How Long Will I Cry? (7 page)

In my neighborhood, it’s shootings
everywhere. There are a lot of vacant lots, abandoned cribs boarded
up. Some kids aren’t going to school or anything. Six guys got
killed between 2009 and the end of 2010. Terrible as usual.

Ain’t no activities, I mean
positive
activities. They got playgrounds, but then in the playgrounds you
see the teenagers. The teenagers, they gangbang and all that, and
the kids in the park see this. They’re just gonna copy that. So
they need some recreational centers or something. In the ’70s and
’80s, they had game rooms. As times went by, everything that was
around our area got burned down or abandoned. The government could
put a little recreational center up for these kids so they could
see something different, besides being out there in the
streets.

The key thing is, kids gotta have things to
do besides sitting around on the block. The kids that are growing
up right now, they’re paying attention to us. They’re following our
footsteps.

See, I had a beautiful childhood in my eyes.
I stayed around my family and didn’t need for anything. I remember
playing with cousins, climbing trees, playing cops and robbers and
making guns out of wood, just doing what kids usually do.

I went to Harper High School.13 Freshman,
sophomore, junior year, I was an A, B and C student. I stayed busy,
stayed working. I loved high school. I got kicked out my senior
year, acting a fool. The guys who I hung out with, man, we just
wanted to run the whole school. We was just having a ball in
school. We just got super reckless and started pulling fire alarms,
like eight times a day, just to get outside. They kicked us out.
They kicked us all out.

My senior year, I think I had like 20 ½
credits when they kicked me out. I could have enrolled in another
school, but I wanted to have fun and hang around in the streets. I
could have put a stop to it. I could have just singled myself out
and did the right thing, but instead I wanted to be bad. I wanted
to have fun.

I remember it was the summertime that my dad
got shot and killed. I don’t really know the reason. He was in
Michigan. I don’t know why he was out there. I think it was one of
them white girls he was messing with that stayed out there.

My mama told me to come into the crib. I was,
like, 13. She told me and my sister that my dad had just got
killed. Everything went blank. I remember that day like yesterday.
Everything went blank and I couldn’t cry. I didn’t know what to do.
It was hard to take it all in. I just remember thinking, like,
“He’s gone.”

I think my mama took it worse than me. Even
though they weren’t together for a while, she took it harder. While
she was telling me, she was crying. My grandma was crying. My
sister started crying and I’m just sitting there, the only one not
crying. Just sitting there, like I’m retarded, puzzled. The day of
the funeral, my little brothers see my daddy in the casket. They
was saying, “Daddy, Daddy, Daddy.” They was crying for their daddy.
That’s all I could hear.

My Uncle Delvin, he took care of us when my
father got killed. He made sure I was straight and didn’t need
nothing. He would go to my football games and all that. He took
care of his family; he took care of everybody. He was about the
only male influence that I was getting. He was a Chicago police
officer. He was there for me, so I’ll say he was my biggest role
model.

He killed himself.14 I don’t know why, but he
killed himself. I think he shot his wife, like, seven times, then
killed himself. Somehow he snapped, because that wasn’t him. He
wasn’t a killer and wasn’t the type of person to harm a female. He
just lost it.

When he was alive, I was on football teams,
basketball teams and softball teams. I stayed in school. All that
went down the drain when he left. I was 15, and I wasn’t getting
that extra push or that guidance anymore. So, it went from kicking
it with family to kicking it with the guys.

I’m soft. People who know me know that I am a
sweetheart. But people who don’t know me, just based on how I look,
they would think I’m a hard-ass, super tough. I’m hard on the
outside and mushy on the inside. I’m the type of person that’s not
gonna bother anybody, you feel me? But if somebody bothers me, I
step up and give them what they’re looking for. Other than that,
I’m a good person.

