The day is like an itch. George scratches and scratches at it, and at times it seems to work. It goes away. He forgets about it. And then it’s back again. One time I sat with George in his apartment’s living room, on the couch, dirty clothes piled in a corner, his DJ’s turntable on a high table, and as we spoke he seemed distracted, as if he had just remembered an appointment. “Everything okay?” I asked. He seemed startled. He nodded. “I hate talking about this,” he said. That was a half-truth. I hadn’t seen George in several months, and he had emailed to check in, to ask if we could get together again. This is grief. You feel ripped in half. Half of you wanting to retreat, to disappear, to find a place where no one asks questions. And then there’s the part of you that wants to remember, has to remember because if you don’t, not only will the day cease to exist but so will the reality of that moment. And if that happens, you start to think the person is still there, in the next room, down the street, at school, in the park, somewhere near enough that you start thinking about what might have been. George wonders if he and Daquan would’ve gone fishing together. If Daquan would’ve gone crazy over his Chevy Malibu with its twelve speakers. If Daquan and he would’ve played music together.
George told me that after Daquan was killed and after he got out of the halfway house, he sought out Daquan’s friends. “They told me Daquan was so glad I was home,” he said. George then got up and told me he had somewhere to be.
Chapter 15
I Ain’t Going Nowhere, part two
AUGUST 20…AUGUST 21…AUGUST 22…
Dressed in loose-fitting gray sweatpants and sweatshirt, Anita Stewart, the Harper High School social worker, pulls up in front of Thomas’s house midafternoon. The mechanical lift in front and the NO TRESPASSING sign affixed to the beige siding mark the location. Earlier in the summer she had learned that because of budget cuts at the Chicago public schools, she wouldn’t be returning to Harper. The school would have to make do with one social worker. She hadn’t broken the news to Thomas yet. She told me that she worried how he’d respond, but in truth I think she was also worried how she’d hold up, worried that she might break down.
Thomas’s mother, who floats in and out of his life, stands on the front porch, her arms across her chest to keep warm in the unseasonably chilly air. Anita explains why she’s there. “It’s going to break his heart,” Thomas’s mother muses. “You’ve come a long way with him.” Anita smiles. It feels good that Thomas’s mother appreciates her efforts. The front door opens and Thomas emerges, dressed in an oversized sweatshirt that reads “Lincoln U Township,” his long hair pulled back into a ponytail. He seems groggy, as if he’s recently awoken, though he has actually just returned from a day of summer school classes.
“What’s up, Thomas? You didn’t get none of my texts? Did you finish your Spanish class? Where’s your paper?” Anita can’t help herself. She’s on him from the get-go, desperately wanting to see him graduate.
“I don’t know what I did with it,” Thomas says, not so much apologizing as matter-of-factly explaining the situation.
“You don’t know what you did with it? You got to keep it. That’s proof you took it. What you been doing?”
“Nothing,” Thomas replies, as he picks at his fingernails.
“So what do you think this year’s going to look like, Thomas?” Anita asks, trying to ease into the news. She has a habit of invoking his name when she wants his attention. “You remember, Thomas, when they were talking about all those budget cuts and not having the money for certain positions?”
“Yeah.”
“They didn’t have the money to fund my position. So when you step in there, there won’t be a bunch of old faces. I won’t be there.” Thomas pulls the sleeves of his sweatshirt over his hands. “But Crystal will.”
“Y’all got to find new jobs?” For all of Thomas’s frostiness, he can be empathetic. Anita thinks to herself, Here I am worried about him—and he’s worried about me.
“I found a new job, at an elementary school. What exactly does that mean for you? That doesn’t mean you’re not going to be going to class. That doesn’t mean you won’t graduate. I’ll be over there to see you. It means you go to school and do what you got to do to get out. It means you got to listen to whoever the social worker is. Thomas?”
“Yeah.” Thomas pulls his sweatshirt up over the bottom half of his face. He’s finding distance, drifting, like flotsam at sea. Anita senses it and tries to pull him back in.
“You think you could find that paper for me?”
Thomas shakes his head. “I got a C.”
“You got to find that paper.”
