Then that’s what became like a big war. So tenant patrol, they come to each building, holler up in the buildings, say, you kids come on down. They pick them up out of each building and walk them to school ’cause some parents are probably hung over or couldn’t get it together for some other reason. You get them ready, then you pick them up from each building and walk them to school. The different buildings was doing things together, just to make sure the kids weren’t hurt by violence.
It was so bad down there that the U.S. Marshals had to come and escort the kids back and forth to school. We couldn’t come outside. If you did, you took a chance. Over there it’s like life is based on a chance. You might win, you might lose; you might live and you might not live. It was so bad. They had them close the buildings down, and you had to sign on the first floor to come up. We had to buzz you in, like normal high-rise buildings, but we had police officers. There was a police for each project location—each project had a station in it. They were the CHA Police—Chicago Housing Authority. They called them Chicago Rental Cops, or Robocops, as a joke. They were tough cops.
The Fifty-first Police Station also sent a lot of people to the Robert Taylors, people who knew the area and the residents. Some of the officers they sent were part of the regular force and some were private security officers. So it was very dangerous. You couldn’t have a birthday party for the kids downstairs in the playground; that’s how terrible it was.
The street gang didn’t get me. I gave it up and started hanging out with friends. I never did drugs. I got pregnant, and I had my first child when I was seventeen. And it was like, okay, what am I gonna do now? Public aid. They ain’t giving no money to no kids, so you have to go on your mother’s grant. I wasn’t living with my mom, but she was still in the Robert Taylors and I was still coming over there.
A year passed after I had my baby, and then I got my own apartment. Only if you had a child and you were a certain age could you get an apartment. So most people was like, well, sure, I’m having me a baby to get my own apartment. That’s how I was thinking, and I wanted someone to love me and to have for my own. Them years I was thinking that way, but now I know more. I wish I would’ve took my time and settled down instead of doing a lot of things that I did. I wish I had thought things out before I reacted. It was just so terrible.
You see the guys, the drug dealers, have things that you would like to have, and you get with them. The car, the fashion; it was all about the fashion, really. Selling drugs for fashion. A lot of people did a lot of things for the fashion and appearance and the talk of the town. Selling drugs for the cars, the money, and now you’re more important to us in the projects. You have all this money, so we’re gonna try to get with you and hang around with you and be your friend. You don’t know that wasn’t the right way until after you have thought to yourself if that’s what you really wanted.
Now I’m twenty-nine, and I have six children. If I could do it over again, I probably would’ve had them six, but I probably would’ve been on number one now. If I would’ve stayed with the YMCA that we had to practice in, and the activities that we had at the time, I would have had more options. The communities would’ve had more options for the teenagers, which they don’t really have now, because everyone is going their way. It’s more kids that’s out of grammar school now than it was back then, and more kids pregnant by sixteen too, and have more than two children now.
I have three girls and three boys. I kept having babies; they kept coming out. I couldn’t stop them; no, I could not stop them. I thought about abortions, but I never had no abortion. My mother she did prefer abortions. She said, well, you get pregnant, you should have taken more of a responsibility, ’cause I’m not gonna keep them. That’s what she told me. So why did I go six times? I don’t know. I haven’t asked myself that. It’s just I got pregnant and I had them. With help or not. I had one actually born in the Robert Taylor Homes. I was having it so fast it just came. The baby came on down on my auntie’s bed. The birth certificate has it.
I’m a good mama, though. I went through a lot of changes to be the good mom that I am today. I had to learn from my mistakes and experiences to know what to look for.
I went through a lot of things dealing with DCFS—the Department of Children and Family Services. They come to your home, and if there’s something wrong, you get reported. They take your children and you have to go through parenting classes, or whatever they ask you to go through; you have to go through it. They took my children away. So much was happening in the Robert Taylors, I mean living the fast life.
There is things that you do have to think about if you have children first of all, if you love them and want them to be with you and grow up with you, and not just with you, but with each other. So it was good they went to my mom. They were in the system but they weren’t spread out all over town somewhere and don’t know each other.
Oh, but I have them back now. I have certificates and everything. My eldest daughter is thirteen. I keep her in the house a lot. I cannot always do that, but I try to talk to her. She’s not more mature like I was when I was thirteen. I was more experienced back then than how the kids are now. I try to talk to them and get them to understand life, what life is all about, and what I’ve been through—my mistakes, my wrongdoing. I try to tell them my wrong-doing. I don’t hide nothing from my kids. I tell them everything I think they won’t know. I don’t hide nothing.
Some things I tell them straight out. I know how to talk to my children. I know how they will understand me the way I talk to them. Sometimes I come straight out with it, and sometimes you have to not beat around the bush, but put it in a different level for them to understand what you’re talking about, trying to explain to them.
My son he been suspended from school before I got them back home with me. I don’t have a male in my home right now; none of the kids’ fathers are around. I don’t see them; I don’t have no contact with them. It don’t bother me at all. I really don’t worry about it. I really don’t care, ’cause I’ve been making it all this time without their help. So I can stay alone.
