In a Monday, March 14, 2016 photo, Ruth Sanders poses for a photo, in her home in Dallas. Sanders, 93, is in the early stages of dementia. While she can discuss the history of her neighborhood clearly and vividly, she does not understand that a large brokerage firm is currently suing her to collect money […]

DALLAS (AP) – As a legal battle swirls around her, Ruth Mae Sanders drifts between worn rooms in her family home, her memories slipping further into the fog.

The 93-year-old clearly recalls the white-only seats on Dallas trolley cars, which she rode daily to school in a bustling black neighborhood originally settled by freed slaves.

Her Alzheimer’s disease makes it harder to remember when developers bought up that neighborhood and turned it into the affluent area now called Uptown.

She can’t keep track of the present at all.

Ruth appears confused about why she’s ensnarled in a lawsuit over her home. A Dallas real estate firm has sued her over a failed deal to build a 7-Eleven in place of her faded, blue-paneled house, one of the last vestiges of Freedman’s Town.

The Dallas Morning News reports that Henry S. Miller Brokerage wants tens of thousands of dollars in commission, money Ruth’s daughter says they don’t have because the house never sold.

Already behind on their legal bills, Ruth and her daughter have until Friday to appeal to the Supreme Court of Texas.

Among the issues: Whether Ruth had the mental competence to sign documents that led to a four-year saga over a home that’s been in her family since the early 1900s.

An attorney for Henry S. Miller said the firm’s brokers did their part before the deal fell apart – and legally earned the commission. He called Ruth’s Alzheimer’s defense “convenient” and accused her of using her skin color to renege on paying.

“Miller’s not the bad person here. They did a job,” lawyer Randy Ackerman said in an interview. “Ms. Sanders played the race card (that) this is the white man trying to take advantage of a poor old black lady. I don’t think there’s anything racial about this.”

Even so, a black community’s history echoes in Ruth’s life story.

Changed neighborhood

In Uptown today, the Nodding Donkey bar thumps where a black barbershop once stood.

Luxury apartments loom where wooden boardinghouses lined the streets years ago.

Labradors and Goldendoodles romp in Griggs Park, where Ernie Banks perfected his game before finding fame as the Chicago Cubs’ first black player.

But the century-old home on the corner of Thomas Avenue and Allen Street stubbornly remains.

“There’s lots of reconstruction going on now. You see these things going up in the air. Over on McKinney Avenue, what’s that new store called? It takes up several blocks,” Ruth says, referring to a Whole Foods Market.

Ruth’s skin crinkles like tissue paper when she laughs – a polite chuckle that bubbles up when her memory fades. Her mother-in-law once told fortunes in this house, and in 1985 Ruth moved in, after her husband died.

By 2012, the year Ruth turned 90, friends say, a parade of strangers had shown up with baked goods and real estate paperwork.

Ruth had flirted with selling for years, as property taxes in the State-Thomas area kept rising, even enlisting brokers before. But Marian Sims, a neighbor and Ruth’s home health care worker, noticed the offers multiplying around the same time Ruth began to repeat herself and lose track of the days.

Sims suspected dementia, a diagnosis a doctor confirmed in 2014, court documents show.

She called Ruth’s only child in New York. “I said, ‘Leena, you need to get down here. She’s not in a state where she can make decisions. She thinks people are her friends, and they may not be.'”

Leena Sanders, a jazz singer and schoolteacher, flew to Dallas. She noticed one company’s brokers seemed especially close to her mother. They worked for Henry S. Miller, a major real estate firm with roles in upscale developments, including Dallas’ West Village.

Leena said she acquiesced and told her mom, “Well, this is what you want – or what I thought she wanted.”

Leena returned to Manhattan with a copy of a contract the firm wanted her mother to sign, to put her house on the market. She asked a lawyer friend to look it over, a point Henry S. Miller later emphasized.

She called her mother in June 2012 to urge caution.

“I said, ‘Let’s wait. Don’t sign anything because we don’t know these people,'” Leena said. “She said, ‘I went ahead and signed it.'”

A broker for Henry S. Miller had already come to the house. Leena and a lawyer she hired years later said the broker snapped a photo of Ruth that day, smiling with the paperwork that would be at the center of a legal battle for years to come.

Back in the day

They once called her “Readin’, ‘Ritin’ Ruth.”

Ruth Sanders grew up in Oak Cliff and took the bus to the city’s only black high school, Booker T. Washington, in the old Freedman’s Town. Lined with dirt and cobblestone roads, the capital of black Dallas stretched from the high school up to Lemmon Avenue, where “Keep This Neighborhood White” yard signs began.

In the 1970s, Ruth got a degree from Southern Methodist University and campaigned for the Dallas school board with the “readin’, ‘ritin'” slogan. In the early ’80s, as a member of the City Plan Commission, she help fight against encroachment on the worn-down remains of Freedman’s Town.

