by Ben Austen
She checked in with the lawyer every few days, asking how her transfer was progressing. With no move in sight, though, she started to doubt whether her attorney was all that sweet. “When am I supposed to be moving?” she asked during one of their many phone calls.
“When we confirm your rent situation, when all of that is taken care of, we’ll go from there.”
“That’s what you all on now?”
“Just trying to get them to confirm that you’re eligible to be on the wait list for a four-bedroom.”
“So how long will that be?”
“I wish I knew. I think they’ll respond to me. I’ll bother them until they do. I think this is going to be taken care of. It’s not going to be done quickly.”
“It should be quickly, because you’re my lawyer.”
“I may be a lawyer; however, I’m not a magician.”
She ended up firing him. He’d been emailing the CHA since July, and it was now September. “I’m not prejudiced,” she’d say. “But if I’d have been white he’d have moved me the very same day. He doesn’t have to live in Wentworth Gardens, in the ghetto, as they say.”
Then she had the idea of moving out of the city altogether, to suburban Oak Park. She thought she could switch to a housing voucher and find a place there, maybe a single-family home. The public transportation and the schools were excellent. Two people at the CHA encouraged this move, though soon they stopped returning her calls. But she remained positive, certain that a move was imminent. “God is going to bless me with an apartment in Oak Park,” she’d say. “It’s not going to be public housing where I’m going to live.” She just needed to stick it out and fight. “I got nothing but time.”
As she waited, one of her grandchildren was named valedictorian of her elementary school. Her thirty-three-year-old son Erskine married a girl from Dolton, the suburb where J. R. Fleming had lived as a teenager that was now 90 percent black. Ricks danced at the wedding. Now the newlyweds were expecting their first child—Ricks’s thirty-eighth grandchild. On August 1, 2013, Annie’s family celebrated her fifty-seventh birthday, buying her flowers and balloons and a purse.
She was out walking not long after that, venturing from Wentworth Gardens, when a burning pain shot through her left foot. She continued on, but soon developed calluses on her heel where they’d never been before. Then she could barely put any weight on the foot, and the family took her to the emergency room. When a doctor said Ricks had diabetes, she didn’t believe him. How did she suddenly have diabetes? But she was sent to the county hospital, and a doctor there amputated her toes. She worried what she would do if she couldn’t walk long distances. How would she go shopping, visit family, keep sane? The recovery was supposed to take less than a week, but Annie got an infection at the hospital. She had trouble eating and lost weight, the sharp bones of her cheeks never more pronounced. Weeks at the hospital turned into months, and Annie started to think she no longer was herself.
Her family rallied around her. Children crowded into her hospital room during the day, drawing pictures for their grandmother. One of Annie’s daughters painted her fingernails, and another slept in a chair alongside her mother each night. As her spirits and her health improved, Annie was moved to Northwestern Memorial, where she began to rehab her foot. After a couple of weeks, she was taken outside in a wheelchair for a stroll. She wasn’t walking herself, but at least she was moving about, and Annie raised her arms triumphantly. She started talking again about where she would move after she was discharged in the coming days. “I need to laugh sometimes instead of cry,” she said. “If I’m going to cry, it won’t get me out of Wentworth Gardens.”
But before the Northwestern doctors signed her release papers, Annie came down with pneumonia. She was relocated to another hospital, where the doctors said the scars around her toes had never healed properly. They intubated her to make sure she ate enough, but now she couldn’t talk. She didn’t smile. She needed help breathing. After so much time in bed, she had sores all over her body. Her daughters complained that the nurses there were ignoring their mother, failing to turn her properly. They pointed to the holes that were forming in their mother’s back. Ricks’s gaunt arms were black where months of IVs had ruptured her veins, and she whimpered through a tube.
A doctor came into the room one day to talk to the family about removing Annie from the feeding tube and the assisted-breathing apparatus. It took a while for the Ricks children to understand that he meant to let her die. He claimed she was unresponsive. They argued that their mother was heavily sedated. Each time she came off the assisted breathing, they said, she breathed on her own for longer stretches. She was the toughest person they knew. Their mother would never give up. The family hired a lawyer they heard about on television, a malpractice attorney who asked them repeatedly if there had been a bed fall, because that would be a “slam dunk.” They told him, no, there hadn’t been a fall, and he ignored their calls.
