Gang Leader for a Day

by Sudhir Venkatesh

  In the parking lot, I ran into C-Note, who was in his usual spot with a few other squatters, fixing flat tires and washing cars.

  “Hey, what’s up, guys?” I shouted out. “Long time-how you been?”

  Nobody replied. They looked at me, then turned away. I walked closer and stood a few feet from them. “What’s up?” I said. “Everything all right?”

  One of the men, Pootie, picked up a tool and started to loosen a tire from the rim. “Man, sometimes you just learn the hard way,” he said to no one in particular. “That’s life, isn’t it? Sometimes you realize you can’t trust nobody. They could be a cop, a snitch- who knows?”

  C-Note simply shrugged. “Mm-hmm,” he said.

  “Yup, you just learn you can’t trust nobody,” Pootie continued. “You tell them something, and then they turn on you. Just like that! You can’t predict it. Especially if they’re not from around here.”

  Once again C-Note shrugged. “Mm-hmm,” he muttered. “You got that right.”

  They kept ignoring me, so I walked over to J.T.’s building. A young woman I knew named Keisha was standing on the grass with her kids. They looked like they were waiting for a ride.

  “Hey, Keisha,” I said. “How are you doing?”

  “How am I doing?” she asked, shaking her head. “I was doing a lot better before I started talking to you.” She picked up her things and walked her kids a few yards away.

  In the lobby some of J.T.’s gang members were hanging out. We shook hands and said hello. I went upstairs to see Ms. Bailey and J.T., but neither of them was home.

  Down in the lobby again, I could feel people staring at me, but I couldn’t figure out why. I felt myself growing paranoid. Did people suddenly think I was a cop? What was up with Pootie, C-Note, and Keisha? I decided to go back home.

  Ispent a few days trying to track down J.T., but nobody knew where he was. I couldn’t wait any longer, so I went back to Robert Taylor and found C-Note in the parking lot. He and two other men were working on a car.

  “C-Note, please,” I begged, “what did I do? Tell me.”

  C-Note stood up and wiped the oil off a wrench. He motioned for the two other men to leave us alone. One of them gave me a nasty look and muttered something that sounded equally nasty, but I couldn’t quite make it out.

  “You need to learn to shut your mouth,” C-Note finally said.

  “Shut my mouth? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Don’t play with me. All that shit I told you. All them niggers I introduced you to. If you told me you were going to tell J.T. they were making that money, I wouldn’t have told you nothing.”

  My heart sank. I thought of my long debriefing with J.T. and Ms. Bailey. I had given them breakdowns on each hustler’s earnings: how much every one of them made, when and where they worked, what they planned for the future. I didn’t hand over my written data, but I’d done the next-best thing.

  “J.T. is all over these niggers,” C-Note said. He looked disgusted and spit on the ground. I could tell he was angry but that he wasn’t comfortable expressing it to me. Until now our relationship had been based on trust; I rarely, if ever, spoke to anyone about what I learned from C-Note.

  “He’s taxing every one of them now,” he said. “And he beat the shit out of Parnell and his brother because he thought they were hiding what they were doing. They weren’t, but you can’t convince J.T. of nothing. When he gets his mind to something, that’s it. And then he tells Jo-Jo and his guys that they can’t come around no more because they were hiding things from him. Jo-Jo’s daughter lives up in here. So now he can’t see her.” C-Note kept talking, getting angrier and angrier as he listed all the people that J.T. was cracking down on. “There’s no way he could’ve found out if you didn’t say nothing.”

  There was an awkward silence. I thought about lying, and I began to drum up an excuse. But something came over me. During the years I’d been in this community, people were always telling me that I was different from all the journalists and other outsiders who came by, hunting up stories. They didn’t eat dinner with families or hang around at night to share a beer; they typically asked a lot of questions and then left with their story, never to return. I prided myself on this difference.

