“Darken,” the judge said. “Darken.” Clarise looked at her partner. She knew how to spell it. Pharoah wasn’t so sure. But he proceeded as if he knew. He couldn’t or wouldn’t lose it now.
“Darken,” he repeated. “D-A-R-K”—he hesitated for a moment—“I-N. Darken.” The buzzer sounded. He’d gotten it wrong. Now, Clarise had to spell it correctly. She stepped confidently to the microphone.
“Darken,” she repeated. “D-A-R-K-E-N. Darken.” Her classmates erupted in wild applause. Pharoah might have been upset, except that he was happy for his friend and satisfied with second place. The two children embraced each other, their faces radiant in victory.
“Congratulations,” they muttered to each other. Pharoah felt good. He’d accomplished what he’d set out to do. He hadn’t stuttered. Not once. Not even close. From her seat in the audience, their fourth-grade teacher, Ms. Barone, thought her two former students looked proud and charming in their celebration. She had never doubted they would win. Huge grins covered both their faces. Pharoah thrust his fist into the air, waving it back and forth. This time, he didn’t bring it back down.
In his joy, Pharoah alternately skipped and ran home from school, a pad of paper and a textbook clutched tightly in one hand, his red ribbon flapping in the other. He couldn’t wait to tell his mother of his triumph and show her his award. He had kept his promise. Though not the champion, he had done better than last year.
Pharoah pushed open the door to the apartment, which his mother left unlocked when school let out. Everyone and everything was eerily quiet. The television was turned down. The triplets were in their room. Pharoah could even hear the running bathtub through the closed bathroom door. Lafeyette sat perched by the window on the microwave-turned-ironing board, his arms around his bent knees. He strained to hear the conversation at the kitchen table between LaJoe, Rochelle, and a neighbor, Clementine, whom everyone called Dutt; it was conducted in hollow whispers.
Pharoah first stood at the entranceway—“That little round pie of a face,” his mother later recalled, “it looked like the pie had just got cut all up and ate up; he was so happy”—and then went to his mother’s side, thrusting the ribbon in her lap. “I-I-I c-c-came in second place.” In his excitement and in the spooky stillness, his stutter had returned.
LaJoe returned Pharoah’s smile. “Second place; that’s still good.”
“Mama, if-if-if I hadn’t m-m-missed a word …” He stumbled over his words and for a moment, flustered by the silence, lost his train of thought. “You know what they do?”
“What?”
“If-if you m-m-miss a word, Mama, they make you just get off the stage. That was so embarrassing to peoples. And, and w-w-when I saw that I couldn’t miss a word …” He told his mother that he had slipped up on the word darken when he substituted an i for the e.
“I-I-I-I knew right away it was wrong. My-my-my, you know, my heart, my heart was beating so fast,” he told her, the words streaming out of his mouth.
Pharoah realized that something was terribly wrong. He didn’t want to ask. No one seemed to care about his spelling bee triumph. No one wanted to hear what he had to say. Dutt was weeping. Lafeyette, while he had one ear to the conversation, stared vacantly out the window; he didn’t even congratulate Pharoah. LaJoe tucked Pharoah’s red ribbon into her pocket-book. (She would later display it in the living room alongside three achievement certificates earned by the triplets.) The family had just minutes earlier learned of Craig Davis’s death the night before.
LaJoe turned from Pharoah to Dutt, whose daughter had been Craig’s girlfriend and who felt partly responsible for Craig’s death. Last night, when Craig came over to the house to visit her daughter, she had gotten into a minor spat with the boy, so he had left. If she had let him stay, she told LaJoe, maybe he wouldn’t have been shot. LaJoe tried to comfort her.
“You know God, it’s up to him when you going to come and it’s up to him when you leave,” LaJoe told her neighbor. “In what way, I ain’t sure about no more, but if it’s time for you to go, you’re going to go and it wasn’t up to you. If he had stayed and you hadn’t exchanged words and you hadn’t asked him to leave, it probably would of still happened.”
For much of the rest of the afternoon, the three women remained at the table, sometimes talking, sometimes sitting in silence. Lafeyette huddled on the microwave still as a statue, neither crying nor talking, listening alternately to the subdued conversation and to the roar of the El. During one long pause in the conversation, Lafeyette spoke, his voice flat and tired.
