There Are No Children Here (25 page)

Parents and children, reinforced by the Vice Lords, who wore red tams and who at the time were making an effort to become a constructive part of their community, turned out in protest. They considered stringing a human chain across Washington Boulevard, but they could have been arrested for impeding traffic. Instead, they formed a never-ending picket line that moved back and forth across the boulevard. They were pedestrians, they argued, simply trying to cross the street. They couldn’t help it if it just happened to be rush hour. They called their picket “the funky four corners.”

Tensions heightened with the arrival of busloads of police, in full riot gear, who stood menacingly across the street, ready to make mass arrests. The confrontation never materialized, though the police did arrest a few protesters. During one confrontation, twenty-one-year-old Michael Soto, who was home on a thirty-day leave after a year of service in Vietnam, got into a shoving match with a policeman and was arrested for obstructing
traffic and resisting arrest, charges that were eventually dropped.

On October 5, nineteen days later, Michael’s younger brother, sixteen-year-old John, berated two white policemen who were arresting two of his friends. One of the officers shot and killed John Soto. The police said it happened when the boy started to scuffle with the officer; witnesses said the policeman shot John Soto without provocation.

On October 10, five days later, only hours after burying his younger brother, Michael Soto, while standing on a concrete landing between the first and second floors of the Horner high-rise where his family lived, was also killed. Also by a policeman. The police said he had just robbed someone. Within minutes, the residents of Horner, on hearing the news of yet another dead Soto brother, rose in indignation and for an hour waged furious combat with the police. Snipers shot from the high-rise windows. Residents ran out of nearby stores, brandishing revolvers and shotguns. The police took cover behind their squad cars and under the El tracks. A helicopter hovered overhead. When the shooting subsided twenty minutes later, ten policeman and a twelve-year-old girl had been wounded by gunfire.

The city installed a traffic light. But there was trouble only two months later. Two more blacks were killed by the police.

On December 4, only a few blocks from Horner, thirteen policemen stormed the home of several Black Panthers, killing twenty-one-year-old Fred Hampton, head of the Illinois chapter, and twenty-two-year-old Mark Clark. The police at first contended that the Panthers had opened fire on them as they tried to serve a search warrant. A later FBI investigation, though, found that the Panthers fired one shot to between eighty-three and ninety-nine shots by the police. The Panthers lived only a few blocks from Horner; they were viewed with a mixture of awe and respect. They had started a breakfast program for the children. They held inspiring rallies at their headquarters on the corner of Western and Madison. And they had helped with such seemingly minor things as the traffic light protest.

Their death became a cause célèbre not only in Chicago but across the nation. Five thousand mourners attended a memorial for Hampton. Books were written about the incident and the
subsequent trial of the state’s attorney, who ordered the raid, and the police officers. They were all acquitted.

The four killings—the Soto brothers and the two Panthers—left an indelible scar on the people of Henry Horner. Twenty years later, those deaths at the hands of the police lingered in the memories of Horner’s adults. “What you thought would protect you, you found out that you couldn’t trust,” said LaJoe, who was seventeen at the time. “How can people kill a person like that? And lie? And cover it up? When all they had to do was simply say it was a mistake and everything wouldn’t have got like it had got.”

LaJoe knew that most police weren’t bad people. One of the boys she grew up with had become a detective who worked at Cabrini-Green. He frequently came back to visit. Another policeman had personally warned a gang leader to stay away from the Riverses after he had threatened LaShawn. LaJoe knew how scared some of them must be when patrolling her neighborhood. In 1975, Officer Joseph Cali had been killed by a sniper while writing a parking ticket at Horner. When police left their patrol cars unattended, residents would sometimes toss heavy objects from upper floors. Someone once threw a bowling ball onto a squad car. Another time, someone threw a refrigerator out of an upper floor, barely missing a policewoman. It got so bad that the police had trouble finding volunteers to patrol certain neighborhoods, including Horner.

