And there was Craig Davis. His very presence seemed to calm Lafeyette. Lafeyette had found an older boy who could serve as his model, who articulated much that he felt. LaJoe was sure that Craig could be nothing but a good influence on her son.
But the reason for the feast had nothing to do with Terence or Public Aid’s decision to restore her benefits or Craig’s friendship with Lafeyette. Dawn Anderson, LaJoe’s niece and Porkchop’s older sister, was to graduate from the Richard T. Crane High School. She was to be only the second of Lafeyette and Pharoah’s generation in the Anderson family to graduate from high school. Nine children had already dropped out.
LaJoe was very close to Dawn. The girl, whose name everyone pronounced “D’won,” leaned on her aunt for advice and support. She could open up to her and know that LaJoe wouldn’t reveal her troubles to her mother, LaJoe’s younger sister.
Dawn was a feisty, scrappy girl, who was quite pretty. Broad-shouldered and strong, she backed down from no one—and had had her share of fights in the neighborhood. But it was that determination and fearlessness which had got her this far and, everyone hoped, would carry her even farther.
Dawn’s accomplishment was made even more notable by the fact that she had, at the age of eighteen, four children, aged four, two, one, and three months. She raised the kids with the help of her boyfriend, the children’s father, Demetrius Nance. Earlier this year, deciding she wanted to be on her own, she had moved out of her mother’s home to a third-floor apartment in LaJoe’s building. She, Demetrius, and the children lived there illegally, since the rightful tenant had moved out and had let Dawn take over the unit and pay the rent. (Such illicit arrangements are frequently made in Chicago public housing because the waiting list for units is so long. In addition, because the CHA is so strapped for funds, once an apartment becomes vacant chances are the authority won’t have the money to fix it up for a new tenant. The vacancy rate at Horner alone had ballooned to 40 percent.) LaJoe helped Dawn get through her senior year by baby-sitting for the children on occasion.
Lafeyette and Pharoah revered Dawn. Lafeyette told her he would do twice as many years of college as she. “I have to do a lot of studying to bring up my grades,” he said. “I wanna be like my cousin D’won.” Pharoah told her he’d beat her reading scores. But however proud they were of their older cousin, both boys were emphatic about one thing: they didn’t want to attend Crane.
Crane is one of the city’s worst high schools. It stretches for an entire city block just a quarter of a mile south of Horner, a grim, squat stone structure with pillars marking its entrance. Since the early 1960s, when the school changed from 85 percent white to 93 percent black, it has been a troubled institution. As far back as 1965, a newspaper series on the school showed that because of de facto segregation in the school system, Crane had been forced to enroll fifteen hundred more students than its capacity. Nearly 60 percent of the freshman class never made it to their senior year. The series described the fear felt at Crane by both faculty and students. In one three-month period, six teachers had been attacked by students, and after a small riot broke out in the lunchroom, the school ordered plastic utensils in place of the metal ones.
It hadn’t necessarily gotten worse at Crane, but it certainly hadn’t gotten much better. Today, about half the entering freshmen never makes it through the senior year. In 1985, the seniors’ reading tests were in the eighteenth percentile nationwide. One semester, the school decided to raffle off a bicycle among those who passed all their classes. That involved only 287 of its 1220 students.
Security was still a problem. In Dawn’s yearbook, two full pages were devoted to photos of the school’s eleven security guards, some of whom were moonlighting Chicago police officers. Students were prohibited from wearing jackets in the lunchroom because they might use them to conceal weapons. James, Lafeyette’s friend, so feared going to Crane that he tried to get held back at Suder. “ ’Cause I was real short and I know a lot of tall people be there so I thought they’ll probably try to beat me up, take my jacket and stuff, and make me pay peon fees,” he said. So, James figured, if he messed up his standardized reading test, maybe Suder wouldn’t graduate him from the eighth grade. James filled in test answers randomly, and received scores that showed him over a year below grade level, despite his having a perfect attendance record. But that was hardly bad enough to keep him from graduating. Suder gave James his diploma. James, however, chose to attend Westinghouse, another local high school whose reputation was not quite as bad as Crane’s. Some children went to live with relatives in other neighborhoods and even other states to avoid attending Crane and the area’s other high schools.
