by Ben Austen
EDDIE MURPHY AND 21 were James Martin and Eric Davis. Martin was working as a beat cop on the South Side when he issued a couple of traffic tickets to Jesse Jackson Jr., the future disgraced US congressman and son of the famous reverend. After ticketing Jackson, he was transferred to Public Housing North, the commander at Cabrini-Green greeting Martin with bemused laughter. On that very first day, he was in a squad car on Oak Street when rival gangs in the red high-rises opened fire on one another. A man jogged over from the rowhouses to join the gunfight, using the police cruiser with the cops inside it as cover. “I’d never seen anything so ignorant in my entire life,” Martin said. He’d grown up in public housing himself, at the South Side’s Ida B. Wells Homes. But he’d had a peach tree outside the rowhome he lived in with his grandparents; he’d graduated high school and attended West Point for a year. Tenants nicknamed him “Eddie Murphy” because he had a passing resemblance to the comedian and also because he cracked jokes endlessly, even making fun of a guy’s clothes or running style as he was clasping cuffs on him.
Eric Davis was so fresh faced when he showed up for work at Cabrini-Green in 1987 that residents called him “21,” for the TV show 21 Jump Street, about cops young enough to go undercover as high school students. He’d lived in a Cabrini high-rise as a child in the 1960s, when his family first made the trek north from South Carolina. He went on to become a prep basketball and football star in the Uptown neighborhood, and then as a backup point guard he co-captained the University of Houston basketball team—Phi Slama Jama—that featured Hakeem Olajuwon and Clyde Drexler and lost in the 1982 Final Four to Michael Jordan’s University of North Carolina Tar Heels. As a cop, Davis wanted to serve at his former home.
Crack cocaine was just starting to ravage the neighborhood. Mothers, long the cornerstone of the community, were disappearing for days, handing off their children for others to watch. In Cabrini-Green’s white high-rises, a renegade faction of Gangster Disciples bought drugs from suppliers not sanctioned by the gang’s leadership and kept the profits. Across the dividing line of Division Street, you didn’t just have Disciples fighting Cobra Stones and Vice Lords but also GD hit squads firing at one another with automatic assault rifles. And the Disciples in the Whites warred as well with young men in a rival gang who lived a couple of blocks away in the Evergreen Terrace apartments, a small low-income development next to Marshall Field Garden Apartments on Sedgwick Street.
As a way to talk to the kids at Cabrini-Green, and as a response to the gangsta rap that was then popular, Davis, Martin, and another officer formed a rap group of their own, calling it the Slick Boys, slang for undercover cops. A sometime drug dealer from Cabrini, Pete Keller, known as K-So, helped them with lyrics, which were part rap battle rejoinder and part public-service announcement. “C is for CHA, which really lacks / D is for the dealers of drugs like crack / E is for the end of the ee-conomee / F is for the fathers that I’d rather see.” The media embraced the story of the police trying to save lives through music, with headlines such as “Cops Stay on the Beat.” The Slick Boys delivered talks at public schools about the dangers of gangs and drugs. They worked nights at Cabrini and then by day traveled around the city and later the country to deliver their musical message about the efforts needed to turn around blighted communities. They hired dancers and roadies from public housing. They filmed a music video. A movie was written based on their lives, hinging on an invented beef between a fictional drug lord at Cabrini-Green and 21, the two presented as childhood friends now on opposite sides of the law—and the mic!
In the summer of 1991, Eddie Murphy and 21 learned that a security guard in one of the Cabrini high-rises had kidnapped a thirteen-year-old girl from the building. Michael Keith was twenty-six and had worked for the private security firm for half a year. The girl was Veronica McIntosh, J. R. Fleming’s baby sister, who along with their mother had moved back to Cabrini-Green that June. At 1017 N. Larrabee, where they now stayed, Veronica jumped rope with other girls late into the night. One afternoon, she and her fourteen-year-old cousin were in front of another Cabrini high-rise when Keith pulled up alongside the girls and offered them a ride. They knew him from the building, so after hesitating for a moment they climbed in.
