An American Summer

by Alex Kotlowitz

  You don’t understand or know your own strength, Anita assured Thomas, who was so withdrawn Anita wondered how he navigated school. I don’t let it get to me, he mumbled.

  Not long afterward she learned that the previous summer Thomas had been with one of his older brothers, Leon, when he was shot across the street from their home. Thomas comforted Leon as he lay on the sidewalk, unable to move his legs. Thomas kept assuring him that the ambulance was on the way. Just hold on, man. Just hold on, Thomas told his brother. His brother, it turns out, was paralyzed from the waist down. Anita wondered if Thomas felt guilty for not doing more.

  During those high school years, the stories just kept coming. Thomas was like the Zelig of Englewood’s violence. There was Nugget. And the time he saw a boy shot in the face in a nearby park. And his friend who was shot in the leg. And his brother. And coming upon two men who’d been shot and killed still sitting in their car, one of them with his head leaning out the window as if he were trying to get some air. “I seen some crazy things,” Thomas once told Anita. The thing about Chicago’s violence is it’s public—very public—and so each shooting or its aftermath is witnessed by many, children and adults alike. I’ve met kids who have flashbacks or are easily startled or have trouble sleeping. I once visited Lawndale Community Christian Academy shortly after two of its students had been killed in separate incidents. The school’s principal, Myra Sampson, told me that students would stop her in the hall, and tell her, I’m going to be next. She told me that the kids were in such a heightened state of arousal they were unable to learn. One boy had to be hospitalized after experiencing auditory hallucinations that one of the deceased students was talking to him. “What’s going to be the impact of having a group of young adults who shut off?” she asked me, somewhat rhetorically. This was Anita’s concern as well.

  Anita began visiting Thomas at his home, just stopping by to check on him. The house, which sat near the corner, was immediately recognizable because of the blue tarp and because of the metal lift by the front porch. As taciturn as Thomas was, Leon was even more so. Their other brother, Deon, was in and out of jail. Anita began to learn bits and pieces about Thomas’s home life. His mother wrestled with drugs, and his father had virtually disappeared from his life. Thomas lived with his grandmother, whom he was especially close to, as well as his older sister, Stella, and his twin brothers. Sometimes an uncle would stay with them, too. Along with cousins. It was enough of a flow that often when Anita came by, whoever answered the door was someone she hadn’t met before. Anita knew. This was her house growing up. Everyone depended on her mother. Two uncles came to live with them, one of whom drank and cursed at people, almost as a manner of affection. A mentally unbalanced neighbor whom everyone called Crazy Stan would hang out on their porch. Anita would disappear into her room, and everyone thought she was stuck up, that she thought she was better than everyone else, when really she couldn’t handle the crowds. “I just didn’t trust people,” she said, by way of explaining that she understood Thomas’s reticence.

  The young people on Thomas’s street, 70th Place, had formed a clique or crew which they called 7-0. They hung together, watched each other’s back. It was hard to grow up in Englewood and not be identified with a gang, given that the cliques were organized block to block. You needed to belong, if for no other reason than because you needed protection. A reporter once asked the police officer assigned to Harper, Aaron Washington, how a boy at the school could avoid becoming a member of a clique. He replied, “You can’t. It’s not going to happen…There is no neutrons anymore. It used to be if you played sports or you were academically better than the average kid, they didn’t bother you. Now it’s different. It doesn’t matter. If you live here, you’re a part of them. You live on that block or you live in that area, you’re one of them…They don’t have a choice.” Virtually every boy at Harper identified with one crew or another, and the names seemed a statement of both place and intent: S-Dubs. Blockheadz. The St. Lawrence Boys. The 7-0s were in a long-standing dispute with the S-Dubs, who were from the area just south. Thomas couldn’t tell me what it was over. No one seemed to know. We just into it, he’d say, as if that was all anyone needed to know. Some of the adults at Harper believed that Thomas was a leader of his small band, but Anita scoffed at that. Once, administration and staff gathered to talk about tensions in the school, and there an administrator claimed that Thomas had forty people under his command. When Anita and Crystal returned to their office, they found Thomas waiting for them. They bristled at the allegations, and so they couldn’t help but tease Thomas.

