Rose Marie Fletcher doesn't sleep well at night. She closes her eyes and dozes on and off, but her mind never rests.
Some nights, the mother of three youngsters wonders how she's going to buy groceries or pay the rent. Other times, Rose is haunted by the sight of young boys she's seen killed in her neighborhood and worries about losing her children to drugs.
Or she wonders whether she'll ever have anything more -- a husband, a car, a stone house on a quiet, tree-lined street.
To comfort herself, she'll get out of bed and pace through her four-bedroom apartment, looking in on her children -- Ricky Jamel Broadway, 13, Ebony Shakia Williams, 9, and Nakia Nicole Williams, 4 -- soundly sleeping beneath soft, pastel-colored comforters.
Silently, she'll tidy up their bedrooms while they sleep -- putting away Jamel's Nintendo and her daughters' Barbie dolls, and rewinding the video they had watched on the VCR.
But the tranquillity within the walls of her home is often shattered by the sounds of gunfire, police sirens and helicopters outside. Peeking through the peach lace curtains on her kitchen window, she can see school-age drug dealers being pushed into the back of police patrol wagons and school-age mothers carrying their children in one arm and a bottle of beer in the other.
At the age of 29, a resident of the George B. Murphy Homes public housing complex for virtually her entire life, Rose feels her hopes slipping away.
She has made a decent life for herself and her family, but it is not the life she imagined she would have as a child -- something out of "The Cosby Show," with her working as an attorney and living in a comfortable apartment with a fun-loving husband and several children.
With no high school diploma, she found a low-skill job to try to get out of Murphy Homes and free herself from the clutches of welfare. But the pay was so low in the winter when her hours were cut in half that she found herself in even more dire straits. Within months she was back on welfare, her expectations diminished, her confidence shaken, her spirit crushed.
Now, the thought of leaving Murphy Homes scares her more than staying.
"In public housing, if I lose my job or get into money problems, they will lower my rent," she says. "But in the real world, I'd be out on the street."
Rose is one of 40,000 Baltimoreans who live in public housing -- commonly referred to as the projects. Those words conjure up images of people cowering behind locked doors, of young children dealing drugs on playgrounds, of senseless murders, bare cinder block walls, gray cement floors and smells of trash and urine.
For the past year, Rose has shared her life with The Sun to permit a look behind those images. The expectation was that stereotypes would be shattered and what emerged would be a portrait of a family not unlike the middle-class readers of this newspaper.
The reality was different, the result mixed.
Murphy Homes, a sprawling complex in West Baltimore, is home to nearly 2,000 people. It is a cluster of a dozen two-story brick town houses, separated by small patches of grass, and four 14-story high-rises that tower over rundown playgrounds. A rickety gazebo sits in the middle of the complex -- the last vestige of the old Perkins Spring Square -- and on weekends tenants gather there to trade or sell old clothing and appliances.
In many ways, Rose fits the statistical profile of her neighbors and others who live in public housing across Baltimore.
More than 90 percent of all public housing tenants in Baltimore are black. Half of them have lived there more than 10 years.
Like many other tenants, Rose is a single mother who grew up in public housing, dropped out of high school and fell into welfare. Close to 45 percent of the public housing households are headed by single mothers with at least two children under age 12. Their average annual gross income is $6,700 -- most of it from welfare -- and they pay 30 percent of their income for rent.
Rose pays $100 a month for rent in a two-story, four-bedroom apartment in the same courtyard where she grew up with her mother, three sisters and a brother.
She was born on June 5, 1961, in Lancaster, Va., the third of Raymond and Hazel Fletcher's five children. Hazel, who was 18 when Rose was born, had grown up in Lancaster, a sleepy farming town on the peninsula between the Potomac and Rappahannock rivers, and had returned there from Baltimore to be with relatives when she gave birth to Rose.
Raymond was a mechanic at a Chevrolet dealership in Baltimore, and the best the family could afford on his salary was a one-bedroom apartment in the 900 block of North Fulton Avenue. But the arrival of a fourth child in 1964 made that apartment unbearably small. Hazel applied for public housing just a few months after the brand new Murphy Homes opened, less than a mile from her flat.
She was offered a three-bedroom unit there for $32 a month, and Hazel jumped at the chance to move in.