Keith drove a white Oldsmobile Cutlass, a two-door coupe, and Veronica shimmied into the back while her cousin sat up front. For a while Keith was chatty and amiable, pointing out stores and buildings as he drove them around the Near North Side. It was when the girls said they were ready to go home that he turned strange. Between long silences, he told them that wasn’t what they wanted. At a stoplight, Veronica’s cousin jumped out. But as Veronica was sliding out as well, Keith grabbed her and pulled the door shut. She turned to face him. He held a gun pointed at her face. Over the next twenty hours, with Veronica crouched against the red leather backseat, Keith drove silently. He’d park somewhere secluded, climb into the back, rape her, and drive some more.
Veronica hardly knew the city, so she had no sense of where they were. During the night, Keith stopped outside a house in a residential neighborhood and tried to get her to come inside. But she clutched the seat and screamed, and he gave up. Later Veronica learned that it was Keith’s home on the South Side. She’d blame herself for not going inside with him. J. R. had been with a girl when Veronica was abducted, but he’d since tracked down Keith’s home address through the security firm. If she had just gone inside, Veronica told herself in the days and decades to come, then J. R. might have saved her from a dozen more hours of hell. It wasn’t until the next day, with Keith bleary and muttering, that Veronica slipped out of his reach and fled the moving car. She ran away along a crowded street. She looked up and saw the Cabrini high-rises in the distance and headed toward them. Keith didn’t return to his house, but he did come to work to pick up his paycheck, and Eddie Murphy and 21 were waiting for him.
Years later, after Keith had served a fourteen-year prison sentence, Veronica confronted him in a South Side diner. Up to then, she avoided talking about what she referred to only as “the incident.” She’d lost her ability to trust people. She believed all men were devious, and she had trouble leaving her own children alone even with their father. For a while she’d popped pills and turned violent. With her sister by her side, Veronica asked Keith how he could have done what he did to her. She was thirteen, a baby. She’d still had dolls lined up in her bedroom. He’d stolen her childhood. Keith didn’t apologize or ask for forgiveness. Rather, he smiled coyly as he reflected on their hours together. He said he’d really wanted her. And since it was public housing, he took her.
DOLORES WILSON
FOR DOLORES WILSON and the other public housing residents training for self-management, it felt like they had enrolled in school. “What we did took longer than college,” Dolores would say. They spent hours in workshops and evening sessions, studying best practices for screening tenants and for conserving heat and electricity. They learned how to read a lease. They reviewed the endless rules and regulations issued by the CHA and HUD. They went over how to form committees, bill vendors, and fill out tax returns. “I think I came to know more about housing than Jack Kemp did,” Dolores said, referring to the NFL quarterback turned Republican senator turned secretary of housing. They went on weekend retreats outside Chicago, where a trainer taught them leadership skills. As managers, they couldn’t lord their power over others. They needed to understand that it was better to listen than to speak all the time. In their new positions, they would have to inspire their neighbors. “If no one is following, you aren’t a leader,” the teacher repeated. But it was also going to be up to them to lay down the law, to put an end to illegal activities in their buildings. They role-played how to resolve conflicts and also to evict tenants whose conflicts couldn’t be resolved.
The Metropolitan Planning Council called this effort “empowerment training,” teaching residents how to become “participants in the process of managing their buildings and deciding their future.” To model
this self-determination, the MPC hired Bertha Gilkey, a resident of a public housing complex in St. Louis. In 1969, Gilkey, twenty and a single mother, organized a system-wide rent strike that lasted nine months, and she went on to run the tenant group at Cochran Gardens that took over custodial and management duties from the St. Louis Housing Authority. Cochran Gardens had been a lot like Cabrini-Green: abutting a gentrifying city center, it was seen as a “war zone,” with “rooftop snipers and drug wars.” But under resident management, the rehabbed apartments filled to near capacity, crime fell, and rent collection doubled.
