walk like a tightrope walker, one foot in front of the other, balancing along the backrest. She felt hopeful and expectant, waiting for parades to begin, music to start, and usually she was not disappointed. Something always happened.
    “Wanna play?” She was a plump white girl, a little older than herself, someone Sara had never seen before. She didn’t look Sara in the face, her eyes fixed on the doll in Sara’s lap.
    She had taken her gift outside for the first time, after what seemed like weeks of begging that had finally resulted in her mother’s reluctant approval. After days of just watching it, as if it were a picture, and days gradually gaining the courage to actually play with it, she had grown bored, her solitary delight proving too lonely a pleasure. She craved the envy and admiration that could only be found in the eyes of her peers. Now, in this stranger’s covetous eyes, she found exactly what she had been longing for: a confirmation of her good fortune.
    The girl lunged, grabbing the doll and holding it high over her head. “Wanna play house? I’ll be the mommy.”
    Sara’s stomach