High-Risers

by Ben Austen

  “You know what happens when you lie down?” her mother asked one day. Annie said she knew. But her mother meant it less as a question than as a warning. And when Annie was fifteen and draping herself in her brother’s oversize shirts, her mother knew what was up. Ricks gave birth to a boy, and they named him after Ernest. When she returned to tenth grade, a couple of months later, Annie’s mother watched the baby during the day. In her senior year, Annie became pregnant with her and Ernest’s second child, and left school for good.

  Leap ahead a few years, to the tail end of the 1980s, and Annie and Ernest haven’t traveled far from the West Side block where they met. They rented the second floor of a house just around the corner. Ricks was thirty-three, and she and Ernest now had five boys—Ernest, Shannon, Cornelius, Kenton, and Erskine (named for Inspector Lewis Erskine, a character from the TV show The FBI)—and three girls—Kenosha (whose name came not from the neighboring Wisconsin town but from the first initial of seven of Annie’s closest friends), Latasha, and Earnestine. Rose, Deonta, Reggie, Raymond, and Raqkown would come later. The neighborhood had undergone its own changes. International Harvester, Sunbeam, the giant Hawthorne plant of Western Electric, Zenith, the Sears headquarters, and many other manufacturers and retailers had shut their doors, tens of thousands of jobs gone, with most of the smaller businesses making an exit as well. Just one supermarket and one bank remained. The neighborhood lost half its population, and it would halve again in the coming decades. But Ricks had a job not far away in a factory molding plaster figurines. She enjoyed the work. “I enjoy everything that I do,” she liked to declare.

  Annie believed that if she followed the rules, if she kept up her part in whatever contract she signed, then she was entitled to all that was promised her. Their landlord lived on the first floor, and when the rent was due each month, she paid it. When something in their unit broke, the landlord fixed it. That was how the arrangement was supposed to work. So they all got along fine. One afternoon that fall, Ricks saw the landlord arguing with a man in front of the two-flat. She didn’t know what about, but she figured later that it was that man who torched their place. Annie’s brother was staying with them, and that night, while they were asleep, he was the first to smell the smoke and yelled for everyone to wake up. They collected the children and scrambled onto the sidewalk, managing to grab a few framed pictures and toys on the way out. A half-asleep Latasha, hoping to curl up in bed, was on her way back through the front door when somebody saved her a second time that night. Then from the yard they watched as their home and everything in it burned.

  They tried staying at a cousin’s apartment, and then another cousin’s place. Ricks bought groceries, took her younger relatives with them to a diner. But even family could do only so much. She came with a mob of kids, so many that they seemed to fill every space. When they spent the night, they covered the floor like a carpet. You couldn’t put a foot down without stepping on one of them. Some nights Ricks found herself herding her children along West Side streets with no place to go. They walked a mile east, to Cook County Hospital, and huddled in the lobby. Other families were there, too, and Ricks kept watch as her children slept.

  When Annie considered her predicament, the fact of it baffled her. She knew parents who were dope fiends and deadbeats, their children unkempt and uncared for. That wasn’t her at all. She’d been providing since she was a teenager. Her children were well fed and neatly dressed, their hair combed and cut and braided. She made sure they finished their homework and were on time for school. She volunteered in their classrooms and attended their basketball games. When they pleaded for Air Jordans, she made sure they weren’t the ones among their teammates to go without the shoes. So how could she not have a place for them to spend the night? The word describing her situation, that it applied to her, simply didn’t make sense: Annie Jeffrey Ricks was homeless? Without a permanent address, she lost her public aid. At her lowest, she asked a social worker at the public hospital to take her children, figuring they’d be better off in foster care, at least until she straightened out her housing mess. But the social worker refused. “Look how good these children are doing,” the woman said. So Ricks divided up her family, parceling off the children to different relatives, keeping a couple here and a couple there.

  One of Ricks’s sisters had a job at Sears. A brother worked in a pickle factory. Two other brothers found service jobs at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and one of them was able to buy a bungalow in Marquette Park, where Martin Luther King had been attacked, and which was now well on its way to being largely black, Latino, and Arab. All Annie’s siblings worked, and none of them, at that point, lived in public housing. But Annie was desperate and in need of what President Truman had described as every American’s right to “a decent home and a suitable living environment.” She applied for a CHA apartment. She put down as her first choice Lawndale Gardens, a development of 128 units in two-story rowhomes not far from her on the West Side. Her second choice was the Henry Horner Homes, a much larger complex on the Near West Side. Cabrini-Green was third.

