How Long Will I Cry? Read online

  Copyright © Miles Harvey

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means,

  or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written

  permission of the publisher, except

  to review.

  Published by

  Big Shoulders Books

  DePaul University

  Smashwords Edition

  Chicago, Illinois

  First Edition

  ISBN: 978-1-62890-155-9

  Library of Congress

  Control Number 2013949113

  Cover photo by Carlos Javier Ortiz

  www.carlosjortiz.com

  Big Shoulders Books logo design

  by Robert Soltys

  Table of Contents

  Introduction

  Foreword

  Love Without Condition

  My Life Was Only Worth A Few Guns

  Why Should I Harass People For Standing On The Corner?

  Four Bullets

  My Son Lazarus

  What The Watchman Saw

  Don’t Trust Nobody

  Meet The Juju-Man

  Like Walking Through Baghdad

  God, Are You Trying To Get My Attention?

  A Message For Stupid People

  Defending The Goners

  The Whole World Stopped

  Death Is Contagious

  Unanswered Prayers

  A Twig In a Tornado

  Everything About Me Is Tainted

  What’s One Bullet?

  You Live By It, You Die By It

  Tomrrow Is Not Promised

  The Dream Club’s Chief Dreamer

  Trying to Break the Cycle

  The Girl Was a Fighter

  Where In This Community Does It Say We Care?

  Hell Broke Loose

  I Only Work Here

  The Walk Home

  When a Bullet Enters a Body

  Both Feet Out

  How Dare I Still Be Happy?

  Home Was The Three of Us

  The Funeral Home Lady

  The Scar Tells a Story

  How Do You Learn to Live Again?

  Final Words: Take a Risk

  Acknowledgements

  Resource Guide

  Study Guide

  About the Editors

  VOICES OF

  YOUTH VIOLENCE

  Miles Harvey

  Editor

  Chris Green and Jonathan Messinger

  Associate Editors

  Lisa Applegate and Molly Pim

  Managing Editors

  Bethany Brownholtz,

  Rachel Hauben Combs and

  Stephanie Gladney Queen

  Associate Managing Editors

  Becky Maughan

  Copy Editor

  Published by Big Shoulders Books

  DePaul University

  About Big Shoulders Books

  Big Shoulders Books aims to produce one book each year that engages intimately with the Chicago community and, in the process, gives graduate students in DePaul University’s Master of Arts in Writing and Publishing program hands-on, practical experience in book publishing. The goal of Big Shoulders Books is to disseminate, free of charge, quality anthologies of writing by and about Chicagoans whose voices might not otherwise be shared. Each year, Big Shoulders Books hopes to make small but meaningful contributions to discussions of injustice and inequality in Chicago, as well as to celebrate the tremendous resilience and creativity found in all areas of the city.

  The views and opinions expressed in this book do not necessarily reflect those of DePaul University or the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences, and should not be considered an endorsement by DePaul for any purpose.

  About This Book

  THIS BOOK IS FREE. The editors ask that by taking a copy, you agree to support groups working on anti-

  violence efforts in Chicago. Please donate money—or your time—to one of the organizations listed at the end of this volume. When you’re done, pass the book along to someone else (for free, of course), so that he or she can give. It adds up

  About Our Funders

  This book was made possible by

  grants from the Vincentian

  Endowment Fund at DePaul and the William and Irene Beck Foundation. Additional support came from

  Steppenwolf Theatre Company and Now Is The Time, a citywide call

  to action against youth violence. Funding for Now Is The Time was

  provided by the Hive Chicago Learning Network, through the Smart Chicago Collaborative, a joint project of The Chicago Community Trust, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the City of Chicago.

  The Richard H. Driehaus Foundation provided funding for educational

  programming connected to this book.

  Additional financial, logistical and/

  or administrative support was

  provided by the following organizations at DePaul University:

  Irwin W. Steans Center for

  Community-based Service Learning

  Egan Urban Center

  Beck Research Initiative

  Women’s and Gender Studies

  Program

  Office of Institutional Diversity

  and Equity

  Department of English

  College of Liberal Arts and

  Social Sciences

  The following DePaul University

  students participated in this project:

  Emily Ce Anderson

  Lindsey Anderson

  Mickie Anderson

  Leah Andrews

  Ruben Anzures Oyorzabal

  Lisa Applegate

  Steve Barclay

  Zachary Baron

  Nicole Bartoloni

  Meredith Boe

  Ashley Bowcott

  Ashley Braun

  Bethany Brownholtz

  Nathan Brue

  Kevin Cahalin

  Borja Cabada Anon

  Matthew Caracciolo

  Mariah Chitouras

  Adam Cohen

  Rachel Hauben Combs

  Teresa Cronin

  David Cueman

  Emma CushmanWood

  Mollie Diedrich

  Anna Dron

  Jerae Duffin

  Lynneese Duckwiley

  Rose Gregory

  Mellissa Gyimah

  Shawn Haynes

  Bridget Herman

  Bethanie Hestermann

  Timothy Hillegonds

  Maria Hlohowskyj

  Rachel House

  Stefanie Jackson-Haskin

  Tannura Jackson

  Megan Jurinek

  Olivia Karim

  Haileselassie Keleta

  Bryan Kett

  Danielle Killgore

  Marc Leider

  Christopher Lites

  Brittany Markowski

  Genna Mickey

  Adrienne Moss

  Ashley Mouldon

  LaDawn Norwood

  Michael O’Malley

  Miriam Ofstein

  Sara Patek

  Molly Pim

  Robin Posavetz

  Stephanie Gladney Queen

  Sydney Riebe

  Ariel Ryan

  Jacob Sabolo

  Genevieve Salazar

  Tyler Sandquist

  Amy Sawyer

  Samantha Schamrowski

  Jason Schapiro

  Kristin Scheffers

  Monica Schroeder

  Michael Shapiro

  Barbara Sieczka

  Erika Simpson

  Kendall Steinle

  Annelise Stiles

  Ann Szekely

&n
bsp; Molly Tranberg

  Jaida Triblet

  Danielle Turney

  Michael Van Kerckhove

  Sarah Vroman

  James Walsh

  Colleen Wick

  Alexis Wigodsky

  Nora Williamson

  Kaitlyn Willison

  For those who died and those who are still bleeding.

  Introduction

  By Miles Harvey

  This book began with a brutal murder, a viral video and a cup of coffee.

  The murder took place on Sept. 24, 2009, in the Roseland neighborhood on Chicago’s Far South Side. On that Thursday afternoon, a fight broke out between two groups of students from the nearby public high school, Christian Fenger Academy High School. There had been a shooting outside the school earlier in the day, and now tensions exploded into a wild melee near a local community center. Acting “out of impulse,” as one of the participants later put it, about 50 young people swarmed toward each other, a few of them wielding huge pieces of lumber as weapons.

  Somebody slammed one of those boards into the skull of a 16-year-old named Derrion Albert; somebody else punched the honor student in the face; somebody else swung another board down on him like an ax; somebody else stomped on his head and left him to die; somebody else shot a video, laughing while he filmed. And when that video went viral on the Internet, it caused a national uproar. U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan described the killing as “terrifying, heartbreaking and tragic,” while Attorney General Eric Holder, who traveled to Chicago with Duncan shortly after the incident to call for a “sustained national conversation” on youth violence, claimed the murder had left an “indelible mark” on the American psyche.

  I normally don’t pay much attention to the platitudes of politicians, but by that time I was beginning to realize that Derrion Albert’s death had left an indelible mark on my psyche, too. Chicago is the most racially segregated city in the country,1 and it’s easy for those of us who live here to think of other neighborhoods as distant planets. Before that video, I had pretty much viewed youth violence as someone else’s problem. But now I could no longer turn away. I wondered how such carnage could happen in my own city, and then I began to wonder how I could stand around and let it happen. But what was one white, middle-aged creative-writing professor supposed to do about it? What was anybody supposed to do, for that matter? The problem just seemed too big and scary and complex.

  Then one day I happened to have coffee with Hallie Gordon, an old friend. As the artistic and educational director of Steppenwolf for Young Adults, Hallie produces plays aimed at teenage audiences. She spends a lot of time with young people, and she’s passionate about their problems. Like me, she was frustrated and angry about Derrion Albert’s death; unlike me, she had a plan. Her dream, she explained, was to produce a documentary theater piece about youth violence in Chicago, a production that would weave together the real stories of real people, told in their own words. The trouble, she said, was that she didn’t have anyone to go out and do the interviews. For me, it was one of those aha! moments. “What would you think,” I asked her, “about the possibility of my students doing those interviews?”

  Our plans were modest at first, but things quickly snowballed. Before long, Hallie had not only received the enthusiastic backing of Steppenwolf Artistic Director Martha Lavey, but she had also enlisted the support of other arts and cultural organizations in Chicago. The result was Now Is The Time, a citywide initiative aimed at inspiring young people to make positive change in their communities and stop youth violence and intolerance. Partner organizations eventually included the Chicago Public Library, Facing History and Ourselves, and more than 15 of Chicago’s finest theater companies.