As a whole, it’s just me and my guys. We
ain’t no big gang, not like how it was back in the day, like a big
nation and all that. When you go to high school, you link with a
lot of guys. So we started meeting with other guys in the
neighborhood, which made us bigger and bigger. These are my close
guys. We don’t hang in the area where all this gangbanging is
happening. I mean, when we go out, we have fun, we party and we get
out of the neighborhood so we don’t have to look over our shoulder
and stuff. We’ll probably go downtown to restaurants or something,
like to Dave and Buster’s or the Cheesecake Factory. We don’t go
looking for trouble.

The most recent time I was shot, it was gang
affiliation. Over the years, we never liked each other. The guys
that shot me, we went to high school together. Ever since then, it
just escalated, bigger and bigger. I got locked up and everything
came right back and haunted me. It beat me in the ass. It built up
over the years. The beefing, all that, and not liking each other.
We all Gangster Disciples, but they call they self something else,
and we call ourselves something else. It’s not a big organization.
So when people say gangs, it’s not no gangs out here. It’s just
individuals who claiming something. We’re Creep Town Gangstas. I
don’t know what they call themselves. Everybody got their own
little cliques and their own little names, but at the end of the
day, they all Gangstas, GDs.

Nov. 4, 2008. That’s the day I got locked up
for selling drugs. I was 20, locked in Pinckneyville Correctional
Center.15 At the time, I was working, but I didn’t have a high
school diploma, so I didn’t have a decent job. There’s a lot of
stuff I like, and there’s a lot of stuff I be needing, and my
people and my family be needing. It’s not going to come to us, you
know. So I was working in a furniture store, delivering furniture,
and selling drugs at the same time. I ain’t going to say I had to,
but I wanted that little extra money. That’s one thing I hate, is
to struggle. I hate struggling.

Jail is what you make it. I mean, it’s going
to have some challenges, and there’s going to be some guys that are
going to try and test you. But at the same time, to me, jail is
like college, like going away to college somewhere. The only thing
on your mind is your people, or what’s going on outside of the jail
walls.

I came home Jan. 4, 2010. I was supposed to
have come home earlier, but I messed up in jail. I was fighting my
cellmate and I put him in the hospital. They took three months from
me, so I had to stay. Finally, I came home. When I was in jail, I
said I was going to change. I said I was going to do everything
different. But I mean, that’s just jail, period. It’s going to
change your mind state, because you’re not going to like what
you’re seeing in there.

I was shot on two different occasions. The
first time, I was on 79th and just got off the bus. I’m walking to
my grandma’s crib and, as soon as I get up the alleyway, two guys
come up. I had a pocketful of money and these guys tried to rob me.
All I could do was run, because they weren’t about to take my
money. So that was probably why they shot at me.

I got shot in the back of my leg. I didn’t
know I was shot at first until I got like two blocks away, and my
leg went out. I couldn’t even walk no more. I was scared. I went to
the hospital the next day. It wasn’t internal bleeding or none of
that. I could see the bullet in my leg. It was throbbing, but
that’s about it. When I got to the hospital, the nurse told me that
it would come out on its own. So, I just signed myself out and
left. I took that one out myself.

That was in November 2007, and then I got out
of jail in 2010. The summer of 2010, I got shot again, three times.
I had just come from my grandma’s house. The guys who I was into it
with, they were close by, on 69th and Ashland. Me being me, I get
off the bus at 69th and Ashland. I always look around. You know,
just the neighborhood that we stay in, you gotta look around and
pay attention to your surroundings. That’s what I was doing, and at
the same time, somebody was sitting there watching me. As soon as I
get to my grandma’s crib, somebody popped up from behind and shot
me.

Man, I was scared that time. When he shot me
in my chest, I seen my blood splash in my face. I turned around and
I ran and he kept on shooting. He shot me in my back; that’s when I
felt everything get numb. My back, my side and my chest, everything
got numb. I jumped my grandma’s gate, then I went in my neighbor’s
backyard. I was scared, super scared, because I didn’t know how
many times I got shot. I couldn’t breathe, so that really made me
panic. The bullet that went in my chest came out my back. The
bullet that went in my back got stuck in my lungs; it messed my
lungs up. When I got shot in my butt, it came out my hip. So two of
them came in and went out, but one of them was stuck.

