There Are No Children Here

by Alex Kotlowitz

  He wanted to look tidy for the assembly, so he had his hair shorn. He also cleaned and ironed a black-striped sport coat that his mother had bought for him two Easters ago. He didn’t have many occasions to wear it. With his neatly pressed white pants and olive-green shirt buttoned at the collar, LaJoe thought, he looked very handsome.

  LaJoe got to the school’s gymnasium early. She was as excited as Pharoah. When she saw her son on stage, she couldn’t help thinking, There’s the one. There’s the one. I’m going to get it back.

  Lafeyette sat with his class. He too was “happy for my little brother.” Ms. Barone was so proud of her former student that she took a snapshot of him in his new clothes and haircut.

  Pharoah had been on this platform before for the spelling bees, so he knew what to expect. He knew that he had to speak loud and clear, and that he needed to speak deliberately so as not to stumble. But in his excitement, as he stretched to reach the microphone, he realized that he had to go to the bathroom something awful. His bladder felt ready to burst. Not here, he told himself. He locked his knees together, tensing his bladder muscles. He wasn’t going to pee on himself, not in front of all these people. He tried to look relaxed.

  He spotted his mother in the crowd, with her full and open grin. But he tried to avoid her eyes and fixed his stare at the back of the auditorium. That way, he’d been told, it would look as if he were talking to everyone.

  “Uh-uh-uh … uh.” Pharoah paused. He wasn’t going to stutter. Not here. Not now. Slow down, he told himself. Take your time.

  “Try, try, try, try, that’s what special effort means.” His soft, amplified voice rang through the auditorium; once he got through the first line, his confidence returned. His heart was in it. He indeed believed hard work could overcome all.

  And when you put your best foot forward, it really isn’t hard as it seems.

  Success comes to those who when given a chance

  Do their very best and work hard to advance.

  The special effort award is what they’ve earned.

  Though it can’t begin to match the things they’ve learned.

  The applause rang in Pharoah’s ears. He looked over to his mother. She winked. Lafeyette clapped so hard and long that his teacher had to ask him to stop. “Nice job,” Ms. Daigre, the principal, whispered to Pharoah. He thanked her, stepped off the stage, and then sprinted for the bathroom.

  That morning Pharoah received two certificates: one for placing second in the school’s spelling bee, the other for special effort in math and reading. His brother Timothy got three, including the much coveted principal’s list as well as one for scholastic achievement and another for excellent conduct. Tammie received one for outstanding student, another for excellent conduct. Tiffany got one for special effort in handwriting. “The only person who didn’t get a ribbon was Lafie,” Pharoah said later. “That made me feel bad.” Along with the certificates came ribbons. LaJoe was so proud of her children’s accomplishments that she pinned all eight of them to her white sweatshirt. She paraded around the neighborhood all day with a rainbow of green, purple, white, and red ribbons hanging from her chest; she looked like a decorated war hero.

  After the assembly, Pharoah and his mother attended a meeting at which it was announced that Pharoah was one of twenty-five Suder students chosen for Project Upward Bound, a summer school designed to assist minority students in bringing up their math and reading scores. Primarily a program for high school students, this Upward Bound, which operated at the University of Illinois, had in recent years begun to focus some of its efforts on sixth-, seventh-, and eighth-graders with the hope of following them through their four years of high school, working with them on Saturdays and during the summers.

  The Upward Bound staff described the Summer Scholars program and then asked the assembled children what they wanted to be when they grew up. Pharoah knew. A congressman.

  “I want to change a lot of rules,” he told the others. “I want to change them and everybody move out of the projects. I’ll pay people to build housing. Let the people who live in the projects live in other houses. Any gang member who has their hat turned, they’d go directly to jail. Stop stealing and stuff. A little kid got to come into a store with their parent or guardian or they can’t come in. They’d probably steal.”

  He paused, then added, “If you be a congressman, there be people guarding me so you won’t get hurt. I like that.”

