Gang Leader for a Day

by Sudhir Venkatesh

“You mean you don’t have any white friends?” I asked.

  “You have any black friends?” Old Time countered with a sly grin. I didn’t need to answer. “And you may want to ask your professors if they have any,” he said, clearly pleased with his rebuke.

  From these conversations I started to gain a bit of perspective on what it was like to be black in Chicago. The overriding sentiment was that given how the city operated, there was little chance for any significant social progress.

  This kind of fatalism was foreign to me. When you grew up in affluent Southern California, even for someone as politically disengaged as I, there was a core faith in the workings of American institutions and a sustaining belief that people can find a way to resolve their differences, even racial ones. I was now beginning to see the limits of my narrow experience. Nearly every conversation with Old Time and his friends wound up at the intersection of politics and race. I couldn’t follow all the nuances of their arguments, especially when it came to local politics, but even I could see the huge gap between how they perceived the world and how sociologists presented the life of urban poor people.

  One day I asked Old Time and his friends if they’d be willing to let me interview them for Professor Wilson’s survey. They agreed, and I tried for a few days. But I felt I wasn’t getting anywhere. Most of the conversations ended up meandering along, a string of interruptions and half-finished thoughts.

  Charlie could see I was dejected. “Before you give up,” he said, “you should probably speak to the people who you really want to talk to-young men, not us. That’s the only way you’re going to get what you need.”

  So I set out looking for young black men. At the U of C library, I checked the census records to find a tract with poor black families with people between the ages of sixteen and twenty-four. The Lake Park projects looked good, at least on paper, and I randomly chose Building Number 4040, highlighting on my census printout the apartments where young people lived. Those were the doors I’d be knocking on. Old Time told me that I could go any day I wanted. “Most black folk in the projects don’t work,” he said, “so they don’t have nowhere else to be.” Still, I thought a weekend would be the best time to find a lot of people.

  On a brisk Saturday afternoon in November, I went looking for 4040 South Lake Park, one of several high-rise projects in Oakland, a lakefront neighborhood about two miles north of the U of C. Oakland was one of the poorest communities in Chicago, with commensurately high rates of unemployment, welfare, and crime. Its population was overwhelmingly black, dating back to the early-twentieth-century southern migration. The neighborhood surrounding the Lake Park projects wasn’t much of a neighborhood at all. There were few people on the streets, and on some blocks there were more vacant lots than buildings. Aside from a few liquor stores and broken-down bodegas, there wasn’t much commerce. It struck me that most housing projects, even though they are built in cities, run counter to the very notion of urban living. Cities are attractive because of their balkanized variety: wandering the streets of a good city, you can see all sorts of highs and lows, commerce and recreation, a multitude of ethnicities and just as many expressions of public life. But housing projects, at least from the outside, seemed to be a study in joyless monotony, the buildings clustered tightly together but set apart from the rest of the city, as if they were toxic.

  Up close, the buildings looked like tall checkerboards, their dull yellow-brick walls lined with rows of dreary windows. A few of the windows revealed the aftermath of an apartment fire, black smudges spreading upward in the shape of tombstones. Most of the buildings had only one entrance, and it was usually clogged with young people.

  By now I was used to being observed carefully when I walked around a black neighborhood. Today was no different. As I approached one of the Lake Park projects, five or six young men stared me down. It should be said here that I probably deserved to be stared at. I was just a few months removed from a long stretch of time I’d spent following the Grateful Dead, and I was still under the spell of Jerry Garcia and his band of merrymakers. With my ponytail and tie-dyed shirt, I must have looked pretty out of place. I tended to speak in spiritually laden language, mostly about the power of road trips; the other grad students in my department saw me as a bit naïve and more than a little loopy. Looking back, I can’t say they were wrong.

