Sweet Alice’s Chariot Ride : Honors aside, Parents of Watts founder maintains common touch, ‘hitching’ herself to needy.

Outside her office, a ruckus starts,and the sounds of women fighting filter through the sliding glass door. Sweet Alice Harris rushes to the door and orders one woman to come to-- don’t even try to disappear : “You know I’m going to get you.”

Trudy Stephens, 35, pregnant and wearing a housecoat and shower cap, enters, fuming and sputtering. The other woman had called her a “bitch,” and if there is one word that sets Stephens off, she says, that’s it.

Looking pointedly at Stephens’ swollen abdomen, Harris asks, “How’s the baby kickin’?” Stephens dissolves in laughter and, still angry, sinks into a chair laughing at herself and exploding to Harris at the same time.

So many people are jealous of pregnant women, Harris tells her. Looking incredulous, but liking the idea, Stephens exclaims: “You are kidding. You have got to be kidding. Really?”

Not everyone can get pregnant, says Harris. People want babies so badly, they are buying them. “You’re somebody. You’re a mother.”

And the woman who had tangled with Stephens is not. Not only that--the other woman’s mind is gone from drugs, nobody will have her, she’s got nowhere else to go. Harris leaves the room for a minute and Stephens shakes her head: “She calmed me down. She’s cool. She’s neat. She’s always there for you.”

Later, the other woman comes in, looking bashful and sheepish. She is unkempt and smells bad; her clothes are disheveled.

“You haven’t given me a hug this morning,” Harris chides the woman while embracing her. Then she calls to program director Modine Clark: “See if you can find her some clothes and get her a bath.”

An hour later, the young woman returns, looking fresh and smiling shyly.

“Now you’re lookin’ good. I love it.” Harris beams. “Look now, don’t bother the pregnant mother. You know how to act.”

*

Harris--nicknamed “Sweet Alice” on a 1983 trip to Hawaii with 64 kids, the first of her self-esteem excursions--has been helping people for 30 years. In 1979, she formed Parents of Watts to ease the tensions and violence between the area’s black and Latino populations.

It has grown into a multipurpose program that occupies a good portion of the block on Lou Dillon Avenue, a quiet, tree-lined street in Watts. What used to be private homes now house an emergency shelter, a home for the mentally ill, an education center and computer lab and a residence for college students. The home Harris, 57, shares with her husband, Allen, sits among them.

As the program and its successes have grown, so, too, have the accolades: plaques, ceremonial photos, engraved statues. A letter from President Bush, dated Feb. 25, 1992, calls her his “703rd Daily Point of Light.” It hangs with a photo of them in the reception room of the crisis center, a bungalow remodeled to house 28 homeless parolees.

About 50 other citations hang on the walls of her new office--everything from the MS. magazine 1988 Woman of the Year award and cover story to a signed photo from Nancy Reagan. Others still sit on the floor in cartons.

The latest is the Americas Award from the Positive Thinking Foundation--a secular outgrowth of Norman Vincent Peale’s ministry. One of six individuals honored for their character and spirit, Harris accepted the $5,000, Steuben crystal sculpture prize and certificate last month in Washington before an audience of 2,000 at the Kennedy Center.

She flies to Nashville this weekend to be honored by Maxwell House Coffee as one of its “100 Real Heroes.”

Harris is becoming a national figure and an urban legend. The talk shows call. The foreign press wants to write about her. In September, she appeared on Bill Cosby’s “You Bet Your Life.”

The recognition seems to roll off her. She gets a kick out of some of it and tolerates all of it: “I’m just obedient. It might be a chance to reach someone. You don’t want to die and take it with you. How would (people) get what I know?” she asks, if she didn’t cooperate.

Says producer David Beard, a friend and supporter who is now working on a feature film about Harris: “She meets President Bush--but for the bulk of every day she is working with the poorest people in America. She walks with kings and hasn’t lost the common touch.”

Indeed. Despite the attention and outside demands on her time, Harris has firm ground rules: If someone walks through her door in trouble, that is the priority.

“It’s at that time you can reach ‘em. They’re ready. If you say, ‘Not right now, come back tomorrow,’ probably tomorrow they’ll be gone.”

She takes the toughest ones, those her staff can’t handle. “They take care of the others,” she says. “They need the experience.”

But it’s not the traditional counseling session in an office. Harris may work in the yard with them. She listens, and she says it’s simple: “I just hitch myself up to their chariot and we both ride.”

Harris has her own language--an old-fashioned blend of Alabama and folk humor, dotted with frequent references to God and the devil, topped off with the vernacular of the street and grass-roots political savvy.

She is an intelligent woman who, over the years, course by course, has acquired a degree from Cal State Dominguez Hills. Countless boards and committees want her. Harris has testified before the U.S. House Ways and Means Committee about welfare changes and told representatives that the proposals were “ridiculous.” And she urged the Los Angeles Board of Education to approve an AIDS education and prevention program, which included the distribution of condoms.

She is often vague about things like dates, sums of money, names of agencies, organizational charts, credentials and titles. Terms like “the government,” “the law,” “the lady in charge” and unidentified “theys” will do. She may not be familiar with the details, but she knows what is at stake.

Describing one recent bureaucratic hassle with a government agency, she says that if it had just been her personally, and not the program, her response would have been: “Shove it.”

Sweet--but no sweetie-pie--Harris can be outspoken, accusatory and tough. She knows the street and the power structure. Something in her eyes stays on wary alert. Often, she listens with one ear, looks with one eye.

