An American Summer

by Alex Kotlowitz

  I would come home from work and Robert would be at my house. I would come home from my mother’s house and Robert would be there. I moved on Robert’s birthday and I did not tell him where and I just remember Robert shouting my name at the top of his lungs to my window and I asked him, how did you find me? He looked at me like, you know the face he makes, “You thought I couldn’t find you?”

  A month before he was killed, Erin moved. She had been living in a small house behind her mom’s but felt she needed to get away from Robert. She didn’t want his troubles seeping into her and her kids’ lives. When Robert found out she had relocated, he got her cousin Tevin to point out the apartment building where she was now staying, and at midnight Erin was roused from her bed by someone yelling, “Eeerin! Eeerin!” She raised her bedroom window, and Robert was standing on the street, three stories below. You just gonna move without telling me? he yelled. I gotta go to work tomorrow, Erin hollered back. When Robert threatened to climb the gate, Erin buzzed him in. He wandered through the rooms and muttered, I like this apartment. He then left. He just wanted to know where I was, Erin told me. And that I was okay.

  And I still remember when Robert went to jail a few weeks ago. Tevin came over screaming and I called his mom to find out what happened and she said he would be out and sure enough that Saturday he was out and he was at my house. And we had a long, long talk and Bobby, my son, was really upset and he asked his dad: “Daddy, please don’t go to jail anymore. I thought I wasn’t going to see you at my eighth-grade graduation.” And Robert just cried and cried on my couch about it. And I told him: “Your son means what he say, he wants you to be at his eighth-grade graduation.” And so Robert promised he wouldn’t go to jail anymore.

  Two months before he was killed, Robert, along with another young man and a woman, was stopped by the police and strip-searched on the street, in front of passersby. A neighbor videotaped it from her second-floor apartment and uploaded it to the Internet. The police handcuffed Robert to burglar bars on a first-floor window and pulled his pants down and performed a body cavity search. He was humiliated. Robert and his two friends ended up filing a lawsuit against the police. He told Erin he wanted to leave the city and wanted her to join him. We got to get out of here, he told her. Why you in such a rush now? she asked. When I was ready to go, you weren’t. I’m not going anywhere with you, not if you’re gonna be doing this. I don’t want to go anywhere if I got to worry about you going to jail. He talked about going to Iowa, where some of Erin’s relatives had migrated and where they’d found good-paying jobs at a Kraft Heinz factory. The couple stayed up much of the night, talking. Robert pleaded with Erin to leave with him. What he didn’t tell her is that a few days earlier, he’d been shot at, and he was afraid.

  The last memory that I have of Robert, it was Nani’s last day of school. They were having a party and they asked us to get some snacks and so we went to the store. And then we snuck back to my house, and, uh…

  Erin looks towards the ceiling, shaking her head, as if she’s sharing this inside joke with everyone, as if to say, You know Robert. She laughs awkwardly.

  Robert was just holding me so close—telling me how tired he was and how he wanted to just leave Chicago and he wanted me to pack my stuff and go with him. And I told him no. And he said he wanted to come home and I told him no, because the streets was just torn between us. And I told him I liked my plain life, and he just couldn’t understand that, that money didn’t make me happy. And then I was sitting in my car and my friend just texted me and Robert just flared up and jumped up out his car. He told me I couldn’t have nobody playing with me and I said, “Robert, you’re not my man,” and he said, “I’m always your man.” We laughed. That was the last time I saw Robert or spoke to Robert.

  Robert was killed the next day. While he was sitting in his car with a friend, someone walked up and shot him through the window. Erin insists that a friend set up Robert. After Erin delivered the eulogy, she walked from the podium, and her legs gave out from under her. A friend had to hold her up to keep her from folding over. She went out into the hot, humid air, where some men had unbuttoned their shirts to cool off. In the church’s parking lot, police officers made their presence felt as a police helicopter hovered overhead, not uncommon at funerals when they expect trouble. In the gaggle of people milling about, Erin noticed the friend who she believed had had something to do with Robert’s death, and so did Robert’s uncle, who is in his fifties. The uncle punched the friend, which led to a melee. The police dispersed the crowd before things escalated and then escorted Erin and her children to a waiting car. They headed to Mount Hope Cemetery, where—because so many murder victims are buried there—police search cars before they enter.