Then on November 16, 2014, with gospel playing and her family gathered around the hospital bed, the life passed from Annie Ricks. She was fifty-eight. “You walk in with a sore foot, and you never leave,” a daughter said bitterly. The family struggled to pay for the funeral. One director simply walked out of the room when he heard they didn’t have insurance to cover the cost. But they managed. They had a friend who could do the makeup; others chipped in for the coffin and the flowers and the food for the repast. The services were held at Kingdom Baptist Church, on the West Side. It had been four years since Annie Ricks left Cabrini-Green, and more than a hundred people from the old neighborhood showed up to pay their respects. At the memorial, her children talked about their mother’s stubbornness, her determination to provide for them: “What she didn’t have, she made sure we had it.” In front of the pews, Reggie said he didn’t care that he had a terrible singing voice, and he started in on an R. Kelly song. “Dear Mama, you wouldn’t believe what I’m goin’ through / But still I got my head up just like I promised you.” Rose, crying, couldn’t speak. Kenton, Ricks’s fourth of nine sons, said they all learned from her example: “Be strong, take care of the kids, take care of family.” She made them all better people. “She’d do anything for anybody,” he said. “She was just love.”
KELVIN CANNON
J. R. FLEMING attended Annie Ricks’s funeral. “She was the last voice, the last resident’s voice,” he said. “She talked shit, too. She would tell it like it is.” Kelvin Cannon was there as well. “Ms. Ricks fought for something she felt was right. She fought for her home,” he said. “I admire her for that. If more people fought like her, maybe what happened to Cabrini would be different.” After Cannon’s time as tenant council president ended, he started looking for full-time work again. Despite what some thought, no one handed him a job as part of a quid pro quo. And he didn’t run up to Jesse White, his old PE teacher, and ask to be hired. That’s not how it was done. At almost eighty, White had been Illinois secretary of state since 1999 and Democratic committeeman of their ward for even longer, all while appearing at hundreds of Jesse White Tumblers performances each year. When Mr. White distributed food in the neighborhood, Cannon came out in the cold and hauled turkeys and hams off an eighteen-wheeler. Cannon appeared at fund-raisers and volunteered on campaigns, knocking on doors and passing out literature. He worked the back-to-school picnics. He hung out at every weekly ward night, too, at the Jesse White Tumblers’ offices, on Sedgwick, beneath the Marshall Field Garden Apartments. Up until 2017, the horses that pulled carriages on the Gold Coast were stabled across the street, and the block smelled of hay and manure.
The ward offices also had the feel of a bygone era, as if White’s own beloved mentor, George Dunne, were still doling out the favors and the first Richard Daley were reigning over the city. But it was White who presided behind a short desk, in a room the size of a closet, its walls lined with his memorabilia—campaign posters and photos of him on the Cubs and with the 101st Airborne. One after another, constituents were le
d into the small office, the door was shut, and the person asked humbly for assistance. A man wanted to turn an unused parcel of CHA land into a boarding house for military veterans. A woman was in foreclosure on her apartment and hoped Mr. White might talk the bank into giving her a little more time. Someone needed a suspended driver’s license reinstated. If the person was from the neighborhood, White could name his or her uncle, grandparents, and cousins. “I saw your father run track,” he’d tell a mother of three. Then he’d say, “Reach out to Annette in my office, she’ll take care of it,” or, “Call me tomorrow, here’s my card, I’ll see what I can do.”
Boys always showed up, hoping for a spot on White’s famous tumbling team. “I like smart people in my program. I don’t like dull knives,” he’d lecture the teen. “Keep your pants up, don’t show your underwear. Don’t say ‘yeah,’ say ‘yes.’” He’d had 16,500 people flip and leap in the program since the 1950s and he said fewer than 150 of them had gotten into trouble with the law. And just when it seemed he would toss the dull knife of a teenager out on his sagging pants, he told him to be at the gym on Monday, writing the address on a slip of paper and making the young man repeat the directions to get there.
