新編大學(xué)英語(yǔ)第三冊(cè)u(píng)nit11 Text B: Mr Lee's Side of the Street

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UNIT 11 AFTER-CLASS READING 1; New College English (II)

Mr Lee's Side of the Street

1 When Hattie Robinson moved from a lonely farm outside Tallahassee to West Perrine, Fla., this suburb of Miami was a friendly neighborhood of small frame houses. Neighbors visited one another in the evenings, and the children played tag in the shadows of the street lights. People went to sleep with their screen doors unlatched. It was a good place to raise her grandson, Lee Arthur Lawrence, whose mother and father had split up.

2 Lee loved West Perrine, but Hattie's income as a domestic was small and her frail health often kept her from working at all. When it looked as if they'd have to return to the farm, Lee quit school for a dollar-an-hour job at a sewing-machine company. Though Hattie remained sickly, Lee's paycheck got them by through the years.

3 When he was 24, Lee met Sarah Hagins at a church choir concert. Two years later they were married and in time had two children, Nita and Junior.

4 Lee and Sarah saved enough for a down payment on a house. Two years later a building became available for rent on 104th Avenue. Lee told Sarah he wanted his own store. They withdrew all their remaining savings, two thousand dollars, and opened "Lee's Grocery."

5 Lee's business prospered, but his beloved West Perrine was changing. Men and women were hanging out on street corners. There were craps games, fights. Drugs were being sold. People no longer felt safe visiting their neighbors after dark.

6 Yet in Lee's mind, the neighborhood of his youth was still here; it just needed a little tidying up. "This is our home," he told Sarah. "If I had a million dollars, I wouldn't live anywhere else."

7 Lee joined civic groups: Optimists, parent-teacher associations and the Community Crime Prevention Advisory Board. And he got involved with the kids who came to his store.

8 "Getting in trouble in school, eh?" Lee looked across the counter at a 12-year-old named Derrick, who waited to pay for his potato chips. Derrick's father had been lost in a mission over Hanoi in 1972, and the boy had only his mother to raise him. "Can't get along with the teacher?"

9 "Hate her!"

10 "Well, what are you going to do for a job if you get kicked out of school?"

11 "When I get old enough, I'll go with the pros," Derrick answered confidently.

12 "I quit school." Lee gave him a solemn look. "That was the end of my football career. If I had stayed in school, gone on to college, I'd be playing for the Dolphins today quarterback!"

13 Derrick's mouth dropped open. He looked at Lee with wide eyes, believing every word. "Ooooh, Mr Lee!" he said pityingly. Then he walked slowly to the door. From the corner of his eye, Lee watched Derrick head toward school with the other kids.

14 During the 1980s, a new drug called crack began to flood the streets. It seemed to take possession of those who smoked it, with a nasty, hungry addiction.

15 Lee's store became a drug-free island in a sea of crack and cocaine, a haven for the neighborhood kids who came to the store to get their before- and after-school snacks.

16 "Look here, y'all," Lee would tell them, " I don't care how big you are getting. Y'all stay on this side of the street. " "Yes, sir, Mr Lee," they would chorus, and when they left they walked on Mr Lee's side of the street because they knew he was watching.

17 When a family opened a restaurant next door to Lee's store, the drug trade moved in. Lee kept an eye on the dealers frequenting the place. He called the cops whenever there was a disturbance. The dealers knew that they had an enemy. But Lee never gave that a thought. He was working for a better community.

18 West Perrine continued to deteriorate. More and more businesses closed, their owners tired of working behind metal wire, intimidated by holdups and shootings. But Lee refused to give up. He continued to work with kids. He continued calling the cops and fingering pushers.

19 A few days before Christmas in 1986, Lee pulled into his driveway and got out of the car. Suddenly, a popping sound drew his attention to the lot across the street. A man stood there, arm extended, firing a pistol at him. By the time Lee understood what was going on, the gunman had fled. Another night, just as he entered the house, there was the sharp blasting noise of a burglar alarm from around the corner. The store!

20 The family found the front window shattered. Lying on the counter, they saw a container of gasoline stuffed with a rag. Gasoline was dripping onto the floor.

21 These attacks only made Lee more determined. He went into the schools and told the kids about the dangers lurking on the streets. He told them how easy it was to get into trouble and how hard it was to get out.

22 Soon, the press began to hear about this tireless community worker who couldn't be intimidated. "I don't claim to be important or anything like that," Lee told one interviewer. "If more people would stand up to the dealers, we wouldn't have these problems."

23 One March evening last year, Lee went out to pick up trash in the parking lot. Suddenly, four young men with masks stepped around the corner. They pulled out hand guns and began shooting Lee. When the firing was over, the man everyone called "Mr Lee" lay motionless in the parking lot. He was dead, 12 days from his 52nd birthday.

24 More than a thousand people tried to crowd into the funeral services at Mt. Sinai Baptist Church, a building that was meant to hold hundreds. Expressions of sympathy came from all over the nation, from servicemen abroad, from kids who had grown up in West Perrine. Miami developer Jeb Bush read a letter from his father, the President. "It takes a special man to stand up for what he believes," Bush read. "He will be remembered with great respect."

25 Derrick Thomas, voted the nation's outstanding college linebacker, drove 12 straight hours from the University of Alabama through a rain of tears. "I know Mr Lee is up there with my dad, looking down," he said. "If I could say one thing to him now, I'd say, 'Look, Mr Lee, I'm walking on your side of the street.'"

26 Police charged the four men with murder. Sweeps of the neighborhood led to hundreds of drug arrests. Newspaper and television reporters flocked to West Perrine. They called Lee a martyr in the war against drugs. But the question remains: why did Lee do it? He did it because West Perrine was his home, his neighborhood. "As the saying goes, it's better to light one candle than to curse the darkness," says Sarah. "He wanted to light a candle."

27 Church bells decorated the air of West Perrine the Sunday after Lee's funeral. Sarah, Nita and Junior gathered at the park near Lee's store and began to walk through the neighborhood. They linked arms and marched up Homestead Avenue, their voices ringing out in every corner of the neighborhood, "We shall overcome; drugs and crime must go!"

28 From behind torn curtains and broken doors, drug dealers and drug addicts looked out in amazement at Lee's family... and the 3,000 men, women and children behind them who had come to clap and sing and make Lee's dream come true.