There Are No Children Here

by Alex Kotlowitz

  Because of Rickey’s troubles at Suder, he had been sent to the Moses Montefiore School, a school for troubled boys. It enrolled 152 children from throughout the city and provided them with individual counseling and special instruction. No class ever had more than eight students, compared with as many as thirty at Suder. Most of the students had behavioral problems and tested at two to six years below grade level.

  Pharoah remained friends with Rickey, though now that Rickey was at Montefiore the two saw less of each other. Rickey still gave Pharoah money or candy, and he still watched after the younger boy. But he moved with a crowd that was too old and brazen for Pharoah. Lafeyette was torn. He liked Rickey and, unlike Pharoah, could hold his own among Rickey’s friends.

  On a Saturday two weeks before Christmas, Pharoah, Rickey, Lafeyette, and several other friends went window shopping. They walked the six blocks to Chicago Avenue, which in this part of the city was a distinctly unfashionable strip of discount stores. The children didn’t have much money between them, perhaps enough to buy some french fries and soda pop, so they wandered in and out of stores, admiring the large boom boxes at JB Electronics, the shoes at Chicago Avenue Discount, and the clothes at Goldblatt’s. Ordinarily, Lafeyette didn’t like coming here with other kids from Horner. “It make me feel embarrassed ’cause I’m walking with a whole lot of dirty kids,” he would say. “They know we come from the projects and they think we wanna start something.”

  So he suggested they walk another half mile north to a videocassette store on Milwaukee Avenue, an even larger and more bustling boulevard of small shops and fast-food restaurants. Lafeyette desperately wanted a VCR for his birthday, but he knew his mother couldn’t afford one. Still, he thought, nothing wrong with make-believe.

  “Let’s go see what we could be buying when we get some money,” Lafeyette said to his friends. The six of them straggled into Erol’s Video Club, a spacious, well-lit store with row upon row of videotapes. Pharoah wandered through the stacks until he found the Wrestle Mania movies, where he surveyed the pictures of the massive-chested men. An avid sports fan, Pharoah was particularly captivated by professional wrestling; he regularly watched the matches on television. He, Porkchop, and a couple of other young friends tag-team wrestled in the hallway of their building’s second floor. The loud, savage theater of professional wrestling, seemed an odd love for Pharoah, but he delighted in it, closely following the dubious careers of such characters as the Iron Sheik, Hulk Hogan, and Jake (the Snake) Roberts. On the surface, it didn’t make sense, but wrestling offered the gentle Pharoah an innocent entrance into the brutal world about him. It was one way he could, albeit vicariously, fight.

  As Pharoah admired the wrestling movies, Lafeyette and Rickey looked at the new releases, which included various Ninja and horror films. “Hey, Lafie,” Rickey whispered, “let’s take us some.” Pharoah, who was standing nearby, overheard him. Before Lafeyette had a chance to respond, Pharoah sidled up to his brother.

  “Lafie, let’s go leave them,” he pleaded. Lafeyette hesitated. “Let’s go home, Lafie.”

  “I’m still looking ’round, man. If you wanna go, go!” Lafeyette said in a loud whisper.

  Pharoah and the others left. Pharoah was disappointed in Rickey, but even more so in Lafeyette, who seemed to bow to the pressure of his friend. Maybe they wouldn’t get caught, he hoped. “I’m never going to jail,” he had said more than once.

  Rickey grabbed a Ninja movie and slid it under his coat. He nudged Lafeyette, who pushed a tape under his loose-fitting Chicago Blackhawks warm-up jacket. The two boys walked quickly toward the exit.

  Mario Vera, the assistant manager, had been watching them on a videocamera from the back of the store. When he saw the children bunching up together and whispering, he knew from past experience that they were thinking of shoplifting, so before they could leave, he grabbed them. He had seen young kids do this before; they always wore an air of innocence.

  “What you doing?” Rickey boldly asked.

  Vera smiled. “Now, come on, just give us the tape.”

  “What tape?” Rickey said. Lafeyette remained silent.

  “The tape you have there.” Mario pointed to the bulge in his coat.

  “Man, you don’t leave me alone, my big brother, he be burning this place down.” Rickey didn’t have a big brother.

