Nakesha and I finally made our way to the New Horizons Family Planning Clinic down on Seventy-first Street. It was a century-old, one-story flat-top once owned by a Black woman with thin, crooked silver locks and six-inch yellow fingernails twining like antlers. From what I knew everyone had called her simply Miss Jones, and she had refused to name the building because she thought names brought bad luck. Folks just knew it was a pharmacy, ice cream shop, town hall, and juke joint all at once—depending on the day and time. With the owner herself refusing to name it and Bell Atlantic omitting it from the phone book as a result, South Siders eventually settled for an address: 632. Say “632” and everyone knew where to go, be it an after-school jukebox jam, retirement party, rap session, or a chicken pox emergency. Miss Jones sold her nameless building to retire after one heat-wave summer when the roof dripped black tar and a crawling, limbless veteran suffered a heat stroke under the awning. She had credited the shop display window’s only item—a mammoth King James Bible—as the sole explanation behind five decades without a break-in.

Today, any and all signs of that old-time religion were gone. The place both prevented and got rid of babies from people like us. Chicago University Hospital had swooped in to save it from becoming another redundant currency exchange or high-priced grocery store. Instead of candy and ice cream, New Horizons’ draw became birth control and condoms. Everybody from baby-faced preteens to ancient-faced drug addicts could get exams, prenatal care, and birth control—all for free. But any woman, no matter how old or how much she made, had to cough up the money for her own abortion.

Ezekiel’s Holy Children Pentecostal Temple had the unwanted privilege of sharing a parking lot with New Horizons. With no new adults bothering to join in years, Ezekiel’s old folks competed to see which member could swell the pews with the most grandchildren. Old, husky, jowled women and their waiflike men made up the congregation. Every Sunday and even Wednesday prayer nights, anybody who passed by could hear the collective humming of raspy voices, and sometimes the music made them want to come inside. As they did on any other busy city street, old men who liked to stand on the corner, they had the time of their lives tiptoe dancing to a gospel jam session, courtesy of New Horizon’s musicians with pasts obviously soaked in the blues. You couldn’t help but hear them while you waited in New Horizons’ hard pink chairs, and I wondered if the women who worked in the registration vestibule simply drowned out God’s music while they went about their business.