February 1, 2006:
The day I meet Red she needed to pick up insulin from her mother's house, and when her friend Karen decided she didn't want to go, I took her myself. We returned to see Karen and three others in the process of being arrested (see Cathy's page). Needless to say, Paris found elsewhere to go.

Three weeks later I see her walking along Clark Street. She just returned from Wisconsin to gather her personal effects and planned to head back that day. Maybe to "take a little detour" as she says. She did take time to talk with me at a coffee shop where I took this photo.

 

 May 20 2006:
Red has returned from Wisconsin, having lost her job. She has also learned to travel into Milwaukee to the smoke houses, and to the track where she can earn money pulling tricks.

She is ambivalent about staying in Chicago or returning to Wisconsin, and speaks of both possibilities as though they can be contemporaneous. There are problems either way. In Chicago she must abide conditions of being in her grandmothers home, where her three children live, or take to the streets. In Wisconsin, she has no job and must go live in a shelter, or take to the streets.

That day she disappears into the street, and promises to call later. Three days later she does call with a story about needing food to bring home to her kids, and how this will make things better with her grandmother. We offer her the food packages we have in our kitchen. She says she'll call back in half an hour when she is in the neighborhood. She doesn't. Five days later France calls her grandmother's phone and asks for Red. Grandmother hasn't seen her in a week. Thinks maybe she's back in Wisconsin.

Red is not without insight into her situation, and yet, this does not quite translate into a solution for her.

June 23, 2006:
Emerging from the Women's Shelter in Wisconsin where she left her belongings. We stop at two other homes on this trip to pick up her stuff and succeed in finding one person home. Red is now staying in Chicago with a boyfriend and talking about going back into treatment.