There Are No Children Here (33 page)

Neither Rickey nor Lafeyette knew what he wanted to be when he grew up. That seemed too far away. They spent so much energy just thinking about the present, how could they be expected to look into the future? “I can’t speak on that until I get older,” Lafeyette once said. What’s more, Rickey could barely read. At restaurants, he couldn’t decipher menus. He was too proud to admit his deficiency.

Although Lafeyette spent time with Rickey, he didn’t like hanging out with Rickey’s friends. He thought them too ready to fight. In fact, he warned his mother not to go over to Rickey’s building; they might try to rob her. Lafeyette felt he could keep Rickey out of trouble. Maybe he could be a good influence.

A few weeks after Craig’s death, Lafeyette returned to the stadium to park cars with Rickey. As the crowds walked quickly toward the stadium, the two boys strolled by a new Hyundai that had a detachable radio. “You wanna get it?” Rickey asked. “No,” replied Lafeyette and kept on walking. Rickey followed. Even Rickey recognized Lafeyette’s good influence. “Lafie’s the best friend I have. He don’t like getting in trouble. You have to con him. He tell me, ‘You shouldn’t do that, man. There ain’t no cause for that.’ ”

Lafeyette denied belonging to a gang—and there was some truth in his denial. Frequently, young boys at Horner claimed allegiance to one gang or another. Children as young as four or five at a neighborhood preschool program would arrive each day with their hats turned to the left, showing allegiance to the Vice Lords, or to the right, for the Disciples. A group like the Four Corners imitated their older counterparts. But there was no real organization or discipline; moreover, they didn’t sell drugs. Had it been in another community, perhaps the gang
would have been just a band of friends who occasionally got into mischief. But this was Horner. Such affiliation marked children. “Oh, he’s a gang member,” teachers would say of a student. “He’s trouble.” One public elementary school asked its students to adhere to a dress code so that they could be distinguished from gang members who wore their colors. Children often believe what adults say about them. Rickey at times felt that if they expected him to be bad, he’d be bad. He’d be mean. He’d do it all. Lafeyette resisted, partly at the insistence of his mother. Yeah, he would concede, he hung out with Four Corner Hustlers, “but just ’cause I be with them that don’t mean I be in the gang. The people you thinking be nice, them the ones that gonna be in the gang.”

Lafeyette had grown increasingly cynical. And in a child who has not experienced enough to root his beliefs, such an attitude can create a vast emptiness. He had little to believe in. Everyone and everything was failing him. School. The Public Aid Department. His father. His older brother. The police. And now, in a sense, himself.

Pharoah had found a new interest: politics. It fascinated him. The crowds. The speeches. The promises. The power. LaJoe figured it must be in his blood. Her mother had been the precinct captain for the Democratic Party in Horner and had been in charge of getting out the vote. She handed out chickens, sausages, and pints of wine to neighbors after they voted, not an uncommon practice in Chicago in those days.

As a child, LaJoe remembers meeting aldermen, representatives, and even senators. They would visit the apartments or hold community meetings in the basement. One alderman, Ed Quigley, used to give her and other children stuffed dolls for Christmas. Quigley, who headed the city’s sewer department, helped Paul Rivers get his job with the city. He had helped get her mother her job in the County Treasurer’s Office. Quigley was white; his district was mostly black. His critics called it plantation politics.

Though LaJoe had grown up in a family that thrived on politics, she long ago had given up on politicians. She voted only on occasion. The alderman who succeeded Quigley, Wallace Davis, a local black man, ended his political career in 1987, when he
was convicted of racketeering, extortion, attempted extortion, and lying to the FBI. His successor, twenty-eight-year-old Sheneather Butler, a former library assistant, was rarely seen in the neighborhood. Her father, who opponents claimed was the real force behind his daughter, had been a perennial candidate for office. A local magazine chided the younger Butler for not knowing who the Wirtz family was. They were the owners of the Chicago Bulls, the Blackhawks, and, of course, the stadium, a not insignificant piece of real estate in her political ward. The magazine wrote, “Such ignorance is appalling even by the standards of Chicago aldermen.”

The only time in recent memory that LaJoe had gotten excited about an election was when Harold Washington first ran for mayor, in 1983. When he won, in what was considered an upset and a landmark victory for the city’s blacks, she and other Horner residents went out into the streets to celebrate, cheering and whistling at the triumph. But even Washington disappointed her. Neighborhoods like Henry Horner improved little during his tenure.

But a mayor alone couldn’t cure Horner’s ills. The white opposition on the Chicago City Council gummed up most efforts by the administration to do much of anything. Moreover, Washington headed the city during the Reagan years, when federal funds for the nation’s cities and the nation’s poor were cut sharply. From 1980 to 1988, Reagan’s last year in office, Community Development Block Grant expenditures were cut 28 percent; Urban Development Action Grants, 68 percent; and federally subsidized housing, 70 percent. During those years, life only worsened in neighborhoods like Horner, so LaJoe’s enthusiasm and hope for change under Mayor Washington waned.

But Pharoah seemed to be picking up where LaJoe and her mother had left off. He got his first taste of politics the previous November, when he and Porkchop boarded a bus along with the Boys Club Drum and Bugle Corps to a downtown parade for presidential candidate Michael Dukakis. It was one of the Democrat’s last rallies before the election. The crowd was too big and the downpour too heavy for Pharoah and Porkchop to see much, but amid all the noise and jubilation and rain, the two twirled flashlights they’d been given and hoisted a placard that read
VOTE FOR DUKAKIS
’88. Pharoah yanked his imitation black
leather coat over his head to keep his head dry. It was Pharoah’s first up-close encounter with the excitement of politics, and his adrenaline ran high.

