Lafeyette, Pharoah, and Porkchop joined some friends as they got to Washington Boulevard, which runs along the southern edge of the complex. “The police told us to get away, not to watch no cars,” one boy told the others. A disjointed conversation ensued. Should they turn back? There had been nights when the police seemed more intent than at others to keep the boys away from the stadium. Sometimes, the children would heed the cops’ warnings. Other times, they would continue their efforts to watch cars, careful to avoid the police. This night, Pharoah and Porkchop turned back, choosing instead to play basketball on the jungle gym. Porkchop, always filled with mischief, hollered at a teenage sentry for one of the gangs, “Police!” The young gang member jerked his head around. “Where? Where?” Porkchop and Pharoah burst into laughter at their joke. Lafeyette went on to the stadium with his friends.
Lafeyette helped a parking lot attendant wave in cars. The boys could make $5.00 to $10.00 flagging cars into the lots. A policeman approached and told Lafeyette and a few of his friends, who were waiting for cars to pull into the side streets, to go home. Lafeyette may have talked back to him or he may have been slow in moving, but two other boys have separately recounted what happened next. The policeman grabbed Lafeyette by the collar of his jacket and heaved him into a puddle of water. He then kicked Lafeyette in the rear. “What you doing here?” the officer demanded of the boy. “Little punk, you ain’t supposed to be working here. These white people don’t have no money to give no niggers.”
One of Lafeyette’s friends ran to the safety of Horner, where he breathlessly told Pharoah what had happened. Pharoah panicked. He stood by himself in the middle of the playground, shivering more from fear than from the cold. He didn’t want to go to Lafeyette because he was afraid the policeman might kick him, too. He didn’t want to summon their mother because he worried that “she probably would of gotten involved and they would of taken her to jail for keeping her kids out too late.” He was paralyzed with fear.
Meanwhile, two boys had sprinted to get LaJoe, who bolted from her apartment without her coat. By the time she reached Washington Boulevard, Lafeyette was in the back seat of the squad car. She started arguing with the policeman who had thrown Lafeyette to the ground. Two other officers then showed up. They released Lafeyette. He wasn’t arrested; no charges were filed.
Lafeyette later recalled that one of the policemen had warned him he could get hurt out there at night. “I’ve been living around here all my life and I ain’t got hurt so far,” he told the officer. “Only the police have hurt me.”
No one got the name of the patrolman or his badge number, so there was no way to pursue the case with the police department. Besides, it would be the boys’ word against his. That night ushered in a period of confusion for Lafeyette as he began to question his relationship with the police.
For several weeks, neither Lafeyette nor Pharoah worked the stadium. LaJoe told the two never to go back, but eventually they went. Sometimes LaJoe knew about their forays; sometimes she didn’t. She had trouble saying no to them, as she had had with the older children. Besides, working the stadium was the only way the children could earn spending money.
Pharoah returned to the stadium first. It would be spring before Lafeyette tentatively made his way over there. Pharoah had found a new way to make money. He and his friends performed what was called “the chicken wing” for one of the stadium goers. The man, who was white, would chuckle at the frenzied dance, in which the children mimicked a squawking chicken; he’d give them a few dollars. Pharoah must have realized there was something demeaning about his performance, because when he told the story to others, he would feel embarrassed and would turn his head away, giggling nervously.
For the first time, Pharoah, now ten, began to wonder aloud about being black. “Do all black people live in projects?” he asked his mother. “Do all black people be poor?” He was upset that Michael Dukakis hadn’t chosen Jesse Jackson as his running mate. “He might of won then,” he thought out loud. “Why don’t people elect black people?” The incident at the stadium had unnerved him. He felt that “the police probably don’t like black children or something. The white polices don’t like the black children. That’s what I believe.” It was the first time Pharoah had acknowledged any bitterness toward anybody.
The incident involving Lafeyette and the policeman brought back unsettling memories for LaJoe. Like other long-time Henry Horner residents, she had mixed feelings about the police—and her ambivalence was passed on to her children.
On the one hand, LaJoe and others had sympathy for the police. What young cop, after all, would want to be stuck alone in a neighborhood like Horner after dark? The residents knew this and understood. It wasn’t safe for them. Why would it be safe for anyone else? In one nearby neighborhood, not too long ago, a youth got down on one knee, put a rifle up to his shoulder, yelled out the name of his gang, and then opened fire on a squad car. Most officers wouldn’t venture into Horner by themselves even during the day. Who could blame them?
But the residents didn’t fully trust the cops. For one thing, residents felt stuck in the middle between the drug gangs and the police. The cops came and went, but the gang members were there twenty-four hours a day, every day. It wasn’t a question of allegiance; it was common sense. Few residents, after all, would call 911 for fear that the gangs would discover that they had snitched.
