An American Summer

by Alex Kotlowitz

  One of Gerald’s cousins next door, a girl who was a few years older, had been dating a teenage boy who had a twin brother. Gerald remembers this because the twin brothers got into a running dispute with some boys in the neighborhood. Gerald didn’t know what it was over, but it escalated rapidly. It started outside a candy store when the twins argued with a local boy, Ken Floyd, who lived just up the street. The verbal exchange turned into an exchange of punches. That was followed by an incident in which one of the twins pulled a Louisville slugger out of his jogging pants and, according to Gerald, knocked Floyd across his head, so hard he required stitches. That was followed by Floyd and a friend retaliating by allegedly kicking in the front door of Gerald’s aunt’s house and unleashing a German shepherd and a Doberman pinscher on the twins, one of whom was bitten on the chest. Gerald seems to remember the twins getting the better of the dogs and chasing them away. And then one night someone tried, unsuccessfully, to set his aunt’s porch on fire. Even at thirteen, Gerald had a sense this wasn’t going to end well.

  In the thick humidity of the early morning hours of July 24, 1986, Gerald sat with his mother and his aunt, Heddie, on the front porch of the carriage house, chatting and half watching television on a set his mom had placed there using an extension cord. His mother was worried that the conflict with the twins would escalate, so pleaded with her sister to bring her kids to spend the night with them. Gerald recalls his aunt telling his mother, Girl, I ain’t gonna let them run me out of my house. And so, at three in the morning, his aunt, either in an act of defiance or in a move of resignation, left to go home and walked the twenty feet to her front door, assuring them that she’d be okay. Gerald retreated to his bedroom and lay down while his mother took a bath. He soon fell asleep, sprawled across his blankets, only to be jolted awake an hour later by the sound of glass shattering. He could hear his mother on the phone, panicked, first asking for the police, then for the fire department. Gerald ran onto his porch and saw his aunt’s house ablaze, so close he could feel the rising heat. One of his cousins stood on the roof of the back porch, desperately trying to get his younger siblings and cousins to crawl to the window, but the heat was too intense. (Investigators would later find that the refrigerator downstairs had partly melted.) Smoke seemed to be escaping from every pore of the house. Gerald was frozen on his porch, counting in his head who must still be inside. Ten people lived in the house: his aunt and her five children, one of the twin brothers, and his mother’s niece and her two children. It was a lot to account for. All he could make out was his sixteen-year-old cousin Homer on the porch roof, along with two other figures; Homer had gotten his mother and his eight-year-old brother out.

  What happened next has been etched into Gerald’s memory like an ancient cliff painting, the scene still recognizable but the drawing faded in places and in some cases simply erased by years of erosion. But if Gerald closes his eyes, he can feel it—the urgency, the hope, the sheer force of will. He can taste the smoke which seeps into his clothes. Sometimes he can smell the distinct noxious odor of burned flesh. He sees Homer still on the porch’s roof, uncertain. Homer’s mother is now climbing back in through the window to get the others. Gerald wants to yell at her, No! Then he watches as his eight-year-old cousin, Dante, follows. Gerald waits for what seems like hours but of course is maybe a matter of minutes. They don’t reemerge. If only he can reach them, lead them downstairs, lead them to the door. Gerald, dressed in jeans and T-shirt, runs to the back door, pulling at it, trying to get it open, thinking maybe he can run inside and find his aunt and cousins and lead them to safety. Finally he yanks it open, and with the surge of oxygen the kitchen erupts, and he’s thrown backward by the force of the fire. Flames leap out the window. Homer jumps from the porch roof to the ground. And in that moment Gerald realizes he’ll never reach his aunt or his cousins. Later, after the bodies have been removed, the house still smoldering, the floorboards still hot to the touch, Gerald wanders to the second floor and in his cousin’s bedroom sees what he believes to be Dante’s flesh seared into the bed board.