Dawn was in a special honors program at Crane in which she took courses with other good students. They were given special attention and, as a result, were resented by some of the other students. Dawn had thought of dropping out numerous times. But LaJoe pushed her. “You can’t stop, girl. You got too far,” LaJoe would tell her. “Continue to go, just go. Whenever you don’t want to go to school, D’won, just go ’cause it’s going to pay off. You’re going to live like the people on the south side, like in Beverly [a south suburb].” Dawn’s persistence culminated in her graduation—and the party thrown by LaJoe.
Cousins, aunts, and friends piled into the apartment, where they drank beer and wine coolers and filled their stomachs with LaJoe’s homemade dishes. Pharoah told his mother that when he graduated he planned to rent four white horses and a carriage to take him to his prom. Even five-year-old Timothy told his mother he intended to get his diploma. Everyone seemed almost giddy at Dawn’s accomplishment. Toasts were made to Dawn’s future and her health.
“She got to make it,” LaJoe said. “She got to. She got to get a job. If they don’t see her life take her nowhere after finishing school, it will be the truth. Only thing out here left is to sell drugs. D’won got to be the one to prove it’s not true.”
LaJoe, who is not a very religious woman (a minister once made a sexual advance to her, which turned her away from the church), nonetheless offered a prayer: “God gave D’won a gift and she carried it on. And that gift, I hope she shares it so it’ll go on within the family. Thank God for making it possible.” Glasses and bottles clinked in celebration.
A month later, The Chicago Sun-Times, as part of a series on education, published a short article about Dawn and Demetrius under the headline HOW YOUNG PAIR BEAT ODDS IN PUBLIC HOUSING.
She was 13. He was 16. They were at an arcade.
“Can I have a quarter?” she asked him. He forked it over. Love blossomed.
Now she’s 18 and he’s 21. Their kids are 4, 2, 1, and 3 months.
They are still in love. And together, they wrote one of the rare success stories of Henry Horner Homes.
Dawn Anderson, 18, mother of four, graduated from Crane Vocational High School. She is planning to start college in the fall.
“Everybody says I made history. I never stopped going to school. He took care of the kids while I was at school,” she said.
Says the children’s father, Demetrius Nance, “I’ve taken care of them all—from the first little girl up to her”—the baby, 3-month-old Demeca.
Dawn was seven months pregnant when she graduated from eighth grade. A mother at 14, she lived with her own mother in the Henry Horner Homes.
Demetrius would pick up the children—Demetra, now 4, and later sons Demetrius Jr., 2, and Demond, 1—at Horner in the morning and take them to his mother’s Northwest Side home to watch them while Dawn was in school.
“I’d have one in the front of the buggy, one in the back of the buggy, and I’d hold one in my arms,” he said. “The only thing I’d hate was when it was cold. But it was important. I didn’t get to finish high school like I wanted to. (He earned a GED.) I wanted Dawn to finish.”
“All I ever wanted was to get my diploma,” said Dawn. “I had to prove to them that I could do it. I am not a loser.”
And now that she has her diploma, th
e two are looking at new horizons. Besides college plans, they are thinking about joining the Army. They are looking for jobs. And they are eager to leave public housing far behind.
“I’ve been around this all my life. It’s time to get out,” Dawn said.
“I hate this, I hate the hell out of this. I’ll come home from the park with the kids and see this and I get so angry. I want better for them, for us.”
How has this young pair survived so far?
“We’ve struggled. We’ve had good times and bad times,” Dawn said. “I take half and he takes half. We never let anyone break that bond between us. I respect and trust him. He respects and trusts me. That was all we needed. We’ve always communicated. We’ve always been understanding.”
The wedding is set for Oct. 15.
An accompanying photograph showed the happy couple walking their children in Horner’s playground. Dawn was wearing a pantsuit; Demetrius a tank top and jeans. The photograph, were it not adjacent to the story, might be mistaken for that of a suburban family out for a morning stroll. One line in the story stood out: “And together, they wrote one of the rare success stories of Henry Horner Homes.” Lafeyette and Pharoah each held on to a Xeroxed copy of the article and showed it off to friends.