  But I wasn’t so naïve that I couldn’t recognize what was going on in the lobby of the building that I now approached. Customers were arriving, black and white, by car and on foot, hurrying inside to buy their drugs and then hurrying back out. I wasn’t sure if this building was Number 4040, and I couldn’t find the number anywhere, so I just walked inside. The entryway smelled of alcohol, soot, and urine. Young men stood and crouched on plastic milk crates, a couple of them stomping their feet against the cold. I put my head down, took a breath, and walked past them quickly.

  Their eyes felt heavy on me as I passed by. One huge young man, six foot six at least, chose not to move an inch as I passed. I brushed up against him and nearly lost my balance.

  There was a long row of beaten-up metal mailboxes, many of them missing their doors. Water was dripping everywhere, puddling on the ground. Shouts and shrieks cascaded down from the higher floors, making the whole building feel like some kind of vibrating catacomb.

  Once I got past the entryway, it was darker. I could make out the elevator, but I seemed to be losing any peripheral vision, and I couldn’t find the button. I sensed that I was still being watched and that I ought to press the button fast, but I groped around in vain. Then I started looking for the stairwell, but I couldn’t find that either. To my left was a large barrier of some kind, but I was too nervous to go around it. To my right was a corridor. I decided to go that way, figuring I’d come across a stairwell or at least a door to knock on. As I turned, a hand grabbed my shoulder.

  “What’s up, my man, you got some business in here?” He was in his twenties, about as tall and dark as I was. His voice was deep and forceful but matter-of-fact, as if he asked the same question regularly. He wore baggy jeans, a loose-fitting jacket, and a baseball cap. His earrings sparkled, as did the gold on his front teeth. A few other young men, dressed the same, stood behind him.

  I told them that I was there to interview families.

  “No one lives here,” he said.

  “I’m doing a study for the university,” I said, “and I have to go to Apartments 610 and 703.”

  “Ain’t nobody lived in those apartments for the longest,” he said.

  “Well, do you mind if I just run up there and knock on the door?”

  “Yeah, we do mind,” he said.

  I tried again. “Maybe I’m in the wrong building. Is this 4040?”

  He shook his head. “No one lives here. So you won’t be talking to anybody.”

  I decided I’d better leave. I walked back through the lobby, bag and clipboard in hand. I crossed in front of the building, over an expansive patch of dead grass littered with soda cans and broken glass. I turned around and looked back at the building. A great many of the windows were lit. I wondered why my new friend had insisted that the building was uninhabited. Only later did I learn that gang members routinely rebuffed all sorts of visitors with this line: “No one by that name lives here.” They would try to prevent social workers,schoolteachers, and maintenance personnel from coming inside and interrupting their drug trade.

  The young men from the building were still watching me, but they didn’t follow. As I came upon the next high-rise, I saw the faint markings on the pale yellow brick: Number 4040. At least now I was in the right place. The lobby here was empty, so I quickly skirted past another set of distressed mailboxes and passed through another dank lobby. The elevator was missing entirely-there was a big cavity where the door should have been-and the walls were thick with graffiti.

  As I started to climb the stairs, the smell of urine was overpowering. On some floors the stairwells were dark; on others there was a muted glow. I
walked up four flights, maybe five, trying to keep count, and then I came upon a landing where a group of young men, high-school age, were shooting dice for money.

  “Nigger, what the fuck are you doing here?” one of them shouted. I tried to make out their faces, but in the fading light I could barely see a thing.

  I tried to explain, again. “I’m a student at the university, doing a survey, and I’m looking for some families.”

  The young men rushed up to me, within inches of my face. Again someone asked what I was doing there. I told them the numbers of the apartments I was looking for. They told me that no one lived in the building.

  Suddenly some more people showed up, a few of them older than the teenagers. One of them, a man about my age with an oversize baseball cap, grabbed my clipboard and asked what I was doing. I tried to explain, but he didn’t seem interested. He kept adjusting his too-big hat as it fell over his face.

  “Julio over here says he’s a student,” he told everyone. His tone indicated he didn’t believe me. Then he turned back to me. “Who do you represent?”