  Gladys, Gerald’s mom, would later testify to what she had witnessed. She had gotten out of the bath and was lying across her bed when she heard the back fence rattling. She looked out her bedroom window and in the backyard of her sister’s house she said she saw two figures, both of whom she recognized: Ken Floyd, the boy who had had the dispute with the twins and who lived just up the street, and a sixteen-year-old neighbor, Gerald Rice, who lived across the alley. She says that they had with them what looked like a glass Coca-Cola bottle filled with a liquid, a rag protruding from the mouth. A molotov cocktail. She testified that Floyd handed the firebomb to Gerald, who hurled it, unlit, through the kitchen window. When she spoke with the police at the scene, disoriented and distraught, she identified only one of them. “Junior,” she told the police. That was Gerald Rice’s nickname. She didn’t mention Ken Floyd until later, when she picked him out of a lineup. Gladys would be the prosecution’s key witness at their trial.

  The four dead—Gerald’s aunt, Heddie Johnson, and Gerald’s cousins Dante Johnson, who was eleven, Wendell Johnson, who was eight, and Shekita Johnson, who was seven—were completely charred, skin burned off, tendons and muscle exposed, hair singed. One of the children tried to find safety between a mattress and the box springs. While the medical examiner declared that they had died of “acute carbon monoxide toxicity,” they were, in layman’s terms, burned alive. After the funeral, Gerald’s grandmother, who was sixty-four, had dreams that her grandchildren had drowned, a way of trying to find comfort, that in drowning they might not have suffered as much. She kept asking how they had died, and Gladys couldn’t bring herself to tell her mother the whole story so would simply say, “Smoke inhalation.” But her mother knew. Seven months later, she died of a massive stroke. “My mom,” Gladys told me, “grieved herself to death.” So did Gerald, or close to it.

  When I met Gerald at the halfway house, I learned that he had been clean for a few months. He was clearheaded and thoughtful, a pleasure to be around. We met on numerous occasions after our first encounter with the women. He told me that after the fire had been extinguished, he had walked to a nearby apartment building, curled up by the front door, and sobbed. He had failed his cousins and his aunt. Something—he couldn’t fully describe it—bore in on him, like a jackhammer on cement, pounding cracks in his soul. It never went away. And he couldn’t—or wouldn’t—talk with anyone about it. “I felt like a coward,” he told me. It was his burden to carry. A few months after the fire, sitting in a car with an older cousin, he tried heroin for the first time, snorting the powder rather than injecting it. He hated needles. At first he felt nauseous, but then he felt this stillness, an ease he hadn’t experienced before. It erased the anguish. It softened the blows he hurled at himself. “I was in heaven,” he said. “I fell in love with it.” At thirteen years old, Gerald became hooked.

  The next year his best friend appeared to fall asleep on the couch after snorting a dose. In the morning Gerald tried to wake him, and when he rolled him over, Gerald flinched. His friend’s face was covered in blood, the result of a ruptured blood vessel in his nose. He had overdosed. But it didn’t deter Gerald. His habit went from $100 a day to $200 a day. He hustled to make money. He sold drugs. He stole jewelry from his mom and a fur coat from his girlfriend. He once robbed a man who drove up to his corner to buy heroin. Gerald reached through the car window and snatched $1,500 from the buyer’s hand and took off running. The next day that same man came back around, and in an alley gunned his car as Gerald tried to evade him. The car slammed into Gerald, hitting him with such force that he flew twenty feet into the air, like a rag doll, and into a utility pole, cracking his skull and fracturing his spine. But Gerald was so in the grip of heroin that he checked himself out of the hospital two days later, against doctor’s orders. He was arrested time and again. For possessing and selling heroin and marijuana, for urinating on
an El platform, for disrupting a police sting operation, for stealing a car, and eventually for armed robbery; he held up a man with a gun and took a pager, three lottery tickets, and a gold chain. For this crime he was sentenced to six years.

  Here’s the thing: Gerald is unusually smart and thoughtful. Even with his drug habit, he graduated from high school and attended college, albeit briefly. He learned to play chess in prison, and when he was out he would find games along the city’s North Avenue beach. He kept a journal, the only way he knew to articulate what was going on inside, written mostly as missives to God.

  Sometimes it’s so difficult to express how I really feel inside because my heart aches so, so much. Death. It’s suffering that spoils the spirit…I’m afraid. Afraid to love. Afraid to trust. Afraid to care….Help me know what it is to be happy.

