by Ben Austen
While they’d overcome the Rangers, the guys from 714 W. Division started skirmishing with the boys from the surrounding high-rises. The groups of friends from those buildings had banded together in the same way. They bore arms to keep other teens from storming their entranceways. Guys from 660 W. Division or 1230 N. Larrabee might come over to 714, mess with their girls, disrespect them. A punch would be thrown, and it demanded a response. If they pushed up on you, you went to their building to body slam one of them. One day, a bunch of boys from 630 W. Evergreen snuck into Kelvin’s building and trapped him on the ramp. They came at Kelvin from the stairwells on either side of him. Kelvin figured it better to deal with half of the boys than let the entire group whale on him, so he ran toward one of the stairwells. Several boys grabbed him and tried to pull him down the stairs. Kelvin swung wildly. One of the guys shouted, “I got him!” But Kelvin landed a blow to his face. Then Kelvin’s friends from his building heard the hollering and came to help, and the intruders fled.
Those boys from 630 W. Evergreen called themselves the Insanes. In another surrounding high-rise, they were the Imperial Pimps, and in two of the Reds there were the Outlaws and Renegades. Even 1230 N. Burling, mostly neutral when it came to fighting, had the Black Pearls. Kelvin and his buddies in 714 W. Division decided they were the CCs, for Chocolate City. To them that sounded cool. But they started to think the name too soft. “We wanted to sound as hard as everyone else,” Kelvin said. They changed from Chocolate City to Imperial Gangsters.
The fall of that same year, not long after the start of school, the leader of the Gangster Disciples at Cabrini-Green summoned all these different peewee gangsters from the white high-rises. They were told to meet after class one day, at three thirty, behind their middle school, in the park named for President Lincoln’s secretary of war, Edwin Stanton. Sixty of them gathered there, the boys from each building huddled in their different cliques. Then Bo John arrived, flanked by two of his lieutenants. His real name was Cedric Maltbia, and he was twenty and recently out of the penitentiary. He wore a sleeveless T-shirt that showed off just how much he’d bulked up in prison, and from his neck hung a large, gold six-pointed star—the emblem of the Disciples. Every kid there knew about Bo John. He lived in the Whites, too, and some of the boys had played on Big Wheels with his younger brothers. One of Kelvin’s older brothers ran with the Disciples; he’d recently been violated by the gang, beaten with bats, for shooting heroin. Kelvin accepted that his brother deserved the sanctioned punishment, since he’d broken the gang’s bylaws about drug use. Kelvin was willing to hear Bo John out.
“I call it for the Folks over here,” Bo John began by way of introduction. He praised the guys from 714 W. Division for fending off the Blackstone Rangers. He said it took courage to take on grown-ups. Kelvin and his friends blushed with the thrill of the important man’s attention. But then the Disciples leader scolded the lot of them for tearing up the community. “Y’all acting just like the Stones, battling one another.” He said they’d all grown up in the Greens. He wanted them to imagine how strong they’d be if they didn’t waste their energies beating on one another. Other gangs were corrupt, he told them. But the Disciples fought for what was right. They lived by a code, by rules. They didn’t jump on people for no reason, and they battled heads up. Everyone in front of him had already proven himself worthy of being a GD. “You all might as well ride together,” Bo John said. “I’d like y’all to rise up under me.”
There was nothing Kelvin loved so much as a gangster movie. After he saw Once Upon a Time in America a few years later, he and his crew started calling each other by the characters’ names—Noodles, Max, Patsy. Kelvin became Big Frank, though mostly he was just Cannon, which people assumed was not his real name but a nickname he’d earned through some display of prodigious violence. One of his all-time favorite movies was The Warriors. When he first watched it at the McVickers Theater, in the Loop, he realized Bo John was just like the gang leader at the start of the movie, the one who preaches unity to all of New York’s street gangs, right before he gets shot, telling them that the future is theirs, if they can count—they had strength in numbers. They needed only to overcome their divisions, to join together, talking about “CAN YOU DIG IT!” That’s how Bo John had talked to them behind Schiller school, that the Gangster Disciples could take over all of Cabrini-Green—the rowhouses, the Whites, the Reds along Larrabee, known as the Boulevard, and those on the southern edge of the development as well, the Wild End. All they had to do was follow him.
It was a message most of the middle schoolers were eager to hear. By then, Jesse White had been tapped by George Dunne to run for the Illinois General Assembly. The campaign posters showed White in his Cubs and paratrooper uniforms, strong jawed and stately. Cabrini-Green offered a solid block of Democratic machine votes, and White won the election. He continued to teach at Schiller and attend every Tumblers performance, hundreds of them each year. But with regular trips to Springfield he had to cut back on his other extracurriculars at Cabrini-Green. Kelvin thought sometimes that White’s start in the legislature marked the turning point for Cabrini-Green. “Mr. White was a blessing from God to us here,” Kelvin would say. “But he had to go on to politics and help more people. That’s when everything went bad. We didn’t have nothing else to do. Maybe more of us would have stayed in school if Mr. White had remained more involved. Maybe a lot of people wouldn’t have gone to jail or been killed.” For Kelvin and many others there, it felt like they’d lost another father.