  “Hey, did you know that you lead the 7-0s?” Crystal asked Thomas.

  “No, I didn’t,” Thomas replied.

  “Every time they say you’ve got forty people under your command.”

  “Every time y’all have a meeting?” Thomas asked.

  “How do you get people to listen to you?” Anita inquired, the sarcasm I’m not sure apparent to Thomas.

  “I don’t know,” he replied.

  “You don’t know, and you sitting here covering your face and you won’t even talk to me,” Anita said, as Thomas sat with his head in his hands, as he often did, his dreads hanging over his eyes. There was no way this kid could be telling others what to do, she’d say. Though sometimes blustery, he was fairly passive. He hardly spoke. He kept to himself.

  As the months went by, Thomas retreated more and more. He found refuge in Anita’s and Crystal’s office. He’d be there, it seemed, all the time, sitting on a chair pressed up against the wall as other students wandered in and out. “He seemed deeply sad,” Anita recalls. He made friends with some of the other kids who came through. He gravitated toward Devonte, the boy who accidentally shot and killed his fourteen-year-old brother, mostly because he, like Thomas, seemed so alone. Devonte had been handling a revolver his brother had found, and it went off, instantly killing his brother. Devonte told Thomas that he had trouble sleeping at night and so took Nyquil to help him rest. Devonte asked Anita and Crystal if they could ask his mom not to throw away his brother’s bed; he needed it to fall asleep. Thomas told Anita, “I don’t think nobody know what Devonte be going through.”

  But the friendship that provided Thomas real ballast was with a girl, Shakaki Asphy, who was a year younger. She could give as well as she could take. She usually wore a baseball cap turned backward, her hair done in French braids. Her pants sagged low off her hips, and she walked with a swagger. “She held her own,” Anita recalled, “like she was one of the boys.” Shakaki and Thomas adored each other, referring to each other as “cuz.” Shakaki memorized Thomas’s class schedule and would come to his classroom window, smile, and mouth the words “Let’s go. Get some candy.” She’d beckon him to join her in Anita’s office, and Thomas would find a reason to leave his class to join her. Thomas would walk Shakaki home after school, and sometimes they would sit outside, on a stoop or an abandoned porch, just to talk. Shakaki had a 7 p.m. curfew, so on weekend nights Thomas and a friend would sneak through a window into her basement, where they’d hang out and play video games. Thomas attended Shakaki’s basketball games at Harper and razzed her from the stands. Thomas seemed protective of her. She could go off on people, and Thomas would urge her to chill. Sitting in Anita’s office one day, Thomas told her, Girl, you need to watch your mouth.

  Shut up, you don’t tell me what to do, she shot back.

  Girl, you be tripping. You got to stop tripping. You got to stop going off on folks.

  How you gonna tell me not go off on people?

  And so it went, back and forth. Anita would sit at her desk, amused by the exchange, amused by the irony that Thomas, a boy prone to his own outbursts, was trying to keep Shakaki in check. One time Shakaki rebuked Thomas because he hadn’t told her that a girl she liked was flirting with one of the school’s football players. I hate you, she yelled at him. I hope your grandma dies. Thomas storme
d down to Anita’s office and told her, You better talk to that girl. I’m gonna hurt her. I’m for real. I’m gonna hurt her. Anita had never seen Thomas so agitated. He was trembling, his hands balled into fists. Anita found Shakaki later that day and chastised her. She told her she needed to apologize, that you didn’t disparage Thomas’s grandmother. Anita was worried he’d strike her. Shakaki laughed. Thomas ain’t gonna do nothing to me. That’s my cuz. And he didn’t. Anita says this was the moment she knew how much Thomas cared about Shakaki. He didn’t forgive easily, but with Shakaki, well, things were different.