Thomas has a knack of changing direction to deflect what he perceives as disapproval, and so he quickly shifts the conversation to a subject that will undoubtedly elicit sympathy from Anita, about the boy who allegedly shot and killed Shakaki. It’s been on his mind because of the pressure being applied on him to testify.
“We was looking Monkey Man up online. They shipped him to County,” he said, referring to the jail.
“I don’t think he likes to be called Monkey Man,” Anita says.
“That’s his name,” Thomas asserts.
A scraggly middle-aged man with an unkempt beard and jeans hanging off his hips staggers down the middle of the street, talking to himself, and he notices Thomas on the porch. “What’s up?” he hollers, giving Thomas a thumbs-up before returning to the conversation he was having with himself.
“I like that,” Anita says to Thomas. “He says ‘What’s up?’ and then gets back to talking to his own people. I think that’s pretty good.” She gets a laugh out of Thomas. She tells him to keep texting, that just because she isn’t at Harper anymore doesn’t mean she won’t be around. Thomas is disappearing into his sweatshirt. He looks either deeply sad or lost, or both.
“How come they didn’t have me testify when Nugget got killed?” he asks by way of wondering why he needs to testify in the trial of Shakaki’s assailant. “What if I tell ’em I don’t remember anything?”
“You afraid?” Anita asks.
“No. I don’t want to sit on the stand and tell them everything. It’s snitching. You can get killed for that. I ain’t scared. It’s just like that.”
Anita can feel him slipping away, not necessarily in this moment, but she sees it coming. She tells him how he owes it to Shakaki to appear at the trial. It seems only right. She was his best friend. Justice of any kind feels so ephemeral in Englewood, and this feels like a moment that you can actually grab on to it, a moment when things can be made right, that Thomas can be made right. But Anita knows. And Thomas knows. As Anita later told me, “You need to be honest—Thomas is afraid. I understand that.”
Afterward, in her car, she starts to cry. She tells me that she can tell it’s hard on Thomas, knowing she won’t be around this coming year. “If I had known this was going to happen, I would’ve never gone to Harper,” she tells me. “It’s like I’m giving up on them. It’s so unfair to him.” She pauses to wipe her cheeks and drives down the narrow one-way street: past the two-story home where Shakaki was shot, the downstairs windows covered by sheets of warping plywood; past the sidewalk along a waist-high fence where Dwayne “Duck” Duckworth had been shot so many times—thirteen—it took hours for neighbors to scrub the blood from the pavement; past the home where Nugget was killed at her birthday party by a bullet piercing the large front window, shot by a young man who at the age of thirteen had himself been caught in crossfire and shot in his leg; and past a shuttered home on which someone has scrawled “Fuck 7-0.” Some, Anita tells me, call this “the block of death.”
* * *
—
Ur child is in jail. Anita received this text from Thomas’s sister, Stella.
As the trial of Monkey Man—his real name is Antuan Joiner—approached, Thomas became more and more skittish. At one point, the p
rosecutor on the case asked Shakaki’s mother if she felt she might need protection or if she wanted to move. Thomas was in the room at the time, and after he returned from the courthouse, he told Anita, Miss Stewart, they was asking the wrong person. He worried that he might be the one targeted, not Shakaki’s family. Thomas received a subpoena to appear in court, but he refused to comply, and as a result the judge ruled him in contempt, sending him to the county jail, a place he’d never been. He was miserable. He kept to himself. He would’ve called Anita, but he hadn’t memorized her phone number. After a week locked up, he promised he’d appear at the trial, and so he was released on house arrest. When he arrived home, he learned that a few days earlier someone had driven by and shot up his house, a bullet piercing his grandmother’s bedroom window. The bullet hole was still in the wall. He called Anita, who told him, You need to be in protective custody.
The case dragged on; the trial was postponed several times. In June 2014, Thomas graduated from high school in a ceremony at Trinity Church, and Anita and Crystal cheered and yelled, “Hey, Big Baby!” as he received his diploma. The school also awarded an honorary diploma to Shakaki and one other slain student, a not uncommon occurrence at Chicago public school graduations. The next day Anita texted Thomas: I am so proud of you! You are really growing into a responsible young man. I love you very much and I am still in charge. ? ☺ Anita also celebrated the graduation of her oldest daughter, who was awarded a full scholarship to Carleton College. (Her two youngest, twins, would end up at the University of Wisconsin Madison and at the University of Michigan.)
