Mattapan transfer

photographs by Mark Ostow, text by Yvonne Abraham

Last summer, Mireille Pierrelouis and her three daughters were crowded into one bedroom of a relative's two-bedroom apartment on Blue Hill Avenue, in Mattapan.

Those were the days.

One mid-July morning, the apartment building burned down, and they found themselves in a Red Cross shelter in East Boston. "We lost everything after the fire," says Pierrelouis, a haggard woman who's less stern than she looks. Before the fire, she'd been struggling: the girls' father went back to Haiti years ago and has had no contact with them. After the fire, the family was really in trouble. "I had to buy them everything again. Boots and coats -- everything."

But there was one thing that Pierrelouis would not replace: their neighborhood. She was determined to keep her children -- Mirthy, 11, Shirley, age 9, and Mariette, 8 -- in the Mattapan community, refusing to pull them out of their schools. Everything the girls knew was there, and Pierrelouis was set on maintaining a consistency in her daughters' lives for which emergency assistance simply does not provide.

But in her family's circumstances, stability takes enormous effort. Every day during the school year, Pierrelouis and her daughters rise at 5 a.m. and catch a train and a bus to a friend's house in Mattapan, where they get ready for their day. She takes the children to school, continues on to her GED class, and then picks them up at 2:30 p.m. If she's called into work that day as a nurse's aide, a friend at the Mattapan apartment will mind the girls until she finishes work at 11 p.m. Then she rouses them to take them back to East Boston to sleep. Pierrelouis believes that continuity, however high the cost, is worth it.

"Show them all your report things," she proudly tells Shirley in the first five minutes of an interview in the cluttered Mattapan apartment, and her middle child clomps off in clunky black slingbacks to get them. Once the girl's out of the room, her mother says, "She is touched a little bit by the fire, but she's always laughing." She's also on the honor roll.

Pierrelouis pushes the other two children to work hard, too, and all three are precocious, articulate, and funny. Apart from the dozen Giga pets, Nano babies, and Tamagotchis they have between them, they're the kinds of kids teachers dream of.

"I raise them with my system, the way my mother raised me, " Pierrelouis says. "They know how to talk to people, and they can't swear. I raised them like Haitian kids, not American kids."

The girls also help Pierrelouis with her English and her GED studies, and entertain her with Haitian dances learned at weekly sessions at the local YMCA. If she asks them, they'll throw a cassette into the boom box and do their latest routine.

Pierrelouis takes her children to Catholic church twice a week, and when she asks them to sing a song for visitors, they break into a hymn. And the two younger girls need little persuasion to truck out frilly first-communion dresses and reenact the event -- although Shirley takes it all slightly less seriously than does Mariette, for whom the memory is fresher.

"Come on!" she scolds Shirley. "This is the holy God's thing!" Soon, however, it's a wedding thing, as Shirley and Mariette take turns being the bride and groom. "You may kiss . . . the bride," says Shirley, slowly raising Mariette's veil, giving her a peck on the cheek. The inevitable Now-be-the-man-No-you-be-the-man argument ensues.

Pierrelouis laughs, happy to sit back and let her kids entertain her. "I love them," she says. "They make me complete."

Pierrelouis qualifies for a government rental subsidy, and is looking for a permanent home for her and the girls. Problem is, the property must pass Boston Housing Authority muster, and she has yet to find an apartment with a landlord who will meet the BHA's standards.

Pierrelouis, still determined to keep her family in their Mattapan community -- after eight months of the grueling commute -- will keep looking for as long as it takes.