Two
THE CHILDREN called home “Hornets” or, more frequently, “the projects” or, simply, the “jects” (pronounced jets). Pharoah called it “the graveyard.” But they never referred to it by its full name: the Governor Henry Horner Homes.
Nothing here, the children would tell you, was as it should be. Lafeyette and Pharoah lived at 1920 West Washington Boulevard, even though their high-rise sat on Lake Street. Their building had no enclosed lobby; a dark tunnel cut through the middle of the building, and the wind and strangers passed freely along it. Those tenants who received public aid had their checks sent to the local currency exchange, since the building’s first-floor mailboxes had all been broken into. And since darkness engulfed the building’s corridors, even in the daytime, the residents always carried flashlights, some of which had been handed out by a local politician during her campaign.
Summer, too, was never as it should be. It had become a season of duplicity.
On June 13, a couple of weeks after their peaceful afternoon on the railroad tracks, Lafeyette celebrated his twelfth birthday. Under the gentle afternoon sun, yellow daisies poked through the cracks in the sidewalk as children’s bright faces peered out from behind their windows. Green leaves clothed the cotton-woods, and pastel cotton shirts and shorts, which had sat for months in layaway, clothed the children. And like the fresh buds on the crabapple trees, the children’s spirits blossomed with the onset of summer.
Lafeyette and his nine-year-old cousin Dede danced across the worn lawn outside their building, singing the lyrics of an L. L. Cool J rap, their small hips and spindly legs moving in rhythm. The boy and girl were on their way to a nearby shopping strip, where Lafeyette planned to buy radio headphones with $8.00 he had received as a birthday gift.
Suddenly, gunfire erupted. The frightened children fell to the ground. “Hold your head down!” Lafeyette snapped, as he covered Dede’s head with her pink nylon jacket. If he hadn’t physically restrained her, she might have sprinted for home, a dangerous action when the gangs started warring. “Stay down,” he ordered the trembling girl.
The two lay pressed to the beaten grass for half a minute, until the shooting subsided. Lafeyette held Dede’s hand as they cautiously crawled through the dirt toward home. When they finally made it inside, all but fifty cents of Lafeyette’s birthday money had trickled from his pockets.
Lafeyette’s summer opened the way it would close, with gunshots. For Lafeyette and Pharoah, these few months were to be a rickety bridge to adolescence.
If the brothers had one guidepost in their young lives these few months, though, it was their mother, LaJoe. They depended on her; she depended on them. The boys would do anything for their mother.
A shy, soft-spoken woman, LaJoe was known for her warmth and generosity, not only to her own children but to her children’s friends. Though she received Aid to Families with Dependent Children, neighbors frequently knocked on her door to borrow a can of soup or a cup of flour. She always obliged. LaJoe had often mothered children who needed advice or comforting. Many young men and women still called her “Mom.” She let so many people through her apartment, sometimes just to use the bathroom, that she hid the toilet paper in the kitchen because it had often been stolen.
But the neighborhood, which hungrily devoured its children, had taken its toll of LaJoe as well. In recent years, she had become more tired as she questioned her ability to raise her children here. She no longer fixed her kids’ breakfasts every day—and there were times when the children had to wash their own clothes in the bathtub. Many of the adults had aged with the neighborhood, looking as worn and empty as the abandoned stores that lined the once-thriving Madison Street. By their mid-thirties many women had become grandmothers; by their mid-forties, great-grandmothers. They nurtured and cared for their boyfriends and former boyfriends and sons and grandsons and great-grandsons.
LaJoe, in her youth, had been stunning, her smooth, light brown complexion highlighted by an open smile. When she pulled her hair back in a ponytail, she appeared almost Asian, her almond-shaped eyes gazing out from a heart-shaped face. She had been so pretty in her mid-twenties that she briefly tried a modeling career. Now she was thirty-five, and men still whistled and smiled at her on the street. Unlike many other women her age, she hadn’t put on much weight, and her high-cheek-boned face still had a sculptured look. But the confidence of her youth had left her. Her shoulders were often hunched. She occasionally awoke with dark circles under her eyes. And her smile was less frequent now.