  Erin told me that the last time she saw Robert, just the day before his death, she told him, I’m not one of those girls who gets excited [by this life]. I buried enough friends already. Her cousin had been killed just a year earlier. I like my boring life, she told him. Robert shot back, All you do is work, work, work. To which Erin replied, What else am I suppose to do?

  Chapter 9

  I Ain’t Going Nowhere, part one

  JULY 8…JULY 9…JULY 10…

  This morning Anita Stewart pulled up in front of Thomas’s house shortly before nine. Thomas’s house appeared to wobble as the blue tarp which covered a gap in the roof rustled in the morning breeze. It was hard for Anita to keep track of the abandoned properties up and down the block, sometimes as many as half a dozen, staggering like punch-drunk boxers, downstairs windows covered by sheets of warped plywood, upstairs windows knocked out, open to the elements. It felt like she was witnessing the remnants of a brawl; even the intact homes looked tired and worn. Add the residents and it was, to put it politely, a rowdy street. Earlier this month Thomas had told Anita to stop coming by. He forbid her, really. Though he wouldn’t say why, he clearly feared for her safety. Just a few weeks earlier, a forty-two-year-old man, Dwayne Duckworth, whom everyone called Duck, had been shot thirteen times coming out of his house. Thomas ran down the street to see why there was all this commotion. “I ain’t never seen so many holes,” he told me. “And when they put him on the stretcher, he was still breathing and he had a cigarette hanging from his mouth.” Duck didn’t make it. People whispered that it was over drugs. I’d been there once when three shots rang out nearby; they’re such everyday sounds that the postman paused for a moment and then continued along his route. Thomas liked to tell stories of the block’s waywardness. Once, he recalled, a drug dealer offered money or drugs to anyone who would dismantle a police camera that had been erected at the top of a lamppost. Thomas and others doubled over in laughter as a desperate addict rammed his pickup into the lamppost, knocking the camera down and doing untold damage to his truck. Thomas was amazed that the driver emerged unscathed.

  Thomas had just completed his junior year at Harper High School, where Anita was one of two social workers. He had failed Spanish and English, and so Anita helped enroll him in summer school, paying the $50 fee. But he had already missed the first week of classes, and Anita knew that if he was to graduate, he needed to complete this summer session. She tried calling Thomas on his cell phone, but he refused to answer. Thomas could be petulant, so much so that Anita and her colleague at Harper had taken to calling him “Big Baby.” As in Hey, Big Baby, get over here or Big Baby, I hear you’re giving your math teacher trouble.

  As Anita trudged up the rickety front stairs of Thomas’s grandmother’s house, she laughed to herself. Too early for Thomas or his brothers, she thought. She relished the quiet. Often when she came by in the afternoons or evenings, Thomas’s older brothers, twins Leon and Deon, would be on the porch with him. Like Thomas, they didn’t talk much. Their faces revealed little. Leon, who was in a wheelchair after being shot two years earlier, looked angry, but it could just as easily have been well-earned sadness. He had recently lost his left leg to an infection. They had a lift installed outside so
that he didn’t need to be carried down the stairs every time he went out. But this morning the porch was empty. Anita knocked, and Thomas’s sister, Stella, answered. Thomas, she said, was still sleeping. She went upstairs to his attic bedroom to rouse him.

  Anita could hear Thomas lumbering down the stairs. She smiled. His jeans and shirt were rumpled, his long dreads hanging over his face like a beaded curtain. She suspected he’d slept in his clothes. Where you been? she asked.

  I ain’t going nowhere. His voice rang with a defiance hard to square with the early hour.

  Yes, you are.

  I ain’t going. You hear me. I already told you, man. The pitch of his voice rose, as it always did when he got agitated.

