There Are No Children Here (44 page)

Pharoah is thriving there. He likes being challenged and being given two hours of homework every night. It hasn’t all been easy for him, though. Behind in his reading and math scores before he entered, he hasn’t completely caught up. His one consistently good subject is not surprisingly, spelling, in which he gets mostly A’s. His daydreaming and forgetfulness have sometimes interfered with school. There were times, for instance, when he forgot to complete assignments. Now he writes down upcoming events in a small notepad that he calls his “memo.” He also had a problem getting to school on time. His teachers suggested that he repeat sixth grade to buttress his basic skills, but Pharoah insisted on going on to seventh. The school agreed to promote him on the condition that in the first month of the next school year he reduce his tardy days, get his assignments in, and maintain good grades. If he didn’t live up to the terms of the contract, they would place him back a year. Pharoah willingly signed the contract. He also, through the school, was awarded a full scholarship to a six-week summer camp in Indiana.

For Lafeyette, Providence-St. Mel was more of a struggle. He was unable to keep up with the work, and returned to public school with two months left in the year. The year wasn’t by any means a waste, however. Lafeyette discovered what it meant to be a serious student. He occasionally went to school for five to six hours on a Sunday to try to catch up on his assignments.
And despite his poor grades, he learned a lot. He talked with great enthusiasm about the Aztecs and Madeleine L’Engle’s book
A Wrinkle in Time
. He also learned to ask for help, something that is extraordinarily difficult for him.

But after just two months back in public school, Lafeyette was wrestling again with the lures of the neighborhood. He was caught smoking marijuana one morning before school with boys considerably older than he—and on occasion he played hookey. After his mother was called to the school, Lafeyette admitted he had made some mistakes, and promised his mother he would straighten up. LaJoe knows that it’s not a neighborhood that allows adolescents room for mistakes, so she has kept a close eye on her son.

On June 19, 1990, Lafeyette, who had just turned fifteen, graduated from eighth grade. It was one of the few times he seemed truly happy and at ease. He laughed and smiled and embraced his mother and friends with such warmth and spirit that everyone around him was filled with pride and hope for him. It was a small but important victory for Lafeyette.

He plans to enter a parochial school next year that won’t be as academically rigorous as Providence-St. Mel and that offers special assistance to children who have learning problems.

It has been well over a year since Craig Davis was shot and killed by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms agent, and Lafeyette still will not talk about his friend. The ATF and the police also have remained mum, refusing to discuss the case. One police official, however, who said he couldn’t talk about the incident, challenged the contention that Craig was not a gang member, despite the considerable evidence to the contrary. “Al Capone didn’t have a criminal record either,” he asserted in our brief phone conversation.

Craig’s mother, Christine, plans to file a lawsuit against the ATF. Twice a year, she visits her son’s grave at the Restvale Cemetery, placing on it a wheel of roses and a small American flag. The site is unmarked; it can be found by locating Section A3, Lot 7, Grave 140. She has been unable to afford a tombstone.

Rickey began running drugs for one of the local gangs, though he insists that he has since stopped. The Four Corner Hustlers slowly evolved into a gang that sold drugs, rivaling the Conservative Vice Lords and the Disciples. A man in his early
twenties, fresh out of prison, became the group’s leader. Rickey and his friends continued to belong to the Four Corner Hustlers.

Last February, the police caught Rickey with a long butcher knife. Since he was on probation for breaking into a car, they put him back in the Juvenile Temporary Detention Center for six weeks. He’s been to numerous court psychiatrists, all of whom have told his mother that he’s mad at the world and feels it owes him something. His mother checks Rickey’s room every couple of days to make sure he isn’t storing any guns there. Rickey rarely attends school and spends many nights away from home. “I feel someone’s gonna hurt him or he’s gonna hurt someone if he doesn’t get out of here,” his mother says.

Lafeyette doesn’t hang out with Rickey anymore, though they run into each other all the time. Lafeyette still likes his friend and worries about him. Rickey turned fourteen in December 1989.