“He didn’t have to die like that.” His stare was directed at his mother. “He had to die the way that he lived, God’s way. You die the way that you live and Craig wasn’t bad, so why him?” LaJoe didn’t know how to respond; she felt the same way. She said nothing. Lafeyette returned to looking out the window, his face taut.
In the meantime, Pharoah had shuffled out the door, unnoticed. This was not the time or the place to celebrate his spelling victory. He went to play with Porkchop in the second-floor hallway. “I don’t like to see nobody sad,” he said later.
Craig’s funeral was nothing like Bird Leg’s. For starters, it was held at night. And it was conducted at the A. R. Leak Funeral Home, one of the city’s oldest and most esteemed black-owned funeral homes, a stark contrast to the storefront church where Bird Leg was memorialized. Sam Cooke, the rhythm and blues singer, had been put to rest here, as had Flukey Stokes, a notorious gambler and suspected drug dealer. Over five thousand people had viewed Stokes’s body, which lay in a coffin built in the shape of a Cadillac.
Of the funeral home’s four chapels, the Mahalia Jackson Room was the smallest. The room welcomed visitors with a black-and-white photo of Jackson—“The World’s Greatest Gospel Singer,” the caption read—and was decorated in varying shades of green; the patterned wallpaper in emerald green, the lush carpeting the color of well-watered grass. The room seated two hundred, but at Craig’s funeral an additional fifty to a hundred mourners stood along the walls, overflowing into the hallway outside.
Craig, whose head wound had been stuffed with cotton and sutured to prevent any leakage, was dressed in a fitted navy blue suit and light blue shirt and tie, all of which his mother had bought for $154. The casket’s baby blue paint job contrasted sharply with the dark occasion, but the cheerful color seemed to brighten Craig, who even in death looked happy, his lips turned up slightly in a smile.
It was clear from the size of the crowd that Craig had many admirers. Six former teachers attended, one of whom had saved some of Craig’s writings and now planned to have them framed. Those teachers who couldn’t attend contributed $100 to the family. Children from both ABLA and Henry Horner were there, as were colleagues from work, including his boss, Percy Anderson. Flowers, almost an entire garden, it seemed, surrounded the casket. One bouquet had been sent by his teachers at Cregier, another by his co-workers at the stationery store. Two bunches had been sent by the residents of two different high-rises in the public housing complex where Craig grew up. And as tradition asked, Craig’s mother had contributed “a bleeding heart,” a set of pink and white carnations arranged in the shape of a heart with a cluster of red roses in the center.
Lafeyette came with LaJoe, who despised funerals as much as her son did. LaJoe knew Craig only from the dances in front of the building, but she understood how much he had meant to Lafeyette, so she wanted to be here with him. Lafeyette was older now and had abandoned the corduroys and nylon jacket he wore to Bird Leg’s funeral; instead, he wore a dapper blue, high-waisted silk suit that Terence, when he was making money selling drugs, had had made for himself. It no longer fit Terence, but clung to the sticklike frame of Lafeyette as if it had been tailored for him. Lafeyette also wore a white, furry Kangol cap, shaped like a golf cap, which made him look older, almost as if he were from a different era. LaJoe wore a gray dress given her by a friend who had outgrown it. Together, they made a handsome pair.
&nbs
p; Pharoah chose not to come. He said it was because he didn’t have anything to wear, but more likely he didn’t want to be amid all the crying. He didn’t like to be around sad people, particularly if he knew he couldn’t cheer them up.
James, who wept when he first heard of Craig’s death, had thought of coming, too. His mother was there; in fact, she read the obituary at the opening of the service. But James turned fifteen that day and he felt it would bring him bad luck to attend a funeral on his birthday.
In the Mahalia Jackson Room, the crowd was unusually still. Few cried. Even fewer yelled out for Craig as they had done for Bird Leg. Few mentioned the killing, though it was referred to once in the sermon, and then only obliquely as “the tragedy.” It was as if friends and family were burying an older man who had died of natural causes.
