Explore "Dreams from My Father" by Barack Obama on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
THE ALTGELD GARDENS PUBLIC housing project sat at Chicago's southernmost edge: two thousand apartments arranged in a series of two-story brick buildings with army-green doors and grimy mock shutters. Everybody in the area referred to Altgeld as "the Gardens" for short, although it wasn't until later that I considered the irony of the name, its evocation of something fresh and well tended-a sanctified earth.
True, there was a grove of trees just south of the project, and running south and west of that was the Calumet River, where you could sometimes see men flick fishing lines lazily into darkening waters. But the fish that swam those waters were often strangely discolored, with cataract eyes and lumps behind their gills. People ate their catch only if they had to.