  LaJoe and the children got caught up in the warmth and beauty of those first few days of summer. The children shot baskets on the jungle gym. At night, they wandered over to the stadium to watch cars and make a few dollars. Pharoah’s and the triplets’ awards at school had brightened the family’s outlook. LaJoe displayed them on the wobbly shelves in the living room. They offered some promise of a better tomorrow. And everyone was thrilled with Pharoah for being picked to participate in the summer program. Pharoah would come back with tales of the University of Illinois campus that delighted LaJoe. He talked of the footbridges and the big glass buildings and of the students who seemed to be everywhere, always carrying books. Pharoah would tell LaJoe that he planned to attend college there. But it wasn’t long before LaJoe was rudely reminded of summer’s true character at Horner.

  One afternoon, she and Rochelle were walking down Washington Boulevard to a corner store. She waved to two teenage boys she knew who were walking on the other side of the street; both wore red, the Vice Lords’ color, in Disciples’ territory. LaJoe noticed that two children, one no bigger than Pharoah, and a young man were tailing the two teens. They’d duck into alleys and behind the porches of the two-family homes on Washington. LaJoe yelled to the two teens that they were being followed. Then she watched in horror as the man handed a pistol to the little boy who reminded LaJoe of Pharoah in his small size and bobbing gait.

  “Go kill the motherfucker,” LaJoe overheard him say. The boy aimed the pistol, his entire body straining just to hold it straight, and opened fire on the two teens. POW. POW. LaJoe and Rochelle ducked into the corner store for cover. The two teens ran. They escaped unharmed.

  The incident angered and frightened LaJoe. How did that little boy even know whom he was shooting at? All he saw was a couple of people wearing red and their hats turned to the left. From the back, they could have been girls. Later that day, LaJoe ripped the red Louisville cap off Lafeyette’s head and told him he couldn’t wear any hats. No earrings, either, she told him. That was that. She was putting her foot down. That could have been Lafeyette the boy was shooting at.

  Twenty-seven

  HAD LAJOE KNOWN about the July 13 meeting held by the Chicago Housing Authority’s new chairman, Vincent Lane, she would have attended. But Lane wanted to keep it small. A large meeting, he feared, would lead to shouting and complaints. He wanted to meet with the neighborhood’s leaders, to reassure them that the housing agency was going to clean up the basements.

  Twenty residents, most of them women, packed the first-floor apartment at 1900 West Washington that had been converted into an office for Horner’s tenants’ association. It had been many years since the group had been a real force in the neighborhood, but it was the only organized group of residents in the complex, and its leader, Mamie Bone, could, when she wanted, make lots of noise and force a swift response.

  The women found seats on the folding metal chairs as they fanned themselves with their hands to push away the still and heavy heat. They bristled with anger. It had taken them weeks to get an accurate and full account of the mess in their basements. They’d heard rumors, all right. When the tales began to circulate, the tenants whispered among themselves about radioactive material beneath their buildings. Then they heard talk of brand-new stoves and cabinets, thousands of them, sitting below them, unused. Finally, though, when they couldn’t get answers from the bureaucrats at the housing authority, Ms. Bone went down to see Lane personally. She told him what she’d heard, and he began to ask around. He had heard nothing about the problem with
the basements.

  Gwen Anderson’s April 20 memo had never reached him. Those who had received the memo held on to it; they were afraid they would get fired if Lane found out about the two thousand rusted ranges and refrigerators. When Lane learned of all this, he was outraged. And when he finally got hold of the memo, six weeks after it was written, he got sick to his stomach. Nobody ever thought of the tenants, he fumed. Having been director for one year, he had come to understand that many of his employees had only one thing on their mind: preserving their jobs. And if that meant covering up mismanagement, even if it wasn’t their own, so be it. Now he’d have to explain to Horner’s residents why everything had been so hush-hush and why nothing had been done.