LaJoe had watched and held on as the neighborhood slowly decayed, as had many urban communities like Horner over the past two decades. First, the middle-class whites fled to the suburbs. Then the middle-class blacks left for safer neighborhoods. Then businesses moved, some to the suburbs, others to the South. Over the past ten years, the city had lost a third of its manufacturing jobs, and there were few jobs left for those who lived in Henry Horner. Unemployment was officially estimated at 19 percent; unofficially, it was probably much higher. There were neighborhoods in Chicago worse off than Horner, but the demise of this particular community was often noted because it had once been among the city’s wealthiest areas.
Ashland Avenue, a six-lane boulevard just east of Henry Horner, was named for the Kentucky estate of Henry Clay. By the mid-nineteenth century, it had become one of the city’s smartest thoroughfares, lined with dwellings constructed of elegant Attic marble, fashionable churches, and exclusive clubs. “People would parade along the sidewalk to ogle at the notables and to be seen themselves; to watch the fine carriages spin along the macadam boulevard, to see the latest manifestation of changing fashion,” read one newspaper account. But the neighborhood slowly changed. As immigrants, primarily German, Irish, and Eastern European Jews, settled on the west side, the city’s glitter moved eastward to the lake, just north of the Loop, a strip now known as the Magnificent Mile and the Gold Coast.
The Ashland Avenue area quickly lost its luster. Jane Addams’s founding of the renowned Hull House in 1889 signaled the west side’s growing decline. It was one of the nation’s first settlement houses, delivering various services to the poor of the area and acting as their advocate in housing, health care, and children’s rights. Soon, the mansions on Ashland were transformed into headquarters for local unions or rooming houses for the transients of Skid Row. By 1906, the neighborhood had deteriorated still further, and tuberculosis claimed 5 percent of the west side’s population. The Chicago Lung Association, then called the Chicago Tuberculosis Institute, opened its office on the west side, where it is still located.
The blight has continued and is particularly evident today west of Horner, a section of the city that, along with the south side, during the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s became home to over a half-million blacks who migrated from the South, displacing the earlier immigrants. Western Avenue, now a strip of fast-food outlets, car washes, and family-run stores, borders Henry Horner to the west, though it is not a boundary of much significance, since on the other side the rubble continues. The two- and three-family tenements sag and lean like drunkards. Many of the buildings are vacant, their contents lying on the sidewalk.
To LaJoe, the neighborhood had become a black hole. She could more easily recite what wasn’t there than what was. There were no banks, only currency exchanges, which charged customers up to $8.00 for every welfare check cashed. There were no public libraries, movie theaters, skating rinks, or bowling alleys to entertain the neighborhood’s children. For the infirm, there were two neighborhood clinics, the Mary Thompson Hospital and the Miles Square Health Center, both of which teetered on the edge of bankruptcy and would close by the end of 1989. Yet the death rate of newborn babies exceeded infant mortality rates in a number of Third World countries, including Chile, Costa Rica, Cuba, and Turkey. And there was no rehabilitation center, though drug abuse was rampant.
According to a 1980 profile of the Twenty-seventh Ward—a political configuration drawn, ironically, in the
shape of a gun and including both Henry Horner and Rockwell Gardens, a smaller but no less forbidding public housing complex—60,110 people lived here, 88 percent of them black, 46 percent of them below the poverty level. It was an area so impoverished that when Mother Teresa visited it in 1982, she assigned nuns from her Missionaries of Charity to work at Henry Horner. They had set up a soup kitchen, a shelter for women and children, and an afterschool program. Where there used to be thirteen social service agencies there were now only three: the Missionaries of Charity, the Boys Club, and the Chicago Commons Association. The latter two provided recreational activities as well as tutoring, counseling, and day care, but they had limited funds. A Chicago Commons’ program called Better Days for Youth targeted children under thirteen who were having problems in school or with the police, but there was money to serve only twenty-eight children at a time.
