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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.