  On a December morning, amid a snowstorm, she let her third-oldest son, Cornelius, stay home from middle school. They were on the city’s western edge, almost to the suburb of Oak Park, and Cabrini-Green was seven miles away. The CHA hadn’t responded to her application yet, but Ricks had heard that there were openings at Cabrini. She told Cornelius they were going to get their apartment that day, and they were going to walk. In the snow. They started the journey by heading east on Harrison Street, in the direction of downtown with a hazy Sears Tower hovering in the distance. They passed churches and parks, a police station, and a checkerboard of overgrown empty lots now coated in white. They walked for an hour, and then another. Cornelius knew better than to complain to his mother about sore feet and cold hands. She sometimes walked on her own for entire evenings, and there was no dissuading her when her mind was set. They reached Ogden Avenue, the diagonal street designed to give white West Siders easy access to the lakefront. Ricks and her son walked it for another hour. They took Ogden as it spanned the Chicago River and continued over a valley of rail lines and factories. East of the river’s North Branch, at the 1230 N. Burling building, the elevated roadway came to a blockaded dead end. They were still a mile from Lake Michigan. That’s where Annie and Cornelius descended a flight of stairs. They’d made it to Cabrini-Green.

  A woman at the housing office half-listened as Ricks detailed her plight, not seeming to care that they had trudged through the snow all the way from the West Side. The woman said no apartments were available—which was as much true as it wasn’t. The Cabrini rowhouses were almost completely full. But a third of the red high-rise units were unoccupied and almost half of the white ones. The CHA hadn’t fixed up and readied them for occupancy. The agency said it couldn’t afford to do the repairs to rent the empty units, and not just at Cabrini-Green but at public housing all over the city. Ricks dismissed the woman’s words with a wave of her hand. She didn’t want to hear about budgets or the agency’s problems. To her the math was simple: twelve hundred apartments at Cabrini-Green with no one in them, and she and her children burned out of their West Side home, wandering the streets, sleeping in a hospital lobby, needing just one. “No, ma’am,” she said. She motioned for Cornelius to take a seat. They weren’t going anywhere. Ricks could pester, persist, accuse, as if on a loop. She announced that she was about to raise some hell. She was going to call all the TV news networks, channels 2, 5, 7, and 9. She started naming the journalists who’d be interviewing her—Walter Jacobson, Ron Magers, Oprah. “Why lie and say you don’t have an apartment for my family? I know you have an apartment. There are so many apartments here.” Ricks cut herself short, a look of surprise suddenly giving way to a self-preserving grin. “But I can’t ever be mad.”

  By then, though, the woman at the desk was relenting. She sent Ricks to one of the white high-rises, next door to Dolores Wilson’s building. The tower at 660 W. Division
was a fifteen-story plain box, a giant filing cabinet with a facade the color of cigarette-stained teeth. The elevators were out of order and the stairwells were dark. The fifth-floor apartment Ricks entered looked like a crypt. Plywood covered the windows. Trash and old clothes were clustered along the floorboards like blown leaves. The kitchen cabinets dangled or were missing altogether. Ricks surveyed the run-down surroundings, counting four bedrooms. There was a full bathroom on one side of the unit and a half bath on the other. The front room was large enough for a dining table and a sofa, and it was connected to the kitchen, which (she checked) had a working stove and refrigerator. The ceilings were high, the walls made of seemingly indestructible cinder block. She smiled. What Annie Ricks saw looked like a home.