  But now it was time to accept my fate. “I was sitting in Ms. Bailey’s office,” I told C-Note. “She and J.T. always help me, just like you. And I fucked up. I told them things, and I had no idea that they would use that information. Man, I had no idea that it would even be useful to them.”

  “That has to be one of the stupidest things I ever heard you say.” C-Note began putting away his tools.

  “Honestly, C-Note, I had no idea when I was talking to them-”

  “No!” C-Note’s voice grew sharp. “You knew. Yes you did. But you were too busy thinking about your own self. That’s what happened. You got some shit for your professors, and you were getting high on that. I know you ain’t that naïve, man.”

  “I’m sorry, C-Note. I don’t know what else to say. I fucked up.”

  “Yeah, you fucked up. You need to think about why you’re doing your work. You always tell me you want to help us. Well, we ain’t never asked for your help, and we sure don’t need it now.”

  C-Note walked away toward the other men. They stood quietly drinking beer and watching me. I headed toward the building. I wanted to see if Ms. Bailey was in her office.

  Then an obvious thought hit me: If J.T. had acted on my information to tax the male street hustlers, Ms. Bailey might have started taxing the women I told her about. Worse yet, she might have had some of them evicted for hiding their income. How could I find out what had happened because of my stupidity? As I stood in the grassy expanse, staring up at the high-rise, I tried to think of someone who might possibly help me. I needed a tenant who was relatively independentof Ms. Bailey, someone who might still trust me enough to talk. I thought of Clarisse.

  I hustled over to the liquor store and bought a few bottles of Boone’s Farm wine. Clarisse wasn’t going to talk for free.

  I walked quickly through the building lobby and took the stairs up. I didn’t want to get trapped in the elevator with women who might be angry with me for selling them out to Ms. Bailey. Clarisse opened her door and greeted me with a loud burst of laughter.

  “Oooh! Boy, you fucked up this time, you surely did.”

  “So it’s all over the building? Everyone knows?”

  “Sweetheart, ain’t no secrets in this place. What did Clarisse tell you when we first met? Shut the fuck up. Don’t tell them nothing about who you are and what you do. Clarisse should have been there with you. You were spying for Ms. Bailey?”

  “Spying! No way. I wasn’t spying, I was just doing my research, asking questions and-”

  “Sweetheart, it don’t matter what you call it. Ms. Bailey got pissed off and went running up in people’s houses, claiming they owed her money. I mean, you probably doubled her income, just like that. And you’re really not getting any kickbacks? Just a little something from her?”

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “How do they know I was the one who gave Ms. Bailey the information?”

  “Because, you fool, she told everyone! Even if she didn’t tell them, she was running around saying, ‘You made twenty-five dollars last month,’ ‘You made fifty dollars last week,’ ‘You made ten dollars this week, and you owe me ten percent plus a penalty for not telling me.’ I mean, the only folks we told all this information to was you!”

  “But did she charge you, too?”

  “No, no! She don’t charge the hos, remember? J.T. already charges us.”

  I sat and listened with my head down as Clarisse listed all the women who’d been confronted by Ms. Bailey. I had a sinking feeling that I’d have a hard time coming back to this building to continue my research. I also had to face the small matter of managing to leave here today still in one piece.

  Clarisse sensed my anxiety. As she talked-laughing heartily all the whi
le, at my expense-she started massaging my shoulder. “Don’t worry, little baby! You probably never had an ass whuppin’, have you? Well, sometimes that helps clear the air. Just don’t take the stairs when you leave, ’cause if you get caught there, they may never find your body.”

  I must have looked truly frightened, for Clarisse stopped laughing and took a sincere tone.

  “Folks forgive around here,” she said gently. “We’re all religious people, sweetheart. We have to put up with a lot of shit from our own families, so nothing you did to us will make things much worse.”

