We walked right on past my pile of stuff sitting in the middle of a huge vestibule lined with dark mahogany walls. Each doorway was accented with intricate wood carvings. Either a cross, picture of Martin Luther King, or painting of a Black Jesus centered every room. She led me through each floor: it was a four-story row house with two large bedrooms and one big bathroom on each of the upper floors. The only bed left was in a shared room with two other girls who had babies—there were six large rooms and about fifteen or sixteen of us girls total. The only phone in the whole damn place sat in this tiny booth near the front door, like a guard. There was supposedly one in an office that none of the girls was ever allowed into. The first level had a kitchen almost the size of me and Ma’s whole apartment, with whitewashed cabinets so high up everyone had to scoot around the kitchen on stepladders. There were even some narrow steps by the back kitchen door that led to the upstairs, and the lady called them the old “servants’ quarters.” I didn’t see one television or radio in the entire place. On the outside, it had looked like something out of an old black-and-white picture from the Harlem Renaissance or a Lena Horne movie. When I was bringing in my last garbage bag and Rasul was thanking the cabdriver, I had stared at the iron gate surrounding the house and imagined dragons were waiting inside.

The woman who had answered the phone hadn’t told me much, but while giving me my tour explained just what my new home was. A bunch of old Christian Black ladies who didn’t have a thing better to do were running it with Illinois state money and charity from rich folks. They weren’t charging me to live there. None of the girls at the shelter had any money. Instead, the price was Bible study, prayer meeting, and getting saved, in that order. The application for residency consisted of me writing my full name, age, due date, last school, last address, illnesses, and food preferences in a tattered spiral notebook.