An American Summer

by Alex Kotlowitz

  * * *

  —

  I first met Thomas that August, two months after Shakaki’s death. It was the first week of the school year, and he wouldn’t leave Anita’s side. In her office—which consisted of two small metal desks, a filing cabinet, and an inoperative paper shredder—Thomas would sit, his back against the baby-blue cinder-block wall, his remoteness morphing into churlishness. One time I asked Thomas why he hung out here so much.

  “I just don’t know,” he told me. “Sometimes I just need to talk to somebody.”

  Anita started to say something, but Thomas interrupted. “You want me to be quiet?” Anita asked.

  “Don’t say nothing to me,” Thomas snarled.

  “What’d I do?” Anita asked.

  “Don’t say nothing to me!”

  “So we’re shutting down now?”

  “What I say? Don’t say nothing to me.” Thomas raised his head as if to underscore his point.

  “You’re not on the block,” Anita said, trying to calm him. “We’re not the block.”

  “I don’t want to hear nothing no more. Drop me off at home ’fore I hurt somebody.”

  “After school.”

  “Now! That’s what I’m gonna do, hurt somebody. Watch. Anybody look at me wrong or say something. Watch. I’m telling you that now, I’m gonna hurt somebody.”

  Anita stopped herself. Her inclination was to chastise him, to tell him, No, you can’t do that. But “wanting to hurt someone” or “trying to hurt someone,” these are notions Thomas had verbalized a lot since Shakaki’s death. One time when I asked where he thought he might be in ten years, he said, “Might be in jail. Because I think I’m gonna hurt someone.” Another time he told Anita, “I think I might kill someone.” She realized in this moment that Thomas was trying as best he could to be honest about some feelings he had, feelings that scared him. He was struggling to let Anita know that he had a lot going on inside, that he was filled with wrath and guilt. Anita realized that he was telling her that if he could hurt someone, he might feel better, that maybe some of the pain would go away, even just temporarily. He knew this because it had worked before.

  During the course of the school year, Thomas retreated even more. He shared less. He talked less. He went to class less. Even in his appearance he seemed to be disappearing. He grew his hair longer, so that by winter his dreads fell to his shoulders. When he tossed his head, which he did a lot, the dreads fell across his face and he’d virtually vanish. You couldn’t even make out whether he was smiling or frowning. He was there but he wasn’t. Sometimes he wore hoodies, which hid him even more. When he did talk, he hung his head, avoiding eye contact, as if he was addressing someone lying on the floor. He mumbled, his mutterings sometimes so sluggish that Anita had to ask him to repeat himself, sometimes two or three times. When the school erected a memorial to Shakaki on one of the stairwells—a glass case with photos, a basketball signed by her teammates, and Anita’s laminated letter—Thomas avoided that part of the building. He refused Anita’s invitation to view it with her. And he declined Anita’s invitation to visit Shakaki’s gravesite. It was as if he wanted to push that moment away. But so did Anita. She woke up crying every morning. She and Crystal began seeing counselors themselves. She was under so much stress that the left side of her face went numb and she had trouble seeing out of one eye. At one point she told me that she had a recurring dream in which she grappled with how to tell Shakaki she’d been killed. When she recounted this for me, she said, more to herself than to me, “No, you need to accept it, she’s dead.”

  Thomas still lived just a couple of doors down from where Shakaki had been murdered. He couldn’t escape it. He no longer walked in his neighborhood. He’d go out only if he had a ride. When he stepped out of his house, he scanned the gangway next door and the vacant lot across the street, making sure it was safe. He pulled his hoodie over his head so he wouldn’t be recognized. Once he told Anita, “If it happens again, I don’t think I could stop. If it happens again, nobody’s gonna be able to stop me. I know I could hurt a lot of people.”