Anita called me one day, noticeably upset, trying to keep from crying. She told me that the week before, as Thomas was walking home from Harper after picking up his transcript, he had noticed a figure furtively moving alongside his house. Thomas was crossing a vacant lot across the street when the figure emerged and shot at him. Thomas changed direction and kept low, making himself small, sprinting to the alley. Nine shots. Fortunately, they all missed. “It’s heartbreaking,” Anita said. “How can this be happening in America?”
When the trial finally commenced, Thomas told Anita his plan was simple: he’d attend, but to all questions he would reply that he didn’t remember. He didn’t want to testify. When he arrived at the courthouse, he was told to go upstairs and wait in a small room along with Shakaki’s mother, Kim Shumake, until they called for him. Earlier he had told the prosecutor, his voice gruff and pointed, They’re still shooting at us. The prosecutor, Don Lyman, told me Thomas was so agitated that morning that he couldn’t have a conversation with him. Thomas told a victim’s advocate, I don’t want to be here. This is bullshit. As he waited in that room with Shakaki’s mother, he began to soften. Kim Shumake was alternately crying and trying to hold herself together. Earlier she had relayed a message through Thomas’s mother. Tell him, Kim said, how are you a gangster outside and then you’re afraid to come testify? Thomas became unsettled and discomforted by her deep, penetrating sobs as she awaited the trial, and as he sat there, hiding behind his dreads, he told himself that Shakaki had been there for him, so he’d be there for Shakaki.
It was a bench trial, and Judge Vincent Gaughan had a reputation for his no-nonsense gruffness. As we waited for the trial to begin, an older woman stood up in the back of the courtroom, waving at her son, whom she spotted through an open door near the judge’s bench. Gaughan called her up, admonished her for interrupting proceedings, and held her in contempt, ordering a deputy sheriff to take her into custody. He then heard the charges against a woman who’d been arrested by undercover officers for selling loose cigarettes. The judge shook his head at the pettiness of the crime and told the prosecutor to pass a message on to the police: “They need to get a life.”
Antuan Joiner, or Monkey Man, sat next to his attorney behind a long table. Dark-skinned, he wore his short hair tightly braided and had a small goatee. His expression stoic, he spent much of the trial taking notes on a legal pad. What was most noticeable was his age; he looked like a boy. He was sixteen at the time of the shooting. The case was not a slam-dunk for the prosecution, even if they could get Thomas to testify. Shortly after the shooting, a block away, in the basement of an abandoned house, police recovered a 9mm handgun resting atop a gray hoodie, along with a baseball cap. The police sampled all three objects for DNA, and none of the DNA matched Joiner’s. Moreover, Joiner had no record. Leon, Thomas’s brother, who was twenty-one at the time, testified that he recognized the shooter as Joiner, but his remarks were so inaudible that at one point the judge admonished the prosecutor that if Leon didn’t speak up, he wouldn’t admit his testimony as evidence. Moreover, Joiner’s attorney, Tony Thedford, in his cross-examination suggested that Leon was gang-affiliated (which Leon didn’t completely deny), in an effort to impeach his testimony.
Thomas was called as the second witness. Anita had planned to attend the trial, but she had gotten the days wrong and so wasn’t able to get the day off from her new job working at an elementary school. When Thomas entered the witness box, wearing a black nylon jacket and jeans, he slouched into the high-backed chair, his dreads falling in front of his face. It was as if he were trying to make himself invisible. “Young man, sit up straight,” the judge admonished him. I thought to myself, He so doesn’t want to be here. Even if he tries, he’s not going to be believed. But as Thomas recounted that evening, he prefaced all his responses with a “yes, sir” or “no, sir.” He appeared to sit straighter and taller, his tone uncharacteristically direct and firm. It was as if someone had hit a switch, as if he knew that if he was to be believed, he needed to project an air of self-confidence and calm. He recounted the evening. Shakaki, he said, sat on the porch railing, her legs swinging over the side, while he sat on the front steps and his brother on the front lawn. He volunteered, “We was smoking.” And then, he explained, this boy with a hood tied over his head ran out of the gangway. “He started firing a gun,” Thomas said, his voice even and matter-of-fact. “Toward Shakaki first…It was a lot of times. Then he started shooting at me. I started scooting back to the door…and then I jumped off the porch and ran straight across to the lot.” He explained that once the shooter had run away, Thomas returned, and as he sat with Shakaki on the porch, she moaned, It burns. It burns. Thomas said he recognized the shooter as someone he knew from the neighborhood. “Monkey Man,” he said.
