Another Day in the Death of America: A Chronicle of Ten Short Lives (32 page)

I thought this was odd. Panic in the presence of gunfire seems a perfectly rational response, whether you’re four or forty-four. The problem, it seemed to me, wasn’t the panic but the shooting. On the way home that day, I saw posters on the window of the youth club at the end of our street. I passed them every day, but this was the first time I’d really stopped to look at them. “Stop Killing People,” it read. It seemed like the kind of suggestion you shouldn’t need a poster for.

Most major cities have, at different times, gained notoriety for their high murder rates. Los Angeles, New York, Washington, DC, New Orleans, Detroit, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Miami, to name but a few, have all been there. For the last few years—as it happens, when I was living there—it has been Chicago’s turn. These reputations can rarely keep up with their actual statistical ranking. Kansas City, Oakland, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Detroit, and New Orleans all had higher rates of homicide than Chicago in the year this book was set.
¹
But none of them were the third-largest city in the country or the hometown of the sitting president.

In any case, the infamy was deserved. It is estimated that between 20 percent and 30 percent of Chicago children in public schools have witnessed a shooting.
²
In 2012, there were 500 murders in the city—a 16 percent increase over the year before.
³
On Memorial Day weekend of that year, there were 53 shootings, resulting in 10 deaths.
⁴
In 8 of the 10 years prior to when this book was written, the number of murders in Chicago was greater than the number of US fatalities in Afghanistan.
⁵
The city became disparagingly known as Chiraq, a variation on which (
Chi-Raq
) would later become the title of a Spike Lee film about gun violence in the city. When the snow melted during the spring before my family and I left for England, one gun was found in an alley near our local park and another behind my son’s school.

The city became a gory journalistic trove for a slew of stories that were tragic, epic, or brutal—and sometimes all three. By the age of fifty-four, one mother, Shirley Chambers, had lost all four of her children to gun violence in separate incidents. “I only have one child left,” she said after the
third child was shot dead, “and I’m afraid that [the killing] won’t stop until he’s gone too.”
⁶
When the last one was shot, the killing still continued.

On November 26, 2012, almost a year to the day before this book is set, Sherman Miller, twenty-one, attended the funeral of James Holman, thirty-two, at St. Columbanus Church. Holman had been shot dead a week earlier. From the pews, Miller texted a friend about how the service was affecting him. “Dis preacher like he talkin straight to me,” he wrote. “He talkin bout hurts and pain. I cant run from the pain cause its gone hurt me worse if I’m by myself because I gotta think about everything.” Minutes later, Miller was shot dead on the steps of the church as mourners scattered and wailed.
⁷

Whereas Chicago as a whole earned a reputation for gun violence, the shootings were not evenly distributed throughout the city. The overwhelming majority were concentrated in a handful of neighborhoods in the south and west—predominantly black and Latino areas, respectively. As the response to Samuel Brightmon’s shooting in the previous chapter illustrated, the concentration of poor, black, and Latino people in American cities happened by design, not default. “Residential segregation is the principal organizational feature of American society that is responsible for the creation of the urban underclass,” write Massey and Denton in
American Apartheid
.
⁸
As Dallas did, Chicago perfected that design over the years. By most measures it is, and has long been, the most segregated big city in America.
⁹
Where shootings were concerned this had two main connected consequences.

First, in the rest of the city, one experienced precious little of this mayhem. Nowhere was completely insulated. I lived on the North Side and still have tales to tell. Yet the episodes were noteworthy where I lived precisely because they happened comparatively rarely. (It’s all relative—had a tenth that number of shootings occurred where I now live in London, we would have talked of nothing else.) But occasionally, when reports of particularly murderous weekends in Chicago reached friends in other cities or even abroad, they would contact me to ask if I was okay. If I hadn’t watched the local news the previous night or read the paper
that morning, I might know nothing about it. It really might as well have happened in another city or even another country.

Second, for those who live on the South and West Sides, there was no escaping it. On the tenth floor of the University of Illinois’s School of Public Health, Dr. Gary Slutkin points to a map of Chicago with round stickers showing where murders have taken place. Lake Michigan lies to the east, the north is mostly clear, but you can’t see some of the South Side for dots. “It’s the same pattern on a map showing the incidence of cholera in Bangladesh. It’s an infective process,” he says.

I was interviewing Dr. Slutkin after a spate of shootings in the city had once again piqued the attention of my editors. Dr. Slutkin, the executive director of Cure Violence, specializes in infectious-disease control and reversing epidemics. He used to work for the World Health Organization. He thinks violence behaves like tuberculosis or AIDS and sees it as an infectious disease that can be stamped out by challenging and changing behavioral norms. Across the room, a graph shows fatal shootings in Chicago over several years—a roller-coaster of peaks and troughs. “It’s the same curve for almost every city,” he explains. “It’s an epidemic curve.”

The most blighted communities existed as though in a state of siege. In Lawndale, on the South Side, one local woman told the
Chicago Tribune
that even some of the dogs had ceased barking at the sound of gunfire.
¹⁰
Charles Brown, a retired police officer in the neighboring area of Englewood, told me he’d tuned out the deadly crackling and popping that echoed around his house. “I don’t even hear it anymore,” he said. “It’s just part of your existence here.”

When I started this book, I assumed that whatever day I picked there was a reasonable chance that one of the children slain would be in my hometown, that he would be a young man of color, and that he would be killed on the South or West Side. Sadly, I was right on all counts.