LaJoe sometimes believed that the city had all but given up here. A local billboard warned NEEDLES KILL. There was a time when such a message read DRUGS KILL.
And despite Horner’s proximity—one mile—to the city’s booming downtown, LaJoe and her neighbors felt abandoned. Horner sat so close to the city’s business district that from the Sears Tower observation deck tourists could have watched Lafeyette duck gunfire on his birthday. But city residents never had reason to pass the housing complex unless they attended a basketball or hockey game at the Chicago Stadium, just a block away.
Exacerbating the isolation was the fact that nearly half of the families in Henry Horner, including the Riverses, had no telephone. Residents also felt disconnected from one another; there was little sense of community at Horner, and there was even less trust. Some residents who didn’t have a phone, for instance, didn’t know any others in their building who would let them use theirs. Some neighbors wouldn’t allow their children to go outside to play. One mother moved aside her living room furniture to make an open and safe place where her children could frolic.
But though the isolation and the physical ruin of the area’s stores and homes had discouraged LaJoe, it was her family that had most let her down. Not that she could separate the two. Sometimes she blamed her children’s problems on the neighborhood; at other times, she attributed the neighborhood’s decline to the change in people, to the influx of drugs and violence.
Her three oldest children, to whom she felt she’d given everything she could, had all disappointed her. All had dropped out of school. All had been in jail at least once. All had been involved with drugs. The oldest, LaShawn, a slender twenty-year-old, was so delicately featured some called her “China Doll.” She worked as a prostitute from time to time to support her drug habit. The next oldest, nineteen-year-old Paul, named after his father, had served time in an Indiana prison for burglary. Terence, now seventeen, had been the most troublesome problem for LaJoe and, because of their extraordinary closeness, her biggest disappointment. He began selling drugs at the age of eleven and had been in and out, usually in, trouble with the law ever since.
LaJoe also had a set of four-year-old triplets: Timothy, Tiffany, and Tammie. The two girls so resembled each other that not even their father could tell them apart.
All eight children had the same father, Paul, to whom LaJoe had been married for seventeen years. But the two had long ago fallen out of love. He lived at home only sporadically.
LaJoe wanted it to be different for Lafeyette and Pharoah, different from the way it had been for her three oldest children and different from the way it had been for her.
In her husband’s absence, Lafeyette had become LaJoe’s confidant. She relied on him. So did the younger children. Lafeyette watched after Pharoah and the triplets. He wouldn’t let anything happen to them. He had been a carefree child, a bit of a ham, in fact. For a photograph taken when he was about four, he shoved a big cigar in his mouth and plopped a blue floppy hat on his small head. It was Christmastime, and Lafeyette’s cousins, who in the photo were all crowded behind him, seemed amused by his antics. When he got older, around eight or nine, he’d hop on the Madison Street bus by himself to visit his grandmother, who lived in an apartment farther west. And he loved to draw, mostly pictures of superheroes. He boasted that his name appeared on all seven floors of his building. He was a boy bubbling with energy and verve.
But over the past year Lafeyette had begun to change, LaJoe thought. The past spring, he’d been caught stealing candy from a Walgreen’s downtown. It was the first time he’d gotten into any kind of trouble. He had been hanging out with a youngster, Keith, who was known among the neighborhood kids for his ability to swipe expensive bottles of cologne from the display cases at downtown department stores. Lafeyette was placed in the Chicago Commons’ Better Days for Youth. One of the first children in the new six-month program, Lafeyette received help with his school work as well as counseling. Keith moved out of town, and Lafeyette made friends with Chicago Commons’ staff members, whom he’d periodically visit after his completion of the program.
Lafeyette still laughed and played with Pharoah and friends, but he could be bossy, ordering around his younger brother and the triplets with cockiness and the fury of a temperamental adult. He had inherited his mother’s temper and could turn on the younger ones in an instant. It wasn’t that Lafeyette and they didn’t get along; it was that he worried about them, like a father worrying about his children. He admonished them for hanging out with the wrong people or straying too far from his sight. He cared almost too much about everything and everybody. Sometimes the strain of responsibility showed in his thin, handsome face; it would tighten, like a fist, and it seemed as if he would never smile again. He’d purse his lips and clench his jaw; his deep-set, heavy-lidded eyes would stare straight ahead. His face revealed so little, his mother thought, and yet so much.