  “Represent?” I asked.

  “C’mon, nigger!” one of the younger men shouted. “We know you’re with somebody, just tell us who.”

  Another one, laughing, pulled something out of his waistband. At first I couldn’t tell what it was, but then it caught a glint of light and I could see that it was a gun. He moved it around, pointing it at my head once in a while, and muttered something over and over- “I’ll take him,” he seemed to be saying.

  Then he smiled. “You do not want to be fucking with the Kings,” he said. “I’d just tell us what you know.”

  “Hold on, nigger,” another one said. He was holding a knife with a six-inch blade. He began twirling it around in his fingers, the handle spinning in his palm, and the strangest thought came over me: That’s the exact same knife my friend Brian used to dig a hole for our tent in the Sierra Nevadas. “Let’s have some fun with this boy,” he said. “C’mon, Julio, where you live? On the East Side, right? You don’t look like the West Side Mexicans. You flip right or left? Five or six? You run with the Kings, right? You know we’re going to find out, so you might as well tell us.”

  Kings or Sharks, flip right or left, five or six. It appeared that I was Julio, the Mexican gang member from the East Side. It wasn’t clear yet if this was a good or a bad thing.

  Two of the other young men started to search my bag. They pulled out the questionnaire sheets, pen and paper, a few sociology books, my keys. Someone else patted me down. The guy with the too-big hat who had taken my clipboard looked over the papers and then handed everything back to me. He told me to go ahead and ask a question.

  By now I was sweating despite the cold. I leaned backward to try to get some light to fall on the questionnaire. The first question was one I had adapted from several other similar surveys; it was one of a set of questions that targeted young people’s self-perceptions.

  “How does it feel to be black and poor?”I read. Then I gave the multiple-choice answers: “Very bad, somewhat bad, neither bad nor good, somewhat good, very good.”

  The guy with the too-big hat began to laugh, which prompted the others to start giggling.

  “Fuck you!” he told me. “You got to be fucking kidding me.”

  He turned away and muttered something that made everyone laugh uncontrollably. They went back to quarreling about who I was. They talked so fast that I couldn’t easily follow. It seemed they were as confused as I was. I wasn’t armed, I didn’t have tattoos, I wasn’t wearing anything that showed allegiance to another gang-I didn’t wear a hat turned toward the left or right, for instance, I wasn’t wearing blue or red, I didn’t have a star insignia anywhere, either the five- or six-point variety.

  Two of them started to debate my fate. “If he’s here and he don’t get back,” said one, “you know they’re going to come looking for him.”

  “Yeah, and I’m getting the first shot,” said the other. “Last time I had to watch the crib. Fuck that. This time I’m getting in the car. I’m shooting some niggers.”

  “These Mexicans ain’t afraid of shit. They kill each other in prison, over nothing. You better let me handle it, boy. You don’t even speak Mexican.”

  “Man, I met a whole bunch of them in jail. I killed three just the other day.”

  As their claims escalated, so did their insults.

  “Yeah, but your mama spoke Mexican when I was with her.”

  “Nigger, your daddy was a Mexican.”

  I sat down on a cold concrete step. I struggled to follow what they were talking about. A few of them seemed to think that I was an advance scout from a Mexican gang, conducting reconnaissance for a drive-by attack. From what I could glean, it seemed as if some black gangs were aligned with certain Mexican gangs but in other cases the black gangs and Mexican gangs were rivals.

  They stopped talking when a small entourage entered the stairwell. At the front was a large man, powerfully built but with a boyish face. He also looked to be about my age, maybe a few years older, and he radiated calm. He had a toothpick or maybe a lollipop in his mouth, and it was obvious from his carriage that he was the boss. He checked out everyone who was on the scene, as if making a mental list of what each person was doing. His name was J.T., and while I couldn’t have known it at this moment, he was about to become the most formidable person in my life, for a long time to come.

