How much help is a helping hand? One woman discovers the power--and limits--of charity.

Anthony calls when there's trouble. It's Christmas; his mother is short of cash and faces eviction. I write a $500 check and call the landlord to ask that he wait for her next paycheck for the rest. I've known the family since Anthony was 7, and I know his mother keeps her word. Take my check, for example. I know it won't be repaid. I also know Anthony doesn't ask for help unless he really needs it. If I said I didn't have the money to give, that would be OK. He'd keep looking. The landlord seems like a decent guy, and I assume things work out. I usually don't hear.

Years ago, when my son was Anthony's classmate in a Minneapolis grade school, I got to know him, his mother, and his five siblings. I was white and upper middle class, a newspaper reporter with a husband, a house in the city, and two kids. Lucille was a black single mother, on welfare and living in upper duplexes that were sparsely furnished, neatly kept, and crowded with kids, relatives, and a series of boyfriends. She needed some one to help out with the kids occasionally. I needed to understand what separated us, what made our sons' prospects so unequal, and to try to balance the scale.

Before I met Anthony and his family, I wrote checks to church and charities. Once a month our family stocked shelves at a food pantry and mopped floors at a soup kitchen. Anthony's family provided a chance to give more tangible help--bunk beds and groceries, new shoes and toys at Christmas, help with homework--and to teach my children to answer Christ's call to share our abundance.

I liked Anthony because he had gusto and generosity. You've got to love a kid who borrows a friend's bike, rides three miles to see you, then does wheelies on the front sidewalk to announce his arrival. I also liked him because he struggled to read. I, who live in a house so crowded with books that the plaster ceiling sags with their weight, wanted to help Anthony cross from reading as arduous decoding to reading as escape, knowledge, even pleasure.

Somewhere I had read that many poor children hit a wall with reading at about fourth grade because their life experiences are too limited to support a vast vocabulary. Geode, walrus, and tsunami are easier to fathom if you've at least seen pictures. With outings to libraries, science museums, and apple orchards I could enlarge Anthony's universe.

I hoped his life would be better for my help. His mother, proud and resourceful, never asked for it. "Whatever you give will be fine," she said. When there was need, Anthony asked. Helping a child--open, eager, pliable--is easier than steering through the pride, habits, and defenses we accumulate as adults.

From the start I waged an avid campaign of middle-class values. When Lucille talked of marrying a sweet-natured man who washed dishes at a nursing home, I lent her my sewing machine to make the wedding dress. Months later she returned it unused. When the YMCA encouraged kids to sell candy bars to pay their way to summer camp, I established Anthony and his younger brother in the trade. After the boys ate much of their inventory, Lucille returned the remaining stock and I paid off their debt. Lucille politely deflected my suggestion that she could turn her skill repairing VCRs into a job. Instead she supplemented her welfare check by cleaning apartments for cash. Once welfare reform kicked in, she found work as a home health care aide and moved from welfare poor to working poor.

Can person-to-person help make a difference? Of course. An editor friend who grew up in New York as the son of a cleaning woman glimpsed a larger world when he went to work with her and saw how her clients lived. Some of them treated the boy and his mother like family, taking him to see the Knicks and Islanders play, inviting them to Vermont for a ski weekend. When he applied to colleges, they offered tips to improve his essays. When Columbia awarded him a full scholarship, his life changed forever.

But my editor friend had an asset more powerful than what the Victorians called a "friendly visitor": a fiercely resolute mother. A West Indian immigrant, she devoted herself to blazing a path out of poverty for her only child. She left family and friends in Brooklyn for better schools on Long Island and walked miles to and from work to save bus fare. She shunned welfare, worked prodigiously, and stayed away from troublesome men. Anthony's mother had six children. And she lacked the immigrant's ferocious hope and resolve.

When I look back on those years, I am impressed by my energy and embarrassed by my assumption that hard work, gumption, and a little tutoring could propel Anthony through school and his family out of poverty. For one raised with the brisk optimism of the educated middle class, as I was, it is hard to fathom the tangle of bad luck and bad habits, discouragement and isolation that keep people poor. I also failed to recognize how much changes in the economic structure and erosion of the social safety net have made it harder for poor Americans to climb up the economic ladder. Despite cuts in housing subsidies and Pell grants, increases in health care and housing costs, declines in real wages and job security, I focused on the individual, on Anthony, the one part of this web I could directly influence.

I recognize now both the limits of that influence and the call Christ makes to his followers to venture beyond charity to political engagement. Christ challenged not just individual sinners but unjust authorities and systems. Conservative Christians apply this lesson, albeit generally on moral issues, not economic ones.

At my church I've helped start a Sowers of Justice group, hosting forums and letter-writing efforts on such topics as immigration and hunger. Organizing, informing, and activating a community is far harder than tutoring a child. But if I want to make more than a pin-prick's worth of difference, collective effort is essential.

My presence in Anthony's life has mattered in ways both humbler and more profound than I imagined. I have been a comforter, counselor, and source of emergency cash. He remembers the books we read, the homemade soup, the grace before meals.

Now that he's a young man, Anthony sometimes calls just to talk. He called the day a judge denied him visitation rights for an infant daughter born of an affair with a young woman who was angry that he wouldn't leave his long-term girlfriend and their children. He was confused, angry, and sad. "She's mine, too," he protested.

I understood the judge's reasoning: Anthony has no diploma, no job, no prospect of being able to support this baby. The mother wanted him out of her life. But his loss was no less severe: The only gift he has to offer a child is his humor, family, resourcefulness, love. "If I had a dad, I feel like I would have done better," he said.

The judge couldn't have known how acutely Anthony feels the absence of a father. His father lives in Indiana; his mother calls the man a fool. When Anthony was 14, he asked his father why he never came to visit. The man told the boy he could get on a bus himself. After that, Anthony tried to stop caring. I don't believe he succeeded.

Those of us who fear poor black men often miss this reality: That many have none of the fixtures that make adult life--no car or wife, apartment or job, much less health insurance, Rolodex, or retirement plan. Many depend on girlfriends or mothers for housing, friends for transportation. Aside from prison, precious few government programs are designed to serve them. Children are their only legacy.

Now when Anthony calls, I mostly listen. I have suggested GED classes and a job training program. I have offered to come along the first time and help with homework. But the principles I taught my children--that study and hard work pay off--have taught him different lessons. The last time he called, it was to tell me that the man in the morning paper--a convenience store clerk shot dead by an angry teen because the man defended a retarded customer against the boy's taunts--was his oldest sister's partner and father of her children.

"He was working three jobs, trying to support his family, and he gets shot like a dog."

I offered to send a check; he suggested flowers. I said something about how I knew he would be there for those children. I withheld my usual preachment about the value of work. The words had turned bitter in my mouth.

LYNDA MCDONNELL, a writer and educator living in Minneapolis.