This is important stuff. Ruth knows that. So in the interest of candor, she takes a breath and weighs a lifetime of impressions about that most explosive of American issues: race.

"I've always tried to vote my conscience," she says assuredly. "Not my party or color."

Philadelphia is in the midst of a mayoral contest between a black candidate, Democrat John F. Street, and a white one, Republican Sam Katz. Neither man has made overt racial appeals. But history shows that skin color greatly influences how city voters react at the polls.

Sherman, 51, a school district secretary, is white. She lives on the 800 block of Brill Street in Summerdale, a historically white neighborhood of rowhouses in the lower Northeast. It is one of the city's few racially integrated working-class communities.

In the last month, Brill Street families have shared their views of the candidates, crime and schools in a series of Inquirer stories. Ruth Sherman, her husband, Ben, and some of their neighbors recently agreed to explore their feelings about race.

"What bothers me [is] that people will just vote by color instead of if the person is of substance and what they stand for," Ruth said. "That may be really idealistic, but that's my view."

Political consultants working for Street and Katz are betting, based on historic voting patterns, that Street will get most of the black vote and Katz most of the white vote on Nov. 2. Both candidates will also need crossover support to form a winning coalition.

Assumptions such as these disappoint the Shermans.

"It's like Ruth says - race should have nothing to do with elections," said Ben Sherman, 59, a building engineer for the school district. "You should only base it on what you read and listen to on TV, and try to make the best decision you can without knowing the candidate personally."

But Ben Sherman has been around long enough to know that things just aren't that simple.

Carol Stewart has little patience for all this talk about blacks voting black and whites voting white.

It bothers her that campaign consultants analyze the race of voters as they map out strategies.

In Philadelphia, no more than 20 percent of voters have ever crossed racial lines in mayoral elections with credible black and white candidates, according to an analysis by the Committee of Seventy, a nonpartisan government watchdog group.

Stewart, 49, believes that such talk can end up encouraging voters to take race into account when they might not have otherwise.

"They don't say that the Italians came out and voted," said Stewart, who is black. "They don't even say whether the Jews came out, whether the Irish came out. They always say it's black and white. And that's the problem: They're always bringing in a racial expectation when it's not even there."

Stewart is a psychiatric nurse with a master's degree. She was reared in Mount Airy; her father was a steelworker, her mother a housewife. Her father was Baptist, her mother a member of a Holiness congregation.

Stewart has seven siblings. All but one attended college.

She and her late husband, Leon, moved into a four-bedroom house in Willingboro in the 1980s and sent their children to Catholic school.

Leon died of lung cancer 11 years ago. Left with three young children and a mortgage, Carol picked up a second job to pay the bills.

Her two daughters are now college graduates with families of their own in Philadelphia. Her son, 20, an electrician, lives at home. Stewart moved to the city this year to be near them and her mother.

Stewart votes, but she doesn't rely on sound bites and office chit-chat to make a decision. On her days off, she catches up by reading a week's worth of newspapers.

So far, Stewart has flip-flopped.

After the first televised debate Oct. 3, she was impressed with Katz's directness. But that changed after the Oct. 12 radio debate.

"I was back on Street's side," Stewart said. "Katz let me down 100 percent. A lot of issues he avoided, he would not answer, even though it was put to him straight. He beat around the bush."

What better symbol of the absurdity of racial voting, she wonders, than a radio debate?

Listeners must rely only on voices and issues, substance over skin.

"If they were on the radio and you only had a name and you couldn't tell by voice who was black and who was white," she asked, "who would you have voted for?"

Stewart believes the perception that many voters cast ballots solely along racial lines is overstated.

"Most black voters that I've encountered would like to see who would be best in office, because they live here," Stewart said. "They're putting their money in it just like anyone else."

Call it another crazy night for Marianne Ralston.

She took her three boys to charter school at 7:30 a.m., worked a full day, and is now, at 7:30 p.m., flipping through a Peirce College packet in the auditorium of the Norcom Community Center in the Northeast.

Ralston, 34, a human-resources worker, has never taken a college class. She is eyeing an associate degree in business administration.

An academic recruiter is talking about school loans, credits and financial aid. But Ralston, a single mother, has to slip out. Her oldest boys, Craig, 10, and Matthew, 12, are in a hockey league. She doesn't want to miss their games.

