"I got a garden started," she says. "I helped clear out the rocks and cement that the kids were playing in." She'd met Yvonne Gage and Johnson from her volunteer days. "As soon as I moved in, I started working for them." She helped write a grant and various letters, hoping to win funding for children's programs.
The tenants' meetings at the Hunters Point project never did take off, though. "It was always the same six people," Wright says. And Wright knew she'd be moving on. In 1993 she took a job with the Housing Authority as a community services coordinator.
"I always had to think about not crossing the line, being an employee here," she says. "Particularly because I knew I had to keep in mind that I couldn't try to do too much, that I couldn't take over." She had skills that others didn't. "And on one hand, you want to lend a hand, but you also don't want people thinking that the power is in you."
She speaks from inside a Housing Authority office that lies up a narrow, cement stairway, past a locked door and a lobby that could as easily be a police station as a place for needy tenants. She knows the tone, and doesn't like it. "My goal is for people to not need other people to tell them what to do. For people to be able to tell the Housing Authority to stick it," she says. "All these things we've been given," she says, "have served to make us weak."
But some things she was given did help her. So why doesn't she feel weakened?
"I never have internalized the poverty thing. I've had to dodge collectors and worry about feeding my children. But I never got it in my head that this is it for me," she says. "It was always clear for me that this" -- a housing project -- "was a place I'd only be for a minute."
The escape hatch for Wright arrived in an unexpected form: an angry white man who didn't like blacks having the key. A neighbor who shouted, "I hate you fucking niggers," out his door. "I think he just couldn't stand to see a successful black family living near him," Wright says. "It just irked him to see a wife and husband, both working, and well-mannered children, and to know we were getting out of there and he wasn't."
The tirades escalated; the neighbor called the police on Wright's husband, and called Wright's boss at work to complain about her. (Police say they were aware of the situation and recommended the man for eviction, but the Housing Authority took no action.) Wright began to feel that her family was in danger. This June, shortly after graduating from college, she moved to a location she prefers not to divulge: She fears the man will stalk her.
And things are expensive now, she says, but they don't weigh her down. Nothing seemed to change in Hunters Point, she says. Escaping lets her see that more clearly.
The Hunters Point tenants asked for new blinds, a mural, an office. They asked for their community room back -- it is currently used by Housing Authority managers, whereas in the old days it held a stove (destroyed) and a jukebox (gone). "Big Mama" -- Johnson -- "used to give birthday parties for the kids up there," Wright says. For a while, tenants weren't given access to their own meeting room. "Big Mama was always asking for office space. Housing regulations say every tenant group should have their own office," says Wright. "We never got one thing we asked for.
"I guess that's why people get so frustrated," she says. Her two boys smile down at her from a wall photo, taken outside her new home. "You get a little run-down when you've been asking for a key to a room for 10 years," she says.
I ask her to show me some of the grants and letters she wrote. She searches in the files and stacks and overflowing cabinets; she looks for paper, just as the Hunters Point tenants will soon be doing, if they obey Shirley Thornton. "Send me those letters," Thornton had said.
"It makes you feel powerless," says Wright, who finds what she's looking for. "And obviously, you are.
