Gang Leader for a Day

by Sudhir Venkatesh

  J.T. came over to tell me about a big party the Black Kings were hosting later that afternoon. His gang had won a South Side basketball tournament, and everyone would be celebrating. He and I took a walk toward his building. Again I had so many questions: What did his mother think of the life he had chosen? How much did she even know? What did the typical Robert Taylor resident think about his organization?

  Instead I asked a pretty tame one: “Why is everyone partying with you tonight? I thought you said it was a gang tournament.”

  “See, around here each building has an organization,” he said.

  “Organization,” I knew, was one of the words that gang members sometimes used to refer to the gang; other words were “set” and “folks.”

  “And we don’t just fight each other. We have basketball tournaments, softball tournaments, card games. Sometimes it’s just people in the organization who play, but sometimes we find the best people in the building-like, we sometimes call Darryl, who used to play ball for Wisconsin, but he’s not in the organization. So it’s a building thing.”

  “So people in your building actually root for you?” I was puzzled as to how non-gang members viewed the Black Kings.

  “Yeah! I know you think this sounds funny, but it’s not like everyone hates us. You just have to see, it’s a community thing.”

  He wasn’t kidding. The party was held in a courtyard surrounded by three buildings, and several hundred people showed up to eat, drink beer, and party to the music of a DJ. All expenses were paid by the Black Kings.

  I stayed close to J.T., sitting on the hood of his car, taking in all the activity. I watched young black men drive up in expensive sports cars, trailed by posses and girlfriends. They all greeted J.T. and congratulated him on winning the tournament.

  J.T. explained that it was courtesy for leaders of some of the losing gangs to drop by. “The ones that are shooting at us won’t come anywhere near us,” he said, “but sometimes you got other organizations that you don’t fight, that you just have a rivalry with.” He told me that the various gangs’ higher-ranking leaders tended to interact peacefully, since they often did business together-unlike the teenagers, or “shorties,” he said. “They mostly just beat the shit out of each other in high school or at parties.”

  J.T. didn’t introduce me to many people who stopped by, and I didn’t feel comfortable leaving my spot. So I just sat and watched until the beers began making me drowsy. By dusk the party was dying down. That’s when J.T. had one of his “shorties” drive me back to my apartment.

  After about a month of commuting to his building, I managed to convince J.T. that I didn’t need an escort to meet me at the bus stop. If the weather was okay, I’d even walk, which gave me a chance to see some of the neighborhoods that surrounded Robert Taylor. They were all poor, but even with their mixture of dilapidated homes and abandoned lots, not nearly as intimidating.

  I always got nervous as I approached Robert Taylor, especially if J.T. wasn’t there to meet me. But by now I was known to the gang members stationed out front. So instead of searching me-which they often did to strangers, even if it was an ambulance driver or a utility worker-they let me go up to Ms. Mae’s apartment on the tenth floor. She’d fix me a plate of food, and then we would sit and talk.

  I felt self-conscious that Ms. Mae had to entertain me while I waited for J.T. I also figured she couldn’t really afford to feed another mouth. I once tried to give her a few dollars for my meal. “Young man, don’t ever do that again,” she scolded, pushing the bills back at me. “Let me tell you something about us. We may be poor, but when you come over here, don’t pity us, don’t pardon us, and don’t hold us to a lower standard than you hold yourself up to.”

  Ms. Mae was a heavyset woman in her late fifties who, unless she was off to church, always wore an apron. She always seemed to be in the middle of housework. Today’s apron was flowery, yellow and pink, with MS. MAE and GOD BLESS printed on it. She wore thick glasses and a warm, inviting look on her face. “You know, I came here with the clothes on my back,” she said. “Arkansas. Mother said there was no life for me down there no more. She said, ‘Go see your auntie in Chicago, get yourself a man and a job, and don’t turn around.’ And I didn’t. I raised six children in Chicago. Never looked back.”

  I sat and ate as she spoke, trying to keep up with the stories she was telling as well as the food she kept heaping on my plate.