Reginald Blackmon, one of Kelvin’s best friends, would later say that Bo John was the first man who ever showed him love. Kelvin saw Bo John more as a big brother. His own father had left for the South Side; his brothers were doing their own thing; he was the oldest male in his apartment, with his mother and younger siblings. Kelvin felt it was time for him to grow up. “At Cabrini-Green, you didn’t have to wait until you were eighteen to be a man,” he’d say. “You could be a man at twelve or thirteen.” Bo John gave them money each week; that was better than turning flips with Mr. White. And truth be told, by the time Cannon and his friends were thirteen, fourteen, it was no longer too cool to hang with Mr. White. They didn’t want to be seen wearing the white suspenders and red tams of the tumbling team. Of the hundreds of Boy Scouts under Jesse White, the older brother of Reginald and William, Richard, was the only one any of them knew who tried for Eagle. Like Dolores Wilson’s oldest son, Che Che, Richard ventured out of the neighborhood to Lane Tech, the prestigious magnet high school a bus ride north. On the mornings when his mother couldn’t muster the bus fare, Richard was assisted by the drunks along Halsted, who pooled their nickels to get him to school. He stayed clear of the gangs and went to college, in southern Illinois, later becoming a lawyer and then an educator at a public high school on the South Side. “I adopted Jesse White’s belief,” Richard would say. “I don’t listen to what’s not possible.”
Richard said that his little brothers and Kelvin were wonderful, bright-eyed boys, athletes, math whizzes, goofs around girls. Maybe they buzzed on reefer or cheap wine, but they didn’t know anything about cocaine or heroin. These boys from 714 W. Division were still in middle school. Then all of a sudden Richard didn’t recognize them. They’d transformed. Just a few years earlier they believed in witches haunting the Ogden Avenue Bridge. Adults didn’t even bother with that tall tale anymore. By comparison, a spectral gypsy no longer seemed like much of a threat. Cannon and the other young gangbangers now imagined that they were the ones to be feared at Cabrini. And Cannon believed that it was through such fear that he, too, could provide a little bit of order to the chaos of life there.
5
The Mayor’s Pied-à-Terre
DOLORES WILSON
IN HER JOB with the Department of Water Management, Dolores Wilson helped process the paychecks for the employees of two pumping stations; she filed, typed, and sorted the mail; she answered the phones for three purification labs and the head of mi
croscopy. She was considered a good worker, at one point the department’s employee of the year. Yet even with all her responsibilities, Dolores often found herself with little to do. This was, after all, a patronage job under Chicago’s Democratic machine. One afternoon, she knocked on her boss’s office door. Would it be okay if she read during the downtimes? It was fine as long as she didn’t look too conspicuous; she shouldn’t prop her feet up on the desk or anything like that. So Dolores demurely plowed through romances and inexpensive paperbacks. She devoured the Mandingo series, about slavery and sex on an Alabama plantation. She finished one long Russian novel after another.
Dolores tended to worry herself sick over the suffering of others, even animals. “It’s like a phobia,” she would confide. If she saw a lion catch a zebra on television, the zebra’s cries would stay with her for days. At Holy Family, her church at Cabrini-Green, she’d pray out loud for people in Africa and Siberia. She’d pray for the owners of pit bulls to have a clean heart, a kind heart, and not to enter their pets in fights. She’d go weeks without reading the newspaper because she couldn’t handle stories of people in Vietnam, Cambodia, or wherever else they were being bombed and gassed and massacred. Hubert told the children not to share bad news with their mother, and sometimes she’d learn about a death months after it occurred. She was haunted especially by a line she’d read in Dostoyevsky, about a society being judged by its prisons. Kenny, her youngest, was once sent to the Audy Home, the city’s juvenile detention center. It was winter, and the guards made the boys strip down and shower, lining them up wet and naked by the open windows for hours as their bodies convulsed from the cold. She couldn’t fathom why one human being would do that to another one. Lately, she’d been imagining the prisoners who were trapped in solitary confinement. She realized that at any moment, in some godforsaken penitentiary, there were people shut inside cramped boxes, without windows or contact with others. She learned that inmates might be placed in the “hole” for a week at a time. Were they allowed visitors? Did they receive letters? Were they denied every kindness?
Along with the organist at Holy Family, Gloria Johnson, Dolores decided to start a pen pal program for the incarcerated. Jesse Jackson had moved on from Operation Breadbasket, founding his own Chicago-based organization, Operation PUSH, for People United to Save Humanity. From the PUSH folks, Dolores received a list of twenty-five inmates, and she wrote each of them, explaining who she was and what she was doing, promising that she wasn’t the warden trying to trick them into revealing information. She then reached out to fellow church members and neighbors, finding a letter writer for every prisoner. Gloria took a guy named Jerome, who was serving a long sentence. Dolores’s daughter Debbie wrote another prisoner. For herself, Dolores picked a man named Maurice Slaughter. “With a name like that, I figured he could use a friend,” she said. Those first twenty-five incarcerated men told others about her. Soon Dolores was receiving letters from prisons all over Illinois and then throughout the country, with the number of pen pals reaching into the hundreds. Once, a man from Stateville, the penitentiary less than an hour outside of Chicago, called collect to ask Dolores if she would stay on the phone and listen to one song with him on the radio.