  Another store employee, who held Rickey from behind, began to pat him down. The Ninja tape slipped out from under his jacket. Lafeyette then produced his.

  “Rickey—” Lafeyette started to say.

  “Shut up, dummy,” Rickey snapped, worried that Vera now knew his name.

  “They don’t know what we be talking about,” Lafeyette assured him.

  “What’s your name?” Vera asked Rickey.

  “Joe Styro.” Rickey evidently had gotten the idea from a nearby Styrofoam cup stand.

  While Rickey stood there, unflustered if not somewhat cocky, Lafeyette looked worried. “Since you got the tape, mister, why don’t you lemme go?” Lafeyette asked Vera. “I’m sorry. I won’t come back again.”

  “Sorry?” Vera replied. “It doesn’t work that way.” Vera, though, felt bad for Lafeyette, who seemed genuinely apologetic. Privately, he wanted to let the two boys go. But he couldn’t. Store policy demanded that he report to the police any incidents recorded on the hidden camera.

  While they waited for the police, Vera took the two boys to the back of the store, where he seated them in folding metal chairs. “Is this the first time you’ve done this?” Vera asked Lafeyette.

  “Unh-unh,” Lafeyette mumbled.

  “Like what?”

  “Twinkies, cupcakes, potato chips.”

  Both boys were nervous. Lafeyette sat with his arms tightly crossed against his chest, his face revealing little. Rickey leaned back in his chair, his arms slung over the back as if he had nothing better to do that afternoon than to pass the time with Vera. Vera sensed that beneath Rickey’s tough demeanor he was scared.

  “You guys want something to drink?” Vera asked.

  Lafeyette nodded. Rickey looked at Vera defiantly. Vera brought Lafeyette a root beer. “Thanks,” he said. Lafeyette was surprised at the friendliness of their captor. In later weeks, he expressed a desire to meet with Vera to apologize for his actions.

  Vera beckoned the two boys to a one-way window to show them how he could see the entire store from this back room. “Why don’t you lemme go?” Lafeyette asked again.

  “All they have to do is turn their back and we be gone—” Rickey said to Lafeyette.

  “We’ll give you a head start, and if you make it to the door you’re gone,” interrupted Vera.

  “Really?” Rickey asked. Mario laughed at the boy’s innocently earnest response.

  When the police finally arrived, Vera didn’t press charges. Instead, the cop gave the two boys a short lecture about shoplifting and dropped them off at Chicago Avenue. They walked the rest of the way home.

  LaJoe might not have found out about the shoplifting had a neighbor’s daughter not told her. She began to think of Terence and how quickly she had lost him to the neighborhood. She worried that she might be losing Lafeyette, but hoped the incident might serve some good. It was, after all, a relatively minor violation, considering the crimes of the neighborhood. And it showed Lafeyette that he could get caught. She also knew that Lafeyette, who would turn fourteen next June, would have to make some choices in the coming months and years. It would be easy for him to get caught up with boys who were more daring. She made Lafeyette stay in the house for a week and a half. Lafeyette didn’t seem to mind the punishment. He knew that what he had done was wrong.

  LaJoe had begun to place more responsibility on Lafeyette, partly in the hope that her son would rise to the new duties and partly because there was no one else she could turn to. She made him the beneficiary of her $4000 life insurance policy. She told him she wanted him to take care of Pharoah and the triplets should anything happen to her. She also a
sked that she be cremated so as to save him the cost of a funeral. Lafeyette protested. He didn’t want his mother burned up. LaJoe promised to take him to a funeral home to see the cremation boxes. She didn’t, however, want the ashes scattered in a lake, she told him. She didn’t like water. She told Lafeyette that he or one of his sisters or brothers could keep the ashes.

  Talk of death upset Pharoah. He worried that Lafeyette wouldn’t provide for him if his mother died. “Yes, I will,” Lafeyette reassured him. “I’ll always take care of you, but I don’t want my money like that.” Me neither, thought Pharoah, who had begun to resign himself to the possibility that he might die young. “I don’t be scared only ’cause when it’s time to let you go, God will let you go,” he told his mother. Pharoah told friends that Lafeyette had become his mother’s “obituary.” He meant beneficiary.

