There Are No Children Here

by Alex Kotlowitz

  The five children squatted on the musty floor long after the shooting subsided. LaJoe, who huddled with them, could sit still no longer. Wearing a T-shirt that read WIPE OUT GRAFFITI, she walked into the kitchen and began to sweep the floors. Cleaning house was the only way she could clear her mind, to avoid thinking about what might happen or what might have been. It was cathartic in demanding focus and concentration. She scrubbed and washed and rearranged furniture, particularly when things got tense—with family problems, shootings, and deaths. The kids knew to stay out of her way, except for Lafeyette, who, like his mother, also found cleaning a useful distraction.

  “Lemme help you,” he begged, still sitting by the wall. “You figuring to start cleaning up ’cause you upset. You figuring to start cleaning up.” LaJoe didn’t hear him. “Mama, let me help you. Ain’t nobody gonna get killed out there today.”

  “Stay there, Lafie. Someone’s gotta watch the triplets,” LaJoe said.

  Lafeyette shrugged, but resigned to his duties, he slithered down the wall, resting on the floor as he kept the triplets in check and watched his mother work.

  For LaJoe, cleaning the apartment seemed nearly hopeless. The apartment never looked perfectly neat and orderly: a chair always faced in the wrong direction or a rug’s edge curled up or under itself. Eight people lived in the apartment—LaJoe, her five youngest children, and the two older brothers, Terence and Paul. It swelled to nine if the children’s father stayed over. He would sleep on the couch or, on occasion, in the double bed with the triplets. A stack of food-caked dishes, waiting to be washed, often filled the kitchen sink, or the plastic garbage container overflowed with leftovers and paper. Roaches were everywhere. Even when the housing authority sprayed, the roaches came back. Once a small colony of them took refuge from the pesticides in a small portable radio that belonged to one of the older children. The insects were discovered days later, thriving. Maggots nested in the building, mostly by the undersized incinerator, which overflowed with garbage.

  Even had LaJoe been able to catch up with the dirty dishes and misplaced furniture and overflowing garbage, the apartment itself defied cleanliness. In keeping with the developers’ tight-fisted policies in building these high-rises, the housing authority continued its miserly regard for their upkeep. Maintenance was a bare minimum.

  The walls inside the home were what the Soviets first saw, white cinder block. Along with the encrusted, brown linoleum-tiled floor, which was worn through in many places, and the exposed heating pipes, which snaked through the apartment, the home at night resembled a dark, dank cave. The bedrooms were particularly drab. Not much bigger than some prison cells—they were ten by eleven feet—they got little sunlight.

  Because the bedrooms’ shallow closets had no doors, they were an invitation to messiness. Clothes spilled into the rooms. For all practical purposes, there was no distinction between the closets and the rest of the rooms; the closets looked like two-foot indentations in the walls. They were constructed to accommodate curtains, but the curtain rods had long been missing.

  The kitchen and living room blurred together. They were essentially one large room partly divided by a cinder-block wall that ran halfway down the middle.

  The thirty-year-old kitchen cabinets, constructed of thin sheet metal, had rusted through. They were pockmarked with holes. LaJoe organized her dishes and cookware so as to avoid having them fall through these ragged openings. She usually piled them in the corners of the cupboards.

  The housing authority used to paint the apartments once every five years, but with the perennial shortage of money, in the 1970s it had stopped painting altogether. LaJoe couldn’t remember when her apartment was last painted. No matter how hard she scrubbed, the smudged walls never looked clean.

  But the apartment’s two bathrooms were in the worst shape of all. Neither had a window, and the fans atop the building, which had provided much needed air circulation, had been stolen. In the first bathroom, a horrible stench, suggesting raw, spoiled meat, periodically rose from the toilet. On such days, LaJoe and the family simply avoided using that bathroom. Sometimes she would pour ammonia in the toilet to mitigate the smell. LaJoe had heard rumors that the previous tenants had performed abortions there, and she attributed the smell to dead fetuses.