At one of these ward nights, White hired a couple of his regulars to do maintenance work for the state. The job required a third crew-member, and one of the men pointed to Cannon, who as usual was nearby. “Do you know Cannon?” the man asked. “Yeah, I know Mr. Cannon,” White said. “I’ve known him all his life. I used to spank him.” And that’s how Cannon became an employee of the state of Illinois.
Cannon hoped to keep the job with the state until he got his pension in a few years, but he also had bigger dreams. He’d been asking Mr. White to help him get a pardon for his one felony conviction, a lifetime ago. He talked about going into law enforcement or opening up a restaurant or maybe trying his hand at politics. “Who would be better than me?” he’d say. “I know the politics and I know the people. I’ve run for stuff before. I’m streetwise and political-wise.” Cannon understood that life was fickle, that it could take any sort of turn. He believed he had to be ready for whatever opportunity arose. Anything was possible. Your past didn’t have to define you. “I’ve come a long way,” he would reflect. “Cabrini-Green has come a long way.”
J. R. FLEMING
ONE SUMMER NIGHT, J. R. and other members of the Anti-Eviction Campaign boarded a boat docked at the throat of the Chicago River. Brother Jim was raising money for Brothers and Sisters of Love, the Catholic ministry he started with Brother Bill before Bill retired, and he’d invited church leaders and benefactors to take a cruise with him and some of the Cabrini-Green people he’d worked with over the years. J. R. moved to the upper deck, standing on the prow as they floated through space and time. Jean Baptiste Point DuSable, a Haitian settler, had sailed up this river in the 1770s, setting up a trading post and becoming Chicago’s first permanent resident. Slag and timber and livestock had followed, the river’s direction reversed by 1900 to flush putrid waste downstate. Now the Trump Tower stood before J. R. like a giant switchblade mugging the sky. Tourists who were gathered on the bridges overhead called down greetings, and kayakers paddling alongside the boat waved in fellowship. The boat slipped by the old and the new, past stone buildings and glass spires, the clock tower of the Wrigley Building and the ramparts of the Merchandise Mart. The waterway and the reflective surfaces around it sparkled like treasure.
One of J. R.’s companions on the river was Raymond Richard, who’d grown up in the Cabrini high-rise known as the Castle. Richard had recently started a group called Brothers Standing Together that tried to help the formerly incarcerated find work and avoid a return to prison. He pointed to the berth beneath Wacker Drive where he’d slept for years when he was on his “tramp trail,” a zombie strung out on heroin. “I lost all self-esteem and the will to live,” he said. “My family would feed me through the door, because I would steal my mother’s food stamps to buy drugs.” He could see that people were living on Lower Wacker still.
Mayor Emanuel dismissed the notion that Chicago was divided into two separate cities of haves and have-nots, of the center and everywhere else. “Downtown versus the neighborhoods is a false dichotomy,” he’d insist. But J. R. spent his days in that other Chicago of abandoned homes and joblessness, of black flight and the meanness born of despair. All around were struggling schools and shuttered businesses—half the young black men in Chicago were unemployed, more than in any other big city in the country. Of the thousands of shooting victims in the city each year, most were from these same neighborhoods. Even the “contract sales” from the middle of the last century, back when public housing looked like paradise, had returned. National investment firms were buying up distressed properties and selling the equity-less and exploitative contracts-for-deed on these homes to low-income buyers who likely couldn’t secure a mortgage.
The boat sailed beside the corncob towers of Marina City. Charles Swibel had built them, and Curtis Mayfield had moved there from the Cabrini rowhouses. Then the boat turned right onto the river’s North Fork, nearing Cabrini-Green, and J. R. and his friends talked excitedly about where along the banks they’d walked with girls or ran from police officers. They’d held jobs selling newspapers, picking up their supplies from the Tribune printing house there. They’d played games around the fortress of the Montgomery Ward warehouse. One of them still lived in the Cabrini rowhouses, almost visible now from the river. The plans to redevelop the rowhouses were moving along slowly, and Brother Jim was trying to help the resident’s youngest brother—a teenager who’d been caught, this time, with a gun. Their mother wasn’t giving up on her child, but she also didn’t want to give up on herself, she said. She didn’t want to lose her chance to stay in the neighborhood. She’d seen so many neighbors kicked out of public housing because of their children, and every time she turned around, her son was into something else. “I’m the opposite of optimistic,” she’d told Jim.