  Sometimes he expressed a tinge of hope, especially in talking about his mom.

  First day of college at Harold Washington College. It feels good to know that after all my suffering, heartache and pain that I was given another chance to recapture so many lost dreams…My mother has always amazed me with her love for me…She has been a blessing to me and my life. I pray that you give me the ability to overcome my addiction so I can make her proud. Please Lord help me overcome the burdens of my heart…Ma, thank you for loving me.

  Or the usual ups and downs of life.

  I feel so hurt, angry and yet confused because for the first time in my life I finally realized what it is I want and I’m willing to share it with the only woman I’ve ever really loved but she’s found someone else. It hurts so deeply.

  But throughout his writings, he finds his way back to the early-morning hours of July 24, 1986.

  I can’t help feeling like maybe there was something I could have did to change what happened…I watched as my loved ones died…That summer night, when only a child, twelve yrs old, four of my loved ones were murdered, right in front of me, something inside of me changed. I felt hurt and betrayed by God…but I’m gradually starting to realize that I would’ve died also [if he had gone into the house]. It happened exactly the way God intended.

  Why am I so angry inside? I guess I’m so angry because I feel like I’m a failure…I felt abandoned and angry, afraid to trust in anybody, angry that I allowed my environment to suppress me…angry for the fact that God took all my beloved friends, family and acquaintances right in front of me. I had to watch them die and there was nothing I could do about it…I’m plagued by the spectres of my past. I ask you for forgiveness…My mind is filled with self-doubt, fear, loneliness and confusion. I feel that maybe I’m running out of time.

  For the longest period, no one knew, not even his mother, about the nightmares or the flashbacks. Sometimes if he smelled something burning, he was right back at the fire, at the door. Helpless—and, in his mind, cowardly. He rarely laughed. He didn’t know joy. “I just didn’t feel comfortable being in my own skin, and I always wanted to escape what was going on around me,” he told me. In 2011, just out of prison, Gerald was placed in a program for ex-offenders at A Safe Haven, where once a week he participated in a therapy group. During one session the counselor asked why he had started using heroin, especially at such a young age, and for the first time Gerald told others about the fire and the guilt and the torment. As he did, it felt like he was there, on his porch, sweating from the heat of the flames, yanking open the door, the fireball, the smell of charred flesh. Tears rolled down his cheeks. Someone in the group, someone he didn’t know, seemingly amused by Gerald’s outpouring, muttered, Aw, man, this ole crybaby bitch-ass nigga. This nigga crying like a little bitch, you know what I’m saying? Gerald jumped from his seat and slugged the man so hard he fractured his hand. He ran from the meeting and later wandered to a CVS, where he stuffed into his jacket two electric hair trimmers and half a dozen electric toothbrush heads, looking for things to sell to get a fix. He got arrested yet again.

  When I met Gerald this summer, he was in a good place. He soon moved out of the halfway house into his mother’s apartment on the West Side. He got a job driving train conductors to their jobs at the railroad. He seemed determined not to find his way back to the heroin. Gerald’s sponsor in Narcotics Anonymous, Otto Brown, told me, “To get the definition of who that cat is, you got to catch him when his mind is clear.” I felt lucky, I suppose, to get to know Gerald when his mind was clear. We’d sit around his mom’s apartment or meet for coffee or a meal at MacArthur’s, a soul-food restaurant just a block from his mom’s. We talked about the fire, about his addiction, about his love for writing, about women, about waking up in the middle of the night drenched in sweat, heart pounding, and we talked about forgiveness, really about forgiving oneself. Once over lunch he told me, “I’m sitting here with you, but in my mind I’m there, experiencing everything associated with that moment. The feelings, the smoke, the sirens, the crying.” He told me that outside of a couple of therapists, one in prison, one at A Safe Haven, he’d never spoken about the fire in any detail, not even with his mother. In fact, when I spoke with her, she seemed surprised that it still bothered him. “The heroin,” he told me, “was the only way to cope.” He told me that he worried that he’d only find peace when he died.

