How Long Will I Cry? Read online

  The title of this book (and the theater piece) comes from a conversation I had with the Rev. Corey Brooks, a South Side pastor who, in the winter of 2011 and 2012, spent 94 days camped out on the roof of an abandoned motel to draw attention to gun violence. When I asked Brooks what Bible story had been his biggest inspiration during the vigil, he pointed to the Book of Habakkuk from the Old Testament. Set in an age of bloodshed and injustice, Habakkuk tells the story of a prophet who goes up to a watchtower. There, the prophet speaks to God:

  O Lord, how long will I cry, and you will not hear? I cry out to you

  “Violence!” and will you not save?2

  Those words were written about events that transpired in 600 B.C.—but when I read them in 2012, I was struck by how they spoke to the frustration and rage that so many Chicagoans feel about the slaughter on our streets today—the same frustration and rage that had prompted Hallie Gordon and me to undertake this effort in the first place. I was also struck by how that passage touched upon the two goals Hallie and I had envisioned for this project from the start.

  This book embodies both definitions of the word cry. On the one hand, it is intended as an expression of grief, a means of mourning the hundreds of young Chicagoans whose lives are lost every year. On the other, it is meant to be a howl of protest, a call to action, a cry for peace. But more than anything else, it is an effort to hear. When we began this project, I told my students that we live in a world where everybody’s talking—blogging, texting, tweeting, Friending, shouting each other down—but nobody’s really listening. So that was their assignment: just go out and listen.

  No book, of course, will stop the violence. But I believe in the transformative power of telling stories. I believe that stories connect us with other people and open us to new worlds, that they help us discover ourselves and show us ways to change, that they have the power to heal. And I believe this, too—that stories can save lives.

  The people in this book regularly find themselves in difficult and dangerous situations, the kind where one choice seems worse than the next. What’s amazing is how often they respond with grace, resourcefulness and bravery. My hope is that How Long Will I Cry? might inspire readers to act with similar courage. For young people in violent neighborhoods, that may mean the courage not to give in to the perverse logic of gangs, not to reach for a gun, not to lose sight of your own humanity and potential. For the rest of us, those lucky enough to live in places where our children don’t have to risk their lives every time they step out the door, it means the courage not to turn away. These stories belong to us all.

  ENDNOTES

  1 These results are from a January 2012 census data study conducted by the Manhattan Institute. See Edward Glaeser and Jacob Vigdor, “The End of the Segregated Century,” Civic Report, No. 66. http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/cr_66.htm

  2 This version of Habakkuk 1:2 is from the World Bible translation, with one

  minor change. I have substituted “O Lord” for “Yahweh,” as is often done in other translations.

  Foreword

  By Alex Kotlowitz

  The numbers are unimaginable. During this century’s first decade in Chicago, 5,352 people were killed and, according to the University of Chicago Crime Lab, another 24,392 shot. So many that the violence has necessitated its own language: “To change” someone is to kill them; “a black cat” refers to a woman who has children fathered by at least two men who have been murdered. So many that funeral homes have rules about burying the murdered: Only during the day. No hats. Police present. So many that during the spring and summer, makeshift street side memorials—consisting of balloons and flowers and liquor bottles—pop up like perennials in full bloom. So many that people arm themselves in self-defense, and so the police pull anywhere from 7,000 to 8,000 guns off the street each year. So many that “R.I.P.” has become so commonplace it’s scrawled on walls, embroidered on shirts and hats, and tattooed on bodies. So many that should you walk into a classroom in any of these communities virtually every child will tell you they’ve seen someone shot. Indeed, the vast majority of murders—82 percent of them in 2011—occur in public places such as parks and streets and alleyways.