  RICKS KNEW VERY little about Cabrini-Green or its reputation when she moved in with her family. She hadn’t watched Good Times or Cooley High. She wasn’t living there yet, in 1983, when a documentary on the Jesse White Tumblers, The Ambassadors of Cabrini, aired on TV, contrasting the development’s perilous streets and fetid stairwells with the militarized grace of these athletes leaping and flipping and somersaulting. “Most of the young little white kids, they grow up, their mother can send them to a school, or they can take up gymnastics, use all the apparatus, or go to swimming. So they can take up ballet,” a young Jesse White Tumbler named Marcus says in the film. “We don’t have money to do that. If we had what they had, we’d be equal. But we can’t be equal without nothing to help us out.” Ricks would soon get to know many of the two hundred Cabrini residents who were interviewed for the Free Street Theatre’s musical Project!, and she’d meet Dolores Wilson, who served on the Free Street Theatre’s board. Project!, from 1985, mixed sketches and original songs with testimonials from Cabrini-Green tenants displayed on seventy monitors stacked on the stage to look like the red and white high-rises. An actor rapped, “Cabrini means red, and Green is white / And if you want to stay alive, you better get that right!”

  Ricks hadn’t seen the recurring Saturday Night Live skit from around the same time featuring a teenage single mother named Cabrini Green Harlem Watts Jackson. Especially after Mayor Byrne’s stay, the housing development had entered the pantheon of proper names of scariest black places in America. The character, played by Danitra Vance, the show’s only black female cast member, wore pigtail braids and a T-shirt tucked into a miniskirt. “I was at home, my mama was fixing some cornbread, black-eyed peas, candied yams with neck bones, and some Kraft macaroni and cheese,” Cabrini Green Harlem Watts Jackson relates. “I said, ‘Hi, Mama. You wanna hear a joke? I’m pregnant.’ She said, ‘How did that happen?’ I said, ‘How am I supposed to know how that happened? You never told me nothing about things like that, the school don’t teach us about things like that, you’re asking me how that happened?’” The week Oprah Winfrey traveled from Chicago to guest-host Saturday Night Live, she played both the slave of SNL producer Lorne Michaels and the mother of Cabrini Green Harlem Watts Jackson.

  Ricks did have a brother-in-law who worked at the giant Montgomery Ward warehouse behind the Cabrini rowhouses. He told Annie that people at Cabrini-Green were shooting. But that didn’t mean anything to her. People were shooting on the West Side. People were shooting on the South Side. “Because I hadn’t heard of Cabrini-Green, I came to it fresh,” she would say. Ricks wasn’t in her new apartment twenty-four hours, though, before two police officers banged on the door. Apart from a few garbage bags filled with clothes, the four-bedroom unit was bare. Everything else they’d owned had burned in the fire. Annie was lying on the floor, napping through the riot of noise created by her children, when the police entered. “Is this your apartment?” a lady cop demanded, assuming they were squatters. Boards still covered the windows. Annie handed over her lease. “All these children in here and no furniture,” the officer said. “I could call Department of Children and Family Services on you.” For the cop, Ricks was the embodiment of the Cabrini-Green image, Danitra Vance’s character in the flesh. For Ricks, the threat seemed almost comical.

  “I don’t care what you call on me,” she said. “I tried to get my children to DCFS. They wouldn’t take them. These kids are well-dressed and taken care of.” She snickered. At least she now had an apartment and was in the process of getting on public aid. She had to show the paperwork for that, too. Ricks used a voucher to pick out furniture at a store nearby that catered to families from Cabrini-Green. She got bunk beds for the children, a kitchen table, and chairs. The cabinets were reattached, the boards removed from the windows. She painted the front room blue, the kitchen yellow, and the girls’ bedroom pink. She laid tile in the kitchen. Annie’s mother moved in with them, watching the children when Ricks worked, but Ernest didn’t stay there, at least not officially. He and Annie hadn’t married, and she didn’t want to be disqualified from public aid. “If I had put him on my lease, my rent would have been sky-high,” Annie said. The lady cop returned to check on Ricks, and she saw the kitchen set and the beds, the new paint and the light coming in through the windows. She nodded with approval. But that wasn’t good enough for Annie. “Why are you going to say you’re calling DCFS on me?” she asked. “You’re a mother, too. Why you going to say that to me?”