Dolores liked Gilkey instantly. The sessions the St. Louis activist led were as much self-help revival meetings as they were classes in operations and finance. Gilkey’s voice was husky and operatic; her hair was cut into an asymmetrical bob, her eyebrows arched in a look of perpetual defiance. She would boom that the tenants had been mistreated and misunderstood for too long, dismissed as pushers, pimps, and dope fiends, as if the poor were without dreams or aspirations. She made the Chicagoans believe in themselves and their desire—their right—to run their own buildings. She’d chosen against being on welfare, she explained to her trainees, a personal act of willful defiance. And she expected as much from them. “What I’m saying is that there is a new day, that you will no longer be crying in the wind,” she pronounced. “1230 Burling is going to be a decent, safe, clean, and sanitary place to live.” Gilkey would bring them into a tight circle, all of them clasping hands, and lead them in song. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord! “She was revolutionary,” Dolores would say. “When Bertha spoke, she made you listen. You had to.”
Gilkey emphasized that outsiders wanted them to fail, expected it. Others had been enriching themselves on their backs and wouldn’t give that up without a fight. “There’s big money in poor folks,” she preached. She challenged them to look over the bloated staffs at the Chicago Housing Authority, the deputy deputies and the executive executives. She said that’s where the finances meant to improve their buildings had been going for decades. Housing authorities were paid by HUD for units whether they were vacant or filled, so the agencies had no incentive to make their developments better. The CHA had failed to carry out its charge of providing safe harbor for those overlooked and exploited by the private real estate market. It was up to them, the tenants, to change things. Otherwise, they would continue to live in degradation, or worse, on the streets, because cities were going to generate the will eventually to demolish their run-down projects. She’d seen it happen in St. Louis with Pruitt-Igoe. But she was going to show them how to succeed. “The power to control your own destiny is freedom,” she proclaimed. Then they’d join together in shouting, “I’m fired up! I’m tired, and I can’t take it anymore!”
Dolores and her neighbors were fired up, but they were also overwhelmed. The task ahead seemed both too tangled up in endless details and too abstract. When they felt about ready to quit, Gilkey took them on a trip to St. Louis. Fifty Chicagoans got off the bus at Cochran Gardens and couldn’t believe that what they were seeing was public housing. Under a tenant-led renovation, Cochran Gardens had added new townhomes to the tracts of concrete that had separated its towers; the high-rise units were rehabbed, the buildings updated and outfitted with balconies overlooking a communal courtyard. Everything was pristine, even the incinerator room. Dolores, wearing her Harold Washington button, declared it unbelievable. Cora Moore nodded in approval, envisioning the possibilities at 1230 N. Burling.
In the spring of 1988, after eighteen months of classes, the trainees from 1230 N. Burling were honored at a graduation ceremony held at a downtown Chicago bank. Many of the residents put on their Sunday best—pink and yellow dresses and towering hats ringed by brims as wide as umbrellas. Dolores covered her mouth as she laughed and wept. “I can’t succeed without you and more people like you,” Vince Lane told the graduates.
Dolores wrote a letter to the newspapers, reporting on their achievement. “We have learned many things about tenant management,” she noted. “Now we must put it to work and open the minds of all residents if we are to succeed.” In 1990, the leaders of 1230 N. Burling were designated interim managers of their building. Then in 1992, after seven years of preparation, the 1230 North Burling Resident Management Corporation took over an annual budget of $6 million and became responsible not only for providing security but also for collecting rents, screening tenants, and maintaining the property. In a written statement, its members declared it their mission to “provide management programs and services, social, educational, cultural, and spiritual, to better the lives and living conditions of the 1230 North Burling residents.” Dolores designed their personalized letterhead—a rough ink drawing of the file cabinet high-rise, the windows colored in to highlight the white facade, the motto “Faith Brought Us This Far” stretched across the roof and down one side of the tower.
