Mother Hale "Amazing Grace"

Clara 'Mother' Hale's amazing grace:

She founded Hale House to care for babies born into addiction
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Davis/News'Mother' Hale and her children. 'Before I knew it, every pregnant addict in Harlem knew about the crazy lady who would give her baby a home,' she said. Related ArticlesHarlem Assemblyman Adam Clayton Powell IV on trial for DWIHigh school notification deadline passes without decisionVoice of the People for March 26, 2010Canada: Charter schools' hypocritical enemiesRangel likens conservative foes of health care to racist foes of civil rightsLouis: Moskowitz foes offer much ado about nothing
Clara Hale, by her own admission, couldn't much carry a tune. But that didn't keep her from singing night after night to the babies she walked up and down the hallways of her Harlem brownstone, cradling them in her frail arms as they shook and cried from the cravings in their veins for drugs.

"Amazing grace, how sweet the sound …"

"Sometimes my singing is so bad, I can see them starting to laugh, and I just look at them and I tell them, 'All right, I can't sing, but I'm gonna keep on singing,' " the white-haired woman called Mother Hale would tell visitors to her Hale House.

Clara Hale, who had toiled anonymously for years, taking in children nobody wanted, would keep on singing even after praise from President Ronald Reagan earned her national acclaim in 1985, at age 79. Even after the dual scourges of crack and AIDS left hundreds more tiny souls on her doorstep. Even after City Hall tried to put her out of the business of saving lives barely begun.

No one and nothing would keep Mother Hale from her mission.

"I love children and I love caring for them," she would say. "That is what the good Lord meant me to do."

Left widowed at 27 with three children, she had cleaned houses by day and Loews theaters by night until, frustrated by the lack of good day-care facilities, she started taking the children of other domestics into her walkup apartment on W. 146th St. She had a way with the little ones. "The kids must have liked it, because once they got there, they didn't want to go home," Mother Hale would recall.

She eventually began welcoming foster children into her home for $2 a week. In 1968, at age 63, having reared the last of 40 foster kids, she called it quits and decided to kick back and enjoy retirement.

That all changed one day a year later, when her daughter Lorraine encountered a heroin addict on a park bench, a 2-month-old slipping out of her nodding mother's arms.

"I said what I always say: 'Take it to mother,'" Lorraine Hale remembered.

When the junkie arrived at her door, Clara Hale was dubious. After all, she hadn't raised her daughter to consort with drug addicts. She went inside to call Lorraine to verify the woman's story. When she returned, the woman was gone and the baby was on the doorstep.

Two months later, 22 drug-addicted infants were packed into her five-room apartment. Mother Hale didn't know how to say no.

"Before I knew it, every pregnant addict in Harlem knew about the crazy lady who would give her baby a home," she said.

She didn't know much about drugs, but she knew children, and she knew the value of tough love. There were rules: No fixes - not even aspirin - no matter how much a baby cried. Mothers would have to go into rehab and would be required to visit their children once a week. Ninety per cent of the time, she was able to reunite a cleaned-up child with a cleaned-up mom.