  Vincent Lane provided some hope to LaJoe and the others at Horner, though he seemed an unlikely candidate to head the troubled housing agency. The eighth head in five years, he was a political unknown. When his name first surfaced in the spring of 1988 as a possible director, local reporters scrambled to find out all they could about the nominee. What they learned initially was somewhat disconcerting. He had never managed more than thirty-six employees; the CHA employed thirty-two hundred. And what’s more, Lane, who at forty-five had become one of the city’s premier black developers of residential housing, had shown only a passing interest in social issues. He eschewed New Deal politics, considered himself more a Republican than a Democrat, and cited Robert Moses, the deceased New York builder of public works, as his hero.

  Baby-faced and broad-shouldered, Lane was occasionally mistaken for Jesse Jackson. Besides a passing resemblance, he possessed a similar personal magnetism. People flocked to him and developed loyalty and reverence. Friends boasted of their closeness to him.

  Despite a temper that sometimes vented itself in lofty explosions, Lane could be gentle and warm. And when he spoke with people whose allegiance he wanted—tenants, employees, federal officials, the press—he placed his arm around their shoulders or rested it on their back, physically drawing them closer as if they were the oldest of friends. Women found him extraordinarily handsome, and in later months, after he became a kind of folk hero to the residents of public housing, some women greeted him with kisses and hugs and then dreamed with their friends about how magical it would be if they could manage to get a date with him.

  Lane came to the job with few illusions. As early as 1965, The Chicago Daily News ran an extensive series on “the misery, bungling and a hellish way of life” at the Robert Taylor Homes, the city’s largest development. It detailed regular shootings and rapes, broken elevators, and apartments so overheated that children got nosebleeds. A steady stream of reports and investigations followed. In one five-year period, 1978 through 1982, the CHA was the subject of half a dozen highly critical studies.

  In 1968, a presidential commission on urban problems wrote of Chicago’s public housing that “the sheer scale of such projects … is stultifying to the human spirit. Administration is heavy-handed. The … child caught in such a social environment is living almost in a concentration camp from which he has little chance of escape.”

  A 1975 Chicago Sun-Times series uncovered dubious, and possibly corrupt, practices on the part of Charles Swibel, then the CHA head. It alleged that Swibel’s private management firm had received $79,000 a year in fees from a bank that handled lucrative CHA accounts, that Swibel turned CHA business over to politically connected firms, and that he waived waiting-list procedures for persons seeking to get relatives into the coveted elderly housing apartments. Swibel, who for nineteen years was boss of the CHA, became symbolic of all that had gone wrong with the authority. Under Swibel’s tenure, Chicago’s public housing had gone from bad to worse.

  Then, as if all that weren’t enough, a 1982 Department of Housing and Urban Development audit uncovered a roster of problems that eventually led to Swibel’s dismissal. The 227-page report, which was unusually frank and blunt in its observations, concluded that only five of the agency’s nineteen project managers were “competent or knowledgeable enough to be managing projects.” It found that because of extensive patronage, the CHA never laid off or fired any of its 2288 employees, and that over a third of CHA elevators were out of commission at any one time.

  The CHA, the report concluded, “is operating in a state of profound confusion and disarray. No one seems to be minding the store; what’s more, no one seems to genuinely care.”

  Lane knew about all this. The exposés had all been widely known. Nonetheless, he was in for some startling surprises. It was even worse than had been reported.

  Events in just his first few months on the job had eaten away at his optimism. He had come in knowing he had to win back the confidence of tenants and employees. He thought he could do so gradually, with gestures of good will. He organized town meetings at each of the developments. He met regularly with his staff. He built a new bridge to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which provided most of the authority’s funding and which only a year ago had threatened to take it over.

  But Lane quickly learned the depth of the chasm. The CHA had been so poorly run that the staff didn’t even have an accurate count of the number of tenants in its complexes or, for that matter, the total number of apartments. At town meetings, he heard stories that made him shake with anger. One woman testified that her refrigerator hadn’t worked in two months. She stored her food at her daughter’s. Others told of a front door that had swollen in the heat and wouldn’t close, a bathtub and bathroom sink that periodically spewed out human waste, and plumbing leaks that went unrepaired for weeks.

