Another Day in the Death of America: A Chronicle of Ten Short Lives (34 page)

But as brutal as they are, gangs can also offer a sense of community and purpose in a situation where neither seems attainable. “School failure, unemployment, and family dysfunction tear at the shreds of a young person’s self-esteem,” writes Deborah Prothrow-Stith, former Massachusetts
Commissioner of Public Health and coauthor of
Deadly Consequences: How Violence Is Destroying Our Teenage Population and a Plan to Begin Solving the Problem.
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“Gang membership balms these wounds.” Gangs, she argues, can be places where young men feel they are valued and where a willingness to fight to defend yourself and others compensates for your inability to find a job and mature into more traditional masculine roles.

They become like family, taking under their wing at a young age those who appear vulnerable and giving them a sense of camaraderie and an identity that might otherwise be lacking. “For many a poor boy the most perceptible difference between the streets and home is that home is danger and squalor with a blanket and a roof,” writes James Baldwin in
The Evidence of Things Not Seen.
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Despite several attempts I could not reach Tyshon’s mother or anybody else in his house. But according to Regina, however rough the streets were, they offered Tyshon more than his home life ever could.

“Sometimes [his mother] never came out of her room for days,” she said. “And she kept having kids. And the kids had to fend for themselves. . . . So they had to get out in the streets. They had to find their own food to steal. They had to do whatever they had to do to survive. So those kids had a rough life.

“The older gangbangers, they saw that and they took advantage of that. They made him think that they loved him. They gave him $100 here and $100 there. And he thought, ‘Oh, these people love me. So I’m gonna follow these people in the street. I’m not gonna listen to her.’ So they used him. They knew that kids wouldn’t go to jail long. They knew they wouldn’t be tried as adults. The streets did that. He turned to the streets because he couldn’t go home and call it home. So he was basically a street kid.”

T
HE KEY TO CHALLENGING
the fatal consequences of gang culture, Dr. Slutkin, from Cure Violence, tells me, lies in treating violent crime like
a disease and changing the norms in the worst-affected neighborhoods to prevent its transmission. “We need to interrupt the spread, change the script, change the behavior, and change the norms,” he says.

Cure Violence does a great deal of public education, often in concert with local clergy, to organize communities against gun violence. It also has a team of “violence interrupters.” These are often ex-offenders and former gang members embedded in the community who try to broker truces or who will go to the emergency room when a victim is hospitalized and persuade family members not to retaliate.

I went out with the interrupters in Englewood, one of the neighborhoods on Chicago’s South Side where gun violence has been most rampant. (They do not operate in South Chicago, where Tyshon lived and died.) It was early in the fall of 2014 and late in the afternoon, and as we patrolled the streets by car there were signs of life and death. The weather was good and people were out—sitting on the stoop, kids playing basketball, older folks playing cards and having cookouts. For an area renowned for gun crime, the mood was incredibly relaxed. But every few blocks, some graffiti or an arrangement of flowers and cards marked the spot where somebody had fallen. And since both of my chaperones had grown up in the area, on many blocks they, too, inevitably had stories about some drama involving a shooting.

Herein lies one of the paradoxes of high-crime areas. The communities are, in many senses, engaged and tight. It is the very nature of life in poor areas such as these that the residents have trouble escaping them. So those who remain know each other well, and over the summer months social life spills out onto the streets. Teens and adults gather on porches and stoops, kids run from house to house, and extended families, connected by endless permutations of baby mamas, baby daddies, and “uncles” and “aunts” who have no biological connection (informal family structures familiar to me from my Barbadian family), reach out to each other.

On the other hand, these areas are ripped apart by violence and poverty. Stray bullets aside, the shooters and the shot often know each other. And the boundaries of the community, like most boundaries, are arbitrary,
heavily enforced, and inevitably porous. Make friends in school with someone who lives two blocks over, flirt with someone on a different street, or wear the wrong-color T-shirt on a walk to the store and, like Pedro in San Jose, you could be putting your life on the line.

JC (not his real name), one of the interrupters I was riding with, described the situation that weekend as “hot.” Nine people had been shot in Englewood the previous afternoon. One of them, Deandre Ellis, twenty-two, was sitting in the “first chair” of the Suitable Barber and Beauty Salon getting his hair cut when a man dressed all in black came in and sprayed the room with gunfire, killing him and wounding two others.
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“I found that this beef going on started behind a female,” he said. “These guys went to school together, and once upon a time they were cool together. It’s a touchy situation now because there’s bodies on the ground.”

So JC and Jamal (not his real name) drive the streets they grew up in, stopping occasionally to talk to family, people they know, and people they were in prison with. As we cruise around, young men look up just long enough to get a measure of the vehicle, in case it means trouble, and then return to their conversations on stoops and corners. The police are also cruising the neighborhood. At one point we see them line up several young men against a building; the officers make the men place their hands on the wall and spread their legs as they pat them down. Nobody knows where the next shot is coming from or whom it’ll be aimed at. But everybody knows it’s coming.

