Another Day in the Death of America: A Chronicle of Ten Short Lives (35 page)

The pathos in this account is in the assumption that had he been in prison he would still be alive. Herein lies the brutal reality of growing up poor and black in areas like Chicago’s South Side: that two of the most likely outcomes for a black male under the age of twenty-five is prison or death—and maybe, as was the case for Tyshon, both. These aren’t options—because no one in his or her right mind would choose them. They are simply the paths most readily available, in the same way that children of privilege approaching their final year of undergraduate study are generally destined to either go on to further study or start working. True, those young university students might end up unemployed or dropping out, but if they simply float with the tide of their race and class, that’s unlikely. From career counseling to peer and parental pressure, both system and circumstance are set up for that transition.

For black youth in low-income neighborhoods, system and circumstance are set up for an entirely different trajectory, and to escape that fate you have to both swim against the tide and hope for a lucky break. In this sense, as Regina tells it, Tyshon never really stood a chance.

Given the life he lived it’s amazing he reached the age of eighteen. A few years earlier, he was shot in the leg on 79th Street. The first day he came out of the hospital, Regina says, he was shot again, just a couple of blocks away from the site of the first shooting. When his mom went to the liquor store, one youth told her they weren’t going to stop until they killed him. “You his mama,” he told her. “We should kill you too.”

Regina begged her to move. Regina had once lived with Tyshon’s family—when she was younger and had a drug problem and had to leave
to straighten herself out. She went first to Indiana, then to Wisconsin, and currently lives in Iowa. She tried to convince Tyshon’s mother that she could break the cycle if she left the area and that she could save her children from worse. When his mother refused to move, Regina pleaded with her to let Tyshon come and stay with her, arguing, “There’s so much more to see than Chicago and a liquor store. C’mon now.” But she wouldn’t let him go.

We’ve seen, in previous chapters, how the law of probabilities operates in terms of the criminal justice system, the job market, educational achievement, and so on. What is more difficult to quantify is the psychic load it brings to bear on those who are raised in such environments. “I think we need to recognize how fatalistic many teenagers, especially inner city teens, feel about violence—firearms, physical force, injury, and death are intimately known to these kids,” writes Prothrow-Stith. “Many poor, black, inner city kids are living surrounded by an amount of violence that even those of us who are experts in ‘intentional injury’ find astounding. What you and I read about in the headlines, hundreds of thousands of ordinary kids are living every day, often without protection or guidance of any adult.”
²⁷

Shortly after Tyshon’s killing a photographer for the picture agency Getty Images interviewed a mother who lived in the building where it happened. “She was happy that her 14-year-old son was locked up,” he said. “Because it was safer for him to be incarcerated than to live in the neighborhood.”
²⁸

This precarity pervades everything. In
Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets,
a gang leader, JT, explains to author and doctoral student Sudhir Venkatesh why he should always take a less lucrative deal now than the promise of a better one later. “You always take the sure bet in this game,” he says. “Nothing can be predicted—not supply, not anything. The nigger who tells you he’s going to have product a year from now is lying. He could be in jail or dead. So take your discount now.”
²⁹

A few years ago, Doriane Miller, the Chicago-based primary-care physician we met in a previous chapter, started noticing a growing
number of young patients coming through with physical symptoms for which there was no obvious physical diagnosis. “They came in with complaints of headache or stomachache. Things you couldn’t quite put your finger on and that didn’t seem to be related to any diagnosable physical illness. But they were very sad. And sad in an angry way that you could tell they were very distressed,” she told me. In 2011 she wrote a play about youth violence and depression called
It Shoudda Been Me
after she kept noticing a certain type of tattoo appearing on many of the young people coming to her with psychosomatic illnesses. “They were not the typical tattoos of fantasy, like naked women, Mom, Dad, or a girlfriend or boyfriend’s name,” she says. “But it’d be a face or a broken heart with the initials of a loved one, RIP, and their year of birth and year of death. And most of those young people were born in the eighties and nineties. The ones that passed away.”

It didn’t take long for her to discover, while taking standard medical histories, that many of her patients had either been shot or had a close friend or family member who had been shot. Further probing into how that experience might be related to their ailments was met with stubborn resistance. “They were showing symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. But when I tried to help them tie the pieces between their personal experience around this life-changing event and why they were in the office to see me in primary care, they would say, ‘This is no big deal, this happens every day, please ask your next question.’ They wouldn’t normally say please. They’d say, ‘Move on.’ Because they wouldn’t want me to focus on that event. . . . I would stop to give them space and time and see if they want to explore it, and they’d say, ‘No.’”

Their refusal to delve into the source of their pain, both the physical one that had brought them to her and the psychological one they were actively denying, was not pigheadedness but a harsh, and arguably misguided, form of self-preservation. For her patients to discuss the effect of gun violence on their lives felt like an exercise in futility. Unconsciously laboring under the guidance of Reinhold Niebuhr’s Serenity Prayer (which hung on my own mother’s bedroom wall)—“God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change
the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference”—they were not being obstinate but, given their limitations as they saw them, wise. Toughing it out was about accepting the things they could not change.

“I was willing to talk about it in the way that I’ve been trained to do in primary care,” says Dr. Miller. “It’s not just about physical health but what people bring to their doctors. Their life experiences. Their life circumstances. All of those things that make up who we are as individuals and can have a tremendous impact on improving health and health outcomes. And so knowledge of those things as a primary-care doctor matters, because that’s the way that I was trained. But my patients were not willing to share. Some of them did. But only up to a certain point. They’d say, ‘What are you going to do about it? Nothing is going to change what’s happened.’ There was also a lack of familiarity with the therapeutic process and being able to get counseling. But there was that sense that this is the way it is in my life and in my community. There is a learned hopelessness around this. And so you suck it up, you man up, and you move on.”