T
YSHON
A
NDERSON
,
EIGHTEEN
,
LIVED
and died in South Chicago, which should not be mistaken for the South Side of Chicago. The South Side is an entire area of the city; South Chicago is its own neighborhood within that area. It sits thirteen miles south of the Loop—the downtown shopping district—on the city’s eastern flank. Bordered by the I-90 interstate to the west, Highway 12/90 to the south, the commercial thoroughfare of E. 79th to the north, and Lake Michigan to the east, its proximity to so many transport hubs once made it an ideal location for heavy industry. During the mid-nineteenth century, huge steel and iron works set up there, bringing migrant workers primarily from Poland, Italy, and Ireland. In 1911, South Works, which owned U.S. Steel and was based there, employed eleven thousand people. African Americans soon arrived with the Great Migration, along with Latinos from Mexico and the American West.

“Growing up, the mornings here would be busy with people going to work,” one elderly African American who grew up, and still lives, in South Chicago told me. She did not want to be named. Her father and uncles had worked in the mill. “You’d see parents taking their kids to school and saying, ‘Hurry up, or I’m gonna be late for work.’ Back then, in the summer, the streets were so clean you could take your shoes off if you were too hot and walk in bare feet.”

Racism transformed the neighborhood in the fifties and sixties as many of the descendants of European immigrants fled at speed, fearing the arrival of blacks and Latinos. In
The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration,
Isabel Wilkerson describes the breathtaking pace and scale of the transformation of neighboring South Shore after Ida Mae Gladney, originally from Mississippi, bought a house there. “The whites left so fast Ida Mae didn’t get a chance to know any of them or their kids or what they did for a living. . . . They didn’t stick around long enough to explain.”
¹¹

In subsequent years, white people would relate their version of that process. “It happened slowly, and then all of a sudden, boom,” one white homemaker on the South Side told the writer Louis Rosen. “Everyone
gone. Everything changed. Before you know it, this one, that one. . . . People didn’t want to be the last.”
¹²

And what racism did not change, economics did. The decimation of America’s manufacturing sector devastated South Chicago. Through the eighties the factories closed. What remains on that site is a postindustrial wilderness—huge concrete barriers, maybe thirty feet high, tower over shrub and bush; railway tracks, which used to ferry steel from the old site, are eroded by time and weather. On a weekday morning the only sounds are the wind and the waves as Lake Michigan slaps the rusting foot of what was once a giant. In its absence, South Chicago became an impoverished residential area wedged between busy roads and the shore-side. Abandoned and derelict homes and shops now pockmark what was once a thriving community. No one in his or her right mind would walk barefoot down these streets anymore.

“The neighborhood has been in a collective depression since the steel mills closed down and left lots of people suddenly unemployed,” explains Olga Bautista, a community organizer who was born and raised in South Chicago. “The depression manifests itself in the alcoholism, the domestic violence, the drug addictions. There are no mental health clinics here. So that’s how you see it.”

This was one of the first areas where the young Barack Obama was taken as a community organizer during the mid-eighties. “It expressed some of the robust, brutal spirit of Chicago’s industrial past, metal beams and concrete rammed together,” he wrote in
Dreams of My Father
after visiting the old Wisconsin Steel Plant. “Only now it was empty and rust-stained, like an abandoned wreck.”
¹³

I’d been reporting in Chicago for several years when I started writing this book, and I knew several community organizers and union activists. But almost no one knew anyone in South Chicago. It was almost as if they felt there was not enough going on down there to organize. “We’re a forgotten people,” says one local campaigner. “Honestly, I think a lot of people don’t even know we’re here.”

Today, half of those in the small patch where Tyshon lived earn $30,000 a year or less (roughly two-thirds the national average), and a quarter of the
housing units are vacant.
¹⁴
And the hollowing out is not yet over. The area lost an eighth of its population between 2005 and 2009, and those who remained saw their median income plummet by 22 percent.
¹⁵

To the naked eye, this economic trauma is evident but not striking in the few blocks where Tyshon lived and died. Each surrounding block has at least one boarded-up home. East 79th Street, the main drag that marks the border between South Chicago and South Shore, offers standard strip-mall fare for a working-class urban area—a Family Dollar, a beauty parlor, a Dollar General, a laundromat, a pizzeria. The windows on the nearby bodegas are defended with metal grills.

But the lawns are clipped and the hedges tended, and for every abandoned home there are at least two that, from the outside at least, look comfortable. The census shows that for all the hard times, a sizeable minority here is doing well. One in ten has a bachelor’s degree or higher and earns between $75,000 $100,000 a year.
¹⁶
These statistics illustrate the longstanding struggle within what were once solid middle-class communities to resist the decimation of urban black American life and the pathologies and pathos that come with it.

It’s a trend Obama witnessed three decades earlier in similar neighborhoods. “Despite the deserved sense of accomplishment these men and women felt,” he writes, “despite the irrefutable evidence of their own progress, our conversations were marked by another, more ominous strain. The boarded-up houses, the decaying storefronts, the aging church rolls, kids from unknown families who swaggered down the streets—loud congregations of teenage boys, teenage girls feeding potato chips to crying toddlers, the discarded wrappers tumbling down the block—all of it whispered painful truths, told them the progress they’d found was ephemeral, rooted in thin soil; that it might not even last their lifetimes.”
¹⁷