  The shoplifting incident also unsettled Pharoah. He began to distance himself from Rickey, not because he didn’t like him anymore—in fact, he was still fond of his older friend—but because he worried that Rickey might get him into trouble. As for his older brother, “he was dumb for listening to other people.”

  Pharoah became more alert and prudent. He had never stolen anything. Nor had he ever gotten into any trouble other than talking in class. He wanted it to stay that way. The best way was to hang out more by himself. Pharoah decided he no longer had any friends. Like his brother, he just had associates.

  “You don’t have no friends in the projects,” he said. “They’ll turn you down for anything.”

  “I was figuring to go back and help,” explained Pharoah.

  “How could you help?” chided Lafeyette.

  “Shut up.”

  “You couldn’t fight him,” said Lafeyette.

  Seventeen

  WHAT HAPPENED THAT NIGHT wasn’t clear—and probably never will be. But by the time it was over, Lafeyette was wet and hurting and unusually angry at the police. And Pharoah was confused and disappointed with himself for not doing more to help his brother.

  The late afternoon rain had warmed the December air ever so slightly, enough for Lafeyette and Pharoah to decide to work the Chicago Blackhawks game that night. Lafeyette wore his nylon Blackhawks warm-up jacket. Pharoah refused to wear what the kids called “starter jackets,” the nylon jackets with the logos of various sports teams. They had become so popular that teens were stealing them off others’ backs. During the next year, at least two boys in the city would be killed when others tried to steal their jackets.

  Pharoah, instead, had a black polyester coat, which at first glance looked like leather. The white cotton stuffing poked out through three rips in the sleeves. Pharoah refused to wear the hood for fear it would mess up his new curls. The fancy hairdo made him look older. He had gotten many compliments on it. One woman wanted to know who had done his hair.

  For decades, children of the west side viewed “stadium nights” as a way to make a few dollars’ spending money. When the Chicago Bulls or Blackhawks played, thousands of well-dressed, mostly white sports fans poured into the neighborhood. The children would offer to watch people’s cars if they parked on the side streets instead of in one of the numerous parking lots. If the driver refused to pay a couple of dollars to have his car watched, the children might smash a window with a handful of ball bearings and steal the radio or a jacket or anything else left behind. But mostly the children had no intention of breaking into the cars; they just wanted to earn some spending money.

  Pharoah took the job seriously. He and Porkchop were partners. If someone paid them to watch a car, they would stay by it at least fifteen minutes past game time and then retreat to Pharoah’s apartment, where they would watch the game on television. They checked on the car three or four times during the evening. Once, they went back outside at the end of a game only to find the driver’s window shattered on a car they had been paid to watch. Pharoah apologized profusely to the driver, and was upset the whole day after. He said, as he had before, that “my conscience bothered me.” He didn’t like to let down others or himself.

  When asked his name by stadium patrons, Pharoah always told them “Jimmy.” Porkchop told them “Michael.” Lafeyette once used the name Todd, which was the brand of his jogging suit. Everybody had an alias, even the young children. Rarely did they give their real names to the authorities or to strangers; the belief that they could hide behind false identities gave them a sense of anonymity and, perhaps, invulnerability.

  Pharoah, because he was so small and nonthreatening, was successful at picking up extra tickets from stadium patrons. “Any extra tickets?” he’d ask, looking longingly at a passerby. How could you turn down that face? It was so sweet and open. Sometimes, Pharoah would hand the tickets over to LaShawn’s boyfriend, Brian, who would then scalp them and give Pharoah a few dollars for his help. Mostly, though, Pharoah and the others would use the tickets to attend a game. They loved to watch Michael Jordan and the Bulls. But there were times when the stadium’s attendants wouldn’t let the children in, even if they had tickets. The children would curse the stadium and the ticket takers. Who were the attendants not to let them in? After all, they lived right next door. Besides, if they wanted, they could make life hell for the stadium’s patrons. Some of the patrons—the stupid ones, they’d say—even parked their cars in Horner. It was almost inviting trouble. Once, a stadium attendant humiliated James by tearing up his ticket as other patrons waited to get in. Another time, when Pharoah handed his standing-room ticket to the attendant, the man firmly told him, “No neighborhood kids allowed.” Pharoah got in through another entrance.