The silence, though, extended far beyond the funeral. Silence shrouded Craig’s death. Neither the police nor the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms had contacted Craig’s mother. No phone call of apology or explanation. No letter. No telegram. Not even, Christine thought, flowers. She spent four days after his death trying to learn what had happened. She visited the police, the state authorities, and eventually the ATF. But she learned nothing. The ATF told her they couldn’t talk with her because the shooting was under investigation. We’ll get back in touch with you, they said. They never did.
The ATF continued to tell reporters that Craig had been a Black Gangster Disciple. One of Craig’s teachers angrily said it was a way to justify his death. Of eighteen thousand names the police had on file of people affiliated with the city’s west side gangs, Craig Davis was not among them. Moreover, Craig had no criminal record as a juvenile and had been arrested only once as an adult, and that was for allegedly stealing the cookies, a crime he had insisted he hadn’t done. When he died, the medical examiner found no trace of alcohol or drugs in his blood. His teachers and the principal at Cregier, all of whom thought the world of Craig, knew of no gang affiliation. Nor did his friends. And, people would point out, had he been a member of the Black Gangster Disciples he never would have been allowed to visit Lafeyette’s building, which was controlled by the Gangster Stones and the Vice Lords, both rival gangs. Even a policeman who knew Craig from Horner had only good things to say about him.
It wasn’t impossible that Craig had purchased a sawed-off shotgun. All the adults knew it was hard to resist the lures of the neighborhood. But no one close to Craig knew anything about any gun running by the boy. Friends said he avoided hanging out with known drug dealers and gang leaders. The police never produced any evidence. His mother just wanted to know what happened that night, why they stopped her son. Was it a case of mistaken identity? Did they have the wrong Craig? Had he, in fact, bought a shotgun? She couldn’t find out. Other than the initial press release, the police and the ATF refused to say anything about the case. They ruled it an accidental homicide.
Christine also never heard from the Chicago Housing Authority, on whose property the killing took place. The least they could have done, she thought, was to visit her and offer her condolences. But the CHA didn’t learn of Craig’s death until weeks later. The ATF never called them, either. Even when CHA officials tried to inquire about it, they could learn nothing.
Shortly after the shooting, a police neighborhood relations officer did visit with community leaders, but more to quash rumors—including one that Craig had been shot while handcuffed. Neighbors and friends who now worried about the safety of their own children were afraid to talk about the shooting. Cregier’s principal, Ray Gerlik, who believed that “Craig was done wrong,” urged Craig’s friends who had been with him the night of the killing to go to the police, but he had trouble convincing them. They were afraid that they themselves might become the subject of an investigation.
“People are scared,” said one friend, a student at Cregier. “Who wouldn’t be? This is the FBI [sic]. They’d find out where you live. They’d get you before you even testify.”
Neighbors recalled the Soto brothers’ incident of twenty years earlier with a kind of wistfulness. It was not that they wanted the horrible bloodshed. Nor was it that they wanted to rise up in arms against the police again. It was just that they ached for a time when the community had a collective conscience, when neighbors trusted one another and had enough confidence in their own powers of persuasion to demand a better and more peaceful life. Everyone now seemed timid and afraid. Their whispers damning the police and the ATF fluttered weightlessly like leaves in the wind.
The community itself turned inward, sorry for Craig’s family, but worried about their own well-being. The major newspapers ignored the incident. The police and the ATF simply refused to discuss it, as if by remaining mute they would somehow make people forget. Christine Davis considered filing a civil suit.
The preacher’s voice reverberated among the mourners, but his protestations seemed empty at such a tragic occasion. “Craig was no gang member,” he bellowed, his words barely reaching the mourners standing in the back. “There is drugs, lots of dope out there, but Craig would have none of that. Oh, he had a temper among friends, but he knew enough to walk away from trouble.” His voice reached a crescendo; it was the only moment of untamed anger, “HE KNEW ENOUGH TO WALK AWAY FROM TROUBLE,” he repeated. “Amen,” some muttered to themselves. “Amen.”
