by Ben Austen
ONE AFTERNOON, J. R.’s cousin G-Ball and other Castle Crew members noticed a strange white man nearly skipping toward them across the blacktop known as the Killing Field. He appeared as a ghostly apparition, in a tattered old dress, but less Candyman than Casper. The middle-aged man was chubby and balding, wearing thick, cheap glasses, a child’s grin smeared across his ruddy face, and waving his arms like a semaphore. “Police,” an underage lookout yelled. But anyone with sense could see that this was no cop. What had looked like a dress from a distance was a sort of monk’s habit sewn together from dozens of strips of faded blue jeans. The frock was cinched at the waist, and a rosary and a large wooden cross hung from the man’s belt. The hobo priest was shouting, “Bud! Buddeee!” lengthening the last syllable, as if they were all lifelong friends. To their surprise, he gave each of them the Gangster Disciples handshake. He was Brother Bill, he said. He was with Catholic Charities, and he would be spending time in the neighborhood.
Brother Bill showed up the next day and most days after that. He’d wander between the buildings, sometimes well past midnight, always stopping by 1117 N. Cleveland to spend time with the Castle Crew, asking about their families or small-talking about the Bulls or the Bears. He never told people to stop selling drugs or to give up their guns. “Hey, Brother Bill,” residents would greet him from the ramps and playgrounds. But at the sound of gunfire, whenever there was violence, he hurried to it. He would position himself between the opposing gangs, in the open field and blacktops or alongside one of the towers or in the lobbies, hoping that his presence might stop the shooting. At the very least he wanted to give the gang members an excuse to end a fight. Sometimes bullets zipped by so close that he could hear the vacuum of air as they passed, the metallic taste of fear lingering in his mouth.
Brother Bill believed that he was protected by God’s shield, and he could be harmed only if that protection was lifted. As he neared a gunfight, he said a divine voice would instruct him, Stand here. It was in those moments, with the surge of adrenaline, the rush of having survived, that he felt a sense of grace: he was fulfilling his purpose, witnessing to save lives. There was a night when he came upon ten teenagers outside one of the white high-rises on Division Street. They were battering another teen with sticks. Brother Bill picked up the boy, shielding him with his body. One of the stick-wielders said, “Brother Bill, you shouldn’t do that.” Another of the attackers disagreed: “Nah, that’s what he’s supposed to do.”
Years earlier, in 1983, Bill Tomes was deliberating over two job offers, and he dropped into a Ukrainian Catholic Church in Chicago to contemplate his options. While he knelt before the altar, he recalled, the light in the church suddenly changed and the room seemed to spin as if on an axis. His line of sight had nothing to settle on save an illuminated portrait of Christ on the wall above him. And then Tomes heard Jesus: Love. You are forbidden to do anything other than that. The disembodied voice commanded, I’ll lead. You follow. Tomes had no doubt that the son of God had spoken to him. He’d experienced a miracle. Even the Catholic Church would later recognize that he’d undergone a genuine locution, a private revelation. But he didn’t take himself seriously enough to believe he had a higher calling. He assumed Jesus had made a mistake. Not long after, while lying awake in bed, he felt Christ standing before him, uttering, You will have me. You will be poor. Bill responded, “Poor, wow, not too tempting. Yuck. Such a deal.” Christ went on, You must forgive everyone everything.
Eventually, Bill stopped resisting. He took a vow of poverty and volunteered at one of the poorest parishes in all of Chicago, Saint Malachy’s. The Near West Side parish had over the years catered to Irish families, Italians, and Slavs. It now served the residents of the Henry Horner Homes, a public housing complex of nineteen buildings. Alex Kotlowitz’s 1991 nonfiction bestseller, There Are No Children Here, was about two brothers, Lafeyette and Pharoah Rivers, living in the Horner Homes with their mother, LaJoe, and their siblings. “Twice in May, LaJoe herded the children into the hallway, where they crouched against the walls to avoid stray bullets,” Kotlowitz writes. “Pharoah’s stutter worsened, so that he barely talked and stayed mostly by himself. He continued to shake whenever he heard a loud noise. Lafeyette told his mother, ‘Mama, if we don’t get away someone’s gonna end up dead. I feel it.’” A great number of the young men Tomes came to know at Horner were members of gangs. He found that he liked talking to them. He’d labor at the parish in the morning and walk the housing development from noon until late at night. Sometimes it was difficult to forgive murderers, people who could fire indiscriminately into a crowd or sell drugs to a young mother at her wit’s end. But forgiveness, as Christ had instructed him, was the key to the work.