What’s more, many of the individual policemen LaJoe knew genuinely cared about the children. One, Bill Spencer, who worked at Horner every day, was a favorite among the kids. He understood them, and would give them second and third chances. He was so well liked that when he was transferred residents demanded—and won—his return. Another officer, William Guswiler, a lieutenant in the district’s plainclothes unit, had recently given Lafeyette a ride to a restaurant, and, in a friendly manner, warned him about hanging out with the wrong people.

The police weren’t all bad. It was just that when something tragic happened, like the Soto brothers’ killing, LaJoe couldn’t understand why the police didn’t apologize, just admit they had made a mistake. And now, Lafeyette had been roughed up by a policeman. The incident itself wasn’t that big a deal, she
thought. Lafeyette’s back hurt for a couple of days and he had to stay home from school, but there were no serious injuries. What worried LaJoe, though, was that Lafeyette’s cynicism had begun to define his person. When the Public Aid Department had cut off his family’s income, he immediately suspected a neighbor of telling on them. He had been disappointed so many times that when people let him down, his response was simple and direct: they had lied to him. Why else would they not hold up their end of the bargain? And now he was losing faith in the police. That wariness would only grow in coming months.

The apartment bulged with people that winter. Weasel’s girlfriend moved in, as did LaJoe’s mother, Lelia Mae, who had been depressed from a stroke that paralyzed one side. She had been shifted from one child’s or grandchild’s house to another.

Lelia Mae was initially invigorated by her move to LaJoe’s. She slept on the couch and would tell the children stories of the old Horner, though they had to listen closely, because her speech has become slurred. The old days she spoke of seemed bright and cheery. She told the children, to their disbelief, that families used to keep their doors unlocked at night. During the summers, she told them, they might even spend the nights outside, sleeping on the lawn.

Lafeyette was particularly glad to have her there. He liked to take care of old people. It made him feel needed. At McDonald’s, he would help older people with their trays. He ran errands for his grandmother. They’d always been close. When Lafeyette was younger and Lelia Mae healthier, Lafeyette would ride his bike over to her house. Now, he helped his mother bathe her and would rub her feet with alcohol. And he frequently ran to the local restaurant to buy his grandmother her favorite food: a hot dog with raw onions.

Moreover, Lelia Mae brought her small black-and-white television with her. Lafeyette and Pharoah kept it in their room, where they could watch in private and not put up with the commotion of the young kids.

The apartment seemed to collapse under the weight of all these people. The oven stopped working, and for most of eight months LaJoe couldn’t bake. The wooden door to Lafeyette and Pharoah’s room could be opened and shut only with great care;
otherwise, the top came unhinged and the door leaned precariously into the room as if it had been battered down. A cheap, unadorned light fixture, which the housing authority had only partly installed, hung loosely from the wall, unfinished. A friend of Lafeyette’s stuck a screwdriver in its opening—and recoiled from the electric shock.

And the pipes leading to the kitchen sink sprang a leak. LaJoe tied rags around them to keep the water from dripping onto the floor, and for two weeks, while she waited for them to be repaired, she washed the dishes in the bathtub, which still ran day and night.

In all this activity, both Lafeyette and Pharoah were most troubled by their father’s depression. It didn’t look as if Paul would get his job back. He still drank and occasionally took heroin. He knew he would have trouble passing another urine test. He had become so desperate for money that he stole the television LaJoe’s mother had given the boys and pawned it for $15. Lafeyette and Pharoah figured that one of their siblings’ friends had walked off with it. They got a lock for their room. Paul felt so guilty that he pulled the money together and got the television out of hock, and returned it without their knowing who had taken it.

Lafeyette deeply resented his father. He didn’t feel he had lived up to his promises to the family. When he was younger, Paul had told Lafeyette he would move the family out of Horner to a quieter neighborhood. “One of these days, son,” he had promised, “you’ll have your own big back yard to play in, have some room for a dog.” The house, he went on, would be big enough so that he and Pharoah could have their own bedrooms. And there’d be a playroom where they could entertain friends. As LaJoe once had done, Paul dreamed out loud about the future. Nothing had seemed impossible. Both he and LaJoe were working at the time, and though the two had their problems, money wasn’t one of them. Until Paul’s habit overtook him.

