DO THIS FOR ME: THINK ABOUT how long ago 1983 is from the moment you are reading this column. That was the amount of time separating the folks in my old neighborhood in Richmond in 1970 from the Jim Crow, pre-Civil Rights South — a time when a black man could be taken out on some back road, emasculated and hung for calling a white woman by her first name.

I saw first-hand the psychological devastation in people who experienced that culture. Because of an accident of melanin, they could be murdered for performing the intrinsically human act of speaking with kindness and familiarity to a woman with whom they might actually be acquainted — or for any number of similar “offenses.”

There was a family I knew on my street, the Millers, whose dad worked in the Chevron chemical plant while mom was a part-time secretary at the school district office. They had five children, the youngest of whom was in my class at Pullman Elementary.

The oldest boy, Duane, had had polio, and he walked with a pronounced limp. He had one of the kindest hearts I’ve ever been privileged to know. He used to look out for me sometimes when things in the neighborhood got rough.

One day when I was maybe 8 years old, I was over at the Millers’ house visiting my friend from school and Duane grabbed the family’s new Chihuahua dog and handed it to me. The little mutt bit me on the stomach and held on with its teeth. I screamed in pain and fear, and Duane hurriedly got the dog off me.

His mom came running, and when I told her what had happened, right there on the spot she gave Duane a beating. She shoved him, his bad leg collapsed, and then she attacked. Duane got the beating of his life right there in front of me.

When she was done, she turned to me and apologized anxiously: “Duane didn’t mean it — he was just playing — just tell your mama it was an accident …”

At the time, it struck me as strange: Here was this big, powerful woman, and she was pleading for my forgiveness?

She had met my parents, had sat and talked with my mom over coffee; she knew my parents were about the furthest thing possible from the racists she had left behind in Alabama.

But here’s the thing I’ve realized since: In a time in Mrs. Miller’s life no more remote from that moment than 1983 is from us today, Duane’s carelessness with a white boy might have put the whole family’s well-being, even their lives, in danger. She struck Duane not out of anger, but in deep, unreasoning terror.

My Richmond neighborhood could, at times, be almost saturated with an atmosphere of latent violence, but there was also deep, overflowing, selfless love, a love so profound and simple and deep that it gave me a taste of what heaven might be like.

There was elderly Mrs. Pender next door, who had had a stroke and walked with a walker. Her husband had the most awe-inspiring lawn on the block — he probably weeded the thing with tweezers — but his wife was the real gift to the neighborhood. She would take me in sometimes when the streets were filled with menace, and she would tell me that she knew, just knew that one day I would grow up to be someone really special. (Mrs. Pender is now long dead, and heaven is a richer place for her being there. I’m sure she’s putting in a word for me.)

Then there was the elderly black lady I met one day when I was selling door to door. The whole enterprise, while technically not fraudulent, was making me pretty uncomfortable. Lots of salesmen loved selling to ghetto addresses — they would just wave a couple free months of service in the naive residents’ faces, somehow forget to mention the charges that would hit after that grace period, and rack up the sales. I worked the ghetto when I had to, but hated it. I felt like Judas.

One day I knocked on some humble little basement-apartment door, and the door opened to reveal a frail, elderly woman who had the kindest eyes I had ever seen — it was as if she were staring right through my glib salesman’s veneer, directly into my soul, and genuinely and unconditionally loving the qualities she saw there. It was as if I were staring into the heart of love itself. I never sold again.

There is another woman I know who lost both of her grandchildren — both in their mid-teens — to murder. To see this woman is to see a person who has been almost physically crushed by grief: she walks with stooped shoulders, and on her face are care-lines that have little to do with age and everything to do with having gazed, heartbroken, into the coffins of two grandchildren she loved with primal, protective, simple, profound and unconditional love.

And yet she refuses to believe that murder, hatred and retaliation are all there is in this world. She spends practically every waking moment working in outreach programs for at-risk youth. She sees some straighten out their lives and make it out. Some she loses to murder or prison.

The ones in prison, she writes to; the ones who were murdered, she prays for. Her first name is “Hope” and she is a real, live saint.

I also have some very painful memories of my childhood, but I must say I’ve never found elsewhere the kind of simple, stripped-down, elemental love I witnessed and experienced in the old neighborhood.

There are spiritual treasures heaped in our ghettos amidst the poverty and violence, and one of the more tragic facts of our culture is that the vast majority of white people have absolutely no clue about the riches to be found there.

I have some ideas about possible remedies for this separation, of which more in a future column.

Matt Talbot is a writer and poet, as well as an old Benicia hand. He works for a tech start-up in San Francisco.