  * * *

  —

  By the time the summer of 2013 came around, Thomas had fallen behind at school. He had trouble concentrating. He had trouble sitting still. Sometimes he’d leave class and head to the social workers’ office. There he’d talk with Anita or simply sit in silence, just in need of the company, of knowing he was with someone who knew, or kind of knew, what was boiling inside him. A few weeks ago, when his block threw a memorial for Shakaki, a year after her death, Thomas kept texting Anita during the day to ask when she was getting there. The street had been cordoned off at both ends with blue tape. Teenage boys played basketball on a rim set up in the middle of the street. Young kids removed their shoes to jump in an inflatable castle. Kids and adults ate hot dogs and hamburgers, trying to talk over the rap and hip-hop playing through three large speakers set up on a neighbor’s lawn. Most everyone was dressed in white, and many wore T-shirts which read KAKI WORLD. (Kaki was Shakaki’s nickname.) Anita got there early in the evening, and she texted Thomas to let him know she’d arrived. But he didn’t respond. She later learned he was off shooting dice and smoking marijuana. Anita guesses that he didn’t want her to see him high, but she also sensed his ambivalence about being around her these days. She wondered if he worried that she’d press him to talk about what was going on inside.

  When Anita showed up at Thomas’s house early this morning, unannounced, she was determined to get him back into summer school. She wanted him to graduate, to taste some success, to sense that there was something ahead of him. She continued to wait for him in her car. She had confidence he’d come.

  Five minutes later he trudged down the front steps dressed in his school uniform, khaki pants and a maroon polo, and slid into Anita’s seven-year-old Sebring. He reclined the passenger seat all the way back and rested his head on the headrest. He looked defeated, Anita thought to herself. You okay? she asked. Thomas told her that their electricity had been knocked out by a weekend storm, and that ComEd had told them it might be a week before it was restored. Anita assured him that she would call. As she pulled into the school’s parking lot, she noticed that Thomas had turned away, as if he was admiring the landscape out the window. She noticed tears rolling down his cheeks and so reached over to wipe them away. In the three years she had known him, she had never seen him cry. Not after he told her about Nugget getting killed at her birthday party. Not after he witnessed his brother getting shot and paralyzed. Not in those days after he comforted Shakaki as she lay dying. He seemed so tightly wound at times, he would grunt in place of words. He still talked in threatening tones of hurting one person or another. Anita thought to herself, Thomas, you should’ve cried a long time ago. And what’s more, he was now under pressure by the prosecutor to appear at the trial of the boy who shot Shakaki. He was the key witness, one of two people who could identify the shooter, the other being his brother. He kept telling Anita he didn’t want to testify. Though he wouldn’t admit why, Anita knew. He was afraid.

  It’s going to be okay, she told him. But she wasn’t sure it was.

  Chapter 10

  Going Home

  JULY 13…JULY 14…JULY 15…

  POSTAL WORKER CHARGED IN FATAL SHOOTING OF CHICAGO TEEN

  2nd man is held, could be charged in Far South Side killing

  By Naomi Nix, Chicago Tribune reporter

  A U.S. postal worker and another man followed a 16-year-old boy around a Chicago Housing Authority complex before shooting him to death, Cook County prosecutors alleged Saturday.

  On July 14, Aries Sanders, the postal worker, and his alleged accomplice drove to the Trumbull Park Homes in the South Shore neighborhood, prosecutors said, citing video footage from the scene.

  The video showed Sanders and the other man following Joseph Brewer, of the 10600 block of So
uth Oglesby Avenue, prosecutors said.

  The man with Sanders then shot Brewer several times, eventually killing him, prosecutors alleged.

  That person is in custody with charges pending, Chicago police said. Sanders, of the 6400 block of South Stony Island Avenue, was charged with murder and held on $1 million bail.

  According to police records, Sanders works at the U.S. Post Office at 1300 Northwest Highway in Palatine. He was arrested there Friday.

  Ashara Mohammed had wanted out of Chicago, away from the messiness of the city, and so she went away to college and ultimately moved to Philadelphia, where she rented an unadorned, compact third-floor studio apartment. It was there that I first met her. Ashara, who’s twenty-six and striking, has big, expressive eyes which hide little. She rolls them when annoyed. They widen when she gets excited. She closes them when she wants to disappear. By her own admission, she’s also loud. She likes to talk, to tell stories, to offer her opinion, to reflect, to ask questions. She’s a turbine of energy in a rather small, petite body. When I visited, she sat on her queen-sized bed in jeans and white T-shirt, barefoot, her back against the wall, a roll of toilet paper by her side since she was battling a cold, which seemed to have little effect on her stamina. Because there was no other furniture in the apartment, I sat on the floor. We spoke for nearly five hours, with a short break for lunch.