  I’m not a man, Anita replied.

  I already told you I’m not going.

  Anita had learned to remain firm with Thomas. And patient.

  You are going. I’ll wait in the car—and you can put some new clothes on.

  I told you I ain’t going. He paused in resignation. You get on my nerves.

  Anita chuckled to herself and returned to her car to wait.

  * * *

  —

  When Anita first met Thomas three years earlier, she thought he might be a little off. Maybe, she thought, he heard voices. Her first day at Harper —a struggling and deeply proud school in Englewood—she had stepped into a freshman algebra class and noticed Thomas right away. A broad-shouldered, sad-looking boy, he seemed on edge. His head bowed, he was slowly pacing, while class was in session, from an open window to his desk and back again, as if he were contemplating jumping. Back and forth. Back and forth, muttering to himself, Motherfucker. Motherfucker. Motherfucker. Anita, who had just been hired as the school’s second social worker, reached out to him like she was trying to touch a ghost, her fingers trying to find a place to land. Don’t touch me, he warned, brushing aside her hand.

  Come away from the window, she urged gently. Come sit with me. She had at least got his attention. What’s your name? she asked. He told her, and silently followed Anita to a nearby desk, where they sat across from each other.

  Where d’ya live? Anita asked.

  Seventieth Place.

  I grew up in Englewood, Anita said.

  You did?

  Anita thought she might not be able to engage him. He seemed to move and talk slowly, his voice distant and garbled, as if he were speaking from deep within a cave.

  What school did you go to? she continued.

  Vernon Johns.

  A connection, Anita thought.

  Guess what, I went to Vernon Johns! Do you know Cheap Charlie’s? Thomas nodded. Cheap Charlie owned the corner store by the school. Do you know the reason he’s called Cheap Charlie? If you were a penny short, he wouldn’t let you go. You’d have to return the candy. Anita barely made out Thomas’s smile, his head bowed so low his chin touched his chest.

  Anita went on to share stories of Vernon Johns and of the neighborhood, including the time she stole candy from a local grocery store. Thomas kept his head down, responding to Anita with grunts and groans. He seemed perturbed, but more than anything, she thought, he appeared to be hurting. She just sat there and talked, nothing of substance. She just wanted to connect with him, to pull him out of his state. As she left him that day, she thought to herself, I know something happened to him. I just know.

  Anita, too, had had her share of hardship. When she was young, an uncle molested her. He would grope her, grabbing her rear and her breasts, and threatened to hurt her if she told anyone. He once forced Anita to grip the chain holding his powerful pit bull, King, and had King drag her through the house, crashing into the walls and furniture. When she was twenty, Anita’s anger so consumed her that she confronted him. I remember everything you did, she told him. I’m going to kill you. (He died a few years later of a heart attack.) Anita doesn’t like talking about her uncle, but that experience profoundly shaped her, and the memories have so stayed with her that as an adult she’s joined a support group of women who were abused as children. She knows firsthand how in the wake of trauma all hell can break loose in your heart, so that love and fury and sadness get so stirred together it can be hard to figure out how you’re really feeling, hard to figure out who you really are. She saw that in Thomas, too.

  In the following weeks Anita would stop by that algebra class, usually just to say hello, to ask Thomas how he was doing, and then soon she began to follow him from class to class. She didn’t really have the time for this, but she saw much of herself in Thomas. That was me when I was younger, she thought. Thomas didn’t get into fights at school, but he could be belligerent toward his teachers or simply refuse to attend class. I ain’t doing shit, he told Anita once. I ain’t doing a motherfuckin’ thing. Soon Anita had to split her time between Harper and another high school—a common practice in the cash-strapped Chicago schools—and when she’d return to Harper for her three days every week, Thomas would throw a tantrum. Where you been? You don’t care ’bout nobody. You don’t know nothing ’bout me. Anita would laugh at these small outbursts, and began calling him Big Baby. The name stuck, and that’s how Anita and her colleague, Crystal Smith, would refer to Thomas. “That’s like her son,” Crystal told me. “Her love for Thomas is like the love she has for her own kids. Thomas would always tell Anita, ‘Like, c’mon, don’t talk to them [the other kids].’ ” He wanted Anita to himself.