But much of their wariness was rooted in the past. Memories died slowly. And Horner, like so many other inner-city black communities, had been a victim of the police’s overzealousness or brutality, depending on the way you looked at it. As early as 1968, the Kerner Commission, appointed by President Johnson to explore the problems facing the nation’s inner cities, characterized the relationship between the armed authorities and the black community nationwide as “explosive.” The antipathy of Henry Horner residents toward the police crystallized a year later, in 1969, when four young men were killed by the authorities. Their deaths forever changed the way people at Henry Horner viewed the police.
In the late 1960s, the nation’s black ghettoes were filled with rage and fury, a stark contrast to the resignation and personal excesses of the late 1980s. It was a period when people felt that they could do something, that they could find allies in the “system” to help make it work for them. And when that began to fail them, so did their hope and sense of justice.
First the War on Poverty, despite its grandiose intentions, flickered in its failures, and then the leaders, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr., were gunned down. White America seemed intent on ignoring pleas for equality in the schools, in housing, and in health care. The Kerner Commission, which issued its report only months before Dr. King’s death, presciently warned: “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.”
During those years, the residents of Henry Horner, like many others, organized. They were galvanized by what they considered the neglect and outright exploitation of their community. Pressuring the federal government, they were able to get funds for the founding of a neighborhood health clinic, the Miles Square Health Center. They put pressure on schools, like Crane, to bring in more sympathetic principals. They helped get a swimming pool built at the Boys Club in 1967. And then, in the fall of 1969, residents demanded a traffic light.
Given all the turmoil of those years, it didn’t, at the time, seem an extravagant request. Washington Boulevard had become a virtual expressway for commuters driving from the Loop to the western suburbs, and because there was no traffic light for the one-mile length of Horner, motorists passed it at high speeds. Since the opening of school, two children had been hit by motorists. So it seemed reasonable to the parents in the neighborhood that the city install a traffic light; the city needed to do something to slow down the traffic. But the city refused. It would impede the flow of commuter traffic, officials said.
Parents and children, reinforced by the Vice Lords, who wore red tams and who at the time were m
aking an effort to become a constructive part of their community, turned out in protest. They considered stringing a human chain across Washington Boulevard, but they could have been arrested for impeding traffic. Instead, they formed a never-ending picket line that moved back and forth across the boulevard. They were pedestrians, they argued, simply trying to cross the street. They couldn’t help it if it just happened to be rush hour. They called their picket “the funky four corners.”
Tensions heightened with the arrival of busloads of police, in full riot gear, who stood menacingly across the street, ready to make mass arrests. The confrontation never materialized, though the police did arrest a few protesters. During one confrontation, twenty-one-year-old Michael Soto, who was home on a thirty-day leave after a year of service in Vietnam, got into a shoving match with a policeman and was arrested for obstructing traffic and resisting arrest, charges that were eventually dropped.
On October 5, nineteen days later, Michael’s younger brother, sixteen-year-old John, berated two white policemen who were arresting two of his friends. One of the officers shot and killed John Soto. The police said it happened when the boy started to scuffle with the officer; witnesses said the policeman shot John Soto without provocation.
On October 10, five days later, only hours after burying his younger brother, Michael Soto, while standing on a concrete landing between the first and second floors of the Horner high-rise where his family lived, was also killed. Also by a policeman. The police said he had just robbed someone. Within minutes, the residents of Horner, on hearing the news of yet another dead Soto brother, rose in indignation and for an hour waged furious combat with the police. Snipers shot from the high-rise windows. Residents ran out of nearby stores, brandishing revolvers and shotguns. The police took cover behind their squad cars and under the El tracks. A helicopter hovered overhead. When the shooting subsided twenty minutes later, ten policeman and a twelve-year-old girl had been wounded by gunfire.
The city installed a traffic light. But there was trouble only two months later. Two more blacks were killed by the police.
On December 4, only a few blocks from Horner, thirteen policemen stormed the home of several Black Panthers, killing twenty-one-year-old Fred Hampton, head of the Illinois chapter, and twenty-two-year-old Mark Clark. The police at first contended that the Panthers had opened fire on them as they tried to serve a search warrant. A later FBI investigation, though, found that the Panthers fired one shot to between eighty-three and ninety-nine shots by the police. The Panthers lived only a few blocks from Horner; they were viewed with a mixture of awe and respect. They had started a breakfast program for the children. They held inspiring rallies at their headquarters on the corner of Western and Madison. And they had helped with such seemingly minor things as the traffic light protest.
Their death became a cause célèbre not only in Chicago but across the nation. Five thousand mourners attended a memorial for Hampton. Books were written about the incident and the subsequent trial of the state’s attorney, who ordered the raid, and the police officers. They were all acquitted.
The four killings—the Soto brothers and the two Panthers—left an indelible scar on the people of Henry Horner. Twenty years later, those deaths at the hands of the police lingered in the memories of Horner’s adults. “What you thought would protect you, you found out that you couldn’t trust,” said LaJoe, who was seventeen at the time. “How can people kill a person like that? And lie? And cover it up? When all they had to do was simply say it was a mistake and everything wouldn’t have got like it had got.”
