There Are No Children Here

  On March 1, LaShawn went to Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke’s Medical Center, a private hospital where she had given birth to her first two children. She went in around midnight, and the next morning, when the new shift of doctors came on, they determined that she was not yet in labor and sent her to Mount Sinai Hospital, because, they said, that was where she had had her prenatal classes. It was not the first time Rush-Presbyterian had sent a patient elsewhere. Critics called it dumping. A doctor at Cook County Hospital, which sits just across the street from Rush and is the hospital of last resort for Chicago’s poor, told the story of a pregnant woman who, kicked out of Rush, presumably because she was on public aid, gave birth to her child as she tried to walk across the street to the neighboring hospital.

  A few days later, at Mount Sinai, LaShawn gave birth to a five-pound-fourteen-ounce boy, whom she named DeShaun. He was tested and found to have opiates and cocaine in his system and so had to stay six days at the hospital while the Department of Child and Family Services paid LaShawn a home visit. DCFS eventually permitted the child to go home. LaJoe and the boys helped care for him.

  Despite this flurry of activity in the family, Pharoah remained remarkably focused on the spelling bee. He and Lafeyette talked about the Tough Luck shooting as if it were the most natural of