Pharoah was different, not only from Lafeyette but from the other children, too. He didn’t have many friends, except for Porkchop, who was always by his side. LaJoe had given him his name but, like his brother’s name, spelled it in an unusual way. At the time, LaJoe hadn’t known the story of Moses and the Pharaoh, but in later years when she found out she laughed. Pharoah was anything but a king.
Pharoah clutched his childhood with the vigor of a tiger gripping his meat. He wouldn’t let go. Nobody, nothing would take it away from him. When he was two, Pharoah would run around the apartment naked; sometimes he’d be wearing just small white shoes. When he was four or five, he told LaJoe that he wanted to live on a lake so that he could always feel the wind on his back. At the age of five, he had an imaginary friend, Buddy, whom he’d talk to and play with in his bedroom. Frequently, Pharoah got so lost in his daydreams that LaJoe had to shake him to bring him back from his flights of fancy. Those forays into distant lands and with other people seemed to help Pharoah fend off the ugliness around him.
Now, at the age of nine, he giggled at the slightest joke; he cried at the smallest of tragedies. He had recently developed a slight stutter, which made him seem even more vulnerable. And he listened to classical music on the radio because, he said, it relaxed him. He sensed that his playfulness delighted the adults, so he would tease them and they him. He wanted to be recognized, to know that he was wanted. At the age of eight he wrote a short letter to his Aunt LaVerne, one of LaJoe’s sisters.
Jan. 1986
Pharoah Rivers
I love you do you love me. You are my best aunt verny. I love you very much. The people I love.
Verny
Grandmother
Linda
Randy
Moma
Dad
Brothers
Sisters
Cousins
Aunt
“Oh, that Pharoah,” family and neighbors would say to LaJoe, recounting some enchanting incident involving the nine-year-old. They adored him.
Pharoah liked to tell people he was big-boned “like my mama,” though she was, in fact, a small woman. He had LaJoe’s open and generous smile, and, like his mother, who was only five
feet two, he was short, so that LaJoe could, until he was nine or ten, pass him off as a five-year-old to get him on the bus without paying fare.
Where the adults found Lafeyette handsome, they found Pharoah cute. The women would josh both of them, saying that someday they’d be lady killers. The local Boys Club used a photograph of Pharoah in one of its fund-raising brochures. In the picture, Pharoah, along with four other young boys, was dressed in marching cap and cape with a drum set, almost as large as Pharoah himself, slung around his neck. As he often did, he had cocked his head to one side for the camera and grinned cheerfully, a pose he must have known made him look even cuter.
The boys got along, and for that LaJoe was grateful. The two shared a room and, on most mornings, walked to school together. Occasionally, Lafeyette played rough with Pharoah or told him off, but LaJoe knew that if Pharoah ever needed his older brother, he’d be there. Older and bigger, he offered Pharoah some protection from the tougher kids in the neighborhood.
LaJoe knew that Lafeyette and Pharoah were like millions of other children living in the nation’s inner cities. She knew that she was not alone in her struggles, that other women in other cities were watching their children grow old quickly, too. She had heard of some mothers who moved their families to Milwaukee or to the suburbs, some of which were poorer than Henry Horner, in an effort to escape the neighborhood’s brutality. In the end, LaJoe would almost always learn, these families were up against the same ruthless forces they had faced in Chicago.
It wouldn’t happen to Lafeyette and Pharoah, she had vowed to herself. It just wouldn’t happen. They would have a childhood. They would have a chance to enjoy the innocence and playfulness of youth and to appreciate the rewards of school and family. They would bring home high school diplomas. They would move out of the neighborhood. They would get jobs and raise families. She had made mistakes with the older children that she was determined not to repeat with her younger ones.