ETHEL ARMSTEAD lives in Oliver, an Eastside Baltimore neighborhood that's had a lot of media attention since her neighbors, the Dawsons, died Oct. 16 after standing up to drug dealers. The media repeated images and stories of a place gone wrong, a community under siege. But they largely failed to capture the certainty that life goes on in Oliver, the human condition complicated as before with day-to-day negotiations about right, wrong, good, and evil.

It is winter. Ethel Armstead's sinuses ache, her grandchildren's asthma has kicked in and between the holidays and the heating bills, the pressure to provide financially increases. Yet winter is Ethel Armstead's favorite time of year.

Each weekday Ms. Armstead, 55, is up at 5:15 a.m., a good 45 minutes before the four grandchildren that she has raised since 1992. This is her "serenity time," a time to take a long, deep breath.

She never intended to be a mother again; she bore two children, and they in turn bore eight. But when her daughter became addicted to drugs and the Department of Social Services took steps to split up four of her grandchildren among foster homes in three states, Ethel Armstead sued for legal custody ... and won.

This victory has come at great cost. Retirement is not an option for her. She gets by with the help of her church, the children's school, counseling, mentors, friends and relatives. Still, she often cries herself to sleep at night. "But I have faith," she asserts, "I have to protect the children."

Ms. Armstead walks her granddaughter and two of her grandsons to Dr. Bernard Harris Sr. Elementary School, where they were schoolmates of the Dawson children. Her eldest grandson walks to Lombard Middle School with the day-care mom's husband and son. Ms. Armstead takes little for granted as she steps down the marble stoop to the sidewalk. Before she moved into this house three years ago, dealers used it to stash drugs.

Even after she moved in, the dealers, most of whom came from outside of Oliver, would conduct transactions from her stoop. Addicts loitered in the alley - popping, snorting and shooting up. They used her back yard as a urinal. She called the police, three, four times a day. And sometimes the police actually came.

But the dealers returned. So she confronted them herself.

"It was scary, but I couldn't let them see that I was afraid. I prayed to God first."

Not on my stoop, not in my yard, not in front of my grandchildren, she told the oldest, the leader.

"I shouldn't have to say 'excuse me' to get in my own house."

They moved a few hundred feet up the block. They still deal, but when she or her grandchildren are around, they stop until the family gets in the house. It was not just the beginning of an uneasy truce, but of a continuing negotiation, a conversation between a grandmother and young men, some of whom live in the neighborhood and some whose only business in Oliver is drug-related.

"When I ask them why they sell drugs, they tell me it's because they don't have jobs. They tell me they don't have transportation. You walked here, I tell them, your feet are your transportation!"

Some of them shovel the snow from her walkway without being asked and have checked in on her when they knew she was sick. She doesn't mind when they play football in the street. Sometimes they toss the ball to her grandchildren. "I see a lot of good in some of these kids," she says. She just wants them to stop selling drugs.

Ethel Armstead caught a glimpse of the news report the night the Dawson home was firebombed. Police say it was retaliation for the mother's crusade against neighborhood dealers; mother, father and five children are dead.

"I was shocked. I couldn't imagine it. They were babies. I still didn't realize who it was until I got to school [the next day] and saw the principal." She volunteers an hour at the elementary school before she catches the bus to her job as a city employee. She catches the bus across the street from the burned husk that was the Dawson home.

One of her grandsons was friends with 9-year-old victim Keith Dawson. They talked of going to college together.

" 'I can't go to college now,' " he told her after the fire.

"You can still go," she told him, "You can take Keith with you in your heart."

She believes many of the dealers on her block were just as shocked as she was about the children's horrible deaths. Some of them even quit dealing. Ms. Armstead wonders why the Dawsons died, why they paid such a high price for their convictions while she hasn't. She isn't as confrontational with the dealers as she used to be.

After work, she picks up her grandchildren from school activities and day-care programs that keep them off the streets. The elementary school's Extended Day Program is a godsend, she says, because even with a voucher, the alternative of day care costs her $20 per child per day. The evenings are a blur as she helps her grandchildren complete their homework, prepares for dinner, gives them 90 minutes of TV time and whisks them safely off to bed.

She sleeps lightly until the alarm goes off at 5:15 a.m. She takes a long, deep breath before the new day. It all adds up, people and institutions, formal and informal support systems, street-level negotiations, churches, schools, jobs, day care and police doing whatever it takes to ensure Angela Dawson and her family did not die in vain.

Ethel Armstead knows the stakes of these daily negotiations all too well as she goes about her business raising children in Oliver. She only has to look to the remains of a firebombed rowhouse as she gets on the bus to work each morning.

"I love winter because it's crisp and breezy," she says. "The neighbors are putting things up in the windows. We walk and talk. It's safer to walk because there are less people on the streets."

Stanford W. Carpenter is a cultural anthropologist with the Friends Research Institute, studying the media's coverage of urban drug problems.