There Are No Children Here (5 page)

The trash chutes within each building were too narrow to handle the garbage of all its tenants. The boiler systems continually broke down. There were insufficient overhead lighting installations and wall outlets in each unit. And the medicine cabinet in each apartment’s bathroom was not only easily removed, but was connected to the medicine chest in the adjoining apartment. Over the years, residents had been robbed, assaulted, and even murdered by people crawling through their medicine cabinet.

When a group of Soviet housing officials visited Henry Horner in October of 1955, while it was still under construction, they were appalled that the walls in the apartments were of cinder block. Why not build plastered walls, they suggested. “We would be thrown off our jobs in Moscow if we left unfinished walls like this,” I. K. Kozvilia, minister of city and urban construction in the Soviet Union, told local reporters.

“In the American way of doing things,” huffed
The Chicago Daily News
in an editorial the next day, “there is little use for luxury in building subsidized low-cost housing.” It was no surprise, then, that thirteen years later a federal report on public housing would describe Henry Horner and the city’s other developments
as “remindful of gigantic filing cabinets with separate cubicles for each human household.”

But on this day, LaJoe and her siblings were bubbling over with joy at the sight of their new home. It was, after all, considerably prettier and sturdier and warmer than the flat they’d left behind. Before their father could unload the rented trailer and hand his children the picnic table, which he planned to use in the kitchen, and the cots, which he hoped to replace soon with bunk beds, they ran into the newly finished building. He and his wife could only smile at the children’s excitement.

LaJoe’s older sister, LaGreta, then seven, urged the others into the apartment. As LaJoe scurried through the open doorway, they counted off the five bedrooms in delighted giggles. They were struck by the apartment’s immensity; the hallway seemed to go on forever, one room following another and another and another. What’s more, the freshly painted walls shone a glistening white; even the brown linoleum floors had a luster to them. The youngest children found the coziness of the doorless closets inviting; LaJoe’s infant twin brothers spent much of the first day playing in one. And because of the apartment’s first-floor location, the older children quickly learned, they could exit through the windows, a route they would use in their teens when they wanted to leave unseen by their mother.

In those early years, the children of Horner thrived. LaJoe and LaGreta joined the Girl Scouts. They attended dances and roller-skating parties in their building’s basement. They delighted in the new playground, which boasted swings, sliding boards, and a jungle gym. Their brothers frequented the project’s grass baseball diamond, which was regularly mowed.

All of them spent time at the spanking new Boys Club, which had a gym and in later years an indoor Olympic-size swimming pool. On Friday nights, the family attended fish fries. LaJoe joined the 250-member Drum and Bugle Corps, a group so popular among the area’s youth that some came from two miles away to participate. The marching teenagers, attired in white shirts, thin black ties, and black jackets, were a common sight in city parades.

The Anderson children were exposed to politics as well. Their mother was active in the local Democratic Party, and politicians, from aldermen to United States senators, would
visit the complex and on occasion stop by the Andersons’ home. Elected officials paid attention to the people’s concerns. They had to. People were well organized. In the 1960s, area residents formed the Miles Square Federation, which vigorously fought for better schools and health clinics. The Black Panthers’ city headquarters was only a few blocks from Horner. Martin Luther King, Jr., on his visits to the city would preach at the First Congregational Baptist Church.

Nurtured by a strong sense of community as well as the programs at the Boys Club and other social agencies, Henry Horner boasted numerous success stories: an executive at a
Fortune
500 company, a principal of one of the city’s top parochial schools, the medical director of a nearby hospital, and a professor at a local university.

On that first day at Horner, the Anderson family knew only hope and pride. The future seemed bright. The moment, particularly for the children, was nearly blissful. Lelia Mae made doughnuts to celebrate and played Sam Cooke and Nat King Cole albums on her hi-fi through the evening. That night, in one of the back bedrooms, the sisters lay on their narrow cots and stared out the windows. Because there was no one yet living in the building and few streetlights, they could clearly see the moon and the stars. They had their very own window on the universe.

