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                                                                                NATION, Page 20

THE OTHER AMERICA

Who Could Live Here?


Only people with no other choice -- and in Camden that usually
means children

By KEVIN FEDARKO/CAMDEN


    I dream'd in a dream a city invincible
    to the attacks of the whole rest of the earth.

    -- Walt Whitman, Camden, 1891


    Twenty-four years have passed since Father Michael Doyle
first came to serve the people of Camden, N.J., yet this Irish
pastor still cannot bear returning to his adopted home in
daylight. One would think a quarter-century would be time enough
to harden even a priest to the visual brutality of a city so
broken that its people, like many of its buildings, have buckled
and collapsed. But each time he goes away, Doyle finds he must
slip back in darkness, like a burglar in his own home. "I have
to come back at nighttime and start gently with my bed and my
office," he confesses. "You see, I can't ever get over the
tragedy of this place."

    Night puts a dark mask on this city's abandoned row
houses, gutted factories and boarded shops, a failed cosmetic
for a busted-up prizefighter of a town that crumpled along with
its industries. The forces that flattened Camden may be the
same ones that have pounded scores of other industrial centers
throughout the Northeast in the past 20 years, but a particular
sorrow attends the destruction here. Camden is a city of
children; nearly half its population is under 21. This is a town
that, with fewer than 100,000 residents, has more than 200
liquor stores and bars and not a single movie theater.

    The story of Camden is the story of boys who blind stray
dogs after school, who come to Sunday Mass looking for cookies
because they are hungry, who arm themselves with guns, knives
and -- this winter's fad at $400 each -- hand grenades. It is
the story of girls who dream of becoming hairdressers but wind
up as whores, who get pregnant at 14 only to bury their infants.
"We're a graveyard for everyone else's problems," says Doyle,
"and there is a feeling that this is somehow acceptable because
those who live here are poor. Well, it's not acceptable. God
made the Garden first, and then he made the people. He didn't
make some desolate nest and then say, `Here, cope.' "

    But surely that is just what God must have said to Camden.
To wander through its neighborhoods is to wonder what America
should be doing with towns like this, towns that cry out for
help yet seem beyond saving. The city demands a kind of urban
triage: Is this one worth reviving, or should what little cash
that is earmarked for redevelopment go into places that show
greater promise of survival? Many American cities have sinkholes
that are just as run-down, burned out, crime ridden and drug
infested. The difference is that this describes all of Camden,
not just part of it.

    The sad fact is that most people here equate success with
escape. The city's population has fallen by 35,000 in the past
generation. Even among health-care workers and social workers,
church people and teachers, Doyle is the exception; nearly all
live in the suburbs. "Camden is a city of broken wings," Doyle
says. "Those with the initiative and the strength leave." Those
without it die young.

    Baby Nigeria Collins died in October 1986, a month and a
day after she was born. She lies today in the far corner of
Camden's Evergreen Cemetery, across the street from the Merit
gas station and Memory Discount Florist. Baby Nigeria is
surrounded by a thicket of tin markers that sprout from the
graves of 92 other infants. A hundred yards to the west is a
second batch of buried babies. To count their graves -- 196 of
them -- you must stoop to collect the dozen-odd markers someone
has uprooted and strewn amid Styrofoam cups and broken beer
bottles. A few more yards, and there is another patch, and
another, and another.

    Twenty babies out of every thousand born here never reach
their first birthday, more than twice the national average. Most
are lost to a combination of lack of prenatal care, drug
exposure, premature birth and neglect. "In suburbia, people get
upset if their child doesn't have the right color hair," says
Eileen Gillis, a neonatal nurse at Cooper Hospital, where
two-thirds of Camden's infants are delivered. "Here, if I get
a baby with all of its parts intact, I'm thrilled."

    Like children everywhere, Camden's young make wish lists,
but their wishes are different from most children's. They wish
they knew their fathers' faces and not just their names. They
wish for something better for their own kids, which many of
them already have. And they wish they didn't have to dodge the
gunfire of drug battles in their neighborhoods.

    Nikkeya J. -- her street name is "Legs" -- is one of
dozens of girls who solicit along the downtown boulevards. Often
they are the only sign of life in this city after dark. Nikkeya
is only 17, but her cheeks and brow are marked by scars,
reminders of pimps and Johns who have beaten her with extension
cords, wine bottles and a baseball bat.

    Nikkeya has been turning tricks -- six or seven a night at
roughly $50 a throw -- since she was 13 years old. "I been
stabbed, raped, stomped, kidnapped and beaten up," she says.
"The only thing that's never happened to me is that I never been
shot, and I never died. I figure I know just about everything
there is to know. I probably know more than the President." But
Nikkeya also knows what she has missed. "I can't play hopscotch,
double Dutch or ride a bike," she confesses. "And I've never
been to a zoo."

    If the streets are home, the gangs are family. Between 30
and 40 drug posses have carved up the city and easily outgun
the police with their arsenals of Tech 9s, 45s, M-16s, Uzis and
Glocks. Gangs with names like Eight Ball, Hilltop and Puerto
Rican Connection use children to keep an eye out for vice-squad
police and to ferry drugs across town. Says "Minute Mouse," a
15-year-old dealer: "I love my boys more than my own family."
Little wonder. With a father in jail and a mother who abandoned
him, the Mouse survived for a time by eating trash and dog food
before turning to the drug business.

    Minute Mouse has found that dealing drugs -- "trapping,"
as it's known in the street -- is the fastest route up. An
eight-year-old "watcher" on a bicycle can earn $50 a day, while
a "carrier" clears up to $400 for a single trip to Philadelphia.
Drug profits rapidly compound, which is why in a city where
two-thirds of the adults rely on welfare, teenagers in the
heaviest drug areas drive Mercedes, Lincolns and -- Minute
Mouse's car of choice -- Toyota Corollas.

    The costs, of course, are even higher. Adolpho, 17,
carries for a dealer in a section of north Camden known as the
Danger Zone. Scissor-like scars cut edgewise across his
knuckles, and the skin around his throat is mottled with burn
marks from the time he put a match to an aerosol can in a street
fight. Adolpho has seen five friends die in drug wars. Each time
a child is killed, his epitaph is added to the graffiti murals
adorning the walls of north Camden's vacant lots. "It can happen
at any time to anybody," Adolpho says. "It can happen to me, it
can happen to you and it can happen right now."

    Camden's destitution lends its prosperous past an
evanescent air, so starkly does it clash with the town of today.
Up until 1945 or so, this city was a monument to the gusto and
grit of a nation laboring to create itself. Camden built
everything from battleships to toilet seats, and people here
claim you could find more industry per capita in these nine
square miles than anywhere else in the world. This was the home
of the Victor talking machine, Campbell's soup and the
Esterbrook pen. In the cavernous shipyards, 35,000 men once
toiled, hammering out eight vessels at a time. Bard of it all
was Walt Whitman, whose spirit trembled at the call of an
industrial giant that thrived on the energy, poetry and power
of mac