  “We live in a community, understand? Not the projects-I hate that word. We live in a community. We need a helping hand now and then, but who doesn’t? Everyone in this building helps as much as they can. We share our food, just like I’m doing with you. My son says you’re writing about his life-well, you may want to write about this community, and how we help each other. And when I come over to your house, you’ll share with me. You’ll cook for me if I’m hungry. But when you’re here, you’re in my home and my community. And we’ll take care of you.”

  I felt nervous as she spoke. Her warmth and her notion of community certainly challenged what I had read about Robert Taylor. Ms. Mae spoke to me as though she were teaching a child about life, not giving an academic researcher answers to scientific questions. Indeed, the time I was spending with families felt less and less like research. People who knew nothing about me nevertheless took me inside their world, talked to me with such openness, and offered me the food that they had probably budgeted for their own children.

  No one back at the U of C had prepared me to feel such strong emotional connections to the people I studied. None of the ethnographicstudies I’d read offered much guidance about the relationships a researcher formed during fieldwork and how to manage them. The books talked about the right way to ask a question or address a respondent during an interview, but little about managing relationships with the people you hung out with. In time I would meet the anthropologist Jean Comaroff, who taught me about the benefits and dangers of getting personally attached to sources, but that was still a few years away.

  Nor was Ms. Mae’s description of “community” something I was accustomed to from my own background. I don’t think I could name more than a few people who lived on the nearby streets in the suburb where I grew up, and we certainly never borrowed from one another or planned activities together. Suddenly I envisioned Ms. Mae coming to my apartment someday for a visit and eating bland pasta and steamed vegetables, the only meal I could conceivably cook for her.

  She and I kept speaking. I learned that Ms. Mae was the daughter of sharecroppers, had spent two decades as a nanny and a domestic worker, and was forced to move into public housing when her husband, J.T.’s father, died of heart disease. He had been a quiet, easy-going man who worked for the city’s transportation department. Moving into Robert Taylor, she said, was her last-ditch effort to keep the family intact.

  Finally J.T. walked into the apartment. He took one look at me and laughed. “Is that all you do around here?” he said. “I’m beginning to think the only reason you come over here is to eat!”

  His mother told him to hush and brought over some more sweet potato pie for me.

  “C’mon, Mr. Professor, finish your food,” J.T. said. “I need to survey the building.”

  J.T had by now firmly established his reign over a group of three buildings, one on State Street and two on Federal, each of which he liked to walk through at least once a week. “You have the CHA, the landlord, but then we also try to make sure that people are doing what they’re told,” he explained as we walked. “We can’t have this place go crazy with niggers misbehaving. Because that’s when police come around, and then customers stop coming around, and then we don’t make our money. Simple as that.”

  As we entered the lobby of one of his buildings, 2315 Federal Street, he grabbed a few of his foot soldiers and told them to follow us. The August heat made the lobby’s concrete walls sweat; they were cool to the touch but damp with humidity, just like all the people hanging around.

  “I always start wit
h the stairwells,” J.T. said. There were three stairwells per building, two on the sides and one running up the middle, next to the elevator. “And I usually have my guys with me, just in case.” He winked, as if I should know what “just in case” meant. I didn’t, but I kept quiet. The foot soldiers, high-school kids with glittery, cheap necklaces and baggy tracksuits, walked quietly about five feet behind us.

  We began climbing. It was only eleven on a weekday morning, but already the stairwells and landings were crowded with people drinking, smoking, hanging out. The stairwells were poorly lit and unventilated, and they smelled vile; there were puddles whose provenance I was happy to not know. The steps themselves were dangerous, many of the metal treads loose or missing. Who were all these people? Everybody we passed seemed to know J.T., and he had a word or a nod for each of them.

  On the fifth floor, we came upon three older men, talking and laughing.

  J.T. looked them over. “You all staying on the eleventh floor, right?” he asked.

  “No,” said one of them without looking up. “We moved to 1206.”