  The relationship between the stadium and the neighborhood had long been tense. Built in 1929, the immense concrete monolith has, in addition to serving various sports teams, been host to four Democratic National Conventions, all of them during the Roosevelt and Truman eras. Although they were built nearly thirty years apart, the stadium and Horner mirror each other’s architecture: drab and just plain big.

  Over the past twenty years, the Wirtz family, the stadium’s owners, have helped change the character of the neighborhood. The name of Arthur Wirtz, the family’s patriarch, who has since died, is anathema to some residents of this area who believe him to have been a private demolition crew; he bulldozed blocks of homes to make way for his paved parking lots, forty-eight acres in all. But Mr. Wirtz alone did not alter the landscape. The riots following the death of Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1968 turned to rubble the bustling, brightly lit two-mile commercial strip along Madison Street, which runs just two blocks south of Horner, right past the stadium. Fires set by the rioters destroyed an estimated $10 million worth of property; dozens of other stores shut down, their owners fearing for their safety. It was not a proud moment for the west side—nor for Mayor Richard J. Daley, who ordered the police to shoot to kill. Eleven people died in the rioting, two of them killed by police officers; five hundred were wounded or injured; and three thousand were arrested. Madison Street and the surrounding neighborhood never fully recovered from those two days of rioting. Today, it is lined with liquor stores, currency exchanges, and storefronts overflowing with used refrigerators, stoves, sofas, and other household items.

  In the mid-1980s, angry residents feared that the only improvements planned for the area were the construction of two new stadiums, one for the city’s basketball and hockey teams, the other for its football team. When talk of such plans first surfaced, real estate speculators began buying up property in anticipation of rising land values. Some walked the length of Lake Street, under the El tracks, offering to purchase storefronts.

  Since the city’s downtown—the Loop—can’t expand to the east because of Lake Michigan, it has crept westward, past the Chicago River and through the city’s once notorious skid row, certain to bump eventually right up against Henry Horner. There are many who believe that with a new stadium the area will become gentrified. The absentee owner of one gutted gray stone building just across the street from Henry Horner was aski
ng $150,000 for the property. And artists and professionals have begun to move into the area just north of Horner, converting aged factories to loft spaces. Some smaller companies have also opened up shop there. The city, for its part, has repaved parts of Lake Street and built a ramp onto the expressway to handle the expected influx of fans. These were, residents point out, the first infrastructure improvements in the area in years.

  As this period of real estate speculation began, Henry Horner went into a tailspin, leaving residents, local businessmen, and politicians to whisper of a conspiracy. The thinking went as follows: the housing authority, through neglect and attrition, would empty Horner so that it could be torn down to make way for yet more parking lots or upscale housing. The housing authority’s lack of money to fix up vacant apartments for new tenants fed the conspiracy theory, particularly as the complex’s number of vacancies soared from 501 to 699 in only a year’s time.

  Even passersby who knew of the stadium plans couldn’t help wondering what the city fathers had in store for Horner, which suddenly sat on thirty-four acres of very valuable real estate. Many of the buildings boast more empty units than occupied ones, thin plywood replacing the windows. In some, the black scorching of fires, recent and old, surrounds empty and boarded-up window frames, which look like the blackened eyes of a defeated boxer.

  Authorities assured residents that they had no plans to demolish Horner. They cited a 1987 law passed by Congress prohibiting the razing of public housing unless replacement housing is provided. Moreover, the city’s football team, the Bears, chose to continue to play in its stadium by the lake, so only one new arena was planned. Nonetheless, skeptics abounded.

  The stadium has caused bad feelings among residents for other reasons as well. On stadium nights, the neighborhood overflows with police. There are so many that two years ago Jimmie Lee, according to the police, had to shut down his drug operations during ball games. Why can’t we get more protection for ourselves? the residents asked. Why does it take all these white people, all these outsiders, to flood the area with police? Why is it that only on stadium nights the area is well lit? The questions, rarely posed directly at the stadium or the city, come up in conversations at Horner. The Interfaith Organizing Project, an organization of local churches, challenged the construction of the two stadiums, but its complaint was merely a whisper compared with loud and well-orchestrated voices heard two decades ago. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, numerous community organizations, most notably the Miles Square Federation, vigorously fought for and won neighborhood improvements, including better schools and health care. Demonstrations were frequent. Today, the tensions simmer below the surface.