  Anita had grown close to both kids. They were like her children. In fact, in Thomas’s case, many staff referred to her as his “school mom.” Anita refused to let their churlishness get to her. Once, Shakaki lit into Anita, and so Anita demanded that she join her in a room on the fourth floor which had been set aside as a place for students to cool down. There the two sat on rocking chairs, and Shakaki confided in Anita that she was having trouble with some of her family. They spent much time in this room, the two of them together, talking, sharing, confiding. Once, seemingly out of nowhere, Shakaki asked, Miss Stewart, if I die, will you write a note and put it in my casket? Anita shook her head. Little girl, stop playing. No! Nothing’s going to happen to you. Besides, if something happens to you and I’m fiddling around trying to put something in your casket, your family’s gonna think I’m crazy. Together they laughed. But Shakaki persisted. Miss Stewart, but will you write that note? Anita relented. Okay, I’ll write a note.

  Thomas and Shakaki helped Anita stay erect through what by most measures was a horrific year. The shootings, the deaths, seemed to come so regularly the staff and students were always bracing for the next one. Whenever a student was shot, the principal would page all support staff, including Anita and Crystal, to attend an AAR (After Action Review) meeting. There they’d decide how best to respond to the incident’s fallout, which students they needed to keep an eye on, who needed comforting, whether they needed to dismiss certain students early. Chicago public school officials adopted AAR from the military after a visit to Fort Leavenworth in Kansas, when they were researching training tools which they might use in the city’s roughest schools.

  Early into the school year, Harper’s principal, Leonetta Sanders, began collecting photos and tidbits about each victim, assembling them in a notebook binder which she kept on her desk, an assemblage of the dead and the wounded. By the end of the school year, her binder had virtually filled up; in those nine months, twenty-one current students and recent graduates had been wounded by gunfire and another seven shot and killed. Shakaki would become the eighth.

  * * *

  —

  On a Saturday evening, June 16, 2012, Anita’s and Thomas’s world shifted, and their lives would become forever entwined, tangled together in a knot so tight that barely a day now goes by that they don’t speak.

  It was a beautiful summer evening, the temperature in the mid-eighties, and Shakaki had come by Thomas’s just to hang. She had gotten permission to stay out past her 7 p.m. curfew. The two wandered over to the porch of a house just two doors down from his home. Many thought the house was unoccupied, but actually a family lived on the second floor. Shakaki perched on the porch’s railing. Thomas sat on the top step. Thomas’s brother Leon rolled onto the front lawn in his wheelchair and planted himself just beneath Shakaki. For Thomas, there’s before and then there’s after. And of those moments before he remembers little, only that they were smoking marijuana and talking, not about much. Shakaki told Thomas she’d gone shopping for clothes with her grandma that day, and that she had purchased a new T-Mobile cell phone. Thomas spotted a hooded figure running from the side of the house to the front lawn. A boy, maybe fifteen or sixteen. Thomas recognized him, mainly because of his acne. Everyone knew him as Monkey Man; he was from a part of the neighborhood belonging to a rival clique. With two hands he raised a gun, a semiautomatic with a clip. Thomas pleaded, Don’t shoot that gun. I tole you, don’t shoot that gun. As Monkey Man shot, Thomas scooted back and then leapt off the porch, sprinting across the street through a vacant lot into the alley. When he looked back, the boy was gone, and so was Shakaki. He thought she had followed him. He ran back across the street and found Shakaki lying on the wooden slats of the porch. Holding her stomach, she told Thomas, It burns, it burns.

  And then there’s after. Two ambulances arrived. EMTs lifted Shakaki onto a gurney and carried her down the stairs. Another set of EMTs lifted Leon into the second ambulance; he’d been shot in the knee, though because he didn’t have any feeling there, he didn’t realize it until he saw the blood pooling beneath him. By this time, though, Thomas had wandered off in a daze, feeling a kind of fury that felt like it belonged to someone else. He remembers getting a gun, a .38-caliber revolver—from whom he won’t say—and going to the gas station around the corner, waiting, hoping that someone from the shooter’s crew would wander by. He seethed, the anger welling up like a tsunami about to hit land. He waited.

