There Are No Children Here

by Alex Kotlowitz

  Through all the turbulence, LaJoe thought, Lafeyette still looked for reason and order. She found it reassuring that he hadn’t given up. When a police bomb squad removed a World War II grenade from a fourth-floor apartment, Lafeyette looked on from the playground and matter-of-factly told a friend that the gangs “were figuring to blow up my building.” But, he explained, “there be a whole lot of old people and little kids in the building, so they said, ‘Don’t throw the bomb.’ ”

  Bird Leg’s funeral haunted him. He believed he had seen Bird Leg’s spirit at a friend’s apartment. “He was trying to tell us something,” he told his mother, though he wasn’t sure what. Lafeyette confided to LaJoe, who tried vainly to get him to verbalize his grief, that talking wasn’t going to help him, that everything that “goes wrong keeps going on and everything that’s right doesn’t stay right.”

  His face masked his troubles. It was a face without affect, without emotion. Sometimes he appeared stoic or unamused. In an adult, the hollowness of his face might have been construed as a look of judgment. But in Lafeyette it conveyed wariness. Even in its emptiness, it was an unforgiving face. He was an unforgiving child.

  “I don’t have friends,” he told his mother. “Just associates. Friends you trust.”

  To look into Lafeyette’s rust-colored eyes that summer was to look into a chasm of loneliness and fear. Yet those darting eyes missed little.

  And so, despite Pharoah’s repeated requests, he refused to return to the railroad tracks. It would, he believed, only invite trouble.

  Fall 1987–Spring 1988

  Seven

  A NARROW PARKING LOT cut between the back of the Riverses’ building and a squat, one-story paint factory, Professional Coatings, Incorporated. Few concerned themselves with the factory. Even when operating at maximum levels, it was virtually noiseless and employed only twenty-five people, five of whom, at most, came from Horner.

  Among the parked cars, LaJoe leaned against a rusted sedan, its windows and front tires long gone. Though it was a few weeks into September, summer still lingered. A warm breeze swirled through the development, cutting through the breezeways and the parking lot.

  LaJoe, like the others here, clung to her summer clothes; she wore cut-off blue jeans and a baby-blue, short-sleeved hospital shirt, which she had bought secondhand for forty cents. Her closest friend, Rochelle, grinned and chatted as she rested on the car’s hood, her long legs crossed at the knees.

  Rochelle was six years younger than LaJoe. They had met as children; their mothers had been best of friends. Rochelle’s mother baby-sat for LaJoe’s three oldest when the younger woman worked at a health clinic in the 1970s. LaJoe and Rochelle, like their mothers, eventually became best of friends, the only real friends, they would say, each one had. Rochelle had no children of her own, though for five years she had raised two children who had been abandoned by their drug-addicted mother. LaJoe would say that Rochelle had become “like a second mother” to Lafeyette, Pharoah, and the others; Rochelle occasionally bought them clothes or toys or gave them a dollar for candy. Though she didn’t have a job or an income—she had worked for eight and a half years at a printing company, until it closed and moved south—she ran a monthly card game, which sometimes netted her as much as $700 a month. She and her parents lived a couple of blocks from LaJoe in Horner; her father was retired from a metal-plating factory. LaJoe often visited them. And Rochelle, as on this day, often came by to see LaJoe.

  Whenever the gangs entered into a peace treaty—they actually called it that—the edge of this narrow parking lot became a meeting ground for neighbors. This was such a day, and the children took advantage of the reprieve. “You’re it,” one tall, ungainly girl yelled as she went sprawling on the pavement, just missing tagging her friend. She had tripped over a metal chain that ran the length of the sidewalk, just a few inches off the ground; it often entangled ankles. Presumably it had been installed to keep people off the grass; in fact, many years ago the housing authority fined adults and children who trod on the lawns. But now the chains had become more a nuisance than a barrier. Besides, the lawns were so trampled that the grass grew only in patches, and there was little left to preserve.

