ORCHARD IN A STORM

Glenda Johnson leaned far over a fence on Jay Street and picked a mulberry.
The tree, heavy with black fruit, is joined in the little yard by pear and
peach trees. To Glenda, who grew up two blocks away on Orange Street, the
fruit trees are a remnant of a bygone neighborhood: neat houses with trim
strips of lawn, diverse and friendly neighbors, and streets so quiet she
had to go blocks to find a playmate.

"Our big thrill was rollerskating around a police car," said Glenda, now 36
and an aspiring minister.

Today, the little orchard is hemmed in by chaos, two short blocks from the
driveway where 10-year-old Tyshaun Cauldwell died. To get to the orchard
from Glenda's house, you pass a line of abandoned cars in a wide driveway
where neighbors used to sun themselves and chat. You pass a lawn where a
man was shot to death a few years ago -- in front of a house that has been
boarded up ever since.

The drug culture leaves its deepest mark on young men, said Glenda, who
paused to look at the scrap of yard that was Tyshaun's last glimpse of the
world. "At 15 years old, they're living for the fast buck."

Young men are grist for the mill that is the drug trade. Looking around her
one-time neighborhood one day, Glenda remarked: "This is boys' town."

On these same mean streets, Glenda's mother, Otha Johnson, has tried to get
the word of God to the same boys. They are, she said, respectful and remote.

Otha is 57, a Christian activist, minister's wife, mother of 20 (including
10 foster and five adopted children) and grandmother of 20.

At home on her couch, in a checkered pants suit and dark-framed glasses,
Otha speaks in a voice as soft as the gospel music filtering from the
television.

"This is too common," she said of the street killings and of the drug
traffic, boarded-up houses, litter and noise that have in the past five
years overwhelmed the neighborhood where she has lived since 1978. "We have
to take back what was."

Otha Johnson wants a Neighborhood Block Watch club. More money and cops to
"have the drug problem wiped out, not just tamped down." And meetings
enough to have "a common voice" to appeal to government officials.

"It would take families -- all families -- together to be seen and heard,"
said Otha.

At a string of public meetings at School 17, Otha puts her quiet voice
aside and booms out with Gospel assurance.

"Yesterday's gone. Forget it," she said at one meeting, taking aim at talk
without action. "Today is here. Use it. The future may never come."