  The second bathroom housed the family’s one bathtub. There was no shower, a luxury the children had never experienced. The tub doubled as a clothes washer, since the building’s laundry was long ago abandoned, and the closest one was now a mile away. The tub’s faucet couldn’t be turned off. A steady stream of scalding hot water cascaded into the tub day and night. The boys had learned to sleep through the noise, but the constant splashing drove LaJoe batty. She had considered muffling it by placing a towel under the faucet, but then she realized that the bath would overflow. Instead, she used the towel to wedge shut the bathroom door, which was missing a knob.

  In the winter, the building’s heating system stormed out of control. The apartment could get like a furnace, considerably hotter and drier than in the warmest days of summer. These summer months were a welcome relief from the dog days of winter.

  LaJoe had done what she could to spruce up the place, to brighten it. By the television, which she left on nearly twenty-four hours a day to discourage prowlers, she placed artificial logs. If they had been hooked up to gas, the imitation logs would have lit up, but the family had no such source of fuel. On the living room wall she had hung two identical drawings of a red rose, a portrait of Jesus (though she was no longer religious), and a rendering of a waterfall and a country home on black velvet.

  “You grow up ’round it,”

  Lafeyette told a friend. “There are a lot of people in the projects who say they’re not gonna do drugs, that they’re not gonna drop out, that they won’t be on the streets. But they’re doing it now. Never say never.” He paused. “But I say never. My brothers ain’t set no good example for me, but I’ll set a good example for them.”

  The apartment was cluttered. In the kitchen, in addition to the stove and refrigerator, there was a broken six-foot-high freezer and an old wooden hutch, which housed plates and glassware and, like the freezer, served to stop stray bullets that might come through the kitchen windows. Living on the first floor required such ingenuity. One woman placed big stuffed animals in her windows in the hope that gang members would mistake them for people.

  “Mama, lemme help,” Lafeyette pleaded again. His words were lost in the roar of the elevated train, which passed just a hundred feet from their building. Lafeyette waited for it to pass. “Mama. Mama. I’m gonna take out the garbage.”

  “No, you ain’t.” LaJoe looked at Lafeyette and the others. They had had enough sitting. The shooting had stopped fifteen minutes ago. “Okay, Lafie, tie up the garbage. Don’t take it out. Just tie it up.”

  Lafeyette jumped to his feet and walked quickly into the kitchen, where he nimbly snatched the broom to sweep up a pile of paper. The triplets wandered into the living room, continuing their chatter, beseeching their mother to let them go outside. Pharoah lazily strolled to the couch, where he balled up, lost in his private thoughts. He clutched the bag of aluminum cans, oblivious of the activity around him. He too wanted to go outside. But there wasn’t much to do out there.

  The Riverses’ building and three other high-rises were laid out roughly in the shape of a diamond so that they all opened up on a concrete park. The two swing sets, which boasted only one swing between them, and the three sliding boards were, as far as anyone could tell, the same equipment that had originally been installed thirty-one years before, when the development first opened.

  Across the street sat the baseball diamond, long since paved over, for reasons residents couldn’t recall. Nearby, a rusted orange basketball rim was shoved and twisted against the leaning metal backboard. The court’s opposite rim and backboard were gone entirely. Local management had stopped replacing the rims, so they got installed only when a resident could muster the energy and
the money.

  On this early summer day six of Horner’s four thousand children vied to use one of the neighborhood’s few good courts. They arched jump shots into the opening created by the crossbars of a faded yellow-and-blue jungle gym. It, too, was over three decades old. Lafeyette could dunk on this makeshift rim; Pharoah, not quite yet.

  “Hey, Laf, let’s play,” James urged his friend. James loved basketball. Frequently, he sneaked into the Chicago Stadium to convince players, from both the Bulls and visiting teams, to donate their sneakers to his collection. On his bedroom shelves sat an impressive array of boat-size basketball sneakers, including a pair from the Detroit Pistons’ Isiah Thomas and from Charles Oakley, then a Chicago Bull. James, who was short for his age, dreamed of playing professional basketball.