  At that moment, sitting with Clarisse, I didn’t think that even the Good Lord himself could, or would, help me. It was embarrassing to think that I had been so wrapped up in my desire to obtain good data that I couldn’t anticipate the consequences of my actions. After several years in the projects, I had become attuned to each and every opportunity to get information from the tenants. This obsession was primarily fueled by a desire to make my dissertation stand out and increase my stature in the eyes of my advisers. After I’d talked with C-Note and Clarisse, it was clear to me that other people were paying a price for my success.

  I began to feel deeply ambivalent about my own reasons for being in the projects. Would I really advance society with my research, as Bill Wilson had promised I could do if I worked hard?

  Could I change our stereotypes of the poor by getting so deep inside the lives of the families? I suddenly felt deluged by these kinds of questions.

  Looking back, I was probably being a little melodramatic. I had been so naïve up to this point about how others perceived my presence that any sort of shake-up at all was bound to send me reeling.

  I couldn’t think of a way to rectify the situation other than to stop coming to Robert Taylor entirely. But I was close to finishing my fieldwork, and I didn’t want to quit prematurely. In the coming weeks, I spoke to Clarisse and Autry a few times for advice. Both suggested that the tenants I had angered would eventually stop being so angry, but they couldn’t promise much more than that. When I asked Autry whether I’d be able to get back to collecting data, he just shrugged and walked off.

  I eventually came back to the building to face the tenants. No one declined to speak with me outright, but I didn’t exactly receive a hero’s welcome either. Everyone knew I had J.T.’s support, so it was unlikely that anyone would confront me in a hostile manner. When I went to visit C-Note in the parking lot, he simply nodded at me and then went about his work, talking with customers and singing along with the radio. It felt like people in the building looked at me strangely when I passed by, but I wondered if I was just being paranoid. Perhaps the best indicator of my change in status was that I wasn’t doing much of anything casual-hearing jokes, sharing a beer, loaning someone a dollar.

  One sultry summer day not long after my fiasco with the hustlers, I attended the funeral of Catrina, Ms. Bailey’s dutiful assistant. On the printed announcement, her full name was rendered as Catrina Eugenia Washington. But I knew this was not her real name.

  Catrina had once told me that her father had sexually abused her when she was a teenager, so she ran away from home. She wound up living in Robert Taylor with a distant relative. She changed her name so her father wouldn’t find her and enrolled in a GED program at DuSable High School. She took a few part-time jobs to help pay for rent and groceries. She was also saving money to go to community college; she was trying to start over. I never did find out her real name.

  As a kid she had wanted to study math. But her father, she told me, said that higher education was inappropriate for a young black woman. He advised her instead just to get married and have children.

  Catrina had a love of knowledge and would participate in a discussion about nearly anything. I enjoyed talking with her about science, African-American history, and Chicago politics. She always wore a studious look, intense and focused. Working as Ms. Bailey’s assistant, she received just a few dollars a week. But, far more significant, she was receiving an apprenticeship in Chicago politics. “I will do something important one day,” she liked to tell me, in her most serious voice. “Like Ms. Bailey, I will make a difference for black people. Especially black women.”

  By this time Catrina had been living in Robert Taylor for a few years. But over the July Fourth holiday, she decided to visit her siblings in Chicago’s south suburbs, an area increasingly populated with African-American families who’d made it out of the ghetto. From what I was told, her father heard that she was visiting and tracked her down. A skirmish followed. Catrina got caught between her brother, who was protecting her, and her angry father. A gun went off, and the bullet hit Catrina, killing her instantly. No one around Robert Taylor knew if either the brother or the father had been arrested.

  The funeral was held in the back room of a large African Methodist Episcopal church on the grounds of Robert Taylor. The hot air was stifling, the sun streaming in shafts through dusty windows. There were perhaps fifty people in attendance, mostly women from Ms. Bailey’s building. A few members of Catrina’s family were also there, but they came surreptitiously because they didn’t want her father to hear about the funeral. Ms. Bailey stationed herself at the room’s entrance, welcoming the mourners. She looked as if she were presiding over a tenant meeting: upright, authoritarian, refusing to cry while consoling those who were. She had the air of someone who did this regularly, who mourned for someone every week.

