PRIVATE LIVES, PUBLIC PLACES : The Center Can Hold, With Care

On a quiet side street in South Central Los Angeles, there is a tumbledown church used on Sundays by a spiritualist preacher. A half-starved, mangy bitch covered in fungus has tunneled under the church and, in its unseen safety, is nursing a litter of puppies. Life against the odds; life in our time.

Margarita Jackson lives next door to this church, in the house where her husband grew up. He remembers his grandfather on the broad front porch--the parlor for company only, as it still is. It creaks and moves like a ship, but it is a beautiful old house. That it was derelict for years, until Elmer won it back from his stepmother’s heirs, has been slowly disguised.

A rooster scratches in the back yard, chased by the big family dog. Birds chirp in cages on the back stoop. The sounds come softly into the house. Light filters through drawn curtains. It is a harbor, a haven, a still point in the turning world. An organ stands in the parlor; charcoal-sketch portraits hang by photographs of children, formally dressed, posing with solemn dignity for the occasion. The photographs are of the Jacksons’ children: Jose Israel, 15; Ramon Lawrence, 12; Sandy, 8. The sketches are Elmer’s, drawn from memory, of his grandfather and mother.

Elmer is 58, a post-office mechanic, small, wiry, eager to please. Margarita is 34, slow, graceful, with the confidence of a woman who has always been beautiful and who, besides, raised six younger brothers and two sisters.

Days and nights pass in the quiet house. The Jacksons never go anywhere without the children, but they stay home mostly. They try to be in by 8. Gangs on the corner, violence and fear a block away. The blood-dimmed tide is loosed. . . .

Israel and Lawrence are at a dangerous age: old enough to see the contradictions. Their mother’s brother is going home: “I do not like to be Mexican in America,” he says curtly. If they are American-born, American-easy, they are also old-fashioned: polite, respectful, careful of their mother. Israel is at a Catholic school: $150 a month. Elmer brings home less than $500 a week. Margarita is unruffled: “I know how to handle my money. I have something for everything.”

Lawrence and Sandy are at public school, San Pedro Street School, 1,200 children on a busy street, where gates have to be padlocked and guards alert. Education, says Margarita, is the key. She left school at 16. “My father, he listened to his mother too much and she says girls don’t need to go to school.” Her English is still uncertain; her skills, but for sewing, self-taught.

She could trust the school system, believe that “teacher knows best.” She knows better. She believes that a child is safe only when the family watches over it. She swallowed nervousness and started to go into the school: English lessons during school hours, computer lessons afterward with Lawrence. She worked in the classroom as an aide when called, ferried other children in and out, took over as president of the PTA, is a member of the new Local School Leadership Council.

When she sees trouble, she pays attention. Because she is mild, soft-spoken, people forget how closely she listens. Most teachers smile and stop when they see her; a few--young, officious, condescending--cut her. “Here in America,” she shrugs “lots of people get hurt in their heart because of racism. But the same person can be mean one day and nice another.”

She simply does not acknowledge that her children could go wrong. She sees all--gangs, prejudice, crack. They have no place in that warm, safe spot she has made around her. “Watching very carefully, the family being very close, growing the best you can together--it is all you can do that is important in life.”

Few, much richer, have her elegance. Her talk is always of what she has (“My husband is a courteous, gentle, good man--how lucky I am”), never of what has been taken, or not offered in the first place. “Maybe people today are too ambitious, too greedy? I remember my father used to say, ambition is the ruin of a human being.”

And generosity is the making of one.