  She had a story to tell, really a kind of confession, but it’s a narrative which, as I learned, requires a somewhat full wind-up. It’s a story that involves Aries Sanders, the postal worker involved in the murder mentioned in the Tribune article. Aries and Ashara grew up together, and his arrest rattled Ashara and changed her, in ways she never expected.

  Ashara grew up in Auburn Gresham, a working-class neighborhood of single-family homes and small apartment buildings on the city’s South Side. Her grandmother, an Egyptologist who taught at Mississippi College, named her. Ashara, her grandmother told her, meant “much light and energy,” both of which Ashara had in abundance. Ashara has ambitions to be a writer and a filmmaker, and while in recent years she has swum in darkness, battling depression in part because of events I’ll get to shortly, she has emerged with a sense of purpose.

  Ashara’s sister, who’s three years older, is Shema, also named by their grandmother. They were raised by a single mother, Carmen, and though the girls barely knew their dad, they inherited his last name, Mohammed, which he acquired after joining the Nation of Islam. The three lived in a one-bedroom apartment, Ashara and her sister in bunk beds, their mom on a futon in the living room. Ashara reveled in the tight bonds between the three of them. Her sister panicked in thunderstorms, and so when they heard thunder, their mom would corral them into a walk-in closet, where they huddled together under a blanket, safe in each other’s arms. When the local Borders bookstore held story night, Carmen would take the girls, in their pajamas, and on weekends she’d take them to the local library or to a museum. They didn’t have air conditioning, so during the summer, when their second-floor apartment became thick with humidity and heat, the three rode the bus to the air-conditioned Plaza, a nearby mall, where they bought icies and window-shopped. They were unusually close.

  When Ashara was eighteen months old, her mother took a job at a day-care center, but she struggled on her meager salary. They shopped for clothes at a local thrift store. Her great-grandfather bought them a refrigerator, which they otherwise couldn’t afford. Their Buick LeSabre, which her great-grandfather had handed down to them, had been in so many fender benders that after all the repairs it was such a mishmash of colors it looked like a child’s art project. The gas gauge in the car didn’t work, and so while they assiduously kept track of their mileage, they still on occasion ran out of fuel. “I look back on it,” Ashara recalled, “and honestly, I don’t know how my mom did it.”

  Though Ashara got into an elementary school for the gifted, her mother sent her to a school near the day-care center so she could get there quickly if needed. At Langston Hughes Elementary, Ashara excelled, often testing in the top of her class and learning Japanese. When she was eleven, she traveled with her school to Japan. Because she was light-skinned and because she was so studious, others would sneer at her, calling her “white,” suggesting that she thought she was too good for the rest of them. Her attitude probably didn’t help matters. “I think I took the road that I’m better, that I’m not like these other black people,” she told me. “I speak better. I work harder. I try harder.” She’s not proud of it, just matter-of-fact. It’s who she was, and her aloofness, as you might imagine, didn’t sit well with her classmates. They called her “lame,” or they made fun of the discount, off-brand shoes she had purchased at Payless, or they simply ignored her.

  Among those who teased her, probably the one who teased her the most was a boy named Aries Sanders. Aries, like Ashara, felt like an outsider. Aries was lively. As an infant he was plump, with what he called “a big boxed head,” so his family and friends called him Snub, short for Snubby. He grew to be broad-shouldered and fit, though he was short, shorter than Ashara, something Ashara wouldn’t let go unnoticed. He had a stutter, which came and went, and which seemed to do little to button down his self-confidence. His sleepy eyes made him sometimes seem like he wasn’t fully in the moment, as if he were drifting away or hiding. The two first met at the day-care center, where Aries’s grandmother and mother worked alongside Ashara’s mom. Aries and Ashara loved each other. And they hated each other. “They were like magnets,” Ashara’s mother, Carmen, recalls. “Pull together. Then push apart.”