By the mid-eighties, Chicago’s Cardinal Joseph Bernardin felt the Catholic Church needed to do more to address the violence afflicting the city’s parishes, and he asked Tomes to carry out his work with gang members in other parts of the city as well. Tomes had no calling for the priesthood, so he couldn’t be a father. Officially he would be a consultant with Catholic Charities, earning a small stipend, with the church allowing him to go by “Brother Bill,” a brother in the sense of his union with all people. The place associated most readily with violence in Chicago was Cabrini-Green, so that’s where Brother Bill was sent. He modeled his habit of stitched denim after the sewn rags worn by Saint Francis of Assisi. It looked like the oldest pair of jeans you owned, the denim turned white with wear, tessellated sections gone to holes and then patched, the many parts pieced together like a Frankenstein monster. He could be a holy man or a homeless man. He wore a homemade scapular as well, and his frock had a hood that he never donned, since he felt it looked too Ku Klux Klan. The archdiocese approved the outfit, almost as a kindness to the gang members. Tomes stood out even late at night at public housing; no one would shoot him by accident.
The longer Tomes did this work, the less comfortable he was leaving the land. He’d stay at Cabrini-Green or Henry Horner or Rockwell Gardens until 2:00 a.m., waking for morning mass, and then repeating the cycle day after day. Over the years he saved the programs from each of the funerals he’d attended as Brother Bill—his stack growing from 10 to 80 to 130. He rarely slept, and he berated himself when someone was hurt in his absence, as if he could have done more. He should have been in the stairwell, in the elevator, on Oak Street, the rowhouses, Stanton Park, on the blacktop, by the El tracks, in front of the Rock, outside the Lower North Center.
J. R. FLEMING
THE SUMMER OF the first Bulls championship, in 1991, was miserable with murder: 121 homicides in August alone, the most for any month in Chicago’s history, with the official count for the year surpassing 920. More days than not were peaceful at Cabrini, but sniper fire was an especially effective weapon of terror. Employees of Commonwealth Edison refused to do maintenance at a nearby substation, fearing that from inside a cherry picker fifty feet high they’d appear as targets. Some of the workers weather-sealing the concrete exteriors of the Cabrini high-rises wore bulletproof vests. When J. R. Fleming stepped outside, he would look up to scan the top floors of the towers around him as if checking for bad weather. If he saw white sheets covering the windows, he figured it was probably safe to hustle across the blacktop. But if he didn’t see the sheet, then it was possible someone behind the window was scanning the grounds with a rifle in hand. The thing was, J. R. never knew whether or not he was in the crosshairs, whether the bolt of lightning would suddenly strike.
The high-rises forming the south and north boundaries of the Killing Field fired on the towers lining the east and west borders, and vice versa. In an internal memo, a housing manager at Cabrini told the CHA that snipers in 1157–1159 N. Cleveland had shot at least ten people from 500–502 W. Oak. Every building had some Vietnam veterans, but even untrained guys would go up there to feel the power of aiming the big gun, deciding whether the tiny objects moving below would live or die. “I live in a neighborhood I am sure you’ve heard of, Cabrin
i-Green Housing Development,” a longtime tenant named Mrs. Henry Johns wrote in a letter to President George H. W. Bush. “The innocent residents of this community cannot walk the streets without fearing for their lives,” she explained. “I believe in your foreign policy. The United States must take a major role in world affairs, but to be effective in that role we must also set an example here at home. . . . My solution would be to do what was been done in the Persian Gulf. Send in the troops and get rid of the opposition and ammunition.”
One night when J. R. and his friends were leaving a liquor store on Larrabee, they heard the percussive blows before they saw the little eruptions on the ground around them. It took a moment for J. R. to realize that someone was shooting at them. They dropped their bottles, fell flat on their chests, and crawled military style on elbows and knees back into the store. Once inside, they patted themselves to check if they’d been hit. They were fine. But now they were trapped. They gave their handguns to the clerk, who stashed them away and did the only thing possible: called the police. The two cops who showed up cursed J. R. and the guys with him, resentful that they were risking their lives to deal with this nonsense. Thirty minutes later, four paddy wagons parked front to back to form a wall across Larrabee, and J. R. and his friends crossed the street using the cars as cover.
