“Shut up,” Lafeyette said. “Ain’t nothing there.” Rickey laughed heartily at Pharoah’s imagination. He too thought there might be something there, but he didn’t dare say so out loud. Lafeyette might think him foolish. He’d heard if you got to the end of such a thing you could dig and find some treasure. He’d been told that when he was younger. At thirteen he held on, however tenuously, to that hope.
“I’ll go, Pharoah. C’mon,” Rickey said curtly. Lafeyette shook his head.
“Go if you want. Don’t make no sense,” he scoffed.
Pharoah and Rickey trotted south on Damen, their eyes following the rainbow’s arc. It looked as if it might come down right around Cook County Hospital, about a half mile away. They passed Damen Courts, where Pharoah used to go for peace and quiet. It had since been plagued by gangs, so he no longer visited its manicured lawns. They alternately ran and walked still farther south, their heads bobbing up and down from fatigue. As they approached Crane High School, from which Dawn had graduated last summer, Pharoah noticed that thick, milky clouds had begun to hide part of the rainbow. Then he realized it was beginning to fade.
“The rainbow’s leaving,” he said to Rickey, who was a few feet behind Pharoah, keeping an eye on his younger friend.
“Sure is,” Rickey said. Pharoah ran faster. He hoped to get there before it disappeared altogether.
“Let’s-let’s-let’s hurry,” Pharoah urged.
“I ain’t chasing it no more, Pharoah. It’s going,” Rickey said. Pharoah kept racing, ten, twenty, then thirty yards in front of Rickey, who was shaking his head, smiling at Pharoah’s excitement, not letting his little friend get out of his sight. The rainbow vanished, its colors melting back into the sky. Pharoah craned his neck. Nothing. Dejected and exhausted, he walked slowly back to Rickey.
“Man, we could of seen what was there. We could of seen what was there,” he insisted. Rickey was too out of breath to argue. They walked the three blocks back to the Main Street hot dog stand in silence.
Lafeyette was still in the parking lot, eating his fries, the setting sun warm on his back. He too had watched their treasure fade. “You was psyched out,” he needled Pharoah and Rickey. “I told you so. Man, it stupid. Chasing rainbows.” Rickey laughed.
Eleven-year-old Pharoah said nothing. He couldn’t believe how close they’d come. He knew there might not be anything at the rainbow’s end, but he wanted the chance to find out for himself. What if they’d gotten there and there’d been all this gold? That would have shown Lafeyette. At the least, he figured, he could have made a wish. He had turned it over in his mind as he was running. Not until weeks later did he disclose what his request to the heavens would have been.
“I was gonna make a wish,” he said. “Hope for our family, like get Terence out of jail, get a new house, get out of the projects.” When he disclosed his appeal, he had to stop talking momentarily to keep himself from crying. It hurt to think of all that could have been.
Lafeyette too conceded that he’d wondered about what they would have found at the rainbow’s end. He had pooh-poohed the chase as kid stuff. But maybe Pharoah was right. Maybe they could have found something there. Heaped with disappointments, fourteen-year-old Lafeyette wanted to believe. He wanted to be allowed to dream, to reach, to imagine. He wanted another chance to chase a rainbow.
Maybe, he said later, “there be some little peoples, not more than an inch, just about this little.” He held apart his skinny index finger and thumb. “I wish I could of found some real little peoples and they’d of been my friends, went home with me. I wouldn’t of told nobody.”
September 29, 1989
Thirty-one
LAJOE grabbed Lafeyette’s hand before they walked through the revolving doors of the Juvenile Temporary Detention Center. She could see the fear in his tightly wound face. Last night, Lafeyette had asked her, “Mama, what you think’s gonna happen?” “They’re gonna let you go,” she had told him, only half believing it herself. As she caressed her son’s thin hand this morning, she assured him that “everything’s gonna be all right. You hear me? Everything’s gonna be all right.” Lafeyette looked away.
