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Altars in the Street: A Neighborhood Fights to Survive

Melody Ermachild Chavis

Bell Tower: New York, 1997

257 pp., $23.00 (cloth)

Sarah Fremerman

"Why do you live there?" white acquaintances often ask Melody Ermachild Chavis, a private investigator who has moved with her family to an old Victorian house on Alma Street, in an interracial neighborhood in South Berkeley, California, a street that has become the site of several drug-related murders. "Why don't you leave?" ask her friends. But in their questions Chavis hears a more fundamental one: "Why do I live here? Why am I alive?" For Chavis, the sixteen years chronicled in Altars in the Street have been a test.

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