By MELISSA PEACOCK

RESERVE-Florence Williams sits in front of her apartment in the Reserve Oak Housing Development, staring out into the empty street.

Neighbors see her there almost every day, a tiny 72-year old woman waiting quietly, diligently for the school bus to bring in a slew of neighborhood children.

“They will be here in a little while,” Williams said expectantly. “If you wait, you will see them.”

Outside alone, she sits unafraid, despite the blanket of drugs and violence that has descended on the small community in recent weeks. It is almost three in the afternoon and the neighborhood is silent – empty. There are no gunshots, cries or screaming sirens nearby, only a few tenants out sweeping off dusty sidewalks. For Williams, known by local children as “Mama,” it is a welcome but rare moment of peace.

The Edgard native has lived in Reserve Oak Housing Development for as long as she can remember. She moved to Reserve with her late husband, a Reserve native, and was one of the first to move into the development.

But living in Reserve Oak is not what it use to be.

“It used to be a beautiful place,” she said reverently. “You use to leave the door open, leave your clothes on the line. You can’t do that anymore.”

There are a number of problems facing residents of Reserve Oak – drugs, arson and stray bullets. In recent weeks, early morning police raids have roused sleeping residents from their beds.

Screaming firetrucks have responded to multiple fires, including the recent burning of a unit slated to become a new St. John the Baptist Parish Sheriff’s Office substation. But Williams is most concerned about the amount of theft she sees committed by area youth.

“A lot of them say somebody has given them something and no one has,” Williams said. “You know by the way they answer, the way they hesitate. It is a lot of lies they say, but the truth will find a way through.”

She speaks openly about the troubled 20-year-olds and the teen-agers living on East 13th Street.

She is one of the few residents unafraid to speak to neighbors and to the press about crime in public housing. The crime, she said, is coming from local youth.

Still, she can not speak of these troubled children of Reserve without expressing a maternal love for them. And as a demonstration of the love, she continues to wait curbside to welcome the kids home from school.

“Some of my neighbors ask me why I sit out there,” Williams said. “I sit out here and keep them out of trouble. They (the kids) listen to me. They come and talk to me. Some of them ask me for a dollar and if I have it I give it to them.”

Williams has no real complaints against the parish Housing Authority, a group openly criticized by St. John Parish law enforcement agencies and the Parish Council. Nor does she have any complaints about the Sheriff’s Office. From her own post, a white lawnchair on the grass roadside, she saw the lawns mowed earlier this week. She saw apartment inspections. She watched patrol cars drive through the neighborhood. She is more concerned about how residents raise their children.

“If someone said my child did something, then I did something about it,” Williams said, her weathered face best expressing her quiet maternal outrage. Williams, the mother of five children and now a proud grandmother, does not understand how parents on East 13th Street can turn a blind eye to their children’s behavioral problems.

“Some of the mothers don’t believe you when you say they (the children) did something,” she said.

Williams lives among burned-out, soot-covered brick houses and others covered with black, scrawled graffiti. She knows little about the Board of Commissioners that governs the Housing Authority or the scramble for a new housing director. And she probably has not heard about in-fighting between Parish Council members or even the installation of a temporary housing director from St. James Parish.

But she, along with the other innocent faces of East 13th Street, know that something, somewhere has gotten out of hand. She knows fixing it is going to take a lot of help, maybe more than any administrative body can provide.

“I would like for the situation to change,” she said. “But only God can touch and change the situation now.”

For now, Williams would like to see change start within the Reserve Oak community.

“They aren’t bad children. They just need love, that’s all,” she said. “My mother taught me, ‘If you love your children, but you don’t love someone else’s kids, then you don’t know the same God I know.'”

The community, she said, needs to start watching out for one another and for the community children. It is a motto she lives by.

She loves her neighborhood, especially the youth, and said she will keep encouraging local youth to return what is stolen, to work for what they have and to love one another even in the midst of poverty and despair.