J. R. was living on the far North Side. He’d met someone who loved him for his activism, and they had a son together and soon married. J. R. became a grandfather. He was still rehabbing vacant properties and trying to turn the abandoned homes into community assets. It seemed far-fetched and unfair to believe that the prosperity around the river would radiate out like a star and nourish those satellites distant in space and time. So J. R. was working with banks and nonprofits as well to establish a community land trust, in which everyone in an area pooled resources and collectively owned properties that couldn’t be bought or sold for profit. He was now buying foreclosed homes, too, training young people to repair them and selling them below market value. “I want my legacy to reflect that I cared,” he said. “My children need to know that their father came from Cabrini-Green, this great community, and he did something productive and positive.”
The boat reversed course and began to drift back toward Lake Michigan. The sky was draped in darkness. A light rain started to fall. The common sentiment was that the people who lived in the luxury high-rises around them had created their own good fortune; the generous government benefits and tax breaks they received were rightfully earned. “That makes me smart,” Donald Trump had said on his way to the presidency about paying no federal income tax. For those remaining in the Cabrini rowhouses or the Wild 100s or Englewood or Little Village or North Lawndale—there was no political will anymore for the government to step in and transform the blocks that had been left to wreck. No one cursed the city louder for its inequity and cruelty and racist history than J. R. But also no one cared for it more. “I am Cabrini-Green,” he liked to proclaim. But Cabrini-Green was also Chicago, in all its ceaseless glory and failure. J. R. bellowed into the mist of the night air, “I love my home!”
Acknowledgments
First and foremost, I want to thank Dolores Wilson, Kelvin Cannon, the late Annie Ricks, and Willie J. R. Fleming for sharing so much about their own lives with me. I am indebted as well to hundreds of o
thers who lived or worked at Cabrini-Green—this book exists because they sat for interviews, let me into their homes, met me in Seward Park, or talked on the phone for forty-five minutes or several hours. Carol Steele, the president of the Cabrini-Green tenant council for the seven years I worked on this book, welcomed me into her rowhouse office, and the members of the Near North Unity Program allowed me to take part in their meetings. The staff at the Chicago Housing Authority assisted with my research, and Keith Magee and Todd Palmer supported my work during their tenures at the National Public Housing Museum.
This book would have been much harder to write without the many public housing experts who graciously answered my questions and shared their own insights: Marilyn Katz, Lawrence Vale, Cassie Fennell, Brad Hunt, Julia Stasch, Janet Smith, Sudhir Venkatesh, Jim Fogarty, Peter Landon, Eric Davis, and Susan Popkin. And I owe a special thank-you to Larry Bennett for lending me several bankers boxes’ worth of his research and field notes. In Chicago, other writers, reporters, photographers, visual artists, and documentary filmmakers generously discussed their own work and directed me on my own: Natalie Moore, Alex Kotlowitz, Ronit Bezalel, Nate Lanthrum, Jamie Kalven, Monica Davey, Ryann Flynn, Jan Tichy, and Megan Cottrell.
At Harper’s Magazine, where I was an editor for a time, my former colleagues have edited my writing, offered guidance and support, and helped me professionally and personally in numerous ways. Among them, Jennifer Szalai first suggested I write about the demolition of the last Cabrini-Green high-rise. Christopher Cox, Rafil Kroll-Zaidi, Stacey Clarkson, and Alyssa Coppelman helped turn that idea into a magazine feature. Roger Hodge, Ted Ross, and Donovan Hohn gave tips on the book proposal, and I’ve relied on Bill Wasik’s sage advice too many times to recall. At the New York Times Magazine, Joel Lovell masterfully helped shape what would become a piece of this book into a feature story.