Before long, she was jumping into Gloria’s rickety Volkswagen first thing on Saturdays. In Chicago, being sent “downstate” meant going to prison, and the two of them would drive to the different Illinois towns that housed the penitentiaries: Dixon, Joliet, Menard, Pontiac. In wintertime, they’d wear their coats and boots the entire ride since the heat in the Volkswagen didn’t work. During visiting hours, they’d talk with the inmates, and when possible they brought with them the prisoners’ families. They had cards printed up calling themselves “Prison Problem Consultants.” They’d show the cards to the guards with formality, and because they were “consultants,” they no longer were limited to meeting with just one inmate on each trip. The more the men told Dolores about their experiences in prison, the more distressed she became. Guards hit them with chains and handcuffed them to their cells in standing positions; the inmates were forced to sleep on concrete floors. Many of the black inmates had turned to Islam in prison, and they weren’t allowed to worship. Once, she arrived when the prison was on lockdown: the men rattled their metal cups against the bars as the guards blasted them with water from fire hoses.
Dolores now thought about the prisons nonstop, images of deprivation and torture coming to her as she was falling asleep or riding the bus to her job. She cursed the guards and the wardens, the judges and the lawyers, the police and whoever else determined the fate of these men. She started writing letters to the Chicago newspapers, composing them on her lunch breaks. Writing about the Menard 38, inmates who barricaded themselves in the commissary in 1973, holding a guard hostage, she explained that the men were trying to bring attention to the inhumane conditions at their penitentiary. She argued that wardens and guards were effectively sentencing prisoners a second time by condemning them to physical pain. With no effort to rehabilitate them, the incarcerated were stripped of their dignity; they were being taught to hate and distrust, dooming them before any release back into society. “We, the so-called intelligent and educated, are allowing our men to be made into animals, because they’re being treated as such,” she wrote in a letter published in the Defender. “We are the hopeless, because none are so blind as those who refuse to see and act against injustice!!!”
She published so many letters in the paper that the Defender gave her a byline, calling her a “prison correspondent.” The newspaper described her as a full-time stenographer, a wife, a mother, and a grandmother who was using her nonexistent “spare” time to communicate with those in Illinois prisons. The accompanying photograph showed her at forty-four, with cornrowed hair, heavily arched brows, and large hoop earrings. It’s her eyes, though, that stand out the most; they look past the photographer, the brown in the irises dancing with a private joke and something like judgment. One of the prisoners got ahold of the article and painted a portrait for Dolores based on the photograph, presenting it to her the next time she visited.
As overprotective as Hubert was, he didn’t feel jealous of his wife spending her precious time on these lonely, incarcerated men. Gloria even ended up marrying her pen pal, saying she’d wait the twenty years for Jerome to get out. Hubert was charitable in his own right. Dolores came home once to find him feeding a homeless man at their kitchen table. What Hubert didn’t like about the prison work was that the men were criminals. They’d made their beds, he’d tell Dolores, let them lie in it. They didn’t deserve her empathy. He and Dolores would bicker about it, but the arguments never lasted. They’d been married for more than twenty-five years, the majority of their lives. They threw a silver anniversary party at Saint Joseph’s, inviting all their friends and relatives. They went boating together, horseback riding. And each year, Dolores and Hubert coordinated their vacation days so they could go to Jamaica during the cheaper off-season; thirteen hurricane seasons in a row they made the trip, always booking a room in the same Holiday Inn.
Hubert was promoted to an assistant head janitor position at Cabrini-Green, and Dolores, upon hearing the news, cried. The new job was in a different section of the housing complex, the Whites, and they would have to move across Division Street into 1230 N. Burling. Dolores didn’t want to go. She had everything in their 1117 N. Cleveland apartment exactly how she liked it. All the interior decorating was in place. She knew every neighbor. “It isn’t where you live, it’s how you live,” Dolores would say. “I could move into one of these high-rises overlooking the lake and everything. Until a part of me is in there, it’s just an apartment. A home isn’t a home until you’ve been in it awhile.”
On the morning of the move, as a passive protest, Dolores refused to help, leaving early for the water department. That was fine with Hubert. He carried their belongings north of Division Street and up to the fourteenth floor of the Burling high-rise. He unpacked, putting each item in it
s proper place. He hung his wife’s yellow curtains. He outfitted the kitchen with an upright freezer, an electric dishwasher, and a washer and dryer, all the appliances in the same color of harvest gold. In the bathroom he painted the walls peach with a star pattern, so it almost looked like wallpaper, and installed a shower door with a swan design. The new apartment was bigger: four bedrooms instead of three, and it had a bathroom and a half. When Dolores returned from work to the unfamiliar surroundings, she couldn’t help but like what she saw. Neighbors she didn’t know were inside the apartment, too, admiring the setup. Dolores asked Hubert what all these people were doing there. He said they were envious: “Because we’re more fortunate than they are.”