LaJoe held on tightly to those early memories because so much had since gone sour. By the 1970s, the housing authority ran out of money to paint the apartments. The cinder-block walls became permanently smudged and dirty. The building’s bricks faded. The windows had collected too heavy a coat of grime to reflect much of anything. In 1975, someone, to this day unknown, strangled one of LaJoe’s grown sisters in her bathtub. The oldest brother, home on leave from the Marines, died of a heart attack that day on hearing the news. LaJoe’s parents moved out of Horner because of the murder. Roy died of bone cancer in 1982.

LaJoe hadn’t moved far since that fall day in 1956; she was just down the hall, where she now lived with Lafeyette, Pharoah, her two oldest sons, Paul and Terence, and the triplets.

“When I got my apartment I thought this is what it was meant to be,” she said thirty-one years later. “I never looked
any further than here. It wasn’t like it is now. The grass was greener. We had light poles on the front of the building. We had little yellow flowers. We had it all. I really thought this was it. And I never knew, until I lost it all, that it wasn’t.”

By 1987, the thirty-four acre Henry Horner complex wasn’t the largest of the city’s nineteen public housing developments. That title went to the two-mile long Robert Taylor Homes, which was home to fifteen thousand people. Nor was Henry Horner the most dangerous. That distinction alternately went to Rockwell Gardens, a neighboring complex, and Cabrini-Green, which in 1981 was the site of so many shootings—eleven killed and thirty-seven wounded in the first two months—that the city’s mayor, Jane Byrne, chose to move in. Along with a contingent of police and bodyguards, she stayed for three weeks to help restore order. Some, including LaJoe, viewed the move as gutsy and brave. But that single act by Byrne, more than any murder or plea for help, highlighted the isolation and alienation of these poor, mostly black inner-city islands. It was as if the mayor, with her entourage of police, advisers, and reporters, had deigned to visit some distant and perilous Third World country—except that Cabrini-Green sat barely eight blocks from the mayor’s posh Gold Coast apartment.

Henry Horner’s buildings range from seven to fifteen stories and cover eight blocks. The architect surely had an easy time designing the development, for it is only one block wide, leaving little room for experimentation with the placement of the high-rises. The buildings, with a few exceptions, line each side of the block, leaving the corridor in between for playground equipment, basketball courts, and parking lots. A narrow street once cut through the development’s midsection, but that has long since been displaced and is now part of the concrete play area. At first that pleased the parents, who worried about their children getting hit by speeding cars, but later it served to isolate parts of the complex even more, making it easier for criminals to operate with impunity.

In the summer of 1987, six thousand people lived at Horner, four thousand of them children. They would quickly tell you that they dared not venture out at night. At Horner, for every
one thousand residents there were approximately forty violent crimes reported, a rate nearly twice that of Chicago’s average.

Inside their apartment’s hallway, Lafeyette and Pharoah huddled on the floor, sweating in the early July heat. Pharoah shook with each gun pop, his big eyes darting nervously from one end of the long hallway to the other. He clutched a garbage bag filled with aluminum cans he’d collected; his small body was curled up against the security of the cool concrete wall.

The muscles in Lafeyette’s face tensed. He had his hands full, watching over Pharoah and the triplets. The young ones knew enough to stay in the windowless corridor away from possible stray bullets, but they chattered and fought until Tiffany, too restless to sit still for long, stood up. Lafeyette shoved her back down.

“We wanna go,” whined Tiffany.

“Be quiet,” admonished her brother. “You crazy?”

The narrow hall of their four-bedroom apartment had become their fallout shelter. Stray bullets had zipped through their apartment before, once leaving two holes the size of nickels in the olive-green living room curtains. Another time a bullet found its way into the hallway; it had traveled through a bedroom window and the bedroom door, missing Terence by inches. The children now knew enough to sit away from the doorways.

The five children squatted on the musty floor long after the shooting subsided. LaJoe, who huddled with them, could sit still no longer. Wearing a T-shirt that read
WIPE OUT GRAFFITI
, she walked into the kitchen and began to sweep the floors. Cleaning house was the only way she could clear her mind, to avoid thinking about what might happen or what might have been. It was cathartic in demanding focus and concentration. She scrubbed and washed and rearranged furniture, particularly when things got tense—with family problems, shootings, and deaths. The kids knew to stay out of her way, except for Lafeyette, who, like his mother, also found cleaning a useful distraction.

