If there’s one thing everyone seems to agree on about C. Virginia Fields, it’s that she’s good-natured. “She’s soft and warm,” an old friend of hers, Charles Rangel, says. “She’s very personable” is how a would-be successor, Stanley Michels, who served alongside Ms. Fields on the City Council for eight years, puts it. Even a critic, Bruce Ehrmann, a member of Community Board 1 who says the Manhattan borough president “ripped the heart out” of the board by replacing Madelyn Wils as its chairwoman, allows: “She’s nice.”

One day early this month, Ms. Fields, who’s running for mayor, rolled into a press conference about 20 minutes late, wearing pointy black high heels and a foxy red leather jacket with grommets running up the sides. Her appearance prompted the crowd to stop looking forlorn and fidgety, and several people were moved to exclaim, “There’s Virginia!” They flocked around her, as if it were her birthday party and they all wanted hugs. She didn’t brush them away.

Indeed, there’s little evidence to suggest she’s not nice, but it wouldn’t be fair to limit her appeal to that. Nice is a waitress who draws happy faces on the check. C. Virginia Fields, who is 58, has a formidable streak, which is just as evident as her nice streak, and in that respect she’s a bit like a high school principal in front of whom nobody would dare use a four-letter word.

Her campaign headquarters occupies the bottom two floors of a Harlem brownstone that belongs to her friend Milton Wilson, an architect who also works as the campaign treasurer. The office smells like varnish and is filled with sunlight and cheerful women wearing pretty skirts. It appears much more fitting for the polished Ms. Fields than the downtown office of the Borough President of Manhattan, an endless grim maze of dark cubicles and scratchy carpeting.

She greets The New York Sun at her uptown office, in the back room on the second floor. The office, big and airy, looks out onto a garden overrun with trees and unruly plants. Ms. Fields takes a seat in a chair that is much bigger than she is, removes her wire-rim glasses, and settles into one of its corners, kicking out her sheer-stockinged legs.

When she speaks in public, she has a flair for the dramatic, stressing syllables – “com-MUN-ity,” for example – as from the pulpit. She also has a faint lisp and a slight Southern accent. She favors candy-colored jackets, and she stands before a crowd ramrod straight, head held high, looking like the type of person who has no idea what it’s like to get nervous.

She seems different in the privacy of her office, more pressed for time and beleaguered than she normally lets on. Asked if she’s really as nice as everybody says, she responds: “What does that mean? Does it mean you respect people? I do. Does it mean you listen to people? I do. Does it mean you encourage people? I do.”

Surely, running for mayor is not exactly the ideal job for a tranquil, inner peace type. Does she ever get angry?

“Absolutely,” she says. “You can get angry and express that anger to others in a way that doesn’t have to be so out of control. I don’t deal with out-of-control anger.” She says she never holds onto her anger and sometimes tries to get rid of it through exercise. On good streaks, she pops out of her Harlem brownstone for a 40-minute walk three times a week. Right now she’s on a getting-there streak, still working up to the ideal regimen. “I join health clubs and end up spending a lot of money and not going,” she confesses. “But I can go walking. It clears my mind.”

She needs to go early, at 6:30 a.m., to minimize the threat that people will recognize her on the street, try to talk to her, and compromise either her exercise or her niceness. Six-thirty, she believes, is early enough to forgo the dark sunglasses, early enough for no protection other than a cap pulled down over her face.

Recently, Ms. Fields started to see improvement in her polling numbers against her fellow Democratic mayoral candidates: the early front-runner, Fernando Ferrer of the Bronx; the City Council speaker, Gifford Miller of Manhattan, and the Queens-Brooklyn congressman, Anthony Weiner. The latest Marist poll of Democrats had Ms. Fields in second place, with 30% to Mr. Ferrer’s 34%, up from 21% to his 39% a month earlier. And recent Marist and Quinnipiac polls show her doing better than Mr. Ferrer against Mayor Bloomberg.

Asked if her relationship with Mr. Bloomberg changed after her January announcement that she was entering the race, Ms. Fields closes her eyes and smiles in silence. “Yeah. I think it has,” she says. “I certainly don’t get invited to as many public events in my own borough as I used to.”

Her main criticism of the mayor – that he governs in a top-down style – is the inverse of what her critics fault her for. They say that she dithers, that she freezes when a situation calls for her to make up her mind.

Her deputy borough president, Barbara Baer, says that what some misconstrue as indecisiveness is a “core depth.”

“She really does listen,” Ms. Baer says. “It doesn’t mean one isn’t strong.”

Virginia Fields, nee Clark, grew up the youngest of five children in segregated Birmingham, Ala. She was a sociable, high-energy kind of kid, involved in the local Baptist church and school band and choir and the like. The Fields household was very religious, and the five siblings remain so to this day.

“Virginia reads her Bible daily. We talk on the phone and discuss the Scriptures,” her older sister and frequent travel companion, Thelma Cunningham of Maryland, says, in a telephone interview with the Sun. “She prays a lot and meditates a lot. The entire family prays a lot, and we send our meditations to her.”

When she meditates in her Borough President office, Ms. Fields says, she doesn’t bother sitting cross-legged on the floor – she remains in her chair.

What does she picture when she meditates? “For me, it’s a time of solitude,” she says. “You just remove a lot of things from your mind that take place in the course of the day. I picture a lot of peaceful sceneries, like water. I grew up around water; I love water.”

Is she able to get lost in her practice? “Sometimes I am, sometimes I’m not,” she says. “Meditation is more conscious in terms of your breathing and your posture.”

Might her frequent meditation have something to do with her composed demeanor – perhaps the reason she looks like somebody who takes long, measured breaths is that she is somebody who takes long, measured breaths?