  “To 1206, huh? And who said you could do that?” None of them answered. “You need to settle up if you’re in 1206, because you’re supposed to stay in 1102, right?”

  The men just cradled their beer cans, heads down, stung by the scolding.

  J.T. called out to one of his foot soldiers, “Creepy, get these niggers over to T-Bone.” T-Bone, I knew, was one of J.T.’s close friends and senior officers.

  As we resumed our climbing, I a sked J.T. what had just happened.

  “Squatters,” he said. “See, a lot of people who live around here don’t have a lease. They just hang out in the stairs ’cause it’s too cold outside, or they just need a safe place-maybe they’re running from the police, or maybe they owe somebody money. We provide them protection. Sometimes they get out of hand, but most of them are pretty quiet. Anyway, they’re here to stay.”

  “The gang protects the squatters?”

  “Yeah, no one fucks with them if they’re in here. I make sure of that. But we can’t have two million of these niggers, so we have to keep track. They pay us.”

  As we continued our climb, we occasionally passed an older woman wearing a blue Tenant Patrol jacket. There were about a dozen of these women in each building, J.T. said. “They make sure that old folks are doing okay, and sometimes we help them.” Somewhere around the thirteenth floor, J.T. stopped when he saw a Tenant Patrol woman bent over a man who was squirming on the floor.

  “Morning, Ms. Easley,” J.T. said. The man looked like he was just waking up, but I could also smell vomit, and he seemed to be in pain. He lay right outside the incinerator room, and the garbage smelled terrible.

  “He’s coming down,” Ms. Easley told J.T. “He said someone sold him some bad stuff.”

  “Hmm-hmm,” J.T. said disapprovingly. “They all say that when something goes bad. Always blaming it on us.”

  “Can one of your boys take him to the clinic?”

  “Shit, he’ll probably just be back tonight,” J.T. said, “doing the same thing.”

  “Yeah, baby, but we can’t have him sitting here.”

  J.T. waved over the remaining foot soldier, Barry, who was trailing us. “Get a few niggers to take this man down to Fiftieth.” Barry started in on his task; “Fiftieth” referred to the Robert Taylor medical clinic, on Fiftieth Street.

  “All right, Ms. Easley,” J.T. said, “but if I see this nigger here tomorrow and he’s saying the same shit, Creepy is going to beat his ass.” J.T. laughed.

  “Yes, yes, I know,” she said. “And let me talk to you for a second.” She and J.T. took a short walk, and I saw him pull out a few bills and hand them over. Ms. Easley walked back toward me, smiling, and set off down the stairwell. “Thank you for this, sweetheart,” she called to J.T. “The kids are going to be very happy!”

  I followed J.T. out to the “gallery,” the corridor that ran along the exterior of the project buildings. Although you entered the apartments from the gallery, it was really an outdoor hallway, exposed to the elements, with chain-link fencing from floor to ceiling. It got its name, I had heard, because of its resemblance to a prison gallery, a metal enclosure meant to keep inmates in check. J.T. and I leaned up against the rail, looking out over the entire South Side and, beyond it, Lake Michigan.

  Without my prodding, J.T. talked about what we had just seen. “Crackheads. Sometimes they mix shit-crack, heroin, alcohol, medicine-and they just can’t see straight in the morning. Someone on the Tenant Patrol finds them and helps.”

  “Why don’t you just call an ambulance?” I asked.

  J.T. looked at me skeptically. “You kidding? Those folks almost never come out here when we call, or it takes them an hour.”

  “So you guys bring them to the hospital?”

  “Well, I don’t like my guys doing shit for them, but once in a while I guess I feel sorry for them. That’s Creepy’s decision, though. He’s the one who runs the stairwell. It’s up to him-usually. But this time I’m doing Ms. Easley a favor.”

  The stairwells, J.T. explained, were the one public area in the building where the gang allowed squatters to congregate. These areas inevitably became hangout zones for drug addicts and the homeless. J.T.’s foot soldiers, working in shifts, were responsible for making sure that no fights broke out there. “It ain’t a pretty job,” J.T. told me, laughing, “but that’s how they learn to deal with niggers, learn to be tough on them.”