The two slowly pushed through the revolving doors. Lafeyette, dressed in gray corduroys and a gray T-shirt, hobbled along on crutches. The previous week, he’d taken a fall on the stairwell in a friend’s building. The metal stripping had come loose on one of the steps, and Lafeyette tripped over it, stumbled down a full flight of stairs, and tore a ligament.
In the waiting room at Calendar 14, LaJoe and Lafeyette met up with the four other accused boys. Accompanying two of them were their mothers; another had his father there; another stood by his uncle, who couldn’t have been more than seventeen.
Pharoah had said he didn’t want to come and, besides, he had school. He’d come with LaJoe and Lafeyette for a court date in August, but the case had been postponed then. Pharoah had barely said anything during the visit. He mostly worried about his brother. This morning before he left for school, he told his mother that he had prayed for Lafeyette the night before. He thought the judge might send his brother to the detention center. Of the triplets, only Tammie expressed any interest in coming. “His leg’s hurting and if they keep him they might not take care of him right,” she told her mother. LaJoe assured her that Lafeyette would be all right, and sent her to school with the others.
In the waiting room, the five boys barely spoke to one another. With the exception of two who were cousins, they didn’t know each other well. Lafeyette had spent time only with Curtis—and even that had been on rare occasions. The boys all lived in the same neighborhood but hung out with different crowds. Lafeyette sat on the wooden bench next to Curtis. The cousins sat on another bench. The fifth boy, Derrick, who Lafeyette said had broken into the car, sat by himself.
After a short wait, their public defender, Anne Rhodes, called the five boys, the three mothers, the father, and the uncle into a small room by the courtroom. She wanted to explain their options. Anne Rhodes on first encounter appeared hard-boiled and curt, almost as if she didn’t care. A tall woman, nearly six feet, she sometimes forgot that her size intimidated the youngsters, most of whom barely came up to her shoulder. She spoke forcefully and quickly and took little guff. And because her caseload was so large—over four hundred active cases at a time—she had little time to befriend or comfort her clients. LaJoe found her unfriendly. Lafeyette so disliked her, he thought she was prejudiced against blacks. He felt she’d already made up her mind that they were all guilty.
But Anne Rhodes’s appearance and demeanor were deceiving. Unlike many of the public defenders who were assigned to juvenile court and viewed it as a training ground, Anne Rhodes, thirty-two, chose to work here. She wanted the trial experience, but, more important, she wanted to feel that she was doing something useful. What could be more redeeming, she thought, than defending troubled children from impoverished neighborhoods? She’d been here two years, and it had been a difficult and tiring period. She started out in Abuse and Neglect, where she saw children taken from their parents in trials that lasted no more than five minutes. Before the year was out, she was transferred to Calendar 14, where she represented children from numerous housing projects, including Henry Horner. Half the time, the children’s parents didn’t show up. And when they did, they often created problems themselves. She once saw a drunken mother slash a deputy sheriff across his face with her fingernails. The children could be brash and unnerving. One time in the courtroom a youngster flashed gang signs at the complaining witness’s brother. All this horrified her: the overload of cases, the absence of parents, the hastiness and confusion of the trials, and ultimately the inattention to the children. “We’re supposed to be helping them and we just don’t have time,” she lamented. “It’s scary.” Nonetheless, she stuck with it. There were moments—like the time a fifteen-year-old boy who was on trial for mugging people with a fake gun burst into tears in his mother’s arms—when Anne was reminded that what
ever their misdeeds, they were still just children.
The adults stood against the room’s white walls as the five boys huddled around the circular table. Lafeyette, because of his injured leg, sat down in one of the room’s two chairs. Anne began with her usual lecture. “There’s going to be a trial,” she told the boys and adults. “The person making a complaint against you will testify. Then you will. Just tell the truth. If you don’t remember, don’t be afraid to say you don’t remember.”
Curtis, the largest and oldest of the accused, spoke up. “If I didn’t do it, how come I have to sit up here with them?” he asked indignantly, nodding at his codefendants.
