The Rock Comes to a Hard Place
Can one man save the poorest place in Texas' richest county? In "The Fight for Sugar Hill," Paul Meyer of The Dallas Morning News offers a brilliant profile of Rock Carpenter, a struggling pastor who tries to rescue the desperate residents of a housing complex from violence, drugs and poverty. Meyer follows Carpenter's triumphs and failures since he first came to the Sugar Hill complex in the fall of 2004. Here Meyer describes an encounter between Carpenter and one of the residents:
He moves through the rust-red brick buildings on this autumn day, under a shot-out floodlight and over the potholed parking lot. Past the old swing set and the management building to the door of 91-year-old Mozelle Thornton, where the welcome mat is duct-taped to the ground.
"Hi, Mother, we're comin'," Rock tells her, pushing the door open.
"Hi, precious."
The old woman sits shelling pecans, near where the squirrels were getting into the closet and rummaging about. She doesn't say much. She has survived here nearly four decades by staying inside and keeping quiet about the things she hears or sees. The drug deals in the breezeways. The gunshots.
Rock surveys the work he helped get done to her apartment: patches in the closet ceiling and the first new paint in years.
He promises to return.
The excellent Web package comes with videos and slideshows by Melanie Burford and Michael Ainsworth chronicling the efforts of Pastor Rock and the police captain who tries to help him. It also features inspection reports documenting Sugar Hill's squalid conditions and an interactive map of the complex's 100 apartments.
www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/spe/2007/sugarhill/index.html