Except with children, when she puts the world on hold. One recent afternoon, at Parents of Watts’ home for young mothers on Imperial Boulevard, Harris jostled a toddler on her knee, let him maul her face and eyeglasses, then watched longingly as he headed out into the yard. “I wish I didn’t have nothing to do but stay up here around the little babies,” she sighed.

Schedules are almost pointless for her. Harris is constantly dropping everything to put out fires or handle phone calls. It’s a fragmented way of doing business, perhaps, but comfortable for a woman who raised nine children.

Her main concern now, she says, is trying to get jobs for people, especially young men.

And she is trying to raise $300,000 to build a home--on Parents of Watts property at the foot of the mountains in Altadena--where she can send kids away from the neighborhood. She calls it motivational: Give them a different environment; expand their horizons; provide training and counseling, and help them build self-esteem. She hopes to hire men involved in her programs to build it, putting them under the supervision of a good carpenter for training.

Harris was born in Gadsen, Ala., in 1935 and grew up in that small town. The only daughter among seven sons, she was close to her minister father, while her mother “took to my brothers.”

Her father died when she was young, and at age 13 she had a baby.

It was a disgrace, she says, worse for the daughter of a minister: “My mother couldn’t hardly forgive me. (Here) I was so good--I was the one who went and prayed, who liked the missions, who the sick sent for to pray with them. It was a double shame. I was just so low. The same people who thought I was so good, said I was so bad.”

At 15 she was pregnant again. “With the second,” she says, “I didn’t care. . . . It was such a bad hurt--I wouldn’t want anyone else to experience it.” Clearly, it accounts for much about her. “I’ve been there. I understand. And I know what it takes to convert people, to change their minds.”

She is not talking religious conversion. Her “conversion” came during her second pregnancy, when Harris began baby-sitting for a white family, she says.

The family thought “the bad girl” was wonderful, somebody special, someone to depend on and to help. They took her under their wing, saw that the girl with the eighth-grade education was bright. While the children napped, the family’s chauffeur took Harris for tutoring in reading and cosmetology.

At age 17, she left for beauty college in Detroit, where she had cousins. “I wanted my children to be reared in the north,” she explains. She reconciled with her mother, who moved to Detroit and cared for the children while Alice studied and worked.

Harris later ran a successful beauty shop there, but sold it and moved to California in 1958 after her mother and a brother had relocated here and her mother became ill. She moved into the Jordan Downs housing projects and married Allen Harris, who had followed her from Detroit.

Her husband works as a pipe fitter in the Long Beach shipyards and makes it all possible, she says, supporting her so she doesn’t have to take a salary: “He tells me, ‘You just married me to work for you,’ ” she laughs.

Harris gave birth to another 12 children; nine of the 14 survive, and most live nearby. Several work with her in Parents of Watts.

After the 1965 riots, she decided it was time for her children to live in their own home. But she wasn’t leaving Watts. She says knew then that “the people needed me.”

The family moved to Lou Dillon Avenue, a Watts neighborhood tense with violence and discord between blacks and Latinos, between poor renters and aspiring middle-class first-time homeowners, Harris remembers.

One night, she came home to find an abandoned car on fire in front of her house. Neighbors were concerned that it would attract other vandalism, but Harris said she would get it moved.

Watts, she soon found out, was not the right address for prompt, polite service from City Hall. Every office she called gave her the runaround. The neighbors were not surprised.

Harris headed for City Hall and the mayor’s office, breaking into a run at one point to get to Tom Bradley’s reception area. She sat on the floor screaming and hollering, holding security at bay and calling for the mayor.

She and Bradley talked. They had no resources, no VIPs where she came from, she told him. They couldn’t even get a car moved. Harris says she threatened to organize the blacks and Latinos in Watts, and Bradley told her if she could do that, he would move the car. The car was moved that afternoon; they have been friends since.

Bradley is out of the country and not available for comment, but an aide confirms: “He thinks the world of Sweet Alice.”

Harris’ community work increased. She started the Black and Brown Committee, where parents met about mutual problems and needs and to understand each others’ cultures.

The neighborhood calmed and the committee became Parents of Watts, incorporating in 1979. As Harris’ reputation grew and Parents of Watts expanded, she says, “I never thought about it. You just see a need. . . . “

She did, however, decide to stay small. The board of directors doesn’t consist of big-shot movers and shakers from downtown; Harris seldom goes after big government grants; she does not depend on one funding source. Parents of Watts gets by on about $80,000 a year from regular supporters and lots of in-kind donations.

She calls on friends for emergencies, including Dianne Feinstein, whom she met during the 1988 gubernatorial campaign.

Says Feinstein, now running for the U. S. Senate: “She’s probably the finest person I know. I’ve never met anybody so solidly dedicated, so unselfish and practical.” Harris’ simple programs, Feinstein says, “are a lesson for us in government.”

For her part, Harris can’t explain why she became so active and dismisses talk that she or her efforts are special: “It’s just a matter of giving the love that everyone has within them.” Harris, a woman of deep faith and active in the Church of Christ, says anyone can do it.

But few do.

Harris arrived for work one morning last week and found a hand-delivered letter to “Mrs. Harris” tucked in the door from a young man she had once helped.

Off parole, working and hoping to go to college, he described his progress and gave thanks:

(I) have come a long ways with the help of you and your staff there at the Parents of Watts. They all treated me like a man that I am, and not like the way I have acted in life.

I have made some bad mistakes in life . . . and everybody gave up on me but the Parents of Watts. You all kept on being nice to me, listening to me and even giving me good advice. One day I sat down and decided to turn my life around . . . .

I am a good man now.