“Shut up,” Anne shot back. She then chastised herself for her impatience. In the rush to get things done, she could become short-tempered and abrasive. She never had enough time. She knew that the children rarely felt they were getting adequate attention. But what could she do, she thought, when she had as many as fifteen cases to handle each day? And the irony in this instance was that she believed most of the five boys were innocent.
The meeting lasted another ten minutes, during which Anne continued to explain the procedure. On the way out, Curtis turned to Lafeyette. “I hate her,” he said. Lafeyette nodded in agreement. They returned to the wooden benches in the waiting room.
About a half hour later, Anne Rhodes approached the boys and their parents. She explained that the man whose car had been broken into, Michael Berger, was willing to make a deal. If each boy’s family would pay him $100 in restitution, she told them, they wouldn’t go to trial. Instead, the boys would be placed on supervision, which is essentially probation without a finding of guilt. The boys and their parents had stopped listening. After hearing the amount $100, they had begun shaking their heads. For LaJoe that would be one fifth of her monthly income. “We’re gonna go to trial,” one mother said. The others agreed. “Where am I gonna get that kind of money?” another asked rhetorically. The boys remained silent. Anne had expected this response. It happened all the time. The victim comes to court figuring he might get reimbursed for his losses, but the families can’t afford it. They almost always turned down any deal involving restitution. They’d be going to trial later this morning—and Anne still had to prepare for it. She hadn’t yet talked to the kids about what had happened that day. She hadn’t had the time. In the best of all worlds, she thought, each of these kids would have his own lawyer and she would have been able to prepare for trial days in advance. What if one of the children witnessed who did it—and was willing to testify? There was nothing she could do. The Public Defender’s office had the resources and time to assign only one lawyer to all five boys.
Lafeyette slouched on the bench. He said nothing. His crutches rested at his side. He didn’t like Anne Rhodes; her brusqueness upset him. Lafeyette had told his mother again that it was Derrick who had broken into the truck. Though Lafeyette had resolved not to snitch on him, he was afraid the judge might trick him into telling. All he wanted to tell the judge was that he didn’t do it, that he didn’t break into the truck.
Anne asked to meet with the five boys—without the adults. She had five minutes to prepare for trial. She needed to hear their stories—quickly. She asked them what happened. She needed to figure out who should testify, who would be the most articulate. It was clear from listening to them and seeing them together that they weren’t all friends. That made it seem unlikely to her that they had all broken into this truck as an organized gang of kids. Moreover, they all seemed to have credible alibis—except for Derrick, who conceded that he had asked the man whether he wanted his car watched. The two cousins said they were on their way to the stadium to work in one of the parking lots for the game that night. Curtis and Lafeyette explained that they were returning from a store on Madison Street.
Even with adequate time, trial preparation was difficult with children, Anne thought. They could rarely remember where they were on a particular day. Every day seemed like the next to them. And they didn’t know which direction was north or south or east or west, so that when the prosecution asked them which way they were headed, they often got flustered. In the end, she felt, children just wanted to please adults, so they would do what they could to that end.
As Anne scribbled notes on her legal pad, she began to believe more firmly in the innocence of at least most of these boys. She thought they might have a good chance of acquittal in front of Calendar 14’s judge, Julia Dempsey. Judge Dempsey, a middle-aged former attorney for the Illinois Board of Education, heard all the cases from Horner. She was noted for her compassion toward the children. She went out of her way to make sure they got good counseling or adequate care from their probation officers or in the detention center. Most public defenders liked her because they thought her fair when it came to sentencing. The police thought her too soft. In one station house, they hung her picture on a wall and peppered it with darts. Anne chose the three most verbal of the boys to testify. Lafeyette was not one of them. He’d barely said anything in the short meeting. He rarely did.
Soon after Anne met with the boys, the deputy sheriff called the case. The five boys and the adults walked into the spacious courtroom. Its high ceiling and sparse furniture made it look unusually large. To the left hung the American flag. Judge Dempsey sat behind a raised desk. The public defender and the prosecutor each had a metal table on opposite sides of the room. In the back were two rows of wooden benches where the adults all sat.