  But the most horrific stories were of the gangs and their virtual control of public housing’s high-rises. Lane, in a move that in later months he conceded was the result of frustration and pique, decided to reclaim some buildings. The first one he raided was in Rockwell Gardens, a few blocks to the west of Henry Horner. With the help of sixty Chicago policemen, housing authority officials went from apartment to apartment, looking for weapons and drugs. They secured the building by constructing a makeshift lobby, placing doors at the entrance to the breezeway, and assigning full-time security guards. The one disappointment was that the police confiscated only one gun and made no arrests. Lane learned later that someone in the CHA had tipped off the gangs the night before. Overnight, they had moved their drugs and guns. The problem, Lane realized then, was more insidious than he had been led to believe.

  In later months, Lane got word from a drug dealer that if he wanted to take back the high-rises at Rockwell Gardens, he could have them. The dealers would just move their operations to the low-rises at ABLA and other complexes. The low-rises would be harder for the housing authority to secure, since, unlike the high-rises, they didn’t have only a single entrance that could be enclosed and guarded. Lane heard about threats on his life. He was assigned two bodyguards. The CHA received a bomb threat. During one of the raids, which came to be known as sweeps, the police found two pounds of C-4 explosives and two electrical detonaters, enough to blow up a considerable section of a high-rise. This summer of 1989, Lane vowed to sweep all eight buildings at Rockwell and reclaim the entire complex from the gangs. Then came Henry Horner.

  Lane arrived at the meeting twenty minutes late. The women might have been angry, but they wanted so badly to hear what was going on with their homes that they waited. They’d been stood up before by other CHA officials.

  Lane, dressed immaculately in a gray suit, wasted no time getting to their concerns. He immediately began talking about the basements and the vacant apartments.

  “The reason it was brought to my attention was because of Mamie Bone,” Lane told those assembled. “When I got the full scope of what we were dealing with, apartments that have been sealed with dead cats and dogs, it’s just unbelievable. Unfortunately, our own staff tried to deal with it internally, but that didn’t work.”

  Lane told the women it would cost as much as $500,000 to clean the basements and vacant apartments. But that wasn’t all the money Horner would n
eed, he told them. It would cost upward of $400,000 to replace the stolen heating coils. Moreover, the vacancy rate at Horner had soared because the CHA didn’t have the money to fix up the apartments as tenants left; in some buildings, 85 percent of the units sat empty. Sinks and toilets had been stolen, as had window frames, 249 in all, which addicts sold for scrap.

  “It’s never been like this before,” a tenant, James Mayes, yelled at Lane.

  “It’s been deteriorating for thirty years,” Lane countered.

  “Vince, I’m telling you, it’s never been this bad.”

  Lane jumped up from his chair and, as happened when he got upset, his voice rose an octave. “Now, I’ll tell you, I can’t wave no wands or anything, but we’re going to make a difference. Regardless of what Mayes says. But it doesn’t happen overnight. We’ve got problems in CHA. Now, I feel as bad about the situation at Horner as anyone else. But it’s not going to change overnight. We don’t have the same resources.”

  A few amens rose from the seated women.

  “The gangbangers and drug dealers are eating this development alive. We’ve got to make these buildings manageable … I have the faith and belief that people in public housing are no different than anyone else.”

  Lane told the gathered tenants he had to go; he had another meeting. They came up to shake his hand. One gave him a kiss on the cheek. He’d get the basements cleaned up, he assured them. He’d fix the heating coils. He’d get the money. But what he couldn’t tell the tenants is that he wasn’t sure what he’d do about the gangs and drugs.

  Jimmie Lee may have been gone but as the residents knew all too well, there were many people waiting to fill in for him. No one stepped forward with the power and authority Lee had, but the drug trafficking continued and the gangs battled for retail turf. Standing in their way was a new and determined CHA led by Lane, so the gangs sent a message to him.