  While the adults watched in concern, the girl, who couldn’t have been older than eight, picked herself up, brushed off her skinny legs, and continued to give chase.

  As the young children pursued each other from one end of the parking lot to the other, Pharoah stood by himself on the building’s back stoop. He leaned on the black metal bannister, chin in hand, and stared into space, paying little attention to the shrieking children just a few yards away.

  “He’s daydreaming lots,” LaJoe said to Rochelle. “He’s getting more forgetful. I asked him to take the garbage out. He didn’t. I said, ‘Pharoah, how ’bout that garbage?’ He covered his mouth, you know how he do, and told me he forgot. Just done forgot. You know, he probably did. He’s forgetting lots.

  “Pharoah!” she called. “Pharoah, come here.”

  The boy’s head jerked up as if he had awakened from a deep sleep. He smiled and ran over to his mother’s side, and she ran her fingers through his hair, which had grown to cover much of his neck. Rochelle gave Pharoah a smile.

  “What you thinking?” LaJoe asked. Pharoah looked up at her.

  “Mama, w-w-when … when … w-w-when …” The words tangled in his throat as he strained to answer her. LaJoe continued to stroke his hair and his head.

  “W-w-w-when … when …”

  LaJoe didn’t let him finish. “Soon, Pharoah. Once they get off strike.”

  The city’s teachers were into the second week of their fourth strike in five years; as in the other walkouts, the main dispute centered on money. The teachers wanted a pay raise and a reduction in the size of their classes. A beginning teacher with a bachelor’s degree didn’t earn much, $17,651. The school board, on the other hand, proposed trimming the school year by three days in an effort to save money, which would result in an effective 1.7 percent pay cut.

  Pharoah loved school. Unlike the streets, where his stammer and small size made him the object of ridicule, he stood tall in school. He read at the level of third grade and six months, as measured by the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills, two months below where he should have been. Nonetheless, that placed him near the top of his upcoming fourth-grade class, whose average was 2.6, a year and two months below grade level.

  When school was in session, Pharoah was the first to leave home each morning. While Lafeyette was still dressing, Pharoah would race out the door, urging his brother to hurry up, warning him that he might miss the nine o’clock bell. The school sat a block away. During all of third grade, Pharoah had been late only four times. Lafeyette’s tardiness record the preceding year was eighteen.

  At night, Pharoah frequently read until his eyes hurt. Because he had no lamp or working overhead light in his bedroom, he would lie on his belly on the brown floor with his head poking out the door to take advantage of the hallway light. The naked, sixty-watt light bulb did little to brighten the narrow hallway, so Pharoah’s eyes quickly grew weary. He was sure he needed glasses. In fact, he desperately wanted a pair. They might help him read longer, he felt, and certainly would make him stand out in school. Maybe, he suggested, if he wore glasses, his teachers would choose him more often to run errands or to answer questions. They would, at the very least, he insisted, make him look smarter. Though a later eye examination showed him to have perfect vision, he continued to ask for a pair, even if their lenses were just clear glass.

  When he got bored or had nothing better to do, he practiced his penmanship. His teachers noted that he had an unusually neat and delicate handwriting for someone so young. But Pharoah worked at it, usually writing his name over and over on a piece of paper, so that by the time he had finished, his name appeared maybe two dozen times, leaping in all directions. The P’s would stand out in their grace and dominance over the other letters; he would even loop the letter’s stem
to give it a more pronounced presence. Sometimes, if he got carried away, his name would angle upward, with curls adorning the other letters, too, as if his name were a fanciful spaceship about to rocket off the edge of the paper.

  This summer he had had a lot of time to practice his handwriting. For him, the strike-extended vacation had dragged on far too long. During the long summer, another friend of the family’s, a man in his early twenties, had been shot and killed. The circumstances were never clear. Both boys refused to attend the burial; they still hadn’t gotten over Bird Leg’s death.

