by Ben Austen
“You really got a gun for us?” laughed the bigger of the two, a guy people at Cabrini called Frank Nitti, after Al Capone’s enforcer. He seemed amused, as if J. R. hadn’t been in on the joke. “We were just fucking with you, man.” He and J. R. would later become friends.
J. R. was inclined to see the world through the lens of sports, so he tried to approach Cabrini-Green as if it were a football game, discerning the rules amid the disorder. “You just need to follow your blockers. Follow your blockers and you’ll survive,” he told himself. He went to G-Ball and read through the Disciples literature. One of the gang’s first tenets was that the GDs aided and assisted their own members. But J. R. looked around and saw that the gang was making a lot of its drug money in the Whites, the towers across Division Street; his red high-rise on Larrabee was on the front lines, directly across from a nineteen-story Vice Lords tower. It didn’t seem like anyone was too interested in aiding and assisting them. J. R. phoned his father. Willie Sr. told J. R. to stay out of the gangs. He said J. R.’s brain worked differently than the brains of other guys in the projects, that he was too smart to get involved in petty battles. The advice played to J. R.’s ego. “Don’t be a pawn in another man’s game of chess,” his father counseled.
Instead of gangbanging, J. R. formed a clique in his building called Skee Love, which was mostly about throwing parties, selling a little weed, and hooking up with girls. Their motto: “Bang, bang, bang. Skee, skee, skee.” After being run out of Lincoln Park, J. R. tried another area high school, Wells, a mile and a half west. But he didn’t see any learning happening there. Students brought guns and knives to school in their shoes. The Puerto Ricans fought the blacks who fought other blacks. One day a posse of Spanish Cobras was waiting for him outside the school. J. R. knew he couldn’t fight the entire neighborhood. He elected instead to punch the assistant principal. He would be expelled. But he reasoned correctly that the police would come and drive him home, past the waiting gangbangers. It tore up his mother, but J. R. was done with school forever.
9
Faith Brought Us This Far
DOLORES WILSON
WHEN THE JOB of president of her building opened up suddenly, Dolores Wilson wrestled with whether to take it. Like the prayer said, she needed help distinguishing between what she could and couldn’t change. Her own apartment she could control, but an entire building? The roof leaked and flooded apartments were left to rot. The top two floors were eventually closed off altogether. People weren’t supposed to go up there, but they did. Gang signs were scrawled sloppily over the stairwells and elevators. Garbage collected on the landings. It got to the point where Dolores felt too embarrassed to invite anyone over. “I can’t have visitors come through all of this to get to my house,” she’d say.
For many years the president of the tenant council in 1230 N. Burling was a friend of hers named Ethelrene Ward. Ms. Ward worked with Marion Stamps to demand better services for tenants, and she helped start a community pantry. She let teenagers put on shows in the building, and she organized outings for the residents to the Wisconsin Dells and to a small lake where they played volleyball and fished, though Dolores couldn’t stand to put the hook through the worm. When Ms. Ward died, a reverend who lived in the building took over. But he’d been discovered recently shot dead in an elevator. People said he’d gotten mixed up in a domestic dispute. Dolores believed that preachers should be judged not by their actions, but by their inspiring words, and she liked how at funerals the reverend would say, “I’m not talking to the deceased. She can’t hear me. I’m talking to all of you in the audience.” But now he was the deceased, and she was still seated in the pews. She decided to take on the responsibility and succeed him as president.
She called her first meeting about a year after Hubert’s death. Debbie and Cheryl, her daughters, both had their own apartments in the building now, so Dolores knew they’d show up. But she figured few others would come. When she walked into the first-floor rec room, though, she discovered it crowded with seniors and single mothers and little children and even some gang members. The older tenants talked about restoring 1230 N. Burling to its original glory in the early sixties, when it was freshly painted and surrounded by green grass, flowers, and benches. The young parents complained about the gangs charging them to ride the elevators, about their children being beaten up and robbed. And the gangbangers who were present agreed for the most part—they, too, were offended by the conditions in the high-rise. One of the gang leaders raised his hand and suggested putting stools on each floor, since children who couldn’t reach the trash chutes were spilling garbage or leaving bags on the ground.