On cross-examination, Thedford, Joiner’s attorney, on a hunch asked Thomas whether he’d been smoking cigarettes or marijuana. Unfazed, Thomas told him that he and his brother had been smoking marijuana. He also confirmed that it had taken two days for him to identify Joiner to the police, and conceded that he did so only because the police sought him out. “You knew this girl your whole life and you probably heard the last words she uttered and you didn’t go to the police?” Thedford asked in disbelief. Thomas replied simply, “That’s right.” It was, for Thomas, a remarkably even-keeled performance. He never lost his cool, never seemed uncooperative.
In the hallway later, visibly relieved, he told me, “I’m glad it’s over with. It was like they needed me there. Miss Stewart, she’s gonna be happy to know.”
In his closing arguments, the prosecutor, Don Lyman, made clear how proud he was of Thomas’s appearance. “You saw Thomas,” he said, “and you saw how he rebutted this [defense] counsel.” Lyman went on to emphasize how Thomas remembered small details. “Thomas,” he continued, “did a great job testifying in this case. He was confident. He was certain…the certainty that this is the person he saw.” Antuan Joiner was convicted and sentenced to seventy-one years—though his attorney, Tony Thedford, is convinced that Thomas and his brother identified the wrong person. Joiner, who claims he wasn’t the shooter, is appealing his conviction.
After the trial, Shakaki’s mom thanked Thomas. I’d been angry at you because you were letting Shakaki down, she told him. But I appreciate you stepping up. She asked if Thomas needed anything, but he told her, I don
’t need anything for doing that. She was my friend. Shakaki’s father wanted to pick him and Leon up to take them out for dinner, but Thomas told him that it was too dangerous for him to come around his block. Shakaki’s mom sighed when she heard this. “It’s like Russian roulette every time they walk out the door,” she told me.
* * *
—
Shortly afterward, Thomas, with Anita’s help, moved to St. Louis, where he moved in with a cousin and her boyfriend. There he found a job cleaning offices, and every now and then he called or texted to let me know he was doing well. He and Anita talked or texted every day. “I’d say, isn’t it nice to be in a peaceful environment?” Anita told me. “You can just walk down the street without looking every which way. He would say he was bored, but he got to a place where he was happy. He was safe.” But after a year the boyfriend told Thomas’s cousin he no longer wanted Thomas living there, so Thomas returned to Chicago.
Thomas is back living with his grandmother at the house with the blowing blue tarp on 70th Place, the block where death whispers at you, nags at you, dances about, before swooping down and interrupting the living. Anita doesn’t visit as often as she used to, and when she does she won’t tell her husband, because he worries that death will seek her out, too. Thomas doesn’t hang on the porch like he used to, and when we go out for lunch he insists that it not be a restaurant in the neighborhood, and at the restaurant he insists on sitting away from the window. He often talks of when he was younger, of building a robot in grade school and how he thought he wanted to be an engineer. Or the dollhouse he built in his sophomore year, or almost built. He never got to putting the roof on, because his carpentry teacher suddenly left the school. He talks about having flashbacks, moments when he can’t get certain images out of his head. Nugget lying on the living room floor, her left eye wandering as if she was looking for someone to help her. Duck on the stretcher, a cigarette dangling from his lips. Shakaki lying on the porch, telling Thomas, It burns. It burns. He tells me he’s lost much of his taste. Sometimes he goes a day or two without eating. He says he’s lost twenty pounds.
An American Summer Page 22