  Anita and Crystal shared an office, a windowless cinder-block room the size of a large walk-in closet which was tucked away in the center of the building, symbolic, I suppose, of where social workers fit into the hierarchy of our schools. The two met as undergraduates at Chicago State University, and they made an unlikely pair. Anita is serious and restrained. Sometimes she can seem judgmental, if not downright irritated. She’s a straight shooter, her smile often a mixture of pleasure and sarcasm. Where Anita is short and given to jeans and sweaters, Crystal is statuesque, often in pantsuits and dangling earrings. “I’m heels, Anita’s flats,” Crystal once told me. Crystal, who’s deeply religious, is persistently upbeat; it’s hard not to feel good in her presence. When she sees students in the hall, she’ll hug them and tell them, I appreciate you in advance, her signature phrase, which inevitably makes everyone around her smile. But here’s the paradox. Where Anita appears closed and disapproving, she’s the more optimistic of the two.

  The two are so close that when Crystal got pregnant—she was divorced and already had two children, but this was unplanned—Anita promised that she’d help raise this new child, and so when Christopher was born, Anita took him home with her every other weekend, an arrangement which exists to this day. Anita and her husband, Virgil, have three daughters, all of whom are whip-smart and attend selective-enrollment public schools.

  Anita and Crystal are assigned students who for emotional or learning reasons have an Individualized Educational Program, or IEP, and they’re usually students who are struggling with forces that originate well beyond the school walls. One girl refused to leave the side of her drug-addicted mom, even if that meant she had to sleep in a crack house or on the street. One boy had been passed from foster home to foster home and brought order into his life by joining the ROTC. Another had accidentally shot and killed his brother. And then there was Thomas. It was clear from the outset that Thomas didn’t like to talk much. He was incredibly private. Anita learned about him in dribs and drabs, collecting stories as if she had her hands cupped under a dripping faucet.

  Once when Anita visited him in his math class, Thomas joined her on the side, and there, in a muffled voice, told Anita about his childhood friend Siretha White, or Nugget. Anita knew right away who he was talking about, since her sister had grown up with Nugget’s mom. Moreover, Nugget’s death had made front-page news. You knew Nugget? Anita said. Yeah, she live down the block, Thomas replied, uninterested in the connection. Thomas then went on to recount Nu
gget’s surprise birthday party just a few houses down from his; they were celebrating her eleventh birthday. He was ten at the time. He told Anita that they were dancing in the living room—well, the girls were dancing; the boys were all piled on the couch, goading each other and laughing—when they heard gunfire, which wasn’t all that unusual in the neighborhood. The adults yelled for them to run into the kitchen, which they did, but when they looked around, Thomas didn’t see Nugget. Thomas told Anita he sensed something wasn’t right. When the gunfire subsided, he heard screams, and then the sounds of sirens. His memory from that afternoon exists in small bursts, like a photographer’s roll of film. Lying on the kitchen floor to take cover. The police guiding the children through the apartment. Stepping around Nugget, who lay on the living room floor, her brain matter oozing out of her skull onto her braids. He recalls that Nugget had different colored barrettes in her hair. It looked like she was trying to say something, he told Anita. Once outside, he was swallowed by hordes of neighbors who had gathered, soon joined by photographers and reporters. All he can remember about the aftermath was that it was raining—and overhearing a police officer telling another, Fuck, another kid got killed. Only two weeks earlier, just six blocks away, a fourteen-year-old girl had been fatally shot, so this seemed like an unusual sequence of events, and after Nugget’s death there were marches and cries from city officials demanding more police and tighter gun regulations. But Thomas, a quiet ten-year-old boy, needed to push on. And to do so he needed to shove away the images. He recounted this day for Anita in a flat, distant tone that made it feel like he was talking about someone else. He told Anita he no longer went to parties.