  As Ashara remembers it, Aries tormented her. “He was pretty mean to me,” she said. “He’d talk about my shoes a lot. Sometimes he’d pinch or punch me because he said I talked a lot.” Which of course Ashara did. They were kids, and so they related to each other in ways that masked their affection. One time at the day-care center—Ashara was visiting her mother; Aries was visiting his grandmother—Aries hid her overcoat, and because it was a cold, wintry day, the adults wouldn’t let Ashara leave until they found it. A parent ultimately located it hanging on a fence behind the center. Another time, in the crowded school playground, Ashara, who was worried about an upcoming test, squealed, I’m freaked out. Aries laughed, taunting her: Who says that? Freaking out! You’re such a white girl. Ashara had a way of escalating their disputes. When Aries mistreated Ashara, she’d tattle on him to his grandmother. Aries talked back to a teacher or Aries didn’t do his homework or Aries got into a fight. It became so regular that when Aries’s grandmother saw Ashara, she’d sigh and ask, What did Aries do today? Aries would later scold Ashara, saying, You talk too much, girl. You’re always in somebody else’s business. They fought and squabbled as if they were brother and sister, and yet despite Aries’s bullying—and in part because she didn’t have many friends—Ashara spent time with him. There was another reason, though: Ashara had a crush on Aries’s friend TJ. Where Aries seemed hyped-up, TJ appeared smooth, unflustered, self-aware. In fifth grade Ashara sat next to TJ, and they would pass notes back and forth. Ashara, who by her own admission could be “super-bossy,” enlisted TJ in school projects. “He was just kind,” she recalls. “And patient.”

  Come ninth grade, Ashara went to the neighborhood high school while Aries attended a vocational school and TJ attended a school in the suburbs. She grew apart from them. At sixteen Aries had a daughter, Amoni, and he took a job after school, working at a wholesale candy company. Ashara lost touch with TJ, though she remembers running into him in their senior year and thinking he had become incredibly good-looking. He was dark-skinned and self-assured. She remembers his lips were blackened from smoking weed.

  By her teens Ashara had become deeply disappointed in the men around her. She wanted nothing to do with them. Her cousin, Kyle, whom she adored, was in and out of jail, and during one visit told Ashara that at fourteen he’d become addicted, though he didn’t say whether to heroin or cocaine. H
er uncle, too, lived a life shaped by drugs and petty crime. And she quietly raged at her dad for not being a part of her life, so much so that growing up she had periodic temper tantrums over small things, a lost hairbrush or a dinner she didn’t like, knowing inside that her fury was really directed at her absent father. Her grandfather, she learned, had died in jail after setting his cell on fire. Her great-grandfather, a community activist, was the only man she looked up to.

  Ashara tried to keep everything and everyone at bay by getting absorbed with the notion of getting into college. “I just kept telling myself, those people aren’t doing anything with themselves,” she explained. “They’re not trying to move beyond this community. I just kept focused.” By her senior year Ashara had taken four AP classes, all the school had to offer, so in the afternoons she attended classes at Chicago State University. She graduated as salutatorian of her class.

  Ashara received a scholarship from Bethune-Cookman University, a historically black college in Daytona Beach, Florida, and once there she cut ties with her friends in Chicago, especially the young men she knew. They continued to let her down or fill her with sorrow. While at college she learned that TJ had been killed, shot in the chest by a friend fiddling with a gun that had jammed. Another friend from high school, George, whom she had befriended while at a summer job building playgrounds, had been arrested for armed robbery. Still another boy, Johnnie, who lived in the apartment above her growing up and had played with Barbies with Ashara and her sister, had been shot and killed by the police. At college she rustled up the courage to call her father, to reconnect, but he seemed uninterested, and so she spent the entire phone call yelling at him for not being there for her and her sister. Why’d you leave? she demanded. We needed you and you weren’t there! We made it without you. We’re fine without you. Deep down, she wanted him to be a part of her life, but that anger swirled in her like a spinning top which would knock down anyone who got in the way. Then Aries’s older brother, Sheldon, whom he idolized, was convicted of attempted murder. Ashara didn’t know Sheldon well, but it was boys like Sheldon who so turned her off. Even Aries had begun dabbling in selling marijuana. Ashara saw too much of this, young black men seeming to play a role, thinking that to be black meant to act tough, to act brutish, to maintain a distance from everyone around them. “I think the way I made sense of it is, I’d tell myself I’m just different, I’m better, I want more out of life,” she told me, knowing it sounded snobbish. She would joke with friends that all the good black men were in prison. But it was a half-joke. Of the men she grew up with, she told me, “I couldn’t look them in the eye. I’d just ignore them. I was afraid. I was intimidated. These thugs. These criminals.” Ashara tried to outrun her world.