J. R.’s godmother was one of the women who ran his high-rise. LueElla Edwards had left Cabrini-Green for a time, moving her family to the Harold Ickes Homes, a public housing development on the South Side, but she decided her children were in graver danger there. At least at Cabrini she knew everyone. As far as the young men hanging out in front of her high-rise, she demanded of them a kind of tax. When J. R. entered the lobby of his building, Edwards would charge out of the tenant council office and say she’d checked the sign-up sheet and he hadn’t put in his hours of service. Like all the other guys, he was expected to sweep and mop the ramps, monitor the building’s first-floor computer club, and volunteer for Edwards’s Take Our Daughters to Work Club. They also chaperoned trips for the children from the building to baseball games or Six Flags Great America, and they were sent across the field to help with Holy Family’s Boys in the Hood youth group. There was a weight bench in the 1017 lobby, and J. R. might be waiting to get in his reps when he was ushered into a tenant council meeting, him slouching in the back of the community room, listening abstractedly to the women talk about the city’s plans to kick them all off the land at Cabrini. “I had money then. I’m my own boss,” J. R. would say. “The end of Cabrini wasn’t impacting me.”
It was LueElla Edwards who introduced J. R. to Brother Jim, another lay member of the Catholic Church who’d joined Brother Bill in walking the city’s public housing developments. Twenty years younger than Bill Tomes, Jim Fogarty also wore a habit of stitched denim. Tall and athletic, he’d take it off when he joined pickup basketball games, realizing that J. R. and other young guys wouldn’t really try if he had on the robes. He was a student at a Chicago seminary when Bill showed up one day, describing how he stopped gunfire and asking if anyone cared to join him. Later in life, Fogarty would parse more deliberately the line between the real and the symbolic, between meaning and myth. But back then it looked to him as though Brother Bill had emerged from the pages of Lives of the Saints. Fogarty believed that special people in special places could have divine experiences, and he was eager to see how the Lord worked through this odd man.
For the media covering the urban crisis of the 1990s, Brother Bill was irresistible as well—a white man who looked like he’d stepped out of the Middle Ages claiming that God had sent him to the most infamous public housing project in the country. Time magazine did a feature on him, and in August 1992, a camera crew from the national news show Eye on America followed Brother Bill around Cabrini-Green. Here was “the most dangerous patch of blacktop in America,” the host intoned, and Brother Bill was the “street gang missionary” who had survived some thirty near hits and saved hundreds of lives. The reporters from the program interviewed LueElla Edwards, who said her fifteen-year-old daughter, Laquanda, had begged her to move them away from Cabrini-Green. Edwards said she worried every time her children went out to play, but all she could do was pray. With Brother Bill fitted with a microphone, cameras trailed him as he lurked in the shadows, waiting for the gunfire that would set him in motion. A shooting did occur on the land that night, and Tomes ran to it. Sniper fire had struck a girl in the back of the head as she walked on Larrabee near Holy Family. Bending over the victim, with the cameras rolling, Brother Bill looked into the girl’s face. It was Laquanda Edwards, interviewed by the news crew only hours before. She had been on her way to the corner store to buy milk. Bill wept over the body. Behind him, J. R. skulked back and forth, set on revenge, a .357 Magnum stuffed into his sweatpants, as Brother Jim talked him down.
Brother Jim helped J. R. secure a peddling license, and he found work for many others, although most of the jobs didn’t stick. He even offered J. R. a way out of Cabrini-Green. A group that included Judge Reinhold, the actor from Beverly Hills Cop and Fast Times at Ridgemont High, bought the film rights to Brother Bill’s life. The production faltered, and Brother Jim arranged for J. R. to provide the Hollywood guys with some vérité footage of life on the ground at Cabrini. J. R. already owned the video equipment, and he discovered that he loved the process of filming and editing, creating a story out of a thousand stray moments. He’d capture his friends as they gathered in front of their high-rise or crossed Larrabee on their way to the mall or hung out inside Sammy’s Red Hots, across from Atrium Village beside the El tracks. He sometimes stage-managed, ordering everyone back inside the hot dog stand so he could shoot their exits all over again, instructing them to walk more naturally. He started filming young rappers from Cabrini, and suddenly every guy who wanted to show off his rhyming skills was seeking him out for an audition. The team from Hollywood liked what it saw. Brother Jim suggested J. R. do like Preach at the end of Cooley High and quit Cabrini-Green for the West Coast movie industry. J. R. had savings from his peddling, and he could ask Reinhold for a starter job in film. It was appealing, the idea of the total reinvention.