  J.T. asked the crowd what was happening, but no one could give him a straight answer. Then he turned to me. “What are you doing here?”

  He had a few glittery gold teeth, a sizable diamond earring, and deep, hollow eyes that fixed on mine without giving away anything. Once again, I started to go through my spiel: I was a student at the university, et cetera, et cetera.

  “You speak Spanish?” he asked.

  “No!” someone shouted out. “But he probably speaks Mexican!”

  “Nigger, just shut the fuck up,” J.T. said. Then someone mentioned my questionnaire, which seemed to catch his interest. He asked me to tell him about it.

  I explained the project as best as I could. It was being overseen by a national poverty expert, I said, with the goal of understanding the lives of young black men in order to design better public policy.

  My role, I said, was very basic: conducting surveys to generate data for the study. There was an eerie silence when I finished. Everyone stood waiting, watching J.T.

  He took the questionnaire from my hand, barely glanced at it, then handed it back. Everything he did, every move he made, was deliberate and forceful.

  I read him the same question that I had read the others. He didn’t laugh, but he smiled. How does it feel to be black and poor?

  “I’m not black,” he answered, looking around at the others knowingly.

  “Well, then, how does it feel to be African American and poor?” I tried to sound apologetic, worried that I had offended him.

  “I’m not African American either. I’m a nigger.”

  Now I didn’t know what to say. I certainly didn’t feel comfortable asking him how it felt to be a nigger. He took back my questionnaire and looked it over more carefully. He turned the pages, reading the questions to himself. He appeared disappointed, though I sensed that his disappointment wasn’t aimed at me.

  “Niggers are the ones who live in this building,” he said at last. “African Americans live in the suburbs. African Americans wear ties to work. Niggers can’t find no work.”

  He looked at a few more pages of the questionnaire. “You ain’t going to learn shit with this thing.” He kept shaking his head and then glanced toward some of the older men standing about, checking to see if they shared his disbelief. Then he leaned in toward me and spoke quietly. “How’d you get to do this if you don’t even know who we are, what we’re about?” His tone wasn’t accusatory as much as disappointed, and perhaps a bit bewildered.

  I didn’t know what to do. Perhaps I should get up and leave? But then he turned q
uickly and left, telling the young men who stayed behind to “watch him.” Meaning me.

  They seemed excited by how things had turned out. They had mostly stood still while J.T. was there, but now they grew animated. “Man, you shouldn’t mess with him like that,” one of them told me. “See, you should’ve just told him who you were. You might have been gone by now. He might have let you go.”

  “Yeah, you fucked up, nigger,” another one said. “You really fucked this one up.”

  I leaned back on the cold step and wondered exactly what I had done to “fuck up.” For the first time that day, I had a moment to ponder what had been happening. Random thoughts entered my mind, but, oddly, none of them concerned my personal safety: What the hell is Bill Wilson going to do if he finds out about this? How am I supposed to know whether to address an interview subject as black, African American, or Negro? Did every Ph.D. student have to go through this? Can I go to the bathroom? The sun had set, and it was getting colder. I pulled my jacket tighter and bent over, trying to keep out of the wintry draft.

  Yo! Freeze, you want one?”

  An older man walked in with a grocery bag full of beers and offered a bottle to one of the young men guarding me. He passed out beers to everyone there. Pretty soon they were all in a better mood. They even gave me a bottle.

  By now it was well into the evening. No one seemed to have anywhere to go. The young men just sat in the stairwell telling one another all kinds of stories: about sexual conquests, the best way to smoke a marijuana cigarette, schoolteachers they’d like to have sex with, the rising cost of clothing, cops they wanted to kill, and where they would go when their high-rise building was torn down. This last fact surprised me. Nothing in our records at the university suggested that these projects were closing.

  “You have to leave?” I asked. “What kind of neighborhood will you be going to?”

  “Nigger, did someone tell you to talk?” one of them said.

  “Yeah, Julio,” said another, moving in closer. “You ain’t got no business here.”