Sitting in the library this morning, I looked at my fingers, and regret twisted my intestines the way it uselessly does. I could be a decent pianist today—never gifted but competent—if I had acceded to my mother’s wishes that I study music more seriously. Why had I fought so against practicing? My mother adored me, and I had loved her fiercely back. Why would I not do this thing that was so important to her? Could it be that I’d been jealous of music? Who could possibly compete with Mozart, my rival for her affections? “Mi tradì quell’alma ingrata,” Donna Elvira’s aria about jealousy and betrayal in Don Giovanni, had been one of Gabriella’s favorites.

So lost was I in my memories that I sang the first line out loud and then blushed as everyone in the reading room turned to stare at me. I sank down in my chair and stared fixedly at the screen in front of me.

I looked at reports of homicides starting on January 26 and moving forward to the end of February—they got more play forty years ago when the numbers were smaller—but I didn’t see any unidentified bodies. I looked for car accidents and studied gang activity.

The Daily News had interviewed members of the Blackstone Rangers, who felt they were the legitimate voice of the black South Side. They were going to do all this good for the community, they told the paper: day care, schools, health care. I made a face in the dark reading room. The gang had started some of their grand projects, but, in the end, all they did was sell drugs and run protection and prostitution rackets.

I turned to the Herald-Star and read the same homicide reports there, saw the same pictures of the city up to its rail girders in snow. A week after the News talked to the Rangers, the Herald-Star played catch-up, running a feature on the Avalon Anacondas.

I sat up straighter, my fatigue forgotten, as I began reading about Johnny the Hammer. In the Herald-Star, he described some of the work the Anacondas had performed during the riot-filled summer of ’sixty-six.

I looked at the clock. Reading about Johnny Merton couldn’t be charged to Miss Ella’s account. I read all five articles in the Star’s series: a day inside the projects at Sixtieth and Racine, a day at a clinic that Merton said the Anacondas had started, pictures of the Hammer feeding his own eight-month-old daughter.

“The police are labeling the Anacondas as a criminal gang, and for what? For starting a school milk program for black children? For opening a health clinic at Fifty-ninth and Morgan when there’s been nothing in our neighborhood for fifty years? For organizing our people to vote, and getting us a real candidate for alderman in the Sixteenth Ward?”