The Warmth of Other Suns (83 page)

It is mid-May, the start of the crazy season in South Shore. The weather will be warm soon, and the kids will be out of school, roaming the streets with nothing to do. This time, a gang officer, a big, bearded man in a blue Nike sweatshirt and jeans, is there to brief the beat meeting.

“You have two gangs operating in 421,” the officer is telling residents. “The Black Stones and the Mickey Cobras.”

The residents listen, but they know they have a gang problem. They start to rattle off street names they want the police to check.

The officer jumps in. “We been hitting that area hard,” the officer says. “Every day we’ve been locking someone up new. We’re hitting Colfax, Kingston, Phillips real hard. They know our cars. They got so many guys out there doing lookout, hypes who work for them. They whistle when we get close.”

He tells the residents to report whatever they see. “I call the police enough, they should know my name,” a middle-aged woman in a brown beret says. “We got some terrible kids over where we are. It be raining and sleeting and they coming and going. And the girls are worse than the boys.”

“Amen,” Ida Mae chimes in.

The next meeting begins with a sober announcement: “We had a shooting of one of our CAPS members at Seventy-eighth and Coles.”

“Did they catch the offender?” a resident asks.

“No, not as of yet.” The people look down at their hot sheets.

The beat meetings attract all kinds of visitors—city hall bureaucrats, politicians running for reelection, people heading rape crisis centers or collecting names for this or that petition. This time, the visitor is a legal advocate in a beard and corduroy pants who doesn’t live in the neighborhood. He rises to speak and tries to get the group to join him in opposing a city ordinance that would clamp down on loitering.

“It will make open season on all black youth,” the man says of what he believes will happen if the ordinance were to pass.

The residents want the ordinance anyway, anything to bring them relief.

A man in his sixties stands up as if to speak for them all.

“We live in this neighborhood,” the man says. “We own houses and pay taxes. We’re scared to go outside. Practically every evening there’s a shooting. I don’t care about their rights. Maybe you have to get the good ones to get the bad.”

This being Chicago, famously local in its politics, the residents of South Shore have learned where to get their immediate needs met—a broken hydrant fixed, a pothole patched, a house condemned. The alderman is the closest politician to turn to. Most Chicagoans know their alderman by sight or even personally and will call upon him without hesitation if they think he can help.

When Ida Mae’s alderman, William Beavers, shows up at her beat meeting, there is great anticipation because he is one of the most powerful black politicians in the city and everyone knows him. He has been the Seventh Ward alderman for fourteen years. He arrives in a brown double-breasted suit and has cameras and lights and a television crew with him, which only adds to the sense of the drama of his visit.

“The area is coming back,” he announces to the residents. He then lists what he’s doing for the ward: “We got a new field house. We’re building a senior home at Seventy-fourth and Kingston. We have a new shopping center at Ninety-fifth and Stoney.”

Then he gets to what matters to them most, the crime, says he’s seen it himself, especially the prostitutes over on Exchange Street. “They’re on Exchange all day and all night,” he says. “They be waving, ‘Hey, Alderman Beavers!’ ”

A woman raises her hand with a complaint that is right up his alley. “There’s no curb across the street for us,” she says.

“I put them on the other side,” he says without apology. “I put them where the people vote.”

He then leaves them with a hotline number to call to report crime: the number, he says, is 1-800-CRACK-44.

South Shore is in Police Beat 421, Ward Seven, State Representative District 25, and State Senate District 13. The officeholders of the latter two districts rarely figure into the daily concerns of most people in Chicago. The state legislators are just low enough on the political food chain to go unrecognized, focused as they are on approving budgets and legislation. They are just lofty enough, however, to be seen as of little help in an immediate crisis as when, say, a drug dealer sets up shop in front of your house. It could be argued that many people could not name their state legislators off the top of their heads. As for state senators, there are fifty-nine of them, they meet in Springfield, and they are not usually household names, as would be the mayor or even one’s alderman.