From my experience at the Robert Taylor Homes, I’d say the trouble was from drugs and meanness. Both. But then sometimes you get some good things going on. Like they had Triple-H. They had summer programs where the children could eat breakfast and lunch. They took the children on trips. There was a lot of good over there too. But it didn’t last long, ’cause some of the workers, when they get shown around, didn’t want to come over there. So they gave up on our community over that. They gave up, so we had more people to get together, to make a solution, and everyone joined in. See, everyone talks the talk, but a lot of people just don’t do the walk. A lot of people they say, well, they should’ve did this and should’ve did that, but we don’t have peoples, my peoples, black peoples, we don’t get together to make a statement and make it last and stick together. We say one thing to the next person, but we don’t make no action towards our world, see.
I see a lot of mothers my age now. A lot of them are doing real good. Like one of the twirlers, she’s trying to open up her own day-care center for the children. It’s things like that we need to be doing, getting together to help other black people. There’s some of us out there can be saved if we have the right hand to hold on to, to help us save the communities, the children. Our own children first; we have to start at home. We have to teach our kids not to run down the street twenty years later, be in jail for robbing the lady next door. We need to get them back into these schools and onto these basketball teams and into cheerleading. I don’t see a lot of competitions going on anymore. They used to have the Pizza Hut, the small pan pizzas given to them free to read so many books. I don’t see that no more in schools. I don’t see a lot of trips no more. Not just going to the park, to the zoo, but going to these libraries to pick out books and read. Have them do a report on them as we did. A lot of the kids nowadays, we put them with so much material things that whatever they do they have to get
paid for. That’s the big problem.
Most of the adults in my neighborhood, a lot of them have jobs. Also they had jobs in the Robert Taylors. The Robert Taylors had a lot of programs for tenants. Janitor, the lunchroom, building presidents, tenant patrols, all of them had a part in the community. You had the porch captains; you had to make sure you kept your own porch swept and mopped. No clothes hanging on the galleries or the gates. It was basically helping us to develop ourselves as a clean environment, helping us keep it clean and be lovely neighbors. Everyone got into it some of the time, but if your children aren’t home, you can’t teach them about respect and honor, and about honoring other people’s things and property. If you could, the neighborhoods wouldn’t be so trashy. Over my way, where I live at now, they have garbage cans on each corner. Over at the Robert Taylors you probably would’ve had but one trash can. You’d probably only see one out of the whole community. Of course people are gonna throw trash on the ground and things and on people’s grass.
The reason so many kids at the Robert Taylors went wrong, I guess, was because they was somehow dealing with fashion, with wanting fashion. If we’d stayed in school, we would have had more money to get more fashion later. But we didn’t learn that when we was growing up. We see them making money quicker with drugs, so why go to work? This is how I learned things. Why work for three weeks when you get that same amount in five or ten minutes just by selling drugs? So it looked good.
Or there was a group of girls who used to go hang out with the drug dealers. They’d trick off with them and get the cash and get their hair and nails done and an outfit. It’s not like standing on a corner for it and getting twenty or thirty dollars. It’s like for hundreds and thousands. It depends on how much the guy makes. You get your 5 or 10 percent. You wouldn’t be his regular woman; you just need some money, and you gotta look for. You get the money from the guys, get the nails and the hair done, nice little outfits and shoes. House looks a mess, no food, bills not paid, kids look a hot mess too. Terrible.
If I was in control, what I would do to change the life of our people in the ghetto is I wouldn’t give up on you. You see, that’s the problem. We give up too quick. First of all, I would have to think about it and map out what I would want to do. I would like to clean up our community. You can’t put no wall around the whole project, ’cause someone gonna find a way to get over it. Someone gonna leave half a motor and crawl over it. So I would start with the ones that want to do for themselves. And ask questions, ask about them, what they like, what they wanna do, how they wanna raise their kids, what kind of environment they want to live in. I’d go to the source to start making a solution. See what they talk about. See what they aiming for and what they do to set their goals, and see what they need to get to their goals.
I would start with the first group as the ones who know what they gonna do, and help them and see what kind of things I can do. There’s organizations now here. You can look in the phone book, in the papers. You can dial information; you can dial 311 and ask them about different things, so there’s a lot of connections I do have. There’s Section 8 if you don’t have no home. There’s a lot of things that you can do to help them. What I would do is put my connections that I have to help the ones who want to be helped, ’cause those who don’t wanna be helped, you’re just not gonna be able to reach them.
Our people who live in ghettos now all across the country, I know they’re not gonna live in a project all their life, ’cause they’re tearin’ them all down. This is going on right now. My building was torn down. I had just had my last child and come home from the hospital. They were tearin’ the building down; it was cold, frozen. There was ice on the door and I couldn’t open it. So they put me up right away in a hotel and told me they were gonna give us our emergency housing, which was Section 8.