The minister continued. “But he knew his time had come. He was going home. He was going home.” His gravelly, evangelical voice called for some response, some cries of sorrow and pain, some recognition of the tragedy, but the room, except for a bawling baby, remained hushed. You could hear people folding the mimeographed programs and shifting in their chairs, and through the thin walls the cries of a grieving woman in the room next door.
Lafeyette didn’t stay for the service. When he had first arrived and viewed Craig’s body, he pictured the summer evenings spent dancing by the porch, of a laughing and joking Craig spinning records, his body swaying in time to the music. He couldn’t get out of his mind the image of Craig waving to him. Each of those evenings was a time when the present, the here-and-now, had seemed good enough to Lafeyette, one of those rare moments when he wasn’t haunted by the past or worried about the future. Lafeyette couldn’t get those snapshots of memory off his mind. So, early in the service, he neatly folded the funeral program, slipped it into his back pocket, and shuffled out of the chapel into the crowded hallway, where he slumped into an armchair. He bent over in the plush gold chair, his chest pulled down to his knees. His face tightened, his expression became flat and vacant. He was unwilling, perhaps unable, to cry. Only his rust-colored eyes offered any hint of his anguish. Underneath them were two puffy, dark circles. He spoke to no one. He pulled the silence in around him.
Craig’s death, LaJoe believed, broke Lafeyette. From that day on, she said, he started thinking, “I ain’t doing nothing, I could get killed, or if not get killed I might go to jail for something I didn’t do. I could die any minute, so I ain’t going to be scared of nothing.”
For weeks afterward, LaJoe felt Lafeyette personally carrying the burden of Craig’s death, as if there were something he might have done to help his friend. Lafeyette rarely mentioned Craig. He didn’t want to talk about him. “I don’t want nothing on my mind,” he would say. Memories for Lafeyette became dangerous. He recalled nothing of Bird Leg’s funeral. He couldn’t remember the names of any of the performers at the talent show. He sometimes had trouble recounting what he had done just the day before in school. Shutting out the past was perhaps the only way he could go forward or at least manage the present. Besides, he knew, nothing could bring Craig back.
He fell into a deep depression, collapsing in bed immediately after school and sleeping long hours. And when the outward grief diminished in intensity, his distrust of others built—and his memory failed him more. He soon affected a long, jerky gait in which his upper body leaned forward as if it had been realigned; his eyes locked with the ground as if to block out others around h
im. He no longer looked thirteen; his bobbing, cocky walk made him look older.
Many weeks after the funeral, in one of the rare moments when Lafeyette talked about Craig, he asserted with a controlled anger that unnerved those around him: “He wasn’t no gangbanger. They lied. If I was Craig’s mama or daddy I would of walked up to that police and shot him in the head the same way he did Craig. I hope the policeman dies.”
Only two days after Craig’s funeral, Lafeyette lost yet another friend, Damien Russell.
Everybody called him Scooter. Scooter lived in the building across the playground from the Riverses. A couple of years older than Lafeyette, Scooter hung out with a different crowd, but Lafeyette knew him and liked him and felt sorry for him, because he’d heard that his mother was hooked on cocaine. Scooter spent a lot of his time on the streets.
Twenty minutes after midnight on March 12, Scooter and four other friends were tooling around in a stolen Oldsmobile. As the black sedan pulled down Wood Street going south from Horner, it passed a police car going in the opposite direction. The fourteen-year-old driver slumped down in the seat. The officers were suspicious; they made a U-turn and began to follow the car with the five boys. Before they could even give chase, though, the sedan picked up speed. No one is certain how fast it was traveling, though some estimates put it at over sixty miles per hour. It ran a stop light and two traffic lights and then suddenly spun out of control. Like a top, it kept twirling until it careered into a light pole. The car hit the steel pole smack in the middle, just about where the two passenger doors met. No one, it appeared, was wearing a seat belt.
The car’s interior was so mangled that it was impossible to tell where each of the boys had been sitting. The first police officer on the scene had to count the dangling arms to determine the number of passengers in the wreck. By the time the firemen were able to cut them out, two of the boys, including Scooter, were dead of massive internal injuries. Another died later in the hospital. The oldest of the three was fifteen. The driver, who had fled the accident, was later found guilty of three counts of reckless homicide.
There Are No Children Here Page 21