  Sitting in a corner up front was T-Bone, his head down, still as stone. He and Catrina had been seeing each other for a few months. Although T-Bone had a steady girlfriend-it wasn’t uncommon for gang members, or practically any other young man in the projects, to have multiple girlfriends-he and Catrina had struck up a friendship and, over time, become lovers. I sometimes came upon the two of them studying together at a local diner. T-Bone was about to leave his girlfriend for Catrina when she was killed.

  Any loss of life is mourned in the projects, but there are degrees. Young men and women who choose a life of drugs and street gangs may, understandably, not be long for this world. When one of them dies, he or she is certainly mourned, but without any great sense of shock; there is a general feeling that death was always a good possibility. But for someone like Catrina, who had refused to follow such a path, death came with a deep sense of shock and disbelief. She was one of thousands of young people who had escaped the attention of social workers, the police, and just about everyone else. Adults in the projects pile up their hopes on people like Catrina, young men and women who take a sincere interest in education, work, and self-betterment. And I guess I did, too. Her death left me with a sting that would never fade.

  The essays that Catrina used to write covered the difficulties of family life in the projects, the need for women to be independent, the stereotypes about poor people. Writing seemed to provide Catrina a sense of relief, as though she were finally acknowledging the hurdles of her own past; it also helped her develop a strong, assertive voice, not unlike that of her hero, Ms. Bailey.

  In tribute to Catrina, I thought I’d try to broaden this idea by starting a writing workshop for young women in the building who were interested in going back to school. I brought up the possibility with Ms. Bailey. “Good idea,” she said, “but take it slow, especially when you’re dealing with these young women.”

  I was nervous about teaching the workshop, but I was also eager. My relationship with tenants up to this point had largely been a one-way street; after all this time in Robert Taylor, I felt as though I should give something back. On a few occasions, I had managed to solicit donations from my professors, fifty or a hundred dollars, for some kind of program in the neighborhood. This money might do a great deal of good, but it seemed to me a fairly impersonal way of helping. I was hoping to do something more direct.

  In the past I hadn’t been drawn to standard charitable activities like coaching basketball or volunteering at a school, because I wanted to differentiate myself from the people who helped families and
ran programs in the community. I had heard many tenants criticize the patronizing attitudes of such volunteers. The writing workshop, however, seemed like a good fit. Having hung out in the community for several years, I believed I could avoid the kind of fate- exclusion, cold stares, condescending responses-that often greeted the people who rode into town to do good.

  I was also still reeling from the fact that I had alienated so many people around J.T.’s territory. I was feeling guilty, and I needed to get people back on my side again.

  Of all the people in the projects, I had the least experience spending time with young women, particularly single mothers. I was a bit nervous, particularly because Ms. Bailey, Ms. Mae, and other older women warned me not to get too close to the young women. They felt that the women would begin looking to me as a source of support.

  In the beginning the group convened wherever we could-in someone’s apartment, at a diner, outside under a tree. At first there were five women in the group, and then we grew to roughly a dozen as more people heard about it. The meetings were pretty casual, and attendance could be spotty, since the women had family and work obligations.

  From the outset it was an emotional experience. The women wrote and spoke openly about their struggles. Each of them had at least a couple of children, which generally meant at least one “baby daddy” who wasn’t in the picture. Each of them had a man in her life who’d been either jailed or killed. They spoke of in-laws who demanded that the women give up their children to the father’s family, some of whom were willing to use physical force to claim the children.

  Their material hardships were overwhelming. Most of them earned no more than ten thousand dollars a year, a combination of welfare payments and food stamps. Some worked part-time, and others took in boarders who paid cash or, nearly as valuable, provided day care so the young women could work, run errands, or just have a little time for themselves.

  The most forceful stories were the tales of abuse. Every single woman had been beaten up by a boyfriend (who was usually drunk at the time), some almost fatally. Every one of them had lived in fear for days or weeks, waiting for the same man to return.