A dozen people at the meeting volunteered to monitor the building in shifts. All but one of them was a woman, and many of their neighbors called them crazy, saying they were going to get shot. But they went up to the gang members and told them to set up someplace else. They worked in teams, one stationed by the back door leading to Halsted Street, another watching the front, and others on the elevators. When Kelvin Cannon moved into the Burling building after his release from Stateville, he took a shift as well, safeguarding the elevators even as he led the Disciples. Dolores pressured the CHA into replacing lights in the lobby and installing a phone there. One woman sold candy out of her apartment, and with the proceeds the security team bought blue uniforms with a 1230 BURLING patch sewn onto the sleeve. Eventually the CHA paid some of them as security guards. They carried walkie-talkies and clipboards, keeping a list of every unlocked, vacant unit and broken window to send on to the housing authority. “This is where we live, and we have to protect it,” Dolores said. “We started laying down the law, and we found out the law was on our side.”
The CHA allotted the building a small monthly stipend for miscellaneous expenses, enabling Dolores to outfit the rec room with a used pool table, a Ping-Pong table, and a thrift shop sofa with a psychedelic design. She convinced a local store to donate ten gallons of paint, and she paid men from the building $6 for each stairwell they painted. Some of them were so eager for work that they did two or three floors on their own. In the summer, the building hosted a rummage sale, and residents hung clothes on the fence outside; they set up grills and sold hot dogs and refreshments. A couple of tenants planted a garden on the empty land alongside the building. There was a fashion show, a coat giveaway, and a tutoring program.
Dolores conscripted children to help with the tower’s upkeep. The same boys and girls who might have fooled around on the elevators now wore pieces of paper with the word MONITOR taped to their shirts. They walked the high-rise in pairs, making sure other children didn’t litter, prop open the elevator doors, or jump out of the cabins. Mayor Washington’s administration gave the building a permit to block off Scott Street, just to the north of the high-rise, and the residents held a jump rope contest and a Big Wheel race. Because she hated competitions, the whole idea of grown people yelling when a ball didn’t go in a net or a glove, Dolores awarded each child a prize. Neighbors told Dolores that they never imagined they’d clean up after someone else, but the building was looking so good that they had reached down and picked up a potato chip bag from the lobby floor. Dolores soon felt comfortable enough about the state of the high-rise to invite her pastor from Holy Family over for tea. And it thrilled her when he said from her living room that 1230 N. Burling looked like no other building in Cabrini-Green.
Dolores still had her full-time job at the city water department as well as her other volunteer work on local boards and committees. As the secretary of the tenant council for all of Cabrini-Green, she was taking the minutes at a meeting in 1985 when the talk turned to a curious pilot program being funded by the Metropolitan Planning Council. The civic nonprofit wanted to train tenants in a few public housing developments across the city to take over management duties from the CHA.
In recent years, the MPC had considered recommending that all the high-rise public housing in Chicago be torn down. But during the 1980s, both pover
ty and the number of families in need of low-income housing increased in Chicago while federal dollars declined and affordable housing options disappeared. The homeless population in Chicago and the number of people on the CHA waiting list swelled. “Given those circumstances, Chicago cannot afford to lose any housing for low-income families, including the 38,685 units of public housing,” the MPC concluded. Instead, the organization explored the resident-management model. The premise was that tenants would be more motivated than housing authorities or private managers to renovate vacant apartments in their buildings, collect rents, and deal with bad neighbors. And besides, nothing else had worked. The resolution that the Chicago City Council passed to create what it called a “vision of a brighter possible tomorrow” read more like a public housing postmortem:
WHEREAS, the abysmal quality of services rendered to residents of Chicago Housing Authority by management is the stuff that horror stories are made of—tracts of fifteen- to nineteen-story buildings where at times elevators have been inoperative seventy percent of the time—residents waiting for years for new shades, for screens for their doors and windows, waiting months for replacement windows and the most simple repairs; and . . .