If there is one constant at Henry Horner, it is the violence. Gwen Anderson, the CHA’s manager at Horner, was transferred to a less stressful job. In one two-week period in the spring, six people were shot, including a plainclothes detective who was returning from a hockey game at the stadium. He was robbed and shot with his own revolver. Luckily, the bullet only grazed his head. The proprietor of the Main Street restaurant, where the boys first saw the rainbow, was also shot. Pharoah and Lafeyette had both gone there to buy a sandwich for their mother and saw his body wheeled out on a stretcher. They presumed him dead. I happened to stop by the apartment the next morning to run an errand with LaJoe. Pharoah was late for school. He said he didn’t have any clean socks—and then started crying. He told me about his friend at the restaurant being shot. He recounted how he and Porkchop would go there to buy french fries or a hamburger and how the man would joke with them. “Ya wanna hamburger?” the man would ask. “Thirty-seven dollars. Ya hear me? Thirty-seven dollars.” Pharoah said he and Porkchop would laugh at their friend’s jokes. A few days later, Pharoah, much to his relief, learned that his friend had survived.

Weeks later, Lafeyette saw a friend run out of a building, clutching his stomach and hollering, “I’ve been shot! I’ve been
shot!” Lafeyette thought he was joking until the friend moved his hand, revealing a circle of blood. Lafeyette ran to the corner store to call an ambulance. None of these shootings made the newspapers.

Both Lafeyette and Pharoah want to move to a safer and quieter neighborhood. Lafeyette talks about it on occasion. So does Pharoah, who sat on his bed one day and cried because he worried that he might never get out of the projects.

In the spring, shortly after the spate of shootings, LaJoe tried to move—and for two months it seemed as if she’d found a way. Through friends, she contacted a man named Robert Curry, who told her that for $80 he could get her name on the top of a waiting list for subsidized housing. She gave him the money and over an eight-week period met with him regularly at a local McDonald’s. Lafeyette and Pharoah told all their friends. Lafeyette began packing his clothes. For two weeks, LaJoe vigorously cleaned her apartment in anticipation of a housekeeping inspection. Curry took her to the city’s north side one Saturday to look at apartments and gave her the address of a building that might have apartments large enough for her family. She planned to take with her Lafeyette, Pharoah, the triplets, and possibly LaShawn’s three children. But it wasn’t to be. As the promises flowed and the time dragged, LaJoe became suspicious. Finally, she went to check out the address of the building where she was promised an apartment. It didn’t exist. That same day, Curry was arrested on charges of theft by deception, having allegedly sold false promises to a group of residents in another neighborhood. His was the second housing scam uncovered that year. Pharoah asked why someone would do such a thing. LaJoe had no answer. She had suspended her disbelief for a while—and now felt humiliated and depressed. It was yet one more disappointment. She planned to testify at Curry’s trial.

Some things have improved. Chicago Housing Authority employees, wearing moon suits and gas masks, cleaned the basements at Henry Horner, removing the animal carcasses and rusted appliances. The CHA has also repaired leaking roofs and replaced the missing heating coils at Horner. In the Riverses’ apartment, the CHA fixed the bathtub faucet so that it no longer runs day and night. Also, LaJoe got a new stove as well
as paint, which she and Lafeyette used to put a fresh coat on the walls in the kitchen and in two bedrooms.

Vincent Lane, the CHA’s director, raided and reclaimed all eight buildings at Rockwell Gardens. Each high-rise now has round-the-clock security guards. Lane provided nine hundred new bedroom doors for families who had long gone without them. The complex has new playground equipment, and in the spring the area is awash in bright colors: pink and red begonias, pink and white spider ladies, and seven hundred white and pink rosebushes. CHA employees there wear buttons that read
I’M PART OF THE SOLUTION
.

On one of his frequent visits to Rockwell, Lane met an elderly tenant who was standing outside her first-floor apartment. She took Lane’s hand and pressed it between both of hers. “I’m very pleased with what you’re doing,” she said, looking him directly in the eye. “I’m so happy.” Her face lit up with a big smile. Lane told her he hoped to do more to spruce up the complex and to put a stop to the shooting and the drug dealing. Already, the sweeps had had some effect. Violent crime, though it by no means disappeared, was down. The gangs had moved some of their drug operations elsewhere. Lane was about to leave when the woman, still smiling, hollered after him, “I opened my bedroom window for the first time in about seven years last night and got some air. I slept good last night.” Lane turned and smiled. “I’m so happy,” she repeated. “Any way I can help you, I’ll be here.”