She rushes to a nearby roller-hockey rink and settles into the stands. Ralston shifts mental gears to talk about race, voting, and growing up in an all-white neighborhood.

She voted for W. Wilson Goode twice in the 1980s because, she said, he seemed like "a good man."

Her neighborhood? Summerdale has changed a lot since she was young; the playground isn't as safe, and crime seems worse, she said.

Black and Hispanic residents have moved in, but Ralston sees no connection between that and the sense that crime has increased.

"I don't really look at it as racial," she said. "I just look at it like the neighborhood isn't what it used to be." 

Dolores Finnegan, 70, who lives across the street, blames federally subsidized Section 8 renters for harming the community. They make noise and do not maintain the homes toward which they pay relatively little rent, she said.

Some housing advocates claim such opposition is little more than thinly veiled racism because roughly 90 percent of Section 8 voucher recipients are black.

But Finnegan disagrees. She considers her opposition to Section 8 a philosophical issue.

"I lost my dad when I was 10," she said. "My mother took care of me and my two sisters. No one gave us handouts, and we never expected them or asked for them."

Finnegan's first husband, an alcoholic now dead, brought home $10 a week.

Money was tight. Finnegan went to work when the youngest of her three girls was only 18 months old.

She carried her pocketbook everywhere - even in the house.

"Everything I had," she said, "I had to hide somewhere so he wouldn't drink it."

Finnegan bought her Brill Street house 38 years ago with money left to her by a deceased relative. Soon after, she kicked her husband out.

She married her second husband, Bill, about 30 years ago.

They are conservative Republicans, devout Catholics who loved former Mayor Frank L. Rizzo even as a Democrat in the 1970s. They disliked Goode in the '80s. They do not care for Mayor Rendell.

Their politics, they say, have nothing to do with race.

"I saw a piece in the paper the other day that Democrats don't cross the party line," Dolores Finnegan said. "What if the candidate running is the devil incarnate? Would they elect him?

"And Katz," she said. "If his slate was something that would hurt Philadelphia, why wouldn't I cross the party line and vote for Street?"

Three weeks ago, Ben Sherman was as confused as anything.

"I have no doubt Street's going to get in," he said. "He's well-known."

Folks on Brill Street - the Shermans included - know little about Katz. The municipal finance expert has never held elected office.

But the more he thought about it, the more Ben Sherman figured that Katz could become the first GOP mayor in a half-century. White voters out there, he said, may be reluctant to back Street.

"They don't want a black mayor," he said. "Not that Street wouldn't be qualified; it shouldn't come down to that."

It doesn't come down to that in the Sherman household. Their voting record is unconventional.

In 1971, Ruth and Ben Sherman voted for Rizzo. In '75, they didn't.

Ruth Sherman had become fearful of reports of police brutality dating to the 1960s, when Rizzo had been police commissioner.

"After that," she said, "I thought he was a very dangerous man."

In 1982, they helped make Goode the city's first black mayor and backed him again in 1986.

During the Democratic primary this year, they and their daughter Jennifer, 22, voted for Democrat Happy Fernandez.

What is the source of the Shermans' independence?

In Ruth's case, a childhood in Fishtown.

She looks back fondly on the close-knit, river ward community. But living there had its drawbacks.

"I've seen the cruelty of some people, and I've seen the insensitivity of some people, and I just knew I wasn't going to grow up that way," she said. "If I didn't like you, it was because you weren't a nice person - not because you're not white."

Her Polish mother worked in a factory and later a hospital kitchen. Her German father was a Teamster truck driver. They were Catholic.

They worked hard. "But they had their own ideas about things," she said. "They weren't always tolerant of people, so I try to be softer and gentler with people."

Ben Sherman, who is Jewish, was 5 years old when his father left home and 8 when his mother died.

He and his sister were reared by a widowed uncle in South Philadelphia. There were Jews, Poles, Italians and Irish on his block, and blacks around the corner, he said.

The Shermans moved to Brill Street 30 years ago. They raised their two daughters in a house where hateful words were "taboo."

The girls are grown and the Shermans are nearing retirement, but their battle against bias continues.

"It's something you certainly have to work at every day," Ruth said. "I know I do. It's a struggle to be fair with anyone or anything."