  Over time, though, he slowly began to slide. His hair appeared unkempt, his usually groomed beard uncombed. He developed dark circles under his eyes. He seemed agitated. One time, as we walked through the gate toward his mother’s apartment, a young man and woman stood in the walkway, blocking our path. “Excuse me,” Gerald said. The couple, who were talking, seemed not to notice, and so Gerald repeated himself, each time getting louder. The couple were locked in on each other, oblivious of their surroundings, and didn’t hear Gerald. Finally I nudged him, nodding, suggesting we step around them, and as we did Gerald purposefully bumped the woman. She turned around, sneering. “I said ‘excuse me,’ ” Gerald muttered sarcastically, and then to me, “What else they want from me?” The next time I came around, Gerald had a black eye. He told me he got jumped, but it seemed odd that he would have been hit for no apparent reason. Then came the requests for money. Five dollars. Ten dollars. Not a lot, but enough—and enough times to make me realize that he was using again. And then he disappeared. He stopped returning my phone calls. I went by his mother’s apartment one afternoon, and Gladys confirmed that he had indeed started using heroin again, that he’d been arrested, this time for selling drugs. “I’ve had it with that boy,” she told me.

  I thought this might be a good time to talk with her about the fire, and she told me that her son needed to get over it, stop using it as an excuse. She then instructed me: “You need to call the attorneys for Gerald Rice.” Gerald Rice was their former neighbor from across the alley, the only one to be convicted of the murder of Gladys’s sister and her children, convicted mainly on Gladys’s testimony. “Why would he have lawyers after all these years?” I asked. Because, she told me, he didn’t do it.

  * * *

  —

  Two years later: I’m in the county’s criminal courthouse, in a fourth-floor courtroom so cavernous that spectators sit thirty feet from the judge’s bench. It’s like sitting in the bleachers. The sound system is so old and neglected that even sitting in the first row, leaning forward, hands cupped to your ears, you have to strain to hear the proceedings. I’m here for the resentencing of Gerald Rice, twenty-seven years after he was convicted of arson and murder. The first witness for the state, Michael Magana, acting deputy commander of the intelligence unit at the Illinois Department of Corrections, testifies that Gerald Rice, who’s now forty-six, had admitted to being a member of the Mafia Insane Vice Lords, a street gang that also operates in prison. Magana testified that on October 1, 1992, Gerald fought another inmate, and a staff member who intervened got injured. As a result, Gerald was placed in segregation for a month. Then the following January, Magana testifies, after Gerald had been released back to
his cell, guards found a six-inch-long shank made of plexiglass as well as a gallon of homemade hooch there. This time he spent three months in segregation. Again in October 2001 guards found a shank under Gerald’s mattress. This time he spent a full year in segregation.

  During this testimony, Gerald sat at a long table alongside his lawyers, two women from Northwestern Law School’s Children and Family Justice Center. Gerald, who has a shaved head, was dressed in a blue short-sleeved button-up shirt. His hands rested on the table, folded together like a schoolboy’s. He was shackled at the ankles. He barely moved, focused on the testimony. What I’d come to learn is that Gerald Rice is cognitively delayed. This is kind of a mushy label. Gerald has trouble with anything layered or at all complex. It’s not that he can’t interact and laugh and make sense of the immediate world around him, but it’s often without any nuance, without a full understanding. And often people with this kind of delay do things that they know are not a part of their moral makeup, but in the moment it seems to make sense, or in the moment it feels like it’ll win them a friend. And friends, when you have this condition, can be hard to come by. Gerald is without guile.

  Gerald’s condition came out at the original trial, in 1988. Gerald, who was sixteen at the time, attended classes for what was then called “the educably mentally handicapped.” He couldn’t read or write. His math abilities were at a third-grade level. His lawyer told the judge that he was having trouble communicating with Gerald. At one point, he said, Gerald asked him the difference between an attorney and a lawyer. Two psychiatrists testified that Gerald had problems with memory, that he couldn’t remember the name of the last school he attended and that he couldn’t remember the name of his lawyer. They both testified that Gerald could not understand his Miranda rights.