  I recently met one high school student, Thomas, who rattled off for his social worker the people he’s seen shot. The first was at a birthday party for a friend who was turning 11. She was shot and killed when a stray bullet struck her in the head. Then Thomas saw his brother shot, on two occasions, the second time paralyzing him. He saw a friend shot while waiting at the bus stop. And then in the summer of 2012, as Thomas chatted on a porch with a fellow student, a boy with a gun approached. Thomas begged him not to shoot, but he ignored those pleas, and shot the 16-year-old friend three times in her torso. She died on the porch. After this last incident (“incident” seems completely inadequate in referring to such bloodshed) Thomas retreated into himself, unwilling, unable to acknowledge his grief. He could only manage to tell his social worker, “I want to hurt someone. I want to hurt someone.” It was the only way he could articulate the pain.

  We think that somehow people get hardened to the violence, that they get accustomed to the shootings. I’ve made that mistake myself. When I first met Lafeyette, one of the two boys whose lives I chronicled in There Are No Children Here, he recounted the time a teenaged neighbor had been shot in a gang war and stumbled into the stairwell outside his apartment. There, the boy died. I remember that as Lafeyette recounted this moment, he showed virtually no emotion, and I thought to myself, he didn’t care. Over time I came to realize that the problem wasn’t that Lafeyette didn’t have feelings, it’s that he felt too much, and the one thing he could do to protect himself was to try to compartmentalize his life, to push the dark stuff into a corner where he hoped it wouldn’t haunt him.

  But the violence festers. It tears at one’s soul. I’ve met kids who experience flashbacks, kids who have night terrors, kids—like Thomas—who become filled with rage, kids who self-medicate, kids who have physical ailments (Lafeyette would get stomachaches whenever there were shootings), kids whose very being is defined by the thunderous deaths around them. For many, it’s a single act of violence around which the rest of a childhood will revolve. And then there are parents who must bury a child, who swim under a sea of what-ifs and regrets. One mother and father I knew visited their 15-year-old son’s gravesite every day for nearly a year, including grilling meals there. A mother whose 14-year-old boy was executed by a gang member grieved so deeply that for a period of time she only had a taste for sand. Another mother so mourned the loss of her son she left his bedroom just as he’d left it as a kind of memorial: his slippers by the end of his bed, his basketball balanced precariously on his dresser and his collection of M&M dispensers lined up on a closet shelf. In this remarkable book, you’ll meet a number of parents who have lost children to the city’s violence. One of them, Pamela Hester-Jones, says of her son Lazarus, “He loved art and loved to dance. He liked jazz music, and he loved to draw. He loved to swim, he loved going to play golf, he loved going to the movies, he loved Hot Pockets and vanilla ice cream. … I let my son Lazarus go outside. I would never do it again.” Is that what we’ve come to? That the world is such a threatening place that it’s best not to let your children leave their house?

  These are parents and communities who have lost loved ones. They’ve lost ground. They’ve lost hope. They’ve lost trust. They’ve lost a part of themselves. Drive through the city’s West and South Sides, and you’ll be greeted by an array of Block Club signs, and on each of them, neighbors have listed not what they celebrate, but rather what they dread: “No gambling (Penny pitching or dice playing.)” “No drug dealing.” “No alcohol drinking.” “No sitting in or on cars.” They speak not to their dreams, but rather to their fears. These are communities, to borrow a term from the world of psychology, that are hyper-vigilant, that are back on their heels, trying, understandably, to keep the world at bay.

  In How Long Will I C
ry?, one former gang member told his interviewer, “We’re telling each other, ‘You’re not alone in this.’” It’s something many need to remind themselves of because more than anything the violence, the killings, push people away from each other like slivers of magnets of opposite poles. Neighbors come to distrust neighbors. Residents come to distrust the police, and the police come to distrust the residents. The police decry the no-snitching maxim, and think it’s solely because residents don’t respect the police. There is, indeed, a history there, most notably the torture committed by Commander Jon Burge and his underlings—though what really had people incensed was not so much that it had occurred but that for so many years those in positions of power, from Mayor Daley on down, refused to concede that it ever happened. But people also don’t snitch because they don’t trust each other, because they no longer feel a part of something, because they no longer feel safe.