Dolores served as the group’s president, an unpaid position, and Cora Moore ran the day-to-day operations as the head manager. They created a seven-member elected board of directors, and hired a full-time paid staff of seven, which included a leasing clerk, an accountant, and janitors. They recruited two residents from each floor to serve as floor captains, and numerous other tenants joined the building’s fifteen different committees. Wilson required members of the management team to look respectable, since they were now representatives of the building. “I’m not talking about going to the mailboxes in high heels and makeup,” she said. “You just have to be decent. Don’t come to the lobby looking like hell’s a popping.” Potted plants were placed by the mailboxes, and visitors now needed to be buzzed in to enter. The managers inspected every apartment and began the eviction process for tenants who didn’t follow the rules. Dolores said they had to keep out “undesirables.” They started a nursery in the building, covering cinder block walls with yellow and blue hearts. They opened a Laundromat on the second floor, negotiating a sixty-forty profit split with the company leasing the washers and dryers, the tenants selling tokens out of the management office, so no money accumulated in the machines. (“Cabrini Tenants Awash in Still Another Success,” ran a headline.) They operated social service programs for young people and senior citizens. They partnered with a nonprofit to build a new $60,000 playground for the hundreds of children who lived in the tower.
People from other Cabrini high-rises started approaching Dolores, asking if she could get them an apartment in the building. But she didn’t want anyone saying she played favorites, and she referred them to the admissions committee. The building was described in the press as “a ray of hope,” “a shining example of grassroots empowerment.” For Dolores, the highest praise came from Washington, DC. “President Bush named our building a model for the nation,” she announced.
10
How Horror Works
J. R. FLEMING
AFTER J. R. Fleming was expelled from his high school, in 1990, for punching the assistant principal, his mother packed his suitcase and put him on a Greyhound bus headed for Alabama. No way he was going to hang around Cabrini-Green all day, not when they were talking about a murder epidemic in Chicago. J. R. had started spending time with a girl named Donna who lived on the third floor of his high-rise. He was seventeen, and she was fifteen and pregnant with their child. But J. R.’s mother still sent him away to his father. Willie Sr. was living in Alexander City, a textile town in Tallapoosa County, about halfway between Birmingham and Auburn. When J. R. stepped off the bus, his dad was there to greet him, standing alongside the white sheriff. The two men drove J. R. directly to the police station and showed him the jail. “I hope you’re not trouble,” the sheriff drawled. He wouldn’t be, J. R. promised.
J. R.’s sisters had always been “dad hogs” whenever Willie Sr. visited Chicago, dominating his every waking moment. Now J. R. had the man to himself. He was put to work doing carpentry and landscaping. But he also passed the days riding around the county with his father, along the river and lake and
past the many sewing factories for Russell sporting goods, which hadn’t yet moved its manufacturing first to Mexico and then to Honduras. They shot pool together and shot guns at a range and drank in bars. His father talked about his experiences in and out of the military, both legal and extralegal. J. R. listened as his father swapped tales with a group of other Vietnam veterans, the men somehow seeming to run what they called Alex City. J. R. turned eighteen, and his father made him sign a selective service card, but he also told his son that government work probably wasn’t for him. “Be your own man,” he chided. And J. R. tattooed on his bicep a scratchy M.O.M. It looked like “mom” but stood for “My Own Man.”
When J. R. returned to Cabrini-Green after five months, his life there seemed different, but also much the same. He partied with his Skee Love crew in 1017 N. Larrabee, but he had a baby now with Donna, a son they named Jonathan. He played in basketball games and in a softball league, leaping to catch fly balls in front of teammates who were hunched in standing slumbers from heroin highs. But the dreams of college sports that had defined his life up to then were over. What J. R. decided he needed to do was make some money. A guy named Joe Peery, who worked at a local youth organization, was impressed by J. R.’s brashness and intelligence. He helped J. R. land his first paycheck job, sorting packages by zip codes for UPS.
J. R. lasted less than three months at the job. The minimum wage was then $4.25. He couldn’t buy Pampers or feed his son on $4.25 an hour. And he sure couldn’t afford all the other things he wanted for himself. J. R. was obsessed with cars, and he’d always been drawn to technology, trying to test whatever gadget was new to the market, whether it was a computer, a PDA, a pager, or a video camera. But the taxes were what sealed it for him. When he got that first UPS paycheck and saw that $11 had been withheld, he was furious. He could make more money selling weed in three days than he did in an entire week sorting mail.