  Concerned about the safety of her children, LaJoe sent Lafeyette and Pharoah to stay with her mother until school opened. Lelia Mae Anderson lived with a granddaughter on the first floor of a two-family home about two miles farther west. Though it is one of the poorest areas of the city, the gang violence and drug dealing were not as prevalent as at Horner.

  When school finally did open—on October 4, four weeks after it had been scheduled to (the teachers won a 4 percent pay boost for each of two years after a record-long walkout)—Pharoah approached it with fervor. It was to be an important school year for him.

  The Henry Suder Elementary School, named after a turn-of-the-century physical education director, is an unimposing, two-story, red brick building whose architecture is more utilitarian than esthetic. The building is horseshoe-shaped; the three sides surround a concrete courtyard where the children can play football and tag and other games under the faculty’s watchful eye. The courtyard butts up against Horner, separated only by a waist-high fence.

  Suder was one of three area elementary schools built between 1952 and 1963, the period of largest influx of families into Henry Horner. Some five thousand children moved in. In the area’s heyday, years before Horner was built, the neighborhood schools educated such future luminaries as Lillian Russell, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Florenz Ziegfeld. But that was when the public schools were strong and respected institutions.

  While there has been a lot of focus in recent years on the sad state of the nation’s inner-city schools, residents in communities like Horner have always found the schools inadequate. In the early and mid-1960s, the schools, in fact, were a rallying point for blacks in Chicago, who charged that education was both separate and unequal for their children. In 1964, 90 percent of black children of elementary school age attended schools that were 90 percent black. A Chicago Urban League study found that in the predominantly minority schools, the budget for teacher salaries was only 85 percent of that for predominantly white schools, and operating expenses per pupil were only 66 percent as high. Moreover, the school board discouraged parental involvement. It didn’t list the telephone numbers of individual schools in the city’s phone book, so parents couldn’t reach their children’s school by phone.

  The School board president, Benjamin Willis, became the center of the controversy and, to the burgeoning civil rights movement, a symbol of the inequity in the schools. In 1961, Willis announced that no black child could transfer unless his or her school averaged more than forty to a classroom, and no white school could accept transfers unless it had an average of fewer than thirty to a room. To accommodate the overcrowding in the predominantly black schools, he introduced mobile units, which derisively became known as Willis Wagons. The schools near Henry Horner, including Suder, were so crowded that they ran two half-day sessions.

  In 1963, 225,000 children, or half the city’s enrollment, stayed home from school in protest of Willis’s clearly discriminatory overcrowding policy. Nearly ten thousand parents and children picketed City Hall, demanding his resignation. Under pressure from community leaders, Willis eventually resigned, in 1966, but the schools continued their slide. It came as no surprise, then, to those living in neighborhoods like Horner when, twenty years later, William Bennett, President Reagan’s Secretary of Education, tagged Chicago as the nation’s worst school system. It had always been lousy. Why should it be any different today? In 1963, the citywide dropout rate was 38 percent; twenty-five years later it was 40 percent. The citywide reading scores were about the same as they had been twenty years earlier.

  Suder, though, is somewhat unusual for an inner-city school. While its children test below grade level—on average, its eighth-graders graduate a year behind in reading—its halls are well monitored, its children, for the most part, well behaved. Moreover, the reading and math scores of its students show steady improvement by the time they graduate from eighth grade. Much of the good record is due to its dynamic, if sometimes imperious, principal, Brenda Daigre, who has been the school’s head since 1975. Ms. Daigre won’t tolerate hats or earrings in the school, both of which signify affiliation with a gang. The school is free of graffiti and violence.

  A three-foot-high sign hangs from the school’s second-floor windows: PROJECT AFRICA. It is, perhaps, Ms. Daigre’s finest contribution to Suder, and has earned her praise throughout the city. Nineteen eighty-seven was the program’s first year. Ms. Daigre was raising money to travel to Africa over the summer with about a dozen students. In later months, she would display African artifacts in the first-floor hallway, including wood carvings, a handmade straw bowl given as a gift by an African tribal chief, money from various west African nations, and a T-shirt advertising Project Africa. The trips, now an annual institution, continue to garner wide attention; a local television station ran a special program on one of them.