Fourteen
THE 1988 INVENTORY for the Cook County Criminal Courts included 14 perjuries; 103 briberies, 23 impersonations of physicians, judges, and government officials; 260 indictments for official misconduct; 20 charges of obstruction of justice; 3647 aggravated and heinous batteries; 8 charged with possession of explosive devices; 993 caught with burglary tools; 162 home repair frauds; 380 home invasions; 1312 charges of unlawful restraint; 830 kidnapings; 84 jail escapes; 8419 rapes; 1584 armed robberies; 1351 accused of unlawful use of a weapon; 10 police officers disarmed; 73 gambling charges; 5 food stamp frauds; 3101 thefts; 232 attempted burglaries; 6160 burglaries; 81 charged with intimidation; 1 unlawful discharge of hazardous waste; 1219 bail bond violations; 867 forgeries; 388 arsons; 156 charged with deceptive practice; 429 retail thefts; 2568 auto thefts; 2569 incidents of armed violence; 104 reckless homicides; 3 solicitations for murder; 953 attempted murders; 1905 murders; 6 charges of endangering the life of a child; 4 child abandonments; 36 charges of cruelty to children; 1 reckless homicide of an unborn baby; 2 involuntary manslaughters of unborn children; 7 intentional homicides of unborn children; 53 child abductions; 7 solicitations of juveniles; 1 juvenile pimping charge; 174 child pornography charges; 27 charged with taking indecent liberties with children; 14 incest charges; 10,518 drug charges—24,390 cases and 56,204 charges heard by thirty-two judges.
Of those, two held special significance for the residents of Henry Horner. One case had to do with an eight-year-old girl, Urica Winder; the other, Jimmie Lee. Both cases involved drugs, and both cases, unlike most incidents at Horner, made the newspapers. And yet, despite the publicity, the people of Horner refused to talk about them.
Eight-year-old Urica Winder leaned over the witness stand, her braided head poking above the top. The jurors and others in the packed courtroom, which included reporters, Urica’s family, and lawyers intrigued by the case, could just make out her face, which, given the gravity of the event, seemed unusually calm. The prosecutor had rehearsed the testimony with the girl many times, so she was perhaps the only one in the courtroom who didn’t show much emotion.
“Did you notice anything unusual about Lawrence Jackson, the man you have identified here in court today?” Paula Daleo, the prosecutor asked her.
“Yes,” replied Urica confidently.
“What was that?”
“He had a knife in his hand.”
“And can you show the ladies and gentlemen of the jury how big that knife was?”
Urica held her hands about a foot apart.
“And who was Lawrence Jackson facing at that time?”
“Shirley.”
“What did you see Lawrence Jackson do?”
“Stab her in the heart.”
“And what did—Did Shirley say anything to Lawrence before that?”
“Yes.”
“What did Shirley say?”
“I love you.”
“And did Lawrence Jackson reply to that?”
“Yes.”
“What was—What did he say?”
“I don’t love you.”
“And then what did he do?”
“Stabbed her in the heart.”
“Did you see what happened to Shirley after she got stabbed in the heart?”
“Yes.”
“What happened?”
“She started sliding down the wall …”
Urica also testified that she had watched Lawrence Jackson and his partner, Bobbie Driskel, kill her mother, her mother’s boyfriend, and her four-year-old sister. Shirley had been a friend of the family’s. The quadruple murder happened on September 24, 1986, in a second-floor apartment across the street from the Riverses’.
At one point in the trial, the prosecution asked Urica to show her scars to the jurors. She unself-consciously opened her black-and-white dress with ruffles, uncovering an ugly wound that ran from just below her left armpit to her navel. She had been stabbed forty-eight times and left for dead. Two things saved her. So much blood had collected in her body cavity that it virtually stopped the bleeding from her punctured aorta and heart. Also, from the time of the murders, around midnight, until the next morning, when she was discovered, she remained amazingly calm. A cousin found her the next morning, still conscious.