But J. R. couldn’t leave. He told Jim that he already knew all about the Bloods and Crips from what he’d heard in West Coast rap and seen in movies like Colors, Boyz n the Hood, and South Central. The LA gangs had become as infamous, as much of an urban bogeyman, as Cabrini-Green. If J. R. lived out west, he half-joked, he wouldn’t be safe wearing any color other than orange. He was less afraid of the violence, though, than of the unknown of a new place. He’d rather stick it out with what was familiar, where his friends and family lived. For better and for worse, he’d announce, “I am Cabrini-Green.”
11
Dantrell Davis Way
SHE WAS TWELVE, and he was fifteen and to Annette seemed somehow better than the other guys stationed in the lobby. Sharper dressed, funnier, finer. That’s how she knew it was love. In 1982, Kelvin Davis lived on the West Side with his mother, but he showed up each day at Cabrini-Green. K-Mac, they called him. There were lots of boys and also men who tried to talk to Annette Freeman. She was a tomboy, short and cute, with close-cropped hair. It was Kelvin, though, who understood her suffering. Annette’s father died the previous year. Shot dead on the South Side. She’d been running away from her mother’s apartment in 500 W. Oak ever since. Janice Freeman would drink, beat Annette, and then beg forgiveness after sobering up, only to wake Annette later that night with more blows. So Annette left home. “It’s time to man up,” she told herself. She refused to sell her body, choosing to sell weed instead. She got a job selling newspapers, too, hawking them on Chicago Avenue, State, and Michigan, the only girl out there with all the boys. Some nights Annette slept at her grandmother’s house, more than a hundred blocks south, but each morning she hopped on the El to come back to her building. Kelvin would be there, and he’d call her the “lost child” and make her laugh through her pain.
Annette was fourtee
n, in 1984, when she learned she was pregnant. It seemed to her like the end of the world. Among her friends from the building, she was the first to get pregnant. She was humiliated. Her belly sticking out, announcing that she was having sex. So much for manning up. She had to quit the job selling newspapers. “Here I was a child and homeless and about to have a child of my own,” she recalled. She wondered what kind of mother she could possibly be. But Kelvin kept telling her it was going to be all right. “We’re going to be okay, Ann,” he repeated. They named the baby after two of Kelvin’s uncles—Dantrell Tremaine Davis. Annette called him Danny.
Annette had been abandoned as a child, left for several years with a woman on the South Side she didn’t know, and because she was still a ward of the state, the Department of Children and Family Services wanted her to sign over parental rights. A baby was a burden, no doubt, but she wouldn’t give Danny up. No way. She wouldn’t even leave him alone with other people, not after what had happened to her. The two of them went everywhere together. She took him with her to Cabrini, and they would stroll downtown or to the Lincoln Park Zoo or to the beaches on Oak Street and North Avenue. They’d walk to the Milk Duds factory to get candies, and wander Old Town, looking in the bike shop and the Ripley’s Believe It or Not! Museum. Kelvin had other children with other girls, but he’d join them sometimes, the three of them like a family. Annette and Danny slept at her grandmother’s, or at Kelvin’s mother’s place, or in the elevator of 500 W. Oak. Occasionally she rode the train with Danny, going from one end of the line to the other until morning.
When Annette turned eighteen, and Danny was three, she filled out an application for her own apartment at Cabrini-Green. She would never forget the day she got it—February 9, 1989. The unit was on the sixth floor of 502 W. Oak, the twin connected to her mother’s building, and moving in was her freedom. It was liberation not only from the uncertainty of homelessness, the cold, and strange men, but also from all the naysayers who told her she wouldn’t accomplish anything, that she’d probably be dead by age eighteen and couldn’t take care of a child. Her uncle Henry, a bus driver, helped her with furniture. An official from family services checking on her saw that the apartment was clean, that she was providing for her son, and Annette was granted guardianship over both Dantrell and, for the first time, her own self.