Only Twice I ve Wished for Heaven

In 1975 Tempestt Saville and her family are chosen by lottery to "move on up" to Lakland: one square mile of rich, black soil carved out of a Chicago ghetto, cradling sparkling apartment towers and emerald lawns, where the elite black professionals live in privilege, secure behind a ten-foot-tall, ivy-covered, wrought-iron fence. This generation of blacks, only once removed from salt pork, fatback, and biscuits, now dines on caviar and escargot. Within the confines of the fence sits an idyllic community with every amenity, including its own section of Lake Michigan that flows the aqua blue of dreams - its brilliance sometimes helped along by food coloring. Whatever lies outside the fence - whatever the world tells black people they can't do or be - doesn't apply to the residents of Lakeland. But what is shut out by those gates is another matter entirely: 35th Street, where the lure of loud music, housing projects, and row upon row of battered brownstones and dilapidated stores provides eleven-year-old Temmy with a more intriguing landscape. Here the saved and the sinners are both so "done up" you can't tell one from the other: Alfred Mayes, the oily street preacher and self-admitted connoisseur of "fine young thangs, " whose line is as smooth as honey and whose looks are twice as sweet and Miss Jonetta, a former lady of the evening who knows everyone's story, and whose own history is as long and dark as 35th Street. Before a month has passed at Lakeland, Temmy will witness a death, cause an arrest, and start a chain of events that will send 35th Street up in flames.