“Lemme help you,” he begged, still sitting by the wall. “You figuring to start cleaning up ’cause you upset. You figuring to
start cleaning up.” LaJoe didn’t hear him. “Mama, let me help you. Ain’t nobody gonna get killed out there today.”

“Stay there, Lafie. Someone’s gotta watch the triplets,” LaJoe said.

Lafeyette shrugged, but resigned to his duties, he slithered down the wall, resting on the floor as he kept the triplets in check and watched his mother work.

For LaJoe, cleaning the apartment seemed nearly hopeless. The apartment never looked perfectly neat and orderly: a chair always faced in the wrong direction or a rug’s edge curled up or under itself. Eight people lived in the apartment—LaJoe, her five youngest children, and the two older brothers, Terence and Paul. It swelled to nine if the children’s father stayed over. He would sleep on the couch or, on occasion, in the double bed with the triplets. A stack of food-caked dishes, waiting to be washed, often filled the kitchen sink, or the plastic garbage container overflowed with leftovers and paper. Roaches were everywhere. Even when the housing authority sprayed, the roaches came back. Once a small colony of them took refuge from the pesticides in a small portable radio that belonged to one of the older children. The insects were discovered days later, thriving. Maggots nested in the building, mostly by the undersized incinerator, which overflowed with garbage.

Even had LaJoe been able to catch up with the dirty dishes and misplaced furniture and overflowing garbage, the apartment itself defied cleanliness. In keeping with the developers’ tight-fisted policies in building these high-rises, the housing authority continued its miserly regard for their upkeep. Maintenance was a bare minimum.

The walls inside the home were what the Soviets first saw, white cinder block. Along with the encrusted, brown linoleum-tiled floor, which was worn through in many places, and the exposed heating pipes, which snaked through the apartment, the home at night resembled a dark, dank cave. The bedrooms were particularly drab. Not much bigger than some prison cells—they were ten by eleven feet—they got little sunlight.

Because the bedrooms’ shallow closets had no doors, they were an invitation to messiness. Clothes spilled into the rooms. For all practical purposes, there was no distinction between the closets and the rest of the rooms; the closets looked like two-foot
indentations in the walls. They were constructed to accommodate curtains, but the curtain rods had long been missing.

The kitchen and living room blurred together. They were essentially one large room partly divided by a cinder-block wall that ran halfway down the middle.

The thirty-year-old kitchen cabinets, constructed of thin sheet metal, had rusted through. They were pockmarked with holes. LaJoe organized her dishes and cookware so as to avoid having them fall through these ragged openings. She usually piled them in the corners of the cupboards.

The housing authority used to paint the apartments once every five years, but with the perennial shortage of money, in the 1970s it had stopped painting altogether. LaJoe couldn’t remember when her apartment was last painted. No matter how hard she scrubbed, the smudged walls never looked clean.

But the apartment’s two bathrooms were in the worst shape of all. Neither had a window, and the fans atop the building, which had provided much needed air circulation, had been stolen. In the first bathroom, a horrible stench, suggesting raw, spoiled meat, periodically rose from the toilet. On such days, LaJoe and the family simply avoided using that bathroom. Sometimes she would pour ammonia in the toilet to mitigate the smell. LaJoe had heard rumors that the previous tenants had performed abortions there, and she attributed the smell to dead fetuses.

The second bathroom housed the family’s one bathtub. There was no shower, a luxury the children had never experienced. The tub doubled as a clothes washer, since the building’s laundry was long ago abandoned, and the closest one was now a mile away. The tub’s faucet couldn’t be turned off. A steady stream of scalding hot water cascaded into the tub day and night. The boys had learned to sleep through the noise, but the constant splashing drove LaJoe batty. She had considered muffling it by placing a towel under the faucet, but then she realized that the bath would overflow. Instead, she used the towel to wedge shut the bathroom door, which was missing a knob.