The proximity of so many young people to so many deaths prompts existential questions, even if they are not always articulated in the most sophisticated way. Confronted by their mortality in the full bloom of adolescence, the friends and siblings of those who die are forced to contemplate their own lives and, not unreasonably, to despair (similar to what Camilla, Edwin’s friend, did). “They think, ‘What’s the point? I don’t care. There’s nothing you can do about this. Many people I know at the age of twenty-five have passed on in my community, and the same thing might happen to me,’” explains Dr. Miller. “And so in that late-adolescent mind frame in which you tend to do more risk taking and tend not to think about the consequences of your behavior on your future, you think, ‘What the heck, I’m not going to be here anyhow. I might as well live fast, die young, and leave a pretty corpse.’”

In Britain during the World Wars, people would justify any range of impulsive acts—love affairs, hasty marriages, abandoning family, rash career choices—with the phrase “There was a war on.” The omnipresence of death and its constant reminder of mortality were not conducive to
long-term planning. People lived for the day, never knowing if either they or their loved ones would see sunrise the following morning.

Many of the areas where these young people live, and die, look like war zones—empty lots, half-demolished houses, depleted infrastructure, militarized policing, potholed roads, boarded-up houses, abandoned churches. But more importantly, they are experienced as such. People (mostly young men) disappear—either to prison or to the grave—leaving a huge gender imbalance.
³⁰
In Tyshon’s census tract 55 percent of people aged between twenty-one and fifty are female; nationally the divide is even.
³¹
In Chicago, more than 50 percent of the adult black male population and 80 percent of the adult black male workforce has a felony record.
³²
Times are hard, and the informal economy is rife, meaning there are hustlers everywhere making an ostentatious display of their wealth. The distinction between civilians and combatants is blurred; because the entire community has been criminalized, few trust the police any more than they trust the drug dealers. The one major difference is that whereas wars often cement communities as people band together against a “common enemy,” in these areas the enemy is everywhere and, potentially, anyone.

The outward pall that such a calculation—death or incarceration—casts over a neighborhood is clear: crime tape, bullet holes, police presence, RIP tributes by the roadside, rows of men lined up against walls with legs and arms spread, poverty, decay. But it’s obvious only to the few who make the journey there. These areas in cities are like open prisons. Few go in, and precious few make it out. Those who can flee usually do so. Such neighborhoods loom large in the popular imagination. Everybody in Chicago
knows
about the South Side. But very few who are not from there have been down there (apart from going to Hyde Park).

Moreover, precious few who live the life that Tyshon lived ever come out. “I bet you most of the kids who live in that neighborhood have never even been to the Loop, unless maybe if it was a school trip,” says Bautista, the community organizer. The handful who manage to make it out and who have the capacity and space to tell their stories are by definition atypical. Like “the runner” described by Mario Black, Stanley Taylor’s former teacher, they are the ones who got away.

For Tyshon, prison was probably as constant a feature in his teenage years as school. In one letter that Regina has kept, from 2012, he sounds like he could be having a bad time at camp. After dropping some heavy hints to Regina that he wanted her to send him money, he writes:

How have you been? I’ve been alright. Excluding the fact that I’m in the County for doing nothing more than trying to protect my life if them nigga’s tried to pull up on me. And the fact that I don’t think I’m going to get that probation because they never came to evaluate me for it. I mean I still got a whole month before I go to court but it’s not looking too good at this point. I might just have to take that year. I really want the probation because then it won’t be on my record. But I’m starting to get tired. Niggas starting to get on my nerves more and more every day. This food is so shitty and they don’t give you enough to get full at all. If you have to take a shit you gon be hungry all day so best thing is to hold it. LOL My hair is looking shitty. But hopefully I will be home soon . . . I’m about to get a cool cellie. And I ain’t had a fight the whole time. The only thing that keeps me from blanking up is writing these letters. So write me back fool. Lol. Love you and miss you.

But if prison was a constant, an early death felt to Regina like a certainty. “I hate the fact that he’s gone. But I look at it like now I don’t have to worry about him being out there killing nobody else or nobody else trying to kill him. It was sad to see him laying there. But I’m just glad it’s over, because now every day I have to live is a day when they’re not going to kill him. It’s a day when he’s not going to die. Because we knew it was coming, we just didn’t know when. We didn’t know it was going to come three days before Thanksgiving. We didn’t know it was going to come just when he was trying to get his life together. We knew it was going to come because of the stuff he was doing. So we tried to prepare ourselves. One day. And so one day, two o’clock in the morning, I get a phone call.”

Did he know it was coming? I asked. “I think he knew it,” she says. “He knew that a lot of people was after him. He put something on Facebook once that said something like, ‘If something happen to me who would cry
for me?’ So I think he knew his time was coming. That’s why he wanted to change his life. But it was too late. He’d done hurt too many people. People had got killed because they were walking with Tyshon, and they tried to kill Tyshon and they got the wrong person. It was too late.”

On what would have been Tyshon’s twenty-first birthday, Bertha Rufus posted on his memorial Facebook wall. “Happy birthday tyshon its still hard to believe you are gone when your mom had you she was one of the first to have a baby in the student degree so we use to all take turns holding u n church it was like u were all our baby u are loved and truly missed R.I.P. nephew.”

His mother, meanwhile, continued to struggle through the bereavement. “We been talking every day,” says Regina. “She took it real hard. Real hard. To the point where she was telling me she wanted to die. She said, ‘Regina, I’m tired and I’m ready to go. But I can’t go because I’ve got three more.’ She used to be 190 pounds. She’s, like, 130 now.”