WHEREAS, the wholesale flight of working families from Chicago Housing Authority developments . . . have left it a vast urban wilderness three-quarters of whose adults are unemployed, eighty percent of whose households are headed by unemployed single mothers . . . where welfare dependence and the welfare mentality hangs like inescapable miasma in the air coexisting with the all too frequent incidence of criminality, marginality, gang violence, alcoholism, drug abuse and other self-destructive behavior bred by the unbroken landscape of poverty and desperation . . .
The idea that residents of public housing be put in charge of their own buildings was born not only out of desperation but also from an unlikely union between conservatives and black activists. Resident management meant jobs and skills for African American tenants that might lead to success outside public housing. This self-empowerment aligned with the Right’s ideal of personal responsibility and a diminished government, what Republicans decried as the trillion-dollar “poverty-industrial complex” established under Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. Chicago wouldn’t be the first city to try the experiment. In Boston, St. Louis, Jersey City, and Newark, public housing residents had already formed companies and taken over maintenance and daily operations in their own buildings, although the results had been mixed. Housing authorities remained wary: landlords and building managers were supposed to be allies, partners in operating any property, yet in public housing, agencies had long had an adversarial relationship with their tenants. Residents, too, had little to no accounting, hiring, or supervising experience, and the buildings they were put in charge of managing were among the worst in their cities. But tenants embraced the opportunity, and conservative think tanks pushed to expand the venture to other cities. When the Metropolitan Planning Council surveyed residents of Cabrini-Green and two other public housing developments in Chicago, it found that many of the unemployed single mothers would much rather work than receive benefits; they’d been trained as seamstresses, cosmetologists, cashiers, teachers, secretaries, and cooks. Here was an untapped pool of labor. “The brave pioneers of resident management are sowing the seeds of hope and possibility in cities across our nation,” Ronald Reagan declared from the White House.
Dolores Wilson didn’t think too much of the idea when she first heard about it. “I didn’t even know what resident management meant,” she’d say. But then someone from the MPC phoned her at the water department. Because the people in her high-rise had shown initiative, because they’d already done so much to better their home, the person hoped that Dolores and the other residents in her building would apply for the program. Dolores sought the advice of one of her neighbors, Cora Moore. A mother of six, Moore worked for the CHA as the assistant manager of 1230 N. Burling, and had lived at Cabrini-Green since 1969. “Yeah, yeah, we want resident management,” she shouted, saying this was the opportunity they’d been waiting for. Dolores signed them up.
THERE WAS A ten-year-old from the Reds named Rodnell Dennis. He didn’t have J. R.’s way with words or athletic abilities; he wasn’t shrewd or confident like Kelvin Cannon. But he was big and powerful for his age, and he’d acquired the nickname Dirty Rod. He’d “do dirt” on other little kids, grabbing them by the neck as they were heading to the candy store on Orleans Street and robbing them of their change. Also, he’d admit himself, he was plain dirty. His mother got hooked on drugs and stopped mothering. His father wasn’t around. The family had little money, and his clothes were raggedy and unwashed. Rod was surprised one day in 1989 when a Gangster Disciples coordinator told him the gang had been checking him out for a few years and liked what it was seeing. He said the GDs didn’t usually bring young fellas into the fold, but they recognized in Rodnell a fearlessness and believed with a little guidance he could be someone. A boy starving for sustenance of all sorts, Rodnell was spellbound by the praise. He was introduced to the GDs operating on the Wild End, the southern portion of Cabrini-Green that included some of the red towers and the rowhouses. “What do you feel you can do for this organization?” a GD governor asked him. “I can do whatever you want me to do,” Rodnell shouted too quickly, and the group of young men around him laughed.