“Where are we going with this?” she asks, squirming in her chair and starting to look as though she’d prefer to be with on NY1 News’ “Inside City Hall” talking about small business or promotion of third-graders or some such prized issue. No, seriously, she’s told, there must be a link. After chewing this over for a moment, she seems to decide it’s not such a terrible idea.

“It might very well have to do with that,” she says. “I think that words and actions have a lot of impact. A lot of times people say things and regret them later. So I think you should think about what you say. I am a reflective person. I do give thought to words and actions.”

Her father, a steelworker, died of bone cancer when Ms. Fields was 12. Her siblings were either away at college or close to it, and when the only ones left were Ms. Fields and her mother, the two pitched themselves deep into the civil-rights movement. When she was 17, she and two friends marched with Martin Luther King Jr. and were arrested only minutes after they had set out with a group of about 25 demonstrators.

“A police officer said, ‘Turn around,’ and so we fell on our knees and they put us in a wagon and took us off to jail. We knew we were going to be arrested,” she says.

She and her friends were shoved into a cell with about 50 other women. “They had us sleep on little iron single beds, but they didn’t have mattresses,” she says. “You didn’t have covers, blankets and things. It was designed to discourage you. We sang a lot of songs.”

All the children in the Clark household attended college and established solid career paths. One of Ms. Fields’s sisters works as a nurse, the other as an anesthetist; the Clark brothers are both retired, one as a schoolteacher, the other as an Air Force major.

Ms. Fields studied sociology at Knoxville College, a Presbyterian school with fewer than 1,000 students. She describes the atmosphere as fairly conservative, with 10 p.m. curfews and sorority pow-wows and doting dorm mothers. She wasted no time and headed straight to graduate school after she graduated.

At Indiana University, she picked up a master’s degree in sociology and a husband, Henry Fields, a financial analyst, from whom she was divorced in 1986.

Ms. Fields says she sees herself as the maternal type, but she and her husband never got around to having children.

“It never materialized,” she says in a rueful tone. “Upon reflection, I think I would have made a different decision about that.”

It was in 1971 that the couple moved to Harlem. Ms. Fields spent the better part of two decades working as a social worker, serving as social-services coordinator for a work-release program for city prisons, administrator for the Children’s Aid Society, and, finally, consultant for the national board of the YWCA.

For her first job, she went to Rikers Island to interview male prisoners applying for early leave.

“I was a little intimidated,” she says. “Have you ever been to a prison? It’s like every step you make, once you’re there, they have to lock the door behind you and unlock another door.”

Meanwhile, she became president of the New Amsterdam Democratic Club, and she was appointed to Community Board 10, though she resists the idea that the political bug bit her at some point into her career in social work. “I had been constantly involved with some aspect of social justice throughout my life,” she says. “It was all connected.”

When the New Amsterdam club dissolved, she switched to the Frederick Samuel Democratic Club, to which she still belongs, though her attendance record has slackened as of late.

“She doesn’t come to meetings that often because she’s too busy being borough president,” one mainstay of the club, Phyllis Osborne, says.

“When she comes, she talks,” Ms. Osborne, an elderly Harlem resident who came to a fund-raising event for Fields wearing a natty white-leather Peter Pan hat purchased in the 1960s, says. “She’s just plain and very friendly.”

Another woman at the event, Congressman Rangel’s wife, Alma, sums up her longtime friend Ms. Fields this way: “She’s light on her feet. Most politicians just do this.” Ms. Rangel pauses to stiffen her body and lamely shake her hands. She drops her hands to her sides and continues: “But not her. She’s a real person.”

In 1989 Ms. Fields ran for City Council and beat the incumbent, Hilton Clark, by a 3-1 ratio. She’s been borough president for eight years – she is barred by term limits from seeking re-election – and her political career has been unmarred by any scandal or memorable conflict.

Ms. Fields professes to be a straightforward person, a sound sleeper, a good dresser, a television-watcher who has a soft spot for the Lifetime network for women.

“We can sit and watch Lifetime for a while,” her giggly sister Thelma says. “If there’s a program on TV, we’ll call each other and discuss what’s happening on the program. We just make fun and laugh and say, ‘Girl, did you see this? Did you see that?’ “

Ms. Cunningham goes on: “Last year we sat and watched three stories in a row. We love our Lifetime.”

In campaign forums and radio interviews, Ms. Fields courts the everyman, talking of “inclusion” and small businesses. If she were to open a small business, she says, it would be a restaurant-nightclub.

“You’d get to meet a lot of people, serve a lot of people their favorite foods,” Ms. Fields says.

Even her fancy name – with the mysterious initial at the front – is nothing but ordinary, she insists. The C stands for Clara, her given first name. She dropped the name and went only by her middle name. She didn’t resurrect the C until 1988, when she entered politics.

“It’s there for no particular reason,” she shrugs. “I just like the C.” She draws an imaginary C in the air.

Most Sunday mornings find her in Harlem’s historic Abyssinian Baptist Church, but apart from that, she says she doesn’t have much of a social life, or at least “not the kind I would love to have.”

“Most of my socializing right now has been an extension of political life,” she says.

As for dating, she’s been in what she sees as a “casual” relationship for the past two and a half years, with someone whom she declines to identify.

“He’s very supportive, but time wise it’s a problem,” Ms. Fields says.

At the end of the interview, after she’s told her visitor it’s time to get packing and the tape recorder is turned off, she has one more thing she’d like to add: “I’m such a simple person. My approach is not complicated. I love nature. I love people. If I had an opportunity to do nothing, it would probably be running around a pasture, running around a field of trees and flowers.”