  “I don’t wanna play ball with them,” Lafeyette said, referring to the children by the jungle gym. “They might try to make me join a gang.”

  About a week earlier, members of one of the local gangs had asked Lafeyette to stand security, and it had made him skittish. His mother told the teenage members she would call the police if they kept after Lafeyette. “I’d die first before I let them take one of my sons,” she said.

  Gangs often recruit young children to do their dirty work. Recently, a fourteen-year-old friend of Lafeyette’s allegedly shot and killed an older man in an alley half a block north of Lafeyette’s building. Residents and police said the killing was drug-related. “I wish he hadn’t done it,” Lafeyette had told James.

  Lafeyette and James constantly worried that they might be pulled into the gangs. Lafeyette knew what might happen: “When you first join you think it’s good. They’ll buy you what you want. You have to do anything they tell you to do. If they tell you to kill somebody, you have to do that.” James figured the only way to make it out of Horner was “to try to make as little friends as possible.”

  So while a group of young boys shrieked in delight as the basketball ricocheted through the jungle gym’s opening, Lafeyette, James, and a few other boys perched idly on the metal benches in front of their building. Like the swing sets, the benches resembled an ancient archeological find. The entire back of one was gone; only two of four metal slats remained on another, thus making it impossible for anyone other than a small child to sit there. Nearby, Pharoah and Porkchop pitched pennies.

  “I’m gonna have my own condominium in Calumet Park,” James told the others, referring to a Chicago suburb. “It’s nice out there. You could sit outside all night and nothing would happen.”

  “They have flowers this tall,” said Lafeyette, holding his hand four feet off the ground.

  James laughed and hurled an empty bottle of Canadian Mist onto the playground’s concrete, where it shattered, adding to the hundreds of shards of glass already on the ground. “If I had one wish I’d wish to separate all the good from the bad and send them to another planet so they could battle it out and no innocent people would get hurt,” James mused.

  “That’s two wishes,” asserted Lafeyette. “I wish to go to heaven.”

  “I’d wish there be no gangbangers,” piped up Pharoah, wishing out of existence those who fought for the gangs.

  “Wherever you go there be gangbangers,” replied Lafeyette.

  “Not in Mississippi,” Pharoah assured him. An argument ensued as to whether there was, in fact, any state or city or neighborhood that didn’t have gangs. It was on their minds a lot these days.

  By season’s end, the police would record that one person every three days had been beaten, shot at, or stabbed at Horner. In just one week, they confiscated twenty-two guns and 330 grams of cocaine. Most of the violence here that summer was related to drugs.

  Four

  ON A WARM DAY in mid-July, a caravan of three cars pulled up to the sidewalk at the two high-rises just across the street from the Riverses’. Two young bodyguards stepped out of the first and last sedans. Then from the middle emerged Jimmie Lee, a barrel-chested, square-jawed man who was no more than five-feet-seven. A bulletproof vest sometimes made him look even bulkier. He held his cellular telephone at his side as a band of worshiping teenagers mobbed him.

  A commotion caught Lee’s attention. In the entranceway of one of the buildings, a drunken man berated his young daughter. “You bitch. What did I tell you?” the father screamed at the cowering girl. Lee walked toward the building and, with a suddenness that left the father defenseless, slugged him in the jaw, knocking him to the ground. Lee stared at the crumpled drunk.

  “You don’t give no kid disrespect,” he told the man.

  “But that’s my daughter,” the fallen man explained.

  “I don’t care if she is your daughter. She’s thirteen years old and you’re calling her a bitch. Don’t do it again.” Lee walked into the building, where he had a meeting with some of his workers.

  Lafeyette, Pharoah, and the other children knew to keep their distance from Jimmie Lee. But they also knew that he and no one else—not the mayor, the police, or the housing authority—ruled Henry Horner. The boys never had reason to speak to Lee or to meet him, but his very presence and activities ruled their lives.

  When he pulled up in his caravan, they knew enough to go inside. When nighttime fell and Lee’s business swung into action, they knew enough to stay away. And when something happened to Lee or one of his workers, they knew enough not to talk about it. Jimmie Lee, it was said, was everywhere. He knew who was talking about him, who was finking, who was flipping to the other side. And when he knew, someone would pay.