So when, in 1996, a young constitutional lawyer and community activist from Hyde Park ran for the Illinois State Senate seat in District 13, Ida Mae, voting her usual straight Democratic ticket, would become among the first people ever to have voted for the man. She would not have to give it much thought. He did not have Chicago roots and the name was unusual—Barack Obama. But he was running unopposed, having edged out the woman who had asked him to run in her place before changing her mind. His wife, Michelle, had grown up in South Shore, in the more stable section of bungalows further to the west. So Ida Mae and an overwhelming majority of the Democratic stronghold of predominantly black South Shore voted him into office as their state senator.

On August 14, 1997, exactly one month before Alderman Beavers shows up with cameras and lights at Ida Mae’s beat meeting, Barack Obama makes an appearance. He is introduced as the state senator for the district, which not everyone in the room could be expected to know, as he has only been in office since January. He is tall, slight of build, formal in speech and attire, looks like a college student, and he arrives without lights, cameras, or entourage.

He stands before them and gives a minilecture to these bus drivers, secretaries, nurse’s aides, and pensioners about what state legislators do. He says that while the state legislature is not responsible for the police department, it passes laws that the police have to enforce. He describes the role of the legislature in education policy and in health care. And he invites those assembled to call his office anytime.

“Sometimes a call from the senator’s office,” he says like the professor he once was, “may be helpful in facilitating some issues that you have concerns about. Sometimes a call from my office will be answered much more quickly so we can move through some of the bureaucracy a little bit faster.”

Ida Mae and the rest of the people listen politely and with appreciation. But, as this is just another meeting, they sit in anticipation of the reason they are here tonight: the discussion with police about the latest shootings, stabbings, and drug deals, the immediate dangers they will face just getting back home.

The thirty-six-year-old freshman state senator finishes his presentation to Beat 421. The people clap with gratitude as they always do and then turn back to their hot sheets.

That night, as he bounded up the steps and out of the church basement, nobody in the room could have imagined that they had just seen the man who, a decade from now, would become the first black president of the United States.

NEW YORK, SPRING 1998

THE TROUBLE BEGAN
with a mysterious dark spot on the back of George Starling’s foot. One of his grandsons had been the first to notice it. George was a diabetic and knew not to take chances with such things. He made an appointment to see his doctor right away.

The doctor admitted him to the hospital for tests. There was fear the foot might need to be amputated. “All these tests,” Pat, the niece who used to live with him and Inez, said.

Pat came in from Washington, where she was now living, and her brother came in from New Jersey to see about their uncle. There was relief when it turned out that the foot would not need to be amputated. But George was now requiring dialysis. The knees that had always given him trouble could not be relied upon now to hold him up, and he was having a harder time keeping his balance.

Pat and her brother helped George get up when they were there. But after they and his other visitors left, George slipped and fell in the hospital. In time, he appeared to be recovering and was looking to go home.

“Well, they not gonna keep me no longer,” he told Pat.

“Okay, now,” Pat said. “I’ll be up there to see about you.”

But he was instead transferred to a nursing home for rehabilitation. While there, he lost his balance and fell again. This time he hit his head.

By now, Gerard, his firstborn, had been alerted in Florida as to his father’s condition. The two had long been at odds. Gerard’s lifestyle was counter to everything George had worked for. Gerard had been a drug hustler operating out of Miami and Gainesville. He had had money, homes, cars, women. Wherever he showed up, he gave everybody a hundred dollars just because he could. But in recent years, he had been down on his luck. He had diabetes, like his father, and was on dialysis and insulin.

Hearing that his father was in the hospital, he made plans to come up to New York. “We were all waiting on Gerard with great anticipation,” Pat remembered.

It was while Gerard was trying to figure out what day to come to New York that George fell and hit his head. He suffered a cerebral hemorrhage and slipped into a coma. By the time Gerard made it to New York, George was unconscious and hooked up to machines to sustain him on the chance he might come out of the coma.