  The administration at DePaul, meanwhile, proved equally enthusiastic, allowing me to set up special courses for both graduates and undergraduates and providing the project with financial and logistical support through the Irwin W. Steans Center for Community-based Service Learning, the Egan Urban Center, the Beck Research Initiative, the Vincentian Endowment Fund and other programs.

  Soon my students started coming back with stories—amazing, heartbreaking, brutal, beautiful stories, far more stories than we could fit into a single play. Long before How Long Will I Cry?: Voices of Youth Violence premiered at Steppenwolf Theatre on Feb. 26, 2013, we knew we needed to collect as many of those stories as possible in a book.

  The interviews for this volume were conducted over the course of two years. While more than 900 Chicagoans were being murdered in 2011 and 2012, creative-writing students from DePaul fanned out all over the city to speak with people whose lives were directly affected by the bloodshed.

  Most of the interviews lasted one or two hours, after which students took their audio recorders home and transcribed the entire session word-for-word, a hugely time-consuming task. Whenever possible, the student then went back for a second interview, attempting not just to firm up facts but to pin down whatever it was that made the participant tick, even if it was hard for that person to articulate.

  Often, these second interviews produced remarkable results. Young people who had denied gang involvement in the first interview, for example, opened up about their lives on the streets—and about their anxieties. Parents of victims began to talk more frankly about their murdered children. Community activists and public officials set aside their well-rehearsed talking points and spoke from their hearts.

  Once the interviews were complete, students began shaping the raw transcripts into narratives for this book—a process that the legendary oral historian Studs Terkel once likened to “the way a sculptor looks at a block of stone: inside there’s a shape which he’ll find, and he’ll reveal it by chipping away with a mallet and a chisel.”

  In our case, it wasn’t just one sculptor at work, but a team of artisans. All the narratives in this book have gone through several rounds of careful revision and editing by graduate students—a gifted group that included Lisa Applegate, Bethany Brownholtz, Rachel Hauben Combs, Stephanie Gladney Queen, Molly Pim and the members of Professor Chris Green’s editing course. Our goal was always the same—to make every piece as coherent and compact as possible, without losing the poetry of the speaker’s voice.

  One of the trickiest issues we struggled with was dialect. It was true, for example, that some of the African-Americans we interviewed said “ax” instead of “ask.” But it was equally true that white interviewees, with their nasal Chicago accents, often pronounced the same word “ee-yask.” And if we used a phonetic spelling of one ethnic group’s pronunciation of a word, shouldn’t we do the same for all groups? Linguists, after all, insist that everyone speaks with a dialect. Keeping this in mind, I urged my students to steer clear of nonstandard spelling and try instead to capture the cadences, speech patterns, inflections and slang of their subjects. Nonetheless, we found that some words and phrases sounded too formal in standard English, while others simply got lost in translation. The terms “finna” and “fitta,” for example, no doubt derive from “fixing to,” but they now have taken on linguistic lives of their own. In the end, we decided to use dialect on a case-by-case basis, but only sparingly and always with the dignity of the speaker in mind.

  Once the narratives were close to completion, we sent them to the respective interviewees for fact-checking and review. I confess that this part of our plan did not sit well with me in the beginning. Years of training and experience as a journalist had taught me that allowing a source to see a story in advance was questionable on an ethical level and often unwise on a practical one. But the students convinced me that we had a special obligation to the people who had opened their lives and hearts to us. If we were planning to present these narratives as their stories, told in their words, didn’t they deserve to have creative control over the material?

  It took weeks—and in some cases, months—to track down all the people whose stories appear on these pages. Nonetheless, this book is deeper and richer as a result of that final r
ound of give-and-take with participants, many of whom supplied vivid new details that helped make the material come alive on the page. And it’s a tribute to their courage and honesty that relatively few of them ended up asking to remove, alter or otherwise sanitize things they had said, no matter how sensitive or controversial.

  This book contains crude language and graphic descriptions of violence—the result of our decision not to censor the narratives. There was only one exception to this rule: protecting the safety of our subjects. Toward that end, we have changed the names of several people who risk retaliation under “no snitch” codes or might otherwise be endangered by identifying themselves. In a couple of cases, other minor details have also been fudged to protect the security of certain participants. As with all of the narratives in How Long Will I Cry?, however, their stories remain faithful to the speakers’ words and have been verified to the best of our abilities.