  Which brings us to the blunt, discomforting truth about the violence. Most of it occurs in deeply impoverished African-American and Latino neighborhoods, places where aspiration and ambition has withered and shrunk like, well, a raisin in the sun. Look at a map of the murders and shootings, and it creates a swath through the South and West Sides, like a thunderstorm barreling through the city. How can there not be a link between a loss of hope and the ease with which spats explode into something more? There’s a moment when we were filming The Interrupters, and Ameena Matthews, one of the three Violence Interrupters whose work we chronicled, reflected on what she calls “the 30 seconds of rage.” She described it like this: “I didn’t eat this morning. I’m wearing my niece’s clothes. I just was violated by my mom’s boyfriend. I go to school, and here comes someone that bumps into and don’t say excuse me. You hit zero to rage within 30 seconds, and you act out.” In other words, these are young men and women who are burdened by fractured families, by lack of money, by a closing window of opportunity, by a sense that they don’t belong, by a feeling of low self-worth. And so when they feel disrespected or violated, they explode, often out of proportion with the moment, because so much other hurt has built up, like a surging river threatening to burst a dam.

  Then there’s the rest of us who reading the morning newspaper or watching the evening news hear of youngsters gunned down while riding their bike or walking down an alley or coming from a party, and think to ourselves, they must have done something to deserve it, they must have been up to no good. Virtually every teen and young man shot, the police tell us, belonged to a gang, as if that somehow suggests that “what goes around, comes around.” But life in these communities is more tangled than that. You can’t grow up in certain neighborhoods and not be affiliated, because of geography or lineage. (An administrator at one South Side high school estimates that 90 percent of the boys there are identified with one clique or another.) Moreover, it’s often safer to belong than not to belong for you want someone watching your back. And honestly, as Ameena suggests, many if not most of the disputes stem not from gang conflicts but rather from seemingly petty matters like disrespecting someone’s girlfriend, or cutting in line, or simply mean-mugging. This doesn’t explain the madness. Not at all. It’s just to suggest that it’s more complicated and more profound than readings of a daily newspaper or viewings of the evening news would suggest.

  Let’s be frank, these neighborhoods are so physically and spiritually isolated from the rest of us that we might as well be living in different cities. When was the last time you had lunch in Englewood? Or tossed a football in Garfield Park? Or got your car repaired in Little Village? Or went for a stroll in the Back of the Yards? To understand—I mean really understand—what it’s like to grow up in these communities requires a leap of faith—or maybe it’s just a leap. For reasons that no one can really explain, Chicago has been the epicenter for very public and horrifying youth murders—Yummy Sandifer, Eric Morse, Ryan Harris, Derrion Albert and now Hadiya Pendleton. And each time public officials shout, “never again,” and then do very little to strengthen these neighborhoods, do very little to ensure a sense of opportunity—real opportunity—for the kids. Let’s be frank, we’ve abandoned these places, just walked away. We tore down the public housing high-rises, and in places like the State Street corridor have rebuilt just a little over half of what was promised. We talk of dismantling neighborhood schools in communities where the local school is the very fiber that holds things together. A place like Englewood is pockmarked by boarded-up, abandoned homes, so many that on some blocks there are as many as every other structure. Where’s the outcry? Sometimes it feels like even a nod of acknowledgement would do.

  Yet in the midst of all this, people go about their lives. They hold down jobs. They raise families. They go to school. They play basketball and skip rope. They attend church and get their hair done. They shop and grill and mow their lawns (and the lawns of neighboring vacant lots). They tend their gardens and rake their yards. They gossip and share a beer. In other words, despite the five people each day (on average) who are shot, people still are immersed in the routine and banal. They seek some normalcy. So lest we forget, those in Englewood share more than you might think with those, say, in Lincoln Square. Maybe it’s not a leap of faith that’s required, but rather just simply a faith, that everyone wants the best for themselves and those around them.

