A Story of the Season

Where were the Cadillacs? This was Hunters Point, the projects. This was San Francisco’s contribution to that part of the country known as “inner-city” America, where the fear and the stereotypes play. Welfare Queens luxuriate in such places. They drive Cadillacs, crank out children, buy good whiskey with food stamps. It’s a swell life, underwritten by taxpayers who have fallen prey to the Compassion Crowd and who themselves can no longer afford good whiskey, not to mention Cadillacs.

I know these things.

I listen to talk radio.

And yet, somehow, standing beneath the burned-out unit where Nina Davis lived, it all didn’t seem so swell. The cars were junkers, some stripped, tires flat. The housing units were sagging, dilapidated, the pastel paint chipped and scarred with graffiti. Faded orange bedsheets hung in the windows, blocking out the sun and everything else. The faces peeking out from behind the bedsheets seemed less than royally content. Although there was no chance to inquire. Here, they don’t open doors to strangers. Here, Nina Davis, in her brother’s phrase, “was a prisoner in her own home,” staying indoors, not letting her children wander. Trapped.

“Sometimes,” the brother said, “you can only move where your money lets you.”

Well, she has escaped now. They buried her Saturday, five weeks after a still-unexplained fire gutted her unit. While such tragedies are commonplace in cityland, the ordeal of Nina Davis would evolve into something remarkable. Hers is a story of this meanest of seasons.

*

The fire erupted on a Saturday afternoon. Davis, pregnant, unmarried, was in the shower. Three of her children were away for the afternoon. Three others were home. Davis plunged into the smoke, found her terrified youngsters and shepherded them to a third-story window. Flames were everywhere. She shielded her children with her body--”like a mother in her den,” a doctor would say later, “protecting her puppies.” Passersby gathered down below. One by one, Davis hurled her babies down to waiting hands. Then, half her body scorched, she jumped. Everyone made it out alive--even the fetus, delivered later by emergency C-section.

Afterward, the mayor wanted to pin a medal on someone. A press conference was called to honor the one man said to have caught the babies. Then two others came forward, claiming they had been the heroes. Then a fourth. Amid the embarrassment and confusion at City Hall, it was declared finally that Davis herself was, as someone put it, “the real hero.”

That did it. When those words saw print in the San Francisco Examiner, the gates of public opinion hell swung open. Annie Nakao, the reporter who covered the story, was broadsided with letters, calls, faxes, all bubbling with pure white hatred and self-righteous indignation.

“Where do you get the idea of Nina Davis is a hero?” one sputtered, setting the tone for the rest. “Her act of saving three of her seven illegitimate kids may be taken as a small token of repayment for all those tens of thousands of $$$$$$ society, the Federal Government and California taxpayers have put forward. . . . “

“My husband and I,” complained a woman from suburban Burlingame, “pay lots and lots and lots of taxes. I don’t see this person has done anything. . . . That’s the brutal reality of it. So there’re a lot of us who feel this way. Sorry.”

*

On it went. They had a field day with Davis on the radio talk shows and in the letters to the editor columns. How dare a woman on welfare have so many children? Never mind the fire. Never mind her grave injuries. Never mind her life story, which indicated Davis in fact had been working to escape welfare. None of that mattered to her critics. It was as though by receiving public assistance, the woman had forfeited her rights both to motherhood and basic human compassion.

Heavily sedated, Nina Davis never heard any of it, never learned she was so troublesome to those fine people who pay lots and lots and lots of taxes. At the service Saturday, Mayor Frank Jordan--apparently the rare politician whose moral compass is not always calibrated to opinion polls--spoke eloquently, compassionately, of what the woman in the casket had done for her children. He spoke of “the ultimate sacrifice” and of selfless love. And yes, he called Nina Davis a hero.

The children sat in the front row. The boys dressed in new, shiny blue suits, the girls in frilly white dresses. As the funeral ended, the littlest child refused to leave. She was carried away, sobbing for her mother. Then the casket was loaded up for the long ride to the cemetery, where Nina Davis would no longer burden this great, golden land of ours.