Gang Leader for a Day (14 page)

“Not a big deal?” J.T. said, turning to Autry. “You’re more ignorant than I thought you were. You pulled all these people together, and you’re going to fuck it up like this.”

“Whoa, my brother. Like I said, he’s with me.”

“And what if he comes by
my
building? Is he with you then? Huh? Is he with you then, nigger?”

“Fuck, no!” Autry laughed. “Then he’s with
you
! ’Cause I ain’t stepping
foot
in that motherfucker. Hell no!”

Autry ducked inside, grinning broadly. He seemed to be having great fun.

“That’s what I thought,” J.T. said, turning to me. “If you walk in there, the first time all these other niggers see you, then you’re with Autry, not me. You didn’t think about that, did you? You’re a motherfucking impatient nigger. And an ignorant one, from where I stand. You walk in there and I can’t do nothing for you. No more. So it’s up to you.”

“I didn’t think about any of this,” I apologized. “I didn’t know how—”

“Yeah, nigger, you didn’t
think
.” J.T. started walking inside. “Like I said, you’re with me or you’re with someone else. You decide.”

Inside, I could see Autry, giggling at me. “Come in, boy!” he yelled. “Come in, little baby! You scared?”

I decided I wasn’t willing to jeopardize my relationship with J.T., even if it meant missing an opportunity to learn more about the community and the gangs. So I turned and walked away. I started toward the university, and then I stopped. The last time I’d had an uncomfortable episode with J.T.—his beat-down of C-Note—I’d made a mistake. I’d waited too long before speaking to him about it. That made it harder to get a satisfying explanation. So this time I headed straight for J.T.’s building, figuring he’d go there when the meeting was over.

He did. He still seemed upset and started yelling at his mother. “No one understands what I deal with!” he said. “No one listens and does what I say.” He sent his bodyguards out to buy some beer. He sat on the recliner and grabbed the remote control. He barely glanced at me.

“You pissed at me?” I asked.

“What the fuck have you been doing around here?” he asked.

I explained that Ms. Bailey had introduced me to Autry and that I was interested in what went on at the club. He seemed surprised that he no longer knew all the specifics about the people I was meeting. “I guess you were going to make some friends while I was gone,” he said, and then he asked a question I’d been hoping he’d never ask: “What exactly are you doing around here? I mean, what are you writing about?”

He started changing channels on the TV. It was the first time I’d ever been with him when he didn’t look me in the eye.

“Well, honestly, I’m . . . I’m fascinated by how you do what you do,” I stammered. “Like I said before, I’m trying to understand how your mind works, why you decided to come back to the neighborhood and run this organization, what you have to do to make it. But if I don’t get out and see how others look at you, how you have this incredible effect on other people, then I’ll never really understand what you do. So while you were gone, I thought I’d branch out.”

“You mean you’re asking people what they think about
me
?” Now he had turned to look at me again.

“Well, not really, because you know they would probably not feel comfortable telling me. I’m at stage one. I’m trying to understand what the organization does and how people have to deal with it. If you piss people off, how do they respond? Do they call the police? Do they call you?”

“Okay. So it’s how others work
with me
.”

He seemed appeased, so I was quick to affirm. “Yes! How others work with you. That’s a great way of putting it.” I hoped he wouldn’t ask what “stage two” was, for I had no idea. I felt a little uneasy letting him think that I was actually writing his biography, but at the moment I just wanted to buy myself some time.

He checked his watch. “All right, I need to get some sleep.” He got up and walked toward his bedroom without saying good-bye. In the kitchen Ms. Mae kissed me good night, and I walked to the bus stop.

 
 

J.T. was a little cool toward me the next few times I saw him. So to warm things up, I stopped going to the club and spent nearly all my time in and around J.T.’s building. I was unhappy to be missing the opportunity to see how Autry worked with other people behind the scenes on important community issues, but I didn’t want to further anger J.T. I just told Autry that I’d be busy for a few weeks but I’d be back once I got settled in with my course work in the coming fall semester.