  The gang didn’t charge the squatters much for staying in the building, and J.T. let the foot soldiers keep most of this squatter tax. That was one of the few ways foot soldiers could earn any money, since they held the lowest rank in the gang’s hierarchy and weren’t even eligible yet to sell drugs. From J.T.’s perspective, allowing his foot soldiers to police the stairwells served another important function: It let him see which junior members of his gang showed the potential for promotion. That’s why he let guys like Creepy handle this kind of situation. “Creepy can take the man to the clinic, or he can just drag his ass out of the building and let him be,” J.T. said. “That’s on him. I try not to interfere, unless he fucks up and the police come around or Ms. Easley gets pissed.”

  I realized this was what J.T. had done the night I first stumbled upon his foot soldiers and was held overnight in the stairwell. He had wanted to see how they handled this stranger. Did they remain calm? Did they ask the right questions? Or did they get out of control and do something to attract the attention of tenants and the police?

  “So what was going on with Ms. Easley?” I asked.

  “You mean why did I give her money?” J.T. said. “That’s what you want to know, right?”

  I nodded, a little embarrassed that he could see through my line of indirect questioning.

  “Tenant Patrol runs after-school parties for kids, and they buy school supplies. I give them money for that. It keeps them off our ass.”

  This was the first time J.T. had mentioned having to deal with tenants who might not like his gang’s behavior. I asked what Ms. Easley might not like about his gang.

  “I wouldn’t say that she doesn’t like us,” he said. “She just wants to know that kids can walk around and not get hurt. And she just wants to keep things safe for the women. Lot of these crackheads are looking for sex, too, and they beat up women. It gets wild up in here at night. So we try to keep things calm. That’s about it. We just help them, you know, keep the peace.”

  “So she lets you do what you want as long as you help her deal with people causing trouble? It’s a give-and-take? There’s nothing that you guys do that pisses her off?”

  “We just keep the peace, that’s all,” he muttered, and walked away.

  J.T. sometimes spoke vaguely like this, which I took as a sign to stop asking questions. At times he could be extraordinarily open about his life and his business; at other times he gave roundabout or evasive answers. It was something I’d learn to live with.

&
nbsp; We kept climbing until we reached the top floor, the sixteenth. I followed J.T. down the hallway till we came to an apartment without a front door. J.T. told our foot soldier escort to stand guard outside. The young man nodded obediently.

  Following J.T. inside, I was hit by a noxious odor of vomit, urine, and burned crack. It was so dark that I could barely see. There were several mattresses spread about, some with bodies on them, and piles of dirty clothing and fast-food wrappers. The holes in the walls were stuffed with rags to keep out the rats.

  “Sudhir, come over here!” J.T. shouted. I followed a dim light that came from the rear of the apartment. “See this?” he said, pointing to a row of beat-up refrigerators. “This is where the squatters keep their food.” Each fridge was draped with a heavy chain and padlock.

  “Where do they get the fridges?” I asked.

  “From the housing authority!” J.T. said, laughing. “The CHA managers sell fridges to the squatters for a few bucks instead of taking them back to get them fixed. Everyone is in on it. That’s one thing you’ll learn about the projects.”

  J.T. explained that this apartment was a “regular” squat, which meant that the people sleeping there paid the gang a rental fee and were therefore allowed to keep food and clothes inside. Ten people stayed in this apartment. A squatter known as C-Note, who had been in the community for more than two decades, was their leader. It was his duty to screen other squatters who wanted to take up quarters, help them find food and shelter, and make sure they obeyed all J.T.’s rules. “We let him run things inside,” J.T. said, “as long as he pays us and does what we say.”

  There were other, less stable squats in the building, J.T. explained.

  “We got a lot of apartments that are just basically for the hos and the crackheads. They get high and spend a few nights and then they leave. They’re the ones that end up causing trouble around here. That’s when the police come by, so we have to be tight with them.”