Calcutta, Illinois

By DAVID VAN BIEMA

The Chicago police swept into 219 North Keystone Avenue last Tuesday looking for drugs, and found children instead. There were 19 in all. Lying two deep on a pair of dirty mattresses. Or sprawled on the apartment's cold floor amid food scraps, cigarette butts and human excrement. Most were in dirty diapers or underwear; one boy, subsequently found to have cerebral palsy, wore bruises, belt marks and cigarette burns on his body. Two of the smallest children, reads the police report, were awake, sharing a neck bone with a dog. As the police removed the children from the residence, one pleaded to a female cop, "Will you be my mommy? I want to go home with you."

Johnny Melton, 28, is a man who looks on the bright side. "It was due to love," he explains. Melton is fixing himself a red Kool-Aid at the epicenter of America's most recent landscape of despair, the apartment he occupies with 27 relatives at 219 North Keystone Avenue on Chicago's run-down West Side. The dwelling is as the national headlines described it: drug deals transacted outside but not within; a sink swarming with roaches; a refrigerator filled with rotting and moldy food. An old-fashioned ice-cream crank perches incongruously on a shelf. At Melton's feet, mixed up in a pile of trash, dirt and other garbage, is some dried-up chopped beef. It's for the dog. "Son of a bitch only eats the best," explains Melton.

Melton will admit that a lot of people live here; he would like you to believe they lived better than the dog. His sister Maxine rented the apartment less than a year ago. Soon after, a fire burned another sister and her children out of their home. More misfortunes followed, and eventually the two- bedroom apartment with its broken windows housed six women, 20 children, Melton and at least one other man. The love he refers to is familial: "I consider it to be a good idea for us all to be together in these times of struggling." He points to a pantry stocked with some 15 cans of corn, a couple of jars of spaghetti sauce, and pancake mix and syrup -- proof, he says, that no one here goes hungry. He regards as misplaced any sentiment questioning his sisters' child rearing: "They are young single mothers who adore their children," he vouches. On a typical day, he ticks off, "the kids go to school, get fed, watch TV, go to sleep . . . like a normal family."

And what does Melton regard as his own calling? He smiles, knowing his credibility will drop. "I'm a con man," he says.

"This is a damn nightmare," he continues. "The police couldn't get what they came for, so I guess they just wanted us to grieve. The worst kind of abuse a kid can get is taking them away from their parents." Others agreed about the nightmare part. One expert called it the biggest single instance of child neglect in Chicago's past quarter-century. Seven adults were arrested: six for child negligence, a misdemeanor, and one for cruelty, a felony. Neighbors seemed to agree that Maxine Melton meant well and kept faith as the family's de facto matriarch. But not all her housemates were as strong: a sixth woman was out at the time of the raid because she was giving birth; the child was born with a coke addiction.

As depressing as life at 219 North Keystone was, equally alarming was the response from officials who sounded no less hapless than Melton. "You wonder first of all about their parents," said Mayor Richard Daley, who apparently had no trouble casting the first stone. "But how about their neighbors . . . Where are they? Why didn't they come forward?" the Illinois department of children and family services (dcfs) confirmed that it had received complaints on behalf of the children at 219 three times starting on Nov. 20 but had allowed its field workers to be turned away at the door; now it was investigating its own investigation. At a prayer breakfast last week with Mother Teresa, President Clinton cited headlines about the tragedy and wondered aloud: "Not in Calcutta but Chicago."

The Calcutta remark was grimly amusing to Alex Kotlowitz, who wrote There Are No Children Here, the 1991 best seller about two children in a Chicago housing project. Kotlowitz notes that Mother Teresa has visited Chicago's underclass -- and was honestly shocked. "We're talking about second and third generations of children growing in communities like this. It's breaking the spiritual back of the people," he says. And each time that particular wheel is rediscovered, he notes, "we say, 'Oh, my God.' And then nothing is done."

According to an Illinois auditor general's report released the day before the Keystone raid, the state's department of children and family services fails about 1,500 times a year to investigate suspected abuse cases within the mandated 24 hours; it has also apparently been unable to resolve another 1,500 as true or false within the appointed 60-day deadline; 38% of its files were reported as missing key documents. Sterling M. Ryder, head of the social- services agency, admits that his staff should have got to the Keystone kids months ago. And he agrees with Kotlowitz: "The President doesn't understand what the conditions are in the inner cities. In many respects children in the U.S. are in worse shape than children in Third World countries." His voice betrays commitment and real anguish; all that is missing is hope.

Back at 219, Johnny Melton offers a cordial handshake of goodbye. As a reporter picks her way out through the icy backyard, something catches her eye. It is a black doll, lying facedown, abandoned in the snow.

With reporting by Julie Grace/Chicago