LaJoe knew that most police weren’t bad people. One of the boys she grew up with had become a detective who worked at Cabrini-Green. He frequently came back to visit. Another policeman had personally warned a gang leader to stay away from the Riverses after he had threatened LaShawn. LaJoe knew how scared some of them must be when patrolling her neighborhood. In 1975, Officer Joseph Cali had been killed by a sniper while writing a parking ticket at Horner. When police left their patrol cars unattended, residents would sometimes toss heavy objects from upper floors. Someone once threw a bowling ball onto a squad car. Another time, someone threw a refrigerator out of an upper floor, barely missing a policewoman. It got so bad that the police had trouble finding volunteers to patrol certain neighborhoods, including Horner.
What’s more, many of the individual policemen LaJoe knew genuinely cared about the children. One, Bill Spencer, who worked at Horner every day, was a favorite among the kids. He understood them, and would give them second and third chances. He was so well liked that when he was transferred residents demanded—and won—his return. Another officer, William Guswiler, a lieutenant in the district’s plainclothes unit, had recently given Lafeyette a ride to a restaurant, and, in a friendly manner, warned him about hanging out with the wrong people.
The police weren’t all bad. It was just that when something tragic happened, like the Soto brothers’ killing, LaJoe couldn’t understand why the police didn’t apologize, just admit they had made a mistake. And now, Lafeyette had been roughed up by a policeman. The incident itself wasn’t that big a deal, she thought. Lafeyette’s back hurt for a couple of days and he had to stay home from school, but there were no serious injuries. What worried LaJoe, though, was that Lafeyette’s cynicism had begun to define his person. When the Public Aid Department had cut off his family’s income, he immediately suspected a neighbor of telling on them. He had been disappointed so many times that when people let him down, his response was simple and direct: they had lied to him. Why else would they not hold up their end of the bargain? And now he was losing faith in the police. That wariness would only grow in coming months.
The apartment bulged with people that winter. Weasel’s girlfriend moved in, as did LaJoe’s mother, Lelia Mae, who had been depressed from a stroke that paralyzed one side. She had been shifted from one child’s or grandchild’s house to another.
Lelia Mae was initially invigorated by her move to LaJoe’s. She slept on the couch and would tell the children stories of the old Horner, though they had to listen closely, because her speech has become slurred. The old days she spoke of seemed bright and cheery. She told the children, to their disbelief, that families used to keep their doors unlocked at night. During the summers, she told them, they might even spend the nights outside, sleeping on the lawn.
Lafeyette was particularly glad to have her there. He liked to take care of old people. It made him feel needed. At McDonald’s, he would help older people with their trays. He ran errands for his grandmother. They’d always been close. When Lafeyette was younger and Lelia Mae healthier, Lafeyette would ride his bike over to her house. Now, he helped his mother bathe her and would rub her feet with alcohol. And he frequently ran to the local restaurant to buy his grandmother her favorite food: a hot dog with raw onions.
Moreover, Lelia Mae brought her small black-and-white television with her. Lafeyette and Pharoah kept it in their room, where they could watch in private and not put up with the commotion of the young kids.
The apartment seemed to collapse under the weight of all these people. The oven stopped working, and for most of eight months LaJoe couldn’t bake. The wooden door to Lafeyette and Pharoah’s room could be opened and shut only with great care; otherwise, the top came unhinged and the door leaned precariously into the room as if it had been battered down. A cheap, unadorned light fixture, which the housing authority had only partly installed, hung loosely from the wall, unfinished. A friend of Lafeyette’s stuck a screwdriver in its opening—and recoiled from the electric shock.
And the pipes leading to the kitchen sink sprang a leak. LaJoe tied rags around them to keep the water from dripping onto the floor, and for two weeks, while she waited for them to be repaired, she washed the dishes in the bathtub, which still ran day and night.
In all this activity, both Lafeyette and Pharoah were most troubled by their father’s depression. It didn’t look as if Paul would get his job back. He stil
l drank and occasionally took heroin. He knew he would have trouble passing another urine test. He had become so desperate for money that he stole the television LaJoe’s mother had given the boys and pawned it for $15. Lafeyette and Pharoah figured that one of their siblings’ friends had walked off with it. They got a lock for their room. Paul felt so guilty that he pulled the money together and got the television out of hock, and returned it without their knowing who had taken it.
Lafeyette deeply resented his father. He didn’t feel he had lived up to his promises to the family. When he was younger, Paul had told Lafeyette he would move the family out of Horner to a quieter neighborhood. “One of these days, son,” he had promised, “you’ll have your own big back yard to play in, have some room for a dog.” The house, he went on, would be big enough so that he and Pharoah could have their own bedrooms. And there’d be a playroom where they could entertain friends. As LaJoe once had done, Paul dreamed out loud about the future. Nothing had seemed impossible. Both he and LaJoe were working at the time, and though the two had their problems, money wasn’t one of them. Until Paul’s habit overtook him.