“To look back at it, drugs really tore my life down, got my family in the shape it’s in now,” Paul reflected. “I’m sure the kids know. They don’t say anything to me about it, either ’cause they respect me as their father or they don’t feel big enough to get angry at me about it. It’s deprived my family of a lot of
things. I chose a way of drugs instead of necessities for my family.”

Paul, who despite his problems had retained his fighter’s physique, had not only welshed on his promises, but he was too dejected to be of much support for the kids. “I remember times when I would come to the house drunk or high, and the kids would seem to detect it,” he said. “Everybody would be sitting in the living room, sitting up, and when I came in, I’d sit down and one by one they would leave and head to the back. As if to say, Hey, y’all, watch it, Daddy drunk. At times they just totally disregard me. I’m not allowed in my sons’ room. I’m not allowed in my daughter’s room. And if I want to go in any part of the house I have to knock on the doors. That’s rough.”

LaJoe didn’t talk much to Paul either. She had never forgiven him for taking drugs. She was restrained, though, in the way she spoke of him: “He could do what he wants to do. I can’t be angry with him, ’cause he doesn’t even understand himself. I can’t be angry with someone who’s not in control of his self. If he can’t help himself, how’s he going to help me?”

Paul respectfully called LaJoe a “conscientious objector,” since she didn’t drink or get high. Her only habit, he would joke, was cigarettes. Even though LaJoe virtually ignored Paul, he still had strong feelings toward her. “I love that woman,” he would say. “I’m the one that care but I can’t show how much I care.”

Paul continued to come around because he wanted his children to know their father. He felt bitter about his own childhood. His father had left when he was two. “It bothered me for a long time,” he said. “When I questioned my mother about it, she’d get mad, and that would make me more bitter. She won’t talk about it. That’s what pisses me off. That’s one of the reasons I visit with my kids despite my domestic problems with LaJoe. If I left now, they’d never forgive me. At least they have a daddy.”

And at least Paul had Pharoah. Pharoah felt sorry for his father and often tried to cheer him up. If there was a basketball game on, Pharoah would try to get his father involved. He’d make a gentleman’s bet on one team; his father would take the other. Anything to keep his father from becoming too pensive. Then, Pharoah knew, his father would only get depressed.

One balmy December afternoon, Paul sat at the edge of the double bed in the front bedroom, his eyes staring at the brown floor. Pharoah lay on his belly, his chin in his hand.

“Let’s go outside,” Pharoah urged.

Paul shook his head. “I’m all right here. Why don’t you go on out?”

“Is you going back to work?” Pharoah asked.

“I’m off temporarily. It’s a suspension,” explained a sullen Paul.

“What the difference be between that and being fired?”

“It’s
only
temporary.”

“If you ain’t working, how you gonna keep some of your promises to us?” Paul had promised to buy bicycles and snowsuits for the children. “Daddy, you can’t buy it if you ain’t working, can you?”

“Don’t worry about it. Sooner or later I’m going to get back to work and I’m going to try and hold them promises. Try to stay to them.” The two sat in silence for a few minutes. Pharoah looked at his dad, who stared at the floor.

“Why you drink? What you get out of it?”

The question stunned Paul. Pharoah would rarely have the courage to ask his father about his drinking, even though it upset him when his father came to the house reeking of alcohol and talking excitedly. Pharoah would always say that what his father did was his father’s business. But it bothered everyone: him, Lafeyette, and, in particular, LaJoe, who would get angry with Paul and demand that he leave the apartment.

“Why you don’t want me to drink? When I play with you and what-not, you smell it on my breath?”

“It stinks and you don’t look right. You act funny,” Pharoah said.

Paul sat motionless. He said nothing. He knew Pharoah was right. He should stop drinking. He had slowed down in taking drugs, but he should stop. He desperately wanted to return to work, but hadn’t had any success in getting rehired at the transit authority. More than anything, he felt that he had let his children down.

Pharoah got up and sat behind his father, tenderly placing a hand on his shoulder. He made a point of looking cheerful.

“You gonna get your job back, Daddy. If not that one, then
another one. Remember you used to pick up them big old garbage cans? You want that job back?”