"I was happy there," says Hazel Fletcher, who moved out of Murphy Homes four years ago. "Everything was new, people were nice there and it was mostly families -- not like today, with all the young mothers raising kids by themselves."
After living there eight years, Raymond and Hazel separated. Hazel found the struggle to make ends meet exhausting, and she says there was little time left for her children beyond enforcing school attendance and curfews.
For Rose, that meant finding out about life on her own. She says she never discussed the most intimate details of life with her mother. She would sneak out of the house to see friends and meet boys.
Hazel never talked to her daughter about sex and birth control. She says that she didn't know Rose had been dating until she came home and announced she was pregnant.
Rose was 16.
"Of course I was disappointed because I wanted more for my daughter . . . but there was nothing I could do about it," says Hazel, 48. "The baby was coming, and we just accepted it."
Rose's first was Jamel, born during her senior year at Dunbar High School. Rose dropped out to have the baby, got a job as a cleaning woman at the Pimlico Hotel and moved into her own apartment -- a one-bedroom unit in a Murphy Homes high-rise that was a five-minute walk from where she grew up. She never married Jamel's father. "I was ready for children, but I wasn't ready to bemarried," she says.
A few years later she got a new boyfriend and gave birth to her second child, Ebony.
"I was taking birth control pills, but they made me nauseous," she said. "I was bloated all the time on those things, so I stopped taking them.
"I didn't want any more children, but damned if Nakia didn't come along. After her, I had an operation."
Her children are the focus of her life. If the welfare system imprisons its clients in an endless cycle of poverty, then within that prison Rose has made her home a clean and comfortable cocoon that shuts out the crime and despair of the streets.
Rose is strict with her children, but in a loving and protective way. She noticed Jamel walking with a slight limp and rushed him to the emergency room where doctors discovered an infection.
When Ebony's drama club gave its performance on Black History Month, Rose was there cheering loudly, as she was when Nakia graduated from the Head Start program.
She would rather pay a telephone bill late -- as she did in May to buy Nakia a $150 Barbie Car -- than endure a look of disappointment on the faces of one of her kids.
Rose is a good neighbor, too. When a friend's cousin was shot to death, Rose pitched in to buy the victim's children diapers and food.
Ask her about the drug dealers who infest the neighborhood towers, and she'll tell you they should be taken out and dumped, "you know, like you dump trash."
"People think that everyone who lives in the projects are criminals, and that we live in dirty homes," says Rose. "But no one would ever find a roach in my house. We have some bad people here, and I'm not going to say it's not dangerous. But there are a lot of good people, too, who are trying to raise their children the best they can."
She makes a fuss on birthdays and holidays, and often invites her neighbors to the celebrations for food and drink. Even Valentine's Days are celebrated with a cake and a small party, and the children exchange heart-shaped cards with their mother.
"I'm so lucky," Jamel wrote to his mother this year, "because God gave me to you."
Her children's aspirations are not unlike those of kids their age anywhere. Jamel once talked of being a policeman, but now insists he can become an NFL quarterback. Ebony thinks she will be a superstar pop singer like Janet Jackson; her second choice is to become a lawyer.
"I want to make a lot of money so I can buy two houses right next to each other," says Jamel, a thin, pouting boy. "One will be for me and one for my mother -- far away from this place."
But the odds against Jamel and his two sisters ever getting out of Murphy Homes or places like Murphy Homes are long, the hurdles they will have to overcome enormous.
Crime and hopelessness are constant backdrops. Armed drug dealers roam the streets and playgrounds, sometimes killing innocent bystanders in gunbattles. Many children are lured into the illicit business by promises of easy money, flashy clothes and gold chains.
And one of Jamel's strongest memories of his father is watching him buy drugs almost two years ago.
"I told him not to because he could end up dead," Jamel says. "It was the saddest day in my life."
Rose Marie Fletcher lives in one of Baltimore's public housing complexes.They are known for crime, drugs and squalor. They are home to 17,000 families.
Her life is filled with extraordinary struggles.Often, she wonders she'll ever get out of the projects. She remains determined.
For the sake of her three children, she has tried to build a world happiness amid the turmoil outside -- a safe world of comfort and hope.
5/8
Sun reporter Ginger Thompson explores Rose's world in a three-part series beginning today.-- Tomorrow morning in The Sun: Safe at home. * Tuesday: Hard work, broken promises.