  Unlike Ricks, Kelvin Cannon was well versed in Cabrini-Green lore. As a lifelong resident and as a young man, he took a perverse pride in the cartoon depiction of his home. If the media helped form its iconic image as a world of utter deprivation and unrelenting violence, then saying you were from Cabrini projected a kind of power. You mugged into the fun house mirror. You fed people the stories they wanted to hear about the murders, the gunfire, the beatings, the people lined up outside the high-rises to buy drugs. After Mayor Byrne added to its infamy, the name Cabrini-Green was evoked to disparage anything as derelict or dangerous, from neighborhoods in other cities to a temporarily out-of-service elevator in a high-end apartment building. Cabrini-Green became one of the stand-ins for the city itself, something people shouted in recognition when they heard the word “Chicago,” like Al Capone or Michael Jordan. A resident says in Project!, “It’s just automatic, when you say ‘Cabrini-Green’ people start freaking out. It’s almost like a state of mind.”

  When Cannon was a teenager, he’d be in lockup with hardened gang members from other parts of Chicago. A news story about his home would come on the television, and guys would treat him with respect, asking him if he had ever been inside the Rock, or if it was true about the barrage of rifle fire on New Year’s Eve. “Yeah, I’ve been over there,” a man in the jail said to Cannon, as if describing a close call on a military tour. “I’m never going back.”

  On the set of Good Times, at CBS Television City in Los Angeles, the black cast members and the white producers argued about the portrayal of the show’s Cabrini-Green family. They debated authenticity and responsibility, which led to scouting trips to Chicago’s Near North Side. Esther Rolle, who played the Evans family matriarch, demanded that her character be married, the husband hardworking and present in his children’s lives. She and the other actors insisted that the sitcom grapple with real social issues—gangs, welfare, racial discrimination in housing and employment. They wanted the episodes to focus more on the youngest Evans child, Michael, and his middle school protestations of Black Power. But the producers wanted more lines for J. J.—James Jr.—the eldest child, an out-of-work artist living at home, played by the comedian Jimmie Walker. Walker delivered his tagline as if possessed, slapping his hands, throwing back his head and holding the pose—“Dyn-O-MITE!” It was no contest. Jokes about the Nation of Islam lost out to Walker, with his jelly-limbed physical comedy and exaggerated minstrelsy. “I wanted to make my favorite sandwich today, peanut butter and jelly,” J. J. announces. “But there wasn’t no peanut butter, and there wasn’t no jelly. So I was forced to make a ghetto jam sandwich. Two pieces of white bread JAMMED together.”

  When Cannon saw Cooley High, at the McVickers, Cabrini residents packed the downtown theater. They
pointed out the familiar locations and the locals who’d been hired for small parts. “It was an inspiration,” Cannon recalled. The movie’s main character, Preach, convinces a girl to go on a date with him, and the two of them stroll together over the Ogden Avenue Bridge—Kelvin’s bridge! Cannon would attend Cooley High himself. But the film was set in the prelapsarian times before the King riots and cop killings. The characters are members of the Cooley class of 1964, back when Kelvin was a baby. Preach, Cochise, and Pooter, wearing their cardigans and caps, look almost like they’re out of Archie Comics. They skip school to clown at the nearby Lincoln Park Zoo. They meet up at a local soda shop, and join two gangbangers—played by real Cabrini gangbangers—to joyride through the Loop. The movie seemed like an artifact, a portrait of all that had changed in a brief decade, in both the reality and the perception of Cabrini-Green. The teens in the film aren’t afraid that crime is their only option; they crave something more stimulating than the drudgery of low-skilled factory jobs that are still there in abundance.

  Cannon grew up alongside Demetrius Cantrell—Sugar Ray Dinke—who made one of the first rap songs ever to come out of Chicago. The night in 1981 when the singer Larry Potts was murdered in the 1230 N. Burling rec room, that was the end of the Electric Force Band. No way could they play after that. But Dinke continued to make music on his own. He’d rap about anything, verses streaming out of him about news events and sports figures and bits of advice. Oprah Winfrey visited Cabrini-Green in the early eighties to feature the Jesse White Tumblers. The fascination with crime and degradation there meant that the media focused also on the successes that seemed to blossom from the cracked asphalt. There were multiple news stories about Anthony Watson, who grew up in the rowhouses and became a navy commander in charge of a nuclear submarine (“Rough Sailing, But He Beats Cabrini Odds”) and stories of teachers, tutoring programs, and entrepreneurs. As Oprah interviewed Jesse White outside Schiller school, the gym teacher interrupted her. “Hey, Dinke,” he shouted as the young man passed by. “Come do that rap about Cabrini-Green.”