Lane would still like to sweep Henry Horner and all the buildings in the other nineteen complexes, but money from the Department of Housing and Urban Development has not been forthcoming.

Chicago Commons has expanded its Better Days for Youth program, which saw Lafeyette as one of its first participants. A new $750,000 grant from the Department of Health and Human Services will allow Chicago Commons to launch a major gang- and drug-prevention program for children up to seventeen in Horner and nearby neighborhoods. It has also expanded its literacy program and is making an effort to put together its own library for the neighborhood children. A drug rehabilitation center for young mothers plans to open at the boarded-up Mary Thompson Hospital, just a couple of blocks from Horner. And
the juvenile court is doubling the number of courtrooms to accommodate the overload of cases.

Dawn and Demetrius finally got an apartment in another housing complex, the ABLA Homes, where Craig had lived. They are now on the fourteenth floor of a sixteen-story high-rise. Their apartment is sparsely furnished, but they’re doing everything they can to get by. Dawn got pregnant again and tried to have an abortion, but it cost too much. She now has five kids. Her new son is named Demone. Although she hasn’t found permanent work, she spent six weeks, while pregnant, going door to door for the U.S. Census. Demetrius continues to watch the kids and lands an occasional job repairing cars. They rarely visit Horner.

Terence expects to get out of prison sometime in 1991. He has earned his high school equivalency and continues to write regularly to his family. LaShawn, Brian, and their three children live with LaJoe. Paul, the boys’ oldest brother, moved out of the apartment with his girlfriend. They got their own apartment elsewhere in Horner. Paul, the boys’ father, found a part-time job with a moving company. After his first few days on the job, he was able to give LaJoe money to buy Tammie and Tiffany sandals for the July Fourth holiday.

IN REPORTING this book, I spent a good deal of time just hanging out with Pharoah and Lafeyette, sometimes as much as four to five days a week. We watched TV together, played basketball, and sat in their room talking. We ate at nearby restaurants, where I would conduct interviews, some of them tape-recorded. LaJoe was like a second pair of eyes and ears for me. She relayed incidents involving her children that I would talk about with them at a later date. LaJoe and I met regularly over a three-year period.

In addition to my time spent with Lafeyette, Pharoah, and their family, I interviewed over a hundred other people, including the boys’ friends and neighbors, police, schoolteachers, judges, attorneys, Chicago Housing Authority officials, and local politicians. Almost everybody offered cooperation, though there were a few people who declined to be interviewed.

Of the numerous scenes in the book, I witnessed nearly half. I usually took notes at the time—and frequently went back later to question participants about the episode. Those events at which I wasn’t present I re-created from interviews with people who were. Where possible, I talked to at least two participants, especially if one of them was a child. When only children were involved, like the afternoon on the railroad tracks, I returned to the location with one or more of the boys so that they could help me envision what had taken place. In those instances where dialogue was re-created, it was based on the memory of at least one of the participants, and often on the memory of two or three.

Because this book involves children, I made an extra effort to review thoughts and episodes many times not only to ensure
their accuracy but also to make certain that the child felt comfortable at my including the material in the book. There were times when Lafeyette or Pharoah asked me not to write about something that had happened in his life. I obliged both boys in all cases. It was my feeling that none of those events would have altered the shape of the story. In fact, such requests usually had to do with kids’ concerns, things they felt embarrassed about. Often, they didn’t want to get friends into trouble. In the case of the adults, there is some material I have chosen not to write about, in almost all instances to afford those people a measure of privacy.

In the matter of the accidental shooting of Craig Davis, I relied on separate investigations conducted by the Chicago Police Department and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. I received the two reports as well as Craig’s arrest record under the Freedom of Information Act. Both the police department and the ATF refused to discuss the case. I wrote to and called the two officers involved. Neither replied to my inquiries, except once, when Richard Marianos of the ATF returned a phone call, only to hang up when he realized why I had phoned. I talked with friends of Craig’s, some of whom were with him the night he was killed, as well as family members, teachers, and his employer. With permission from the family, the Medical Examiner’s Office provided me with a copy of the autopsy report.