The prosecutor, Daleo, asked Urica about Bobbie Driskel. She had already established that he, like Jackson, had a knife in his hand.
“What did he do?”
“Stabbed me.”
“Where did he stab you, Urica?”
“In my stomach.”
“Do you know how many times?”
“No.”
“Did he have anything else in his hands?”
“Yes.”
“What?”
“A pen.”
“And what did he do with that pen?”
“Digged my guts out.”
Urica’s grandmother left the courtroom, shaken. A juror wept. A newspaper reporter turned to a colleague and whispered incredulously, “Did she really say that?”
It took the jury one hour to find Jackson guilty on four counts of murder; he was sentenced to death. In a second trial, Driskel was sentenced to life in prison. Urica had been the only witness to the crimes. Were it not for her testimony, the police might never have found the killers. The prosecution argued that Jackson and Driskel, looking for money to buy cocaine, robbed the family of a television set and a videocassette recorder. They pawned the two items for $120. Driskel was a cousin of Urica’s mother’s boyfriend.
Mothers at Horner called Urica “the miracle child.” Not only had she survived the attack, but she had had the courage to testify, something many people at Horner wouldn’t or couldn’t do.
Many children had seen the bodies carried out of the building. Lafeyette and Pharoah heard the tale at school and later learned the details on the evening news. LaJoe told them to put it out of their minds. She couldn’t tell them it wouldn’t happen again. It could. Besides, she warned them, what happened that night was between family. They shouldn’t talk about it. The wrong person might overhear. Other mothers did the same.
After the trial, there was no community celebration. People just whispered among themselves about an eight-year-old girl having such strength, perhaps more than they might have under similar circumstances. And they marveled at—and were at the same time saddened by—Urica’s continuing to live at Horner with her grandmother, just two floors above the apartment where the attack occurred. The family had been offered a new apartment house in Cabrini-Green, but they turned it down. At least at Horner, they knew people.
Even in victory, the silence was deafening.
A few weeks earlier, in a courtroom two floors above where Urica’s testimony was hea
rd, Jimmie Lee stood and faced Judge Robert Boharic. To the judge’s left hung a hand-drawn smiley face.
Unlike the attendance at Urica’s case, only a few spectators sat in the hard-back wooden seats. Sophisticated gang leaders like Lee knew better than to have their members attend trials; the judge might take it as an attempt to intimidate the court. Lee looked impassive, as he had throughout the two-day trial. Nothing seemed to unsettle him. Boharic, a former prosecutor who was known for his toughness as a judge, had decided early on, when he learned that Lee was a known gang leader, that if he found him guilty he would give him a long sentence. He would set an example with Lee.
Lee, Lee’s wife Geraldean, and another woman, Donna Scoyners, had been charged with possession of sixty-nine grams of heroin. It had an estimated street value of $7500, not an unusually large amount, but enough to incur up to a thirty-year sentence under Illinois law. Lee had also been charged with unlawfully possessing an automatic weapon.
The police officers in the city’s gang crimes unit are some of the most streetwise and savviest among the city’s cops. Their job is to keep track and detail the workings of the city’s street gangs. On the west side, Michael Cronin, a seventeen-year police veteran who had lost his left foot in Vietnam, was one of the best. He followed the Vice Lords. He probably knew the organization as well as its members, if not better. He knew, in great detail, of Lee’s operations—and he knew Lee. But even Cronin hadn’t been able to catch him with any weapons or drugs. Lee never carried a gun or, for that matter, drugs. He always had intermediaries do the dirty work.
Lee so frustrated the police that Charlie Toussas, the plainclothes cop who had stopped Lee from retaliating after Bird Leg’s death, reached a kind of agreement with Lee’s gang after one of his squad car’s windows had been busted while parked in front of a Vice Lords’ building. He told Lee’s second-in-command that if it happened again, he would sit in the building’s breezeway through his entire shift and disrupt the drug trafficking. From then on, whenever Toussas parked his car on Wolcott, the gang had two or three young Vice Lords watch the sedan. Toussas liked to say that he could leave his wallet on the car seat with the doors unlocked and it would be there when he returned.