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Sanders' other daughter, Janean Fuller, 18, is more forgiving. She spent a long weekend with him at Ophelia's house in August, and Jean washed and waxed the neighbors' cars so he could take her to see Rush Hour 2. He tried to hold her hand when they crossed the street, just as he'd done the last time he'd been with her--when she was 10. "I'm starting to trust him again," she says, "but I don't really want to confide in him too much because what if he messes up and goes back? I don't know what I'll do if he goes back. I worry about it a lot."
Ophelia knows three other women on her street who have had sons in and out of prison. In a three-block radius surrounding her house, there are roughly 50 to 100 men on parole, according to 2000 New York State division of parole data. The police precinct that includes Ophelia's block represents just 4% of Brooklyn's population but houses 10% of Brooklyn's parolees. When a young man disappears off the streets into prison, residents say, in a perverse euphemism, that he has "gone back home."
"We know who has gone in, what they did, when they're coming out and whether they'll try to extract revenge," says Orlando, 38, Jean's youngest brother. Orlando lives upstairs in his mother's house because, he says, he feels he has to look after her. He has created his own immaculate world out of his boyhood room. Between the Smurf doll and the baseball trophies he has set up a big-screen TV and framed photos of his family. When he quietly leaves each day for his job running a city recreation center, he locks his bedroom door. He has never told Jean that he disapproves of him. He says Jean "didn't choose to have a drug problem or whatever." In the next breath, he says that "when we become adults, we make choices."
Jean called the first gigantic brick shelter he stayed in Castle Grayskull. As a rule, he neatly packages his complaints, slipping them in here and there, camouflaged as corny jokes. He likes attention and knows he is not likely to get it playing the bitter ex-con. The second shelter, which was better, he promoted to "Cuckoo-bird Dungeon" and said he was blessed to be there. But both were trials for Sanders. Inside and out, they alternately reeked of prison or temptation. Within a five-block radius of the second shelter, there were three crack houses. Directly outside the shelter, men worked the corner, smoking and doping. Police made frequent sweeps, stopping whoever wasn't in motion. Sanders was careful not to pause. Even so, over the course of three months, he was searched twice. He was polite and compliant; he joked about how his orange wallet looked nothing like a gun. He was clean both times but so shaken he had to sit and catch his breath.