13-year-old's book brings ghetto life into focus

The Boston Herald

Beverly Beckham

"Life in the Ghetto" is a non-fiction children's book, written and illustrated by 13-year-old Anika D. Thomas. You read it and you think it's horror fiction. It can't be true. You don't want it to be true.

On the front cover against a background of coloring-book red bricks, is a child's drawing of a girl's face. The girl in the drawing is crying.

On the back cover is a photograph of the author standing in front of her red-brick home. The windows behind her are boarded up. Trash litters the ground. But the steps to her apartment are clean.

Anika is smiling in the picture, but it is fake, a smile-for-the-camera pose. Her arms are folded and her eyes avoid the camera's lens.

"We moved to the uptown district of Pittsburg, Pa., when I was 16 months old," Anika writes in the beginning of her book. "I am 13 years old now - old enough to take a good look at this neighborhood and know that it is not for me. In fact, no decent person should have to live here. I hate this place."

Anika's autobiography was selected from more than 7,000 submissions to the nationwide "Written and Illustrated By..." contest sponsored by Landmark Editions, Inc, of Kansas City, Mo.

"Life in the Ghetto" won first place in the age 10 to 13 category.

"Our area of Fifth Avenue is run-down and dangerous. So many of the vacant houses on our block are boarded up...There are a lot of bars on our street, too, and drunks are all over the place. Drug peddlers and addicts are everywhere."

The story reads like a twisted fairy tale, Anika a modern-day Cinderella confined to the ghetto. She writes about having to stay indoors while everyone plays on the streets. The streets are too dangerous, her mother says. And they are.

"I remember the first time my mother allowed me to sit on the front steps by myself. Four kids who lived down the street came up and started calling me white honky because my skin color is lighter than theirs. They said a lot of swear words too. Then they kicked and hit me. I started crying and went into the house."

She sits inside her house and hears "sirens wail at all hours" and "gun shots after dark." She watches from her front window the police taking people away. "I would like to go away too - away from the terrifying noises and awful scenes. Everywhere I turn I see ugliness."

Rats "tear into the garbage cans outside." The roaches come inside. "We call the exterminators to come and get rid of them.... But nothing helps for long."

Anika is the youngest of 10 children. Her father died before she was born. "Some people believe a fatherless family doesn't have good children. Well, let me tell you something. Out of 10 children in my family, nine have graduated from high school."

Five went to college. Two graduated.

"After I graduate from college, I am going to find a good job and I am going to get us out of here!" she writes.

Not "when my prince comes." Not when a fairy godmother appears.

"After I graduate from college," Anika writes. Then things will change.

"I dream of having a nice, quiet place with a yard full of flowers. And I'd like to have both a front and a back porch.

"If I had my dream house, any child could skip rope on my sidewalk without being bothered by bullies and drunks."

Anika is only one child, hers is only one story, her book is only one abbreviated tale.

It's worse than rats and bullies and guns. And it's worse than not being able to play outdoors. Once upon time there was this huge country with spectacular land and houses that looked like castles on countless blocks. Lots of people were rich in this country. Many had houses and cars and boats and swimming pools and TV's and phones and VCR's and stereos and enough money to take a vacation a few times a year.

There were poor people in this country, too. Lots and lots of poor people. But they lived far away from the castles in different neighborhoods so nobody thought much about them. Most of the poor people were women and children. Incredibly in this land of plenty, one of every five children was poor. But nobody thought much about them.

Even when one of them wrote a book.

Even when that book won an award.

Even when ghettos like Anika's were front page news, bleeding, erupting and exploding.