  Ms. Daigre, though, is not universally loved. Some mothers complain that she is too quick to judge their children, that she often plays favorites. Some have even transferred their children to other neighborhood schools, where, they hope, their children won’t be written off as “bad students.” On occasion, teachers have protected children from Ms. Daigre. At least one teacher thinks twice before sending a particular student to the principal’s office for fear that Ms. Daigre’s punishment will far exceed the crime.

  There are also elements beyond Ms. Daigre’s control. Like other big-city schools, Suder has experienced financial constraints. Its art and music classes were cut in 1980. Its one counselor must administer the Iowa Tests, maintain the students’ medical records, and set up career day for the eighth-graders, leaving little time for counseling the school’s seven hundred students. Also, Suder must share a nurse and psychologist with three other schools and a social worker with four others.

  Suder has another problem common to most urban elementary schools. Of its thirty-eight teachers, only a handful are men. In a community where positive male role models are scarce, school is one of the few places where children could come into regular contact with an employed man who is not a police officer. (An estimated 85 percent of the households at Horner are headed by women.) The lack of male teachers was felt so acutely at Suder that when the school was awarded extra funds by the city, teachers suggested they be used to hire more male teachers.

  It was the first day back from school after the strike, and Diana F. Barone, forty, strode into her fourth-grade classroom. Her students fluttered around her like baby robins angling for a worm.

  “Where you been?”

  “D’you get your money?”

  “Sure happy you back.”

  The questions and comments came at her fast and furious. They made her feel good. Everyone, students and teachers alike, were glad the strike was finally over.

  Ms. Barone, who had recently gotten married and was still known to her students by her maiden name, Ms. Fecarotta (some students combined the two and called her Ms. Fecarone), had begun teaching at Suder sixteen years earlier, and, while she hadn’t lost her enthusiasm for teaching, she had become a bit leery of investing as much energy and time as she once did. In her early years, it wasn’t unusual for her to spend $500 of her own money to buy books and supplies for her students. She had since become more frugal. Each year, she decorated her four bulletin boards with posters on reading and with essays written by students. One board, she devoted to phonics and displayed large punctuation marks. She dressed them in sneakers and h
ats. To conserve money, though, she had the characters laminated so that she could use them year after year. She also retained various other bulletin board material, some of which dated back sixteen years.

  Ms. Barone tired of the large classes, which at one point swelled to as many as thirty-four students—they now numbered around twenty-five—and of the funding cutbacks. And she worried so much about her children, many of whom came in tired or sad or distracted, that she eventually developed an ulcerated colon.

  The relentless violence of the neighborhood also wore her down. The parking lot behind the school had been the site of numerous gang battles. When the powerful sounds of .357 Magnums and sawed-off shotguns echoed off the school walls, the streetwise students slid off their chairs and huddled under their desks. The children had had no “duck and cover” drills, as in the early 1960s, when the prospect of a nuclear war with Cuba and the Soviet Union threatened the nation. This was merely their sensible reaction to the possibility of bullets flying through the window. Ms. Barone, along with other teachers, placed the back of her chair against a pillar so that there would be a solid object between herself and the window.

  She dreaded the walk each morning and afternoon from and to her car. She no longer wore jewelry or carried her leather purse. Instead, she used a cheap plastic handbag. She regularly slipped her paycheck into her bra before making the short trek to her car.

  But none of this had depleted Ms. Barone’s tremendous energy. A short, spunky woman, she spoke so rapidly that it sometimes sounded as if someone had turned up the rpm. She was always in motion. In the previous year’s school talent show, she and three other teachers had dressed up as the California Raisins, in costumes of black garbage bags, black pants, white gloves, and enormous sunglasses. They entered the auditorium boogying to the tune “I Heard It Through the Grapevine.” Ms. Barone always looked as if she were boogying.