The first week, I don’t remember nothing. I
don’t remember talking to nobody because I was so drugged up. When
everything started calming down, though, I couldn’t think about
nothing. My mind was just going everywhere. I didn’t know who shot
me; I didn’t know what was coming up next. I was just glad I was
here, though. That first shot was supposed to kill me. It was like
literally two inches away from my heart. I just gave thanks every
morning. I did that anyway, every morning I wake up. I made it my
business to acknowledge God. He was most definitely with me that
whole time. It slowed me down, gave me an eye-opener.

The police tried to find the guys that shot
me, but they couldn’t, as usual. There was a police camera right
there where I got shot and the police
say they don’t know who shot me. Basically, I say them cameras up
there are for nothing, because there was no footage of what
happened to me. So, we take all that up in our own actions. We
protect ourselves instead of being quick to call the police. They
come on their time; they gonna do the job on their time.

It’s a lot of police out here that’s dirty.
I’ll say they’re the biggest gang out here, the Chicago police
officers. They can do whatever they want to do. If you don’t have
nothing on you and they don’t like you, they’re going to put
something on you and send you to jail. They can beat you and leave
you right there. Or they can beat you, and then take you to jail
and say you swung on them.

You got some that do their job. Some police
officers got a lot of respect out here, because they respect the
guys on these streets. We got a lot of people out here, like
myself, that don’t be looking for no trouble, but we try to get
some money to try and better ourselves and our family. Some of
these police out here see that and won’t bother us, and some of
them out here just want to make our lives miserable. Make our lives
worse than what it already is.

My proudest achievement: I’ve been out of
jail for a whole year! And, I mean, it’s shocking. Since I was 17,
I’ve been going back and forth to jail every year; every year, I
was in jail at least once. But I just broke my record. I went a
whole year without getting locked up. I’m proud of myself. Mainly,
I’m just sitting back right now. I ain’t got to sell drugs because
my people don’t want me to go back to jail, so they’re going to
make sure I don’t need for nothing.

What motivates me? Today? To get up? My
family motivates me—my Granny Bertha, my mom, my sisters and
brothers. I just want to do something better for them. Because,
since I turned 17, everything started going downhill. I want to
show them that I ain’t just a bad person.

I wouldn’t want to be in a new environment
because I would have to start all over again. This is where I feel
comfortable. I know everybody around here. I can’t go nowhere yet
anyway, until I get off parole.

Violence has affected me mentally, though.
You gonna always have to look over your shoulder. Violence, that’s
every day. We see that every day. It’s gonna be something petty,
and it’s gonna end in violence. But we adapt to our environments,
we’re just so used to it. You’ll hear some gunshots, but all you
gonna do is look around and see if they coming towards you. Unless
it’s right there, and you’re in harm’s way, you don’t go in no
house. It’s just normal. It’s normal. A lot of young males don’t
have any type of guidance, so we go by what we see every day and
that’s all we know. That’s all we know.

My biggest fear is getting shot down and just
being laid out in the middle of the street somewhere. I don’t want
to die like that: getting shot down, beaten to death or stabbed to
death, just being laid out on the sidewalk, period. I want to die
in my sleep, that’s all.

Being stretched out in the street, you gotta
wait for the police to come. You’ll be out there for hours. Just
out there. Too many of my guys got killed around us, so I see that.
Too many times. I don’t want to go out like that. Everybody
standing around, looking at my dead body.

—
Interviewed by Stefanie
Jackson-Haskin

Endnotes

12 See Jeremy Gorner, “Gang Factions Fuel
Violent Year,” Chicago Tribune, Oct. 3, 2012, and Jeremy Gorner, “A
City Battered by Killings Struggles to Find Answers,” Chicago
Tribune, Dec. 30, 2012.

13 William R. Harper High School is at 6520
S. Wood St.

14 Officer Delvin Williams was 29 at the time
of his death. See “City Officer Kills Self, Wounds Wife,” Chicago
Tribune, Dec. 30, 2001.

15 The Pinckneyville Correctional Center is a
medium-security prison in
downstate Illinois.