  The next morning Crystal called Anita and asked if she was sitting down. Why do I need to be sitting down? Anita demanded. But she knew. It had to be either Thomas or Shakaki, her two favorites, the two who never left her side, the two who would fight for her attention. Crystal told her: Shakaki had died eight hours after the shooting, in the hospital. It was Anita’s weekend with Christopher, Crystal’s son, so she scooped him up and, along with her oldest daughter, Brianna, picked up Crystal. They then drove to Thomas’s. He was sitting on the porch of the abandoned property next to his house. Anita approached him, and before she reached him, she burst into tears. Thomas dropped his head, as if he couldn’t bear the sight of what he thought was Anita’s disappointment in him. It was, Anita recalls, like he felt this deep shame. When he looked up, it was as if he was looking through her. Speaking in a monotone, he told her what had happened.

  “In one day I could have lost two of my students,” Anita later told me. “But looking at it another way, at least one of them did make it out. Then I asked myself, did he really make it out?…I looked at his face. He just dropped his head and walked real slow and I asked myself, ‘Did he really make it out?’ One more burden for this kid to carry. I don’t know how much more this kid can take.”

  Anita and Crystal took Thomas to Rainbow’s, an ice cream parlor, but as they sat there outside he played with his ice cream, poking it with his spoon as it melted. He had no appetite. He couldn’t look at Anita, who kept telling him, I’m just glad you’re okay. Later, Crystal said to Anita, We weren’t trained for this. We weren’t taught how to bury a child. To which Anita replied, I can’t make sense of it. Can you?

  * * *

  —

  Hundreds packed a small church on the city’s South Side, Shakaki’s casket in the front, covered with flowers, a basketball to one side. Her teammates all wore their red jerseys. Anita and Crystal stood toward the back. Anita remembered her conversation in the spring with Shakaki and her request for Anita to place a note in her casket should anything happen to her. What’d she know that I didn’t? Anita asked herself. Anita did indeed write a two-page letter, which read in part:

  Shakaki, I guess you know I am devastated because I did not think I would ever have to write this letter. My heart is broken but I am trying to follow through with your wishes. Words cannot express how much I will miss you and forever value our time together. I thank God and I am so very humble and honored that I had the opportunity to cross your path. I will treasure and hold each and every minute of our time together to my heart…I love you. Miss Stewart

  Anita had it laminated, but when she got to the funeral, Shakaki’s mother was so grief-stricken Anita couldn’t bring herself to ask for permission to place it in the open casket, so she held on to the note, feeling like she had let Shakaki down. Anita trembled during the service. Crystal felt her legs buckle. One moment deeply unsettled both of them. Shakaki’s cousin, who
was in her thirties, read a poem. It went like this:

  If only you had basketball practice or you had to stay in the crib to watch your little sister

  If only you could have left five minutes before

  If only you didn’t know your so-called friend who ran instead of jumping in front of those bullets

  If only you had something better to…

  The “so-called friend,” of course, was Thomas. Anita turned to Crystal and they hugged, grateful that Thomas wasn’t at the funeral to hear this. In fact, the rumors blowing through the streets blamed Thomas for Shakaki’s death. The story passed along from person to person went like this: Thomas had gotten into an altercation and had punched someone so hard that one of the victim’s teeth was embedded in his fist. He knew that people would be seeking vengeance. What was he thinking, sitting on a porch, let alone with his best friend, Shakaki, knowing full well that his rivals were looking for him?

  As with so much ear hustle, as they call it in the streets, it held a kernel of truth. Thomas had indeed gotten into a fight—and had indeed punched his victim so hard that his tooth was embedded in Thomas’s hand. But—and this is important—this fight happened after Shakaki’s death. After Shakaki was murdered, Thomas couldn’t sleep. He tried. But nothing worked. He smoked marijuana. Mindlessly watched TV while sprawled on the couch. Listened to music on his headphones. But his mind raced. The fury. The guilt—that he hadn’t been able to keep the boy from shooting. That he had run. He felt like he was losing control. And then one afternoon, a few days after Shakaki’s death, an older boy pushed Thomas’s six-year-old cousin so hard that his cousin tumbled to the ground. Thomas lost it. He struck the boy. This stupid fight, over nothing, brought Thomas some relief. He could sleep again. His hand, though, got infected, and so he had to go to the emergency room, and they admitted him to place him on antibiotics. He missed the funeral—which in the end Anita felt was for the best. Thomas didn’t need to hear that poem or hear the whispers. Thomas was suffering enough.