The gang members saw that Rodnell lacked for many things, and they gave him new shoes and clothes, all in the GD colors of black and blue. In return, he was expected to make certain sacrifices. For someone at the bottom rung of the organization, that meant security time. Every day after school, from three thirty until nine, he stood outside one of two high-rises. Others sold drugs from inside the building. His job was to yell, “One time, lights out,” when the police approached. The Disciples always talked about the Five Ps—“proper preparation prevents poor performance.” Rod now lived by this credo. He attended regular meetings the gang held at the Lower North Center, in the gym or pool room, where they’d discuss business and neighborhood events of the past week. They were instructed that it was their job to take out their enemies. They were at war with the Vice Lords and the Stones in the nearby towers. A higher-up would say, “Who wants to go on a ‘mission’?” Rodnell, eager to show how motivated he was, would be among the first to volunteer.
When he was thirteen, in March 1992, Rodnell went on a mission. It was a freezing Sunday afternoon, and one of Rodnell’s best friends, a boy who would soon be killed, stepped into a circle of GDs. He held out a handgun, a silver .22. He’d spotted a group of Vice Lords not far from Jenner school. Who among them was going to teach the Vice Lords a lesson? Rodnell reached for the gun. He ran over to the 500 W. Oak building, a couple hundred feet away, and ducked behind a Dumpster by the old Death Corner. People were gathered outside the front entrance of the high-rise. Rodnell could hear the sound his gun made, feel the recoil, but otherwise his mind went blank. When he realized he’d emptied the chamber, he ran back to his building, handing off the gun to another boy, who hid it inside an elevator shaft. He took a seat on the stairs outside the tower, breathing heavily into the cold air, and tried to act as if nothing had happened. And maybe nothing had. Less than ten minutes had passed since he’d grabbed the gun, and here he was back where he’d started.
For most shootings, a cop car or maybe two showed up. But ten now raced down Oak, along with an ambulance. Rodnell had to check out the commotion, and he returned to the scene of the crime, sauntering over as casually as he could. Yellow tape surrounded the building’s entrance and a white sheet was draped over what had to be a body. The thought of killing someone hadn’t actually entered Rod’s mind. The victim, he learned, was a boy named Anthony Felton, a nine-year-old who had no part in the Vice Lords or any other gang. Rodnell knew the child’s family. He retreated to his building. Two police officers were already up on his ramp talking to his mother. Someone must have identified him as the shooter. He saw a police cruiser and ducked into one of the h
igh-rises.
There were two plainclothes cops at Cabrini-Green whom everyone called Eddie Murphy and 21. They were young and black, and they treated the residents with respect, even the guys they arrested, referring to them as their “clients.” When things were calm at Cabrini, the officers would visit with families in their apartments. They lifted weights with guys, helped run a baseball Little League, and challenged boys on the basketball courts to games of two-on-two. People at Cabrini believed that Eddie Murphy and 21, unlike other cops, wouldn’t slap them around or plant dope on them or pocket their money. And when a guy committed a serious crime and had exhausted his options, he sometimes refused to turn himself in to anyone else but them. Now the officer known as Eddie Murphy found Rodnell’s cousin and asked him to pass along a message: “If Rod runs, we’ll have to shoot him.”
Rodnell didn’t have anywhere to run. He was thirteen and all he knew was Cabrini-Green. The next night, sleepless and panicked, he walked over to the police station on the ground floor of the 365 W. Oak high-rise and banged on the cage. An officer asked him what he wanted. “I heard you all were looking for me.”
“Who are you?” the cop asked.
“I’m Rodnell Dennis. I’m the one that shot that kid.” Because of the record he’d amassed since the age of seven—criminal damage to property, petty vandalism, theft, attempted theft, shoplifting, battery, robbery, possession of a weapon, auto theft—he was transferred from juvenile to criminal court and tried as an adult. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to thirty-nine years.