Soon after the school year began, a young boy and girl in Robert Taylor were shot, accidental victims of a drive-by gang shooting. The boy was eight, the girl nine. They both spent time in the hospital, and then the girl died. The shooting occurred at the border of Taylor A and Taylor B. J.T.’s gang had been on the receiving end of the shooting, with several members injured. The shooters were from the Disciples, who operated out of the projects near the Boys & Girls Club.

This single shooting had a widespread effect. Worried that a full-scale gang war would break out, parents began keeping their children inside, which meant taking time off from work or otherwise adjusting their schedules. Senior citizens worried about finding a safe way to get medical treatment. Local churches mobilized to deliver food to families too scared to walk to the store.

Ms. Bailey told me about a meeting at the Boys & Girls Club where the police would address concerned parents and tenant leaders. If I really wanted to see how the gang’s actions affected the broader community, Ms. Bailey said, I should be there.

I asked J.T., and he thought it was a good idea, even though he never bothered with such things. “The police don’t do nothing for us,” he said. “You should understand that by now.” Then he muttered something about how the community “takes care of its problems,” mentioning the incident I’d seen with Boo-Boo, Price, and the Middle Eastern store manager.

The meeting was held late one weekday morning. The streets outside the club were quiet, populated by a smattering of unemployed people, gang members, and drug addicts. The leaves had already changed, but the day was unseasonably warm.

Autry was busy as usual, running to and fro making sure everything was ready. Although I hadn’t seen him in some time, he shot me a friendly glance. The meeting was held in a large, windowless concrete room with a linoleum floor. There were perhaps forty tenants in attendance—all fanning themselves, since the heat was turned up too high. “If we turn it off, we can’t get it back on right away,” Autry told me. “And then it’s May by the time you get it back on.”

At the front of the room, several uniformed police officers and police officials sat behind a long table. Ms. Bailey nodded me toward a seat beside her, up front and off to one side.

The meeting was an exercise in chaos. Residents shouted past one another while the police officials begged for calm. A mother holding her infant yelled that she was “sick and tired of living like this.” The younger and middle-aged parents were the most vocal. The senior citizens sat quietly, many of them with Bibles in their hands, looking as if they were ready for church. Nor did the police have much to say, other than platitudes about their continued efforts to disrupt the gangs and requests for tenants to start cooperating with them by reporting gang crimes.

After about forty-five minutes, the police looked very ready to leave. So did the tenants. As the meeting broke up, some of them waved their hands dismissively at the cops.

“Are these meetings always so crazy?” I asked Ms. Bailey.

“This is how it goes,” she said. “We yell at them, they say nothing. Everyone goes back to doing what they were doing.”

“I don’t see what you get out of this. It seems like a waste of time.”

Ms. Bailey just patted my knee and said, “Mm-hmm.”

“I mean it,” I said. “This is ridiculous. Where I grew up, you’d have an army of cops all over the place. But nothing is going on here. Doesn’t that upset you?”

By now the room had cleared out except for Ms. Bailey and a few other tenant leaders, Autry, and one policeman, Officer Johnson, a tall black man who worked out of a nearby precinct. He was well groomed, with a short mustache and graying hair. They were all checking their watches and speaking quietly to one another.

I was about to leave when Ms. Bailey walked over. “In two hours come back here,” she said. “But now you have to go.”

Autry smiled and winked as he passed. What was he up to? I knew that Autry was still trying to groom himself as a local power broker, but I didn’t know how much power, if any, he had actually accrued.

As instructed, I left for a while and took a walk around the neighborhood. When I returned to the club, Autry silently pointed me toward the room where the earlier meeting had been held. Inside, I saw Ms. Bailey and some other building presidents; Officer Johnson and Autry’s friend Officer Reggie, a well-liked cop who had grown up in Robert Taylor; and Pastor Wilkins, who was said to be a long-standing expert in forging gang truces. Autry, I knew, saw himself as Pastor Wilkins’s eventual successor.

They were all milling about, shaking hands and chatting softly before settling into the folding metal chairs Autry had arranged. A few of them looked at me with a bit of surprise as I sat down, but no one said anything.