  It’s the power of what follows here, the frank and often profound reflections of those who have been there, of those who have lost. In their words, often philosophical and poetic, they move us to see what they see and to hear what they hear. They make us all feel less alone.

  LOVE WITHOUT CONDITION

  T-awannda Piper

  The beating death of 16-year-old Derrion Albert, near Fenger High School in 2009, focused worldwide attention on the horrors of street violence in Chicago. The video of that incident—which went viral on the Internet and received widespread airplay on TV—was a profound shock for many viewers. It shows young men bludgeoning Derrion Albert with scrap lumber, then continuing to beat and kick him as he crumples to the street. Off-screen, meanwhile, we hear someone—presumably the man holding the camera—laughing approvingly and, as if watching a prizefight, shouting “damn” when the attackers land new blows on the victim.

  But if the video is a testament to the viciousness and callousness of urban violence, it also documents an act of great courage and humanity. Just before the film concludes, the blurry image of a woman rushing into the crowd appears in the frame. Along with other bystanders, she lifts the limp body of the boy and drags him into a nearby building, the Agape Community Center on 111th Street.

  Her name is T-awannda Piper, a longtime community activist in the Far South Side neighborhood of Roseland, where the attack took place. A dignified and thoughtful woman of deep faith, Piper has not spoken publicly about the incident since immediately after it took place. The following narrative is based on her first in-depth interview on the attack and its aftermath—a conversation she agreed to only after careful consideration. “I want to make sure that, whatever comes from this project,” she says, “it is going to benefit the people I love, the community I love, as well as the city at large.”

  I moved to this community in the summer of 1998. I am originally from Washington, D.C. I attended college in North Carolina, got involved with a ministry called Campus Crusade for Christ as a student. I grew up in an at-risk community and felt like the Lord was leading me to go back and work with young people who were considered at risk. One of the places Campus Crusade owned was in the city of Chicago. That ministry is called the Agape Community Center and it’s on the Far South Side in Roseland.

  Agape means God’s unconditional love. Love without condition. Every Thursday night for many years, the Agape Center had what we call Teen Night. Teenagers from all over the Roseland neighborhood, from all different high schools, would come. We’d have snacks, we’d have games, and then we’d have some time centered around the Bible. And on a given night, we could have 60 to 80 kids there. And what I loved about th
at was there were some kids who were involved in gangs, but the Agape Center was neutral territory. They did not bring that to the center. They respected our rules: remove your hats, pull your pants up, take your earrings out. So just to see that kind of ministry happen with young people was amazing to me.

  The attack on Derrion Albert took place as I was setting up for our Teen Night on a Thursday afternoon. There’s a window at the receptionist’s desk of our building. It’s the only window we have on the first floor. For security reasons, all of the other windows are on top of the building. And the receptionist said to me, “T,” she says, “there’s a group of kids in front of the building looking like they’re getting ready to fight.” I ran over and said, “Call 911 and tell them ‘mob action’ on 111th.” If there’s a group of kids outside fighting and you say, “mob action,” it gets the police there quicker. That’s why I said it. I had no other reason.

  But then, I looked out the window and I looked at the TV monitor for our security cameras. I was just immediately overwhelmed, because there were a lot of kids out there. And so I ran upstairs and I told the other staff in my building, “We need your help.” I was just yelling out loud, “We need your help downstairs. There’s a group of kids outside of our building fighting.” I came back down to the front desk, and that’s when I saw the attack on Derrion.

  Almost immediately when I got to the window, I saw a young man take what looked like a two-by-four—it was a big piece of wood—and hit someone over the head with a board. And so, I saw the injured boy fall to the ground and try to get back up, and another young man came and punched him. They began to kick him, and the next thing I remember was the second hit with the board. I turned to my co-worker and said, “They’re gonna kill him.” And before I knew it, I was outside of the building.