“We drive around critical hotspots,” says JC. “We see someone that’s connected to the block who can give us some details about what took place last night, and we put that together with a lot of other information and try and stop things before it starts. We go to talk to these high-risk guys one on one.”

Who’s high risk? “A high-risk guy would be a known weapon carrier who’s known for hurting somebody,” he continues. “A history of violence. Someone just released from prison. Nine times out of ten someone’s in war right now.” While we’re driving, Jamal gets a call from a woman whose “baby daddy” got killed the night before.

The transition from prison to civilian life is particularly hard—especially if you’ve been away for a long time. Keen to reassert their status, ex-cons emerge to find that they have been forgotten. “A lot of guys come home, and there’s no employment out here for ’em,” explains Jamal. “But if you’ve been gone for a long time, then the block done change. Brothers live in the past. And they think, ‘I was the man round here ten years ago. I’m still the man.’ So he out there showing everybody I’m still that guy. That’s where the conflict come in at. People say, ‘You can’t just come here ’cos we’re already established. Your name don’t hold no weight no more.’”

So how do they intervene in an environment as volatile and dangerous as this? It depends on the situation. Sometimes they can appeal to naked self-interest, pointing out to someone still raging over the death of a family member or gang member what is at stake for them if they act rashly. “He’s on parole,” explains Jamal. “He just got out. If he’s found with a weapon and he goes back, it’ll be ten years. And he don’t want no more of that.”

Sometimes the roots of the conflict are so deep that the protagonists have forgotten what the fighting was originally about. And sometimes there are people you just can’t reach. “There are brothers out there just wanna shoot,” says JC. “You can talk to ’em, but that don’t mean they’re gonna listen.”

In the past, they both agree, there was more structure and discipline to gang life than there is now. They don’t even call them gangs anymore but “cliques” (much like Stanley’s friends on Beatties Ford in Charlotte) that are loosely affiliated under the old gang labels. “Basically there ain’t no real whole blocks in Englewood no more,” they say, looking out over the vacant lots and boarded-up houses of an economically devastated community. “Just maybe five or six houses exist on one block. So it’s just cliques. They become friends, and when they get older they might do things like smoking and drinking, and that becomes your clique. A lot of the time they name themselves, sometimes after their dead homies. What’s your name?” asks Jamal. “Gary,” I say. “Say if you passed away and they might call their clique G-boy or Garyworld.”

As we pulled back up to the Cure Violence office, dusk had arrived. “Now they’re going to the liquor store and heading out with their crew to hatch their plans for tonight,” said JC. Four people were shot and injured in Englewood that night. None died.

T
YSHON
’
S CLIQUE WAS CALLED
Lolo World, after a fallen member who went by the name Lolo. Over the years, Tyshon graduated to a leadership position. His nemesis was Lil Herb, an accomplished rapper from neighboring South Shore from the NLMB (No Limit Muskegon Boys or Never Leave My Brothers)—a gang found on the East Side.

Lil Herb (who later wanted to be known as G Herbo) was the same age as Tyshon. He hit the big time in 2012 with “Kill Shit,” which he recorded with Lil Bibby, before going on to record with major artists like Nicki Minaj, Chance the Rapper, and Common. In one of his songs, “Chi-Raq,” he celebrates the violence that has blighted his hometown.

There is no evidence that Lil Herb had anything to do with Tyshon’s death. But in at least one song, RondoNumbaNine’s “Zeko Pack,” which came out six months after Tyshon was killed, he boasts about Tyshon (who also went by the name Posto) being shot. Tyshon’s clique is now called Postogang.

I
F THE STREETS RAISED
Tyshon, then for much of his teenage life the prison system housed him. He had only just been released from prison that Monday. Little more than six weeks earlier, he’d been arrested for a public-peace violation and for reckless conduct after police saw him in an alley where, they claimed, the Disciples regularly shoot. When they called for him to stop, he ran away, stopping traffic on South Marquette Road, only to be chased down by eight police officers and arrested next to his house. That time he only spent one night in a cell.

On hearing of his death, one of his Facebook friends expressed surprise, because the last time they’d seen each other, they’d been picked up by the police, and she assumed he must have been back in prison. “Last time i seen u we was together n the back of a cpd [Chicago Police Department] van the crazy part is i was going for talking shit to the police cause they was bout to try to play u they gave me a ticket n took u n i didnt even know u was out so when i got that call i wasnt even thinking of u. Then it hit me . . . u will be missed down here . . . prayers to all feeling hurt behind this . . . when will it end . . . feeling sad. . . . ”