And then, to
my
great surprise, I saw J.T., sitting with a few of his senior officers along one wall. Although our eyes didn’t meet, I could tell that he noticed me.

Even more surprising was the group on the other side of the room: a gang leader named Mayne, who ran the Disciples, accompanied by
his
officers, leaning quietly against the wall.

I took a good look at Mayne. He was a heavyset man with a crumpled face, like a bulldog’s. He appeared bored and irritated, and he kept issuing instructions to his men: “Nigger, get me a cigarette.” “Boy, get me a chair.”

Autry walked into the room. “Okay!” he shouted. “The club is closed, let’s get going. Kids are going to come back at five.”

Officer Reggie stood up. “Let’s get moving,” he said. “Ms. Bailey, you wanted to start. Go ahead.” He walked toward the back of the room.

“First, J.T., get the other men out of the room,” she said. “You, too, Mayne.”

Mayne and J.T. both motioned for their senior officers to leave, and they did, walking out slowly with stoic faces. Ms. Bailey stood silently until they were gone. Then she took a deep breath. “Pastor, you said you had an idea, something you wanted to ask these young men?”

“Yes, Ms. Bailey,” Pastor Wilkins said. He stood up. “Now, I know how this began. Shorties probably fighting over some girl, right? And it got all the way to shooting each other. That’s crazy! I mean, I can understand if you were fighting over business, but you’re killing people around here because of a spat in school!”

“We’re defending our honor,” Mayne said. “Ain’t nothing more important than that.”

“Yeah,” said J.T. “And it
is
about business. Those guys come shooting down on our end, scaring people away.”

Pastor Wilkins asked Mayne and J.T. to describe how the fight had escalated. Pastor Wilkins’s original guess was mostly right: two teenage boys at DuSable High School got into a fight over a girl. One boy was in J.T.’s gang, the other in Mayne’s. Over the course of a few weeks, the conflict escalated from unarmed to armed—first a knife fight and then the drive-by shooting. The shooting occurred during the afternoon, while kids were playing outside after school.

J.T. said that because his customers had been scared off since the shooting, and because tenants in his buildings were angry about their lives being interrupted, he wanted Mayne to pay a penalty.

Mayne argued that the shooting took place at the border of the two gangs’ territory, near a park that neither gang claimed. Therefore, he argued, J.T. was ineligible for compensation.

My mind raced as they spoke. I couldn’t believe that a religious leader and a police officer were not only watching this mediation but were actually
facilitating
it. What incentive did they have to do so— and what would happen if people from the community found out they were helping gang leaders settle their disputes? I was also struck by how levelheaded everyone seemed, even J.T. and Mayne, as if they’d been through this before. These were the same two gang leaders, after all, who had been trying to kill each other, quite literally, with drive-by shootings. I wondered if one of them might even pull a gun here at any moment. Perhaps the very strangest thing was how sanguine the community leaders were about the fact that these men sold crack cocaine for a living. But at this moment it seemed that pragmatism was more important than moralism.

After a while the conversation got bogged down, with J.T. and Mayne merely restating their positions. Autry jumped in to try to refocus things. “How much you think you lost?” he asked J.T. “I mean, you don’t need to tell me the amount, but how many days did you lose business?”

“Probably a few days, maybe a week,” J.T. said.

“Okay, well, we’re going to bank this,” Autry said. “Put it in the bank.”

“What the fuck does that mean?” Mayne asked.

“Nigger, that means you messed up,” Autry told him. “J.T. didn’t retaliate, did he? I mean, he didn’t shoot over at you. It was just you shooting down at his end, right? So J.T. gets to sell his shit in the park for a week. The next time this happens, and J.T. fucks up, you get to sell
your
shit in the park for a week.”

Ms. Bailey spoke up. “You-all do not get to sell nothing when the kids are there, okay? Just late at night.”

“Sounds fine to me,” J.T. said. Mayne nodded in agreement.

“Then we have a truce,” Pastor Wilkins said. He walked over to J.T. and Mayne. “Shake on it.”

J.T. and Mayne shook hands, not warmly and not willing to look at each other. The pastor and Ms. Bailey each let out a sigh.