I’m still leaning on Section 8 now, because some people said it’s the last three years. Well, I know it’s not three years ’cause I’ve had it four years now. That’s a big change right there, to live someplace that’s not a Robert Taylor in the ghetto. You can have a regular apartment for $800 a month rent, but I just pay a small portion ’cause Section 8 pays the majority of it. So it’s a lot of chances they are helping us with, and it’s on us to go get it.
There’s still drug dealers very subtly around the neighborhood I live in now, but no way like there was in the Robert Taylors. It’s more quiet. I live in the South Shore area. You don’t hear gunshots. You’re not scared and terrified to walk the neighborhood, walk the parks, Rainbow Beach. It’s better. You have some people who don’t want to leave the Robert Taylors; that’s why they’re still there. I understand 50 percent of them want to stay, because some of them have been there since the homes were first built in the 1930s and 1940s. It’s home to them; that’s all they know. But the other ones, like me, the 50 percent I was in, we left there; we got out of there.
I don’t miss the good old days of the Robert Taylors. I miss the cash, though. That’s the truth. I miss the cash. They had to clear all the drug dealers out of the area. I didn’t live a working life; I never had to work. That’s why I miss that cash. That’s fast cash; it’s hot cash from the drug dealer. But I hope all the guys who are still there don’t try getting it on now with the drugs. One of them is living in Statesville Prison, the father of one of my kids, and I don’t know how much time he has to do there.
The kids nowadays, they still look tough out there, but there’s not as many drugs, not like there used to be. Eventually, all the drug users are dead, or there’s someone don’t have no choice but to stop. Hip-hop don’t have anything to do with the drugs and alcohol. Them videos, them songs, probably do. I think they just put something together that makes them money. I watch the videos on BET, Channel 75. They have alcohol in the videos, and they have blunts, which is marijuana wrapped in cigar paper.
If you want to teach your kids different from you, why have that environment around them and your home first of all? That’s where a lot of kids learnt a lot of stuff from in the Robert Taylors. They looked up to the drug dealers as mentors ’cause their parents weren’t around. That was around 1993 and 1994; them was them days.
I can’t say 100 percent that my kids are gonna get through their teenage years without getting pregnant. But I can say 100 percent that they’re gonna finish school and they’re gonna make it. If my daughter came home pregnant, I wouldn’t say, okay, we’re gonna get an abortion. I feel that no matter how old they are, that’s their choice, ’cause it’s their body and their life. They can go and get an abortion for the first time and not walk back out of there alive. So I don’t take any chances.
I would just talk to my daughters and ask them how they feel about it; ask, do you want it? Whatever they would want with the pregnancy, I will go along with. I would be upset and hurt and mad, ’cause I know what I’ve been through. But I think it’ll be different, because they have me on their side now. I didn’t have my mom or no one. I had the streets to go to. I had my aunties, but they had their own life; they couldn’t be there 100 percent with me. And I had two younger sisters I was taking care of.
There’s so many apartments where I live now, and they’re beautiful, like the neighborhood, the neighbors, the stores. Part of it’s all black and then it’s mixed. It’s all cultures over here. There’s Jamaicans over here, there’s Indians; there’s a lot of different people. And it depends on us if we want to keep the neighborhood clean. It’s way, way different, and I like it more.
THE MASSENBERGS
Finding Their Way
Carolyn and Patrice Massenberg, mother and daughter, have lived in the Robert Taylor Homes since the 1970s. Their building is one of the few remaining high-rises in the development, once a beacon of hope for African Americans aspiring to a better life, and now a frequently cited symbol of despair.
Carolyn
I moved to the Robert Taylor Homes with my three children in the late 1970s. Like so many other black households, there was no male f
igure to speak of. My children were thrust into the middle of all this negative activity with no one to watch over them but me. I think they resented me a little for moving here. I wasn’t working at the time.
These buildings need to come down. They hold way too much sorrow for a lot of people, including myself. My oldest grandson was killed six years ago by a gunshot wound to the head. He was seventeen years old. Violence is everywhere, but it’s congested in the projects. There are people on top of one another. Drugs have turned a lot of good people I knew into someone you don’t even want in your house anymore, one of the reasons being they take items, money, and so on. They get so they don’t care about their children— whether they eat, have clothing, or just being there for them. These kids are left to raise themselves and are at the mercy of the situation. It’s unthinkable unless you’ve heard it before.
It’s not all people that use drugs. And a lot of people on drugs still manage to take care of home and family, hold a job, and lots more. I’m not condoning, just saying there are two sides to a coin.
Don’t get me wrong. Not the whole twenty-four years at the Robert Taylor Homes have been bad. We’ve had some good times, and I’ve met a lot of good people that I’ve come to love and respect, young and old. It’s not what you do all the time, but more so how you do it.
I know Robert Taylor is one place I won’t miss, with having to walk up the stairs all the time because of problem elevators, not to mention all the police brutality and corruption running amuck. Everybody knows it’s happening and no one does anything about it. After all, we’re just black folks living in the lower development projects. We deserve what we get, right?
America Behind the Color Line Page 52