The five youngsters nervously lined up in front of the judge. Lafeyette leaned lazily on his crutches. “Lafie, Lafie,” LaJoe whispered loudly across the courtroom, “stand up straight.” He pushed his thin body up on the crutches, perched on one leg. Anne handed one of the boys a small piece of paper, pointing to his mouth. He spat a wad of gum into the paper, crumpled it up, and shoved it in his pocket. Another fidgeted with his hands. As the judge determined the identity of each child, the boys stood erect, almost automatically placing their arms behind their back. All LaJoe could think was that it looked as if they were handcuffed. Her stomach churned with anxiety. The judge told the boys to raise their right hands as a court officer asked them if they swore to tell the truth. In unison, they muttered, “I do.”
The trial lasted about twenty minutes. Michael Berger testified as to what happened and what he had lost. He pointed out Derrick in the courtroom as the boy who had asked if he could watch the truck.
“He approached the vehicle,” Berger said under questioning from Andrea Muchin, the state’s attorney. “I couldn’t get out of the vehicle. He was in the open area where the door was and he asked if I wanted my truck watched and I told him no. And he told me he sure would hate for something to happen to my truck.”
Andrea looked to another prosecuting attorney for help. This was her first trial. She was nervous, unsure as to what to ask the witnesses. She identified with the victim, whose catering service was located in the suburb where she’d grown up. She believed his story. But she wasn’t sure that all five boys had broken into his truck. She thought she’d be lucky if the judge found just Derrick guilty. Her partner assured that she had asked the right questions.
After Berger, two police officers testified. The first, Bill Freeman, was stationed at the Boys Club and knew the neighborhood children well.
“What happened when you arrived in the area?” Andrea asked Freeman.
“I observed five male black teens running northbound,” Freeman replied.
“Did you see the five male black teens that you observe in court today?”
Freeman turned and pointed to the five boys, describing for the court reporter what each was wearing.
“What happened after you saw the minor respondents?” Andrea continued.
“I ordered them to stop and at that time they began dropping stuff from their pockets.”
“When you say dropping stuff, could you describe what stuff that was?”
“Screwdrivers, pliers. I couldn’t tell you which one dropped what, but they were dr
opping.”
“Did you recover any of this stuff?”
“Yes.” Freeman said he also found five tape cassettes.
The next officer who testified had arrived on the scene after Freeman apprehended the five boys. He testified that he found part of the truck’s radio on Derrick and, contrary to Freeman’s testimony, that he had recovered the screwdriver and pliers from Curtis. In cross-examination, Anne Rhodes tried to establish that the officer couldn’t remember whether Curtis was wearing sweatpants or shorts. In later testimony, Curtis said he was wearing shorts without pockets.
Anne called Derrick, Curtis, and one of the cousins to testify. Their alibis, filled with gaps and pauses, seemed unconvincing in the courtroom. When the state’s attorney asked Curtis what store he was coming from, he replied that he didn’t know the name of it.
“What did you buy at the store?” Andrea asked the youngster.
“I can’t recall that either. We just going up there,” Curtis answered.
“And so you don’t recall what you had bought?” she shot back.
“No,” he muttered.
Anne knew they’d have trouble remembering such specifics. It had been four months since the crime occurred. What kid could remember what kind of junk food he’d bought that long ago? Anne argued that the evidence was “purely circumstantial.” She also tried to point out apparent contradictions in the testimony from the police.
“One of the minors stated in court that he had two tapes,” Anne told the judge in her closing remarks. “The officer testified that he found three tapes on him and the other officer said he found five. The inventory said five tapes, and none of them were listed.” She also pointed out that the radio part allegedly found on Derrick had never been inventoried by the police.
“Further, Your Honor,” Anne continued, “there has been no eyewitness testimony as to anyone actually seeing these minors breaking into the truck. There was a conversation between one of the minors and the complaining witness. The complaining witness did not give any testimony that he saw any of the other four minors here in the area of the automobile … We believe that the evidence put in the testimony today falls woefully short of proof beyond a reasonable doubt. And we ask for a finding of no delinquency.”
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