  Jimmie Lee headed a drug gang called the Conservative Vice Lords. Its name had nothing to do with its political affiliation. The members controlled Henry Horner. No one could sell drugs without their approval. Their arsenal included pistols, Uzis, and even grenades. Some of its members were well schooled in torture techniques, and once allegedly threatened to shove a hot nail up an opposing gang member’s penis. Lee even had an “enforcer,” according to the police, a young man whose job it was to maim and kill and who kept a two-shot derringer for such a purpose.

  Residents so feared and respected the gang’s control that they refused to call 911. In Chicago, the caller’s address automatically flashes at police headquarters, and police will sometimes then appear at the caller’s home, seeking more information. Snitching could get you killed. The police installed a hot-line number and promised confidentiality, but in all of 1986, public housing residents called the number twenty-one times. One woman so feared the long tentacles of the gang that after she drew a rough diagram of a recent gun battle for a friend, she ripped it into small shreds for fear that the Vice Lords would find it.

  By 1987, Lee’s notoriety had grown to such an extent that his photo, taken with five other high-ranking Vice Lords, hung on the walls of every police station on the city’s west side. Next to the others, all of whom glared menacingly at the camera, Lee looked calm, even pensive. He sported a full beard and aviator glasses. His red sweatshirt had BULLS emblazoned on the front; he also wore blue jogging pants and high-tops and a thick gold necklace. Lee worked out with weights, and that showed even in his baggy jogging suit. His upper torso and neck were thick and wide; his closely cropped hair made him look that much heavier. The information under the photo identified him as weighing 210 pounds.

  The rest of the text warned: “They are known to be involved in drug traffic, home invasions of dope flats, extortion (especially of narcotics operations), and other crimes. They have been known to employ fully automatic weapons, travel in car caravans, usually with tail cars for protection.”

  But Lee ruled by more than fear. To neighborhood residents, he could sometimes be a positive force. He reportedly didn’t take drugs himself and, if he drank, did so in moderation. He occasionally bought food for families who needed it. Because of his love for children, he refused to let “peewees,” those around thirteen or fourteen, gangbang for the Conservative Vice Lords. In fact, young boys periodically received lectures from Lee to stay away from dr
ugs and the gangs. On occasion, Lee gave children dollar bills or, if their shoes were torn, bought them new ones.

  Lee’s efforts paid off. To the residents of Horner, he became a figure of contradictions. To some, he was a model. In a neighborhood of runaway fathers, Lee had been married to the same woman for nearly twenty years. And adults and children alike pointed to his generosity.

  “The thing I liked about him was that he gave kids and women respect. He really wasn’t a bad person,” said one resident. “I have a lot of respect for Jimmie Lee,” said another.

  Even Charlie Toussas, a plainclothes officer known for his tough manner, conceded, “He was a real gentleman.”

  Jimmie Lee might be considered by some the hero of a Horatio Alger story. As a child, he didn’t have much going for him. He grew up in Horner. His father was a construction worker, his mother an assembler at a plating company. He had a child by the time he was eighteen; he dropped out of school in the eleventh grade with only a sixth-grade reading level. Later, while in prison, he received his high school equivalency.

  The police speculate that Lee had been associated with the Vice Lords, which has over twenty factions, for possibly as long as twenty years. One of his first tussles with the authorities was when he was seventeen, charged with killing a fourteen-year-old boy who was found in the gangway of a building, shot through the heart. A jury found Lee not guilty. Two years later, Lee and some buddies robbed three men at gunpoint. A letter to the court from Lee’s counselor at the American Institute of Engineering and Technology, where he had received drafting instruction, noted: “While he was with us, Mr. Lee was quiet and passive. He lacked self-confidence and disparaged himself. He handled his conflicts by retreating.” But Lee went on to serve a little over four years in one of the Illinois prisons, which are notorious for their large and strong gang populations and where most gang leaders earn their rank.