Five months later, on March 30, just five days before the city’s mayoral elections, Tim Evans, a black candidate who was running under the banner of the hastily formed Harold Washington Party, visited Henry Horner. Word of his arrival spread quickly through the high-rises. Pharoah, eager for another rally, ran from the apartment to the other side of the Boys Club. A small crowd had gathered around Evans, who was standing on the sidewalk, shaking hands and asking for votes. Suddenly a rock, the size of a baseball, fell near the crowd. Then another. And another. Evans’s bodyguards pushed the candidate into his car. Pharoah covered his head and ran. A rock hit a woman in the knee and a police sergeant on the shoulder. No one was seriously hurt. No one knew who had thrown the rocks or why. It all made the evening news. Evans vowed to return, which he did the next day.

That inglorious moment didn’t dent Pharoah’s enthusiasm, though. The same night, he went to hear Evans and Jesse Jackson speak at the First Congregational Baptist Church. Privately, he began to fantasize about becoming a politician.

The violence never let up. Never. What’s more, no one ever got used to it.

On a dreary April afternoon, LaJoe heard a group of people running from the building past her apartment windows. Often such activity meant the gangs were readying for battle. She pulled back the drapes slightly so that those outside wouldn’t see her. She watched as ten teenage boys chased a man who looked to be about thirty. Two of them caught up with the stranger and wrapped him in their arms as the others flailed away at him with their fists. One boy brought a wooden cane crashing into the man’s rib cage.

From her bedroom window, LaShawn yelled for them to stop. LaJoe ran outside. So did Lafeyette.

“Why’d you try to rape my cousin?” the boy with the cane hollered with each stinging blow. “Why’d you try to rape my cousin?”

The man ran, chased by the pack of teens intent on meting
out their own form of punishment. When LaJoe turned to go back to the apartment, she realized Lafeyette had joined them. LaJoe ordered Pharoah to get Tyisha and the triplets, who were playing on the second floor. Once she had the young ones inside, she told them sternly, “Don’t go out of here. You don’t go out of here even to buy a pop.”

Apparently, the man everyone was assaulting had fondled an eight-year-old boy in a vacant fourth-floor apartment. No one thought to call the police. They chose to render justice themselves.

Lafeyette returned ten minutes later, perspiring and out of breath. He and the others had chased the man to Madison Street, where the accused sought refuge in a liquor store. Along the way, the teens had showered him with bricks and rocks.

“They all like raper mans there,” he told his mother, smiling, knowing that what he was about to say had a humorous ring to it: “Maybe it’s a raper mans’ club.” LaJoe didn’t laugh.

Twenty-four

   
JUDGE FRANCIS MAHAN’S six-year-old courtroom in the Skokie branch of the Cook County Courts is clean and well lit, a stark contrast to the musty courtrooms in the main fifty-nine-year-old Criminal Courts building in Chicago. Handsome dark green carpeting matches the cushioned jury seats. The three rows of varnished benches shine.

For many young men at Horner, their only contact with the world outside their own immediate environs is the courts. It can be a cold and humiliating liaison. No one has enough time.
The courts are so overburdened that the county has transferred many of its Chicago cases to Skokie. Judge Mahan’s court hears only such cases.

The court was late getting started this morning of March 21. The prisoners, who are bused daily from the county jail, twenty miles away, had yet to arrive. Young men and women, waiting for their relatives and loved ones to appear, sat silently on the hard benches. They listened to the friendly conversations between the public defenders and prosecutors. It seemed to an outsider as if all the attorneys—prosecutors and public defenders—were best of friends.

A young pregnant woman approached the clerk of the court. “Is my boyfriend’s attorney here?” she asked. “Ma’am,” shot back the clerk, “I don’t know who your attorney is or who you are.” The woman retreated like a chastised schoolgirl.

Nearby, a mustachioed state’s attorney was asked by a fellow prosecutor what cases he had that morning. In a stage whisper loud enough for everyone in the courtroom to hear: “Bobby Rivers and Tony Oliver. We’re going to stomp them into the ground.” (Bobby was Terence’s alias.) A young man, a courtroom spectator, overheard the exchange. He turned to his friend in disbelief. “Man, they’re dealing with motherfucking lives,” he said.

Judge Mahan, his hands holding up his black robe, entered the courtroom. Everyone rose. With his silver hair and thick black-rimmed glasses, he looked stern and unforgiving. His arrival made people nervous. A
young
man sitting in the back row began to crack his knuckles. A few feet down from him, a baby started to cry.

“The judge doesn’t like babies getting noisy,” a sheriff’s deputy informed the uninterested-looking mother. She left the courtroom with the bawling child.

The first case the judge heard involved a Hispanic man in his twenties. He had been arrested for possession of fifty grams of cocaine and for stealing his ex-wife’s car. He had already been convicted for talking to a juror in another case and for possession of marijuana. His attorney requested that the judge lower his $25,000 bond. Mahan raised it to $50,000.

Next appeared the father of the baby who had disrupted the courtroom just a few minutes earlier. The rosy-cheeked youth
was tall and lanky, his shoulders hunched up to his ears; his blue jeans barely covered his ankles. He was currently on probation (his crime was never disclosed), and he wanted to move his family to Kentucky. “I understand you’ve been good under probation,” Mahan said. “Leave granted.” He then exhibited a rare smile. “Stay out of trouble.”