As downtown towers pushed closer to that community, investors began to scoop up black properties and flip them for huge profits. Brokers fanned out and rang doorbells on shotgun shacks and rooming houses, chauffeuring longtime residents to neighborhoods with tempting brick homes.

Those who stayed saw their tax bills rise, or worse. Many remember the day in 1984 when the First Pentecostal Church of God in Christ, across the street from Griggs Park, went up in flames. Investigators never solved the arson, but the pastor said the congregation had refused to sell.

It was during the black exodus that Ruth moved in. When she took over her late husband’s family home, neat rows of pecan and oak trees marked the places where other houses had stood.

Ruth worked mostly secretarial jobs, but in her spare time helped organize meetings to protect black homeowners from pushy developers.

“We wanted to make sure that some of the older people weren’t being pressured,” Ruth said in 1985, when she told The Dallas Morning News that only 30 neighborhood homes remained occupied by black heirs.

That number had shrunk to about a half dozen when Ruth signed with Henry S. Miller to put her property on the market in 2012.

A daughter returns

Leena Sanders returned to Dallas later that year and moved in with her ailing mom.

In the midst of the move, Ruth signed a second contract with Henry S. Miller, lowering the listing price for her property. Then, Leena said, she found a letter from one of the firm’s brokers, urging a price lower still.

In January 2013, a broker came by with a 28-page contract. An investor working with 7-Eleven wanted the property, along with an old house next door that Ruth rented out. But she had to move fast – and sell for much less than the $1.2 million she first agreed to.

Leena had doubts about her mother’s decision but didn’t protest when Ruth signed the contract to sell her home and the rental house for just under $900,000.

“She presents such a knowing countenance. She’s always been in charge,” Leena said. “I am the daughter. I am respectful . I thought she understood.”

Ackerman, the attorney for Henry S. Miller, blamed the “greedy” daughter. “If there’s an issue on diminished capacity, it’s not Miller’s fault,” he said, adding that “if she didn’t know her mother had diminished capacity, how could a stranger to the family know that?”

Leena said she did not realize the full extent of her mother’s confusion until about a month later, when Ruth told her family doctor that people were “taking her home” from her.

Leena panicked. She asked Henry S. Miller and the buyer if they could stop the sale but was told Ruth would be sued if she tried.

Leena said she had casually consulted lawyers throughout the process – a “friend of a friend” and someone she’d met at a singing gig – but said neither was paid to advocate on her mother’s behalf.

Shortly before the scheduled closing on March 26, 2013, Leena hired a lawyer who quickly drafted a letter asking to delay the sale. “Mrs. Sanders desires to close as soon as her health permits,” he wrote.

That day, Leena said in an interview, Henry S. Miller’s broker showed up at Ruth’s house with closing documents in hand.

Leena didn’t open the door.

When she peeked out the window about half an hour later, she said, she saw the broker sitting at the Nodding Donkey across the street, watching.

Unannounced visit

One Sunday weeks after that, Ruth showed up uninvited at a house four blocks from hers, dressed up in church clothes, her 1990 Camry left in the middle of the street.

Pat Banks said she had just sat down for brunch with her 106-year-old mother, the oldest holdout from Freedman’s Town.

“I was just stopping by to see how your mom was doing,” said Ruth, who had never visited before. She joined the family in the dining room and announced, “I believe I’ll have that tea now.”

Banks hadn’t offered but fetched a cup anyway.

Puzzled, Banks tried to think of something to say to her guest, who had pulled off her pumps and made herself at home. She remembered a sign she’d seen on Ruth’s lawn.

“Ms. Sanders, I’m so glad you’re still with us,” Banks said. “I heard you were moving.”

Mediation meeting

After the March 26 closing date had passed, Leena went to mediation with her mother, Henry S. Miller, the would-be investor and all of their lawyers.

In an attempt to save the sale and stay out of court, they came up with a proposed agreement:

Ruth would get an extra $15,000 and a new closing date. But in return, Leena would agree that her mother “has the legal and mental capacity to proceed with this transaction.” The agreement would also give the investor the right to back out of the sale and state that Henry S. Miller would get its commission – no matter what.

Leena, who now had power of attorney for her mother, said she knew Ruth wasn’t mentally competent. But in the end, she said, she felt she had to sign to avoid a lawsuit.

“I knew it wasn’t right. I knew it wasn’t set up in our favor,” she said. “Of course, I accept responsibility and I feel some disappointment I wasn’t able to protect my mother.”

Leena began thinking about a place to move her mom, reassured that the house’s sale for nearly $1 million would give her options.

But days before the sale was supposed to go through, the investor pulled out. Its main tenant, 7-Eleven, had changed its mind about building a store on that corner, according to court records.

Henry S. Miller sent Ruth a letter demanding its commission of $53,700.

On Dec. 19, 2013, the firm sued her.

Regardless of what happened along the way, real estate law experts say, this case may come down to one question: Was Ruth competent when she signed the original listing agreement with Henry S. Miller in June 2012?

A neuropsychologist who diagnosed Ruth with Alzheimer’s disease last year dated her “cognitive decline” to as early as 2010, two years before she first signed with the brokerage firm.

Ackerman questioned that doctor’s assessment and called the timeline “convenient.”

A lawyer who listens

Two days before a key legal hearing in September 2014, Ruth trudged into her newest lawyer’s office, leaning on a cane and carrying a framed photograph of her family.

Leena had scraped together enough money to pay attorney Douglas C. Kittelson, who, she said, was the first lawyer who truly listened.

Ruth’s case was about to go to arbitration, where a neutral third party would decide whether Ruth had to pay Henry S. Miller’s commission and attorney fees. That decision would be legally binding.

Kittelson, court records show, immediately sensed something off about Ruth. He scrambled to file paperwork arguing that the arbitrator should consider her mental condition.

But it didn’t matter. The arbitrator would not consider Ruth’s health because the paperwork had been filed too late.

He ordered Ruth to pay an amount that had ballooned to more than $100,000.

‘A sympathy argument’

In a downtown Dallas courtroom, Leena listened as Kittelson asked a judge to nullify the award.

“She is a sweet lady, but she had all the signs of dementia,” Kittelson told the judge, according to a transcript of the hearing. “It would be a travesty of justice not to consider that evidence.”

One of Henry S. Miller’s attorneys countered that it’s not clear whether Ruth had dementia back in 2012. Regardless, he said, she had her daughter to advocate for her.

“The defendant keeps asserting her age and circumstances is somehow an excuse for not following the rules,” lawyer Jamie Wall told the judge. “Somehow entitling a person who happens to be 92 and who happens to perhaps not have the money some immunity from having to follow the rules.

“And it is purely a sympathy argument,” he said.

The judge ordered a do-over with a new arbitrator. The first one, he ruled, had not allowed Ruth’s lawyer enough time to prepare his defense.

For a moment, Leena almost let herself celebrate.

But then Henry S. Miller appealed.

Under pressure

Ruth spent last summer stuck at home, recuperating from a fall that broke her leg.

The house looked as old and fragile as its owner. A shag carpet, discolored and bordering on orange, lined the floor from the velvet couch to the creaky staircase. Upstairs, stacks of legal paperwork cluttered spare rooms. Window air conditioners revved to keep the house from feeling as hot as the inside of a dryer.

This is the family heirloom they’d fought to keep. To sell it now, Leena said, would be to do so “under duress.”

That summer, an appellate court in Dallas sided with the brokerage firm, again ordering Ruth to pay Henry S. Miller. Without a record of what happened at arbitration, the court said it had to presume that the arbitrator acted correctly.

Leena felt a heaviness come over her. The judgment had grown to about $125,000.

Leena says she has gone through savings and a loan taken against the house and cannot afford further legal representation.

As Henry S. Miller’s lawyer sees it, the firm has taken the “high road.”

“My client could have forced a sale of this property long before now, but they have not,” said Ackerman.

“Ms. Sanders is obviously elderly and some day she’ll pass and when the property goes down to its heirs, it will be liquidated and money will be distributed to Miller.”

Leena hopes to appeal to the Texas Supreme Court by the Friday deadline – even if she has to write the petition herself.

“I will do what’s best for my mother,” she said.

‘They just don’t give a damn’

One morning, Ruth walks into the sitting room wearing white lace gloves, sequined red slippers and a scarf dotted with hearts.

It’s March 14. She thinks it’s Valentine’s Day.

Sitting in her favorite chair, she holds court on ancient history: segregation and its end, how “we had to fight for equality, and everything.”

When the conversation moves forward, her answers grow vague.

Has she heard of a plan to turn her house into a 7-Eleven? “Just rumors.”

Has she ever run across the Henry S. Miller company? “That name is familiar.”

She drifts off.

But when a reporter stops asking what she remembers and instead asks what advice she would give to an elderly woman, losing her memory, being sued over contracts she doesn’t understand, Ruth awakens.

Does this woman pay her taxes? she asks. Is there anywhere she can turn for help?

“That sounds kind of scary,” she says. “When you think of how far things can be allowed to go … when people have the money and the power.”

“When do you stop? When do you say, ‘No. This is the end.'”

“This is my home.”

She pauses. Her polite chuckle bubbles up. Then the laughter stops.

“Nothing about fairness. Nothing about justice. They just don’t give a damn. They don’t care who you are. They’re the only people that are important: the Henry Millers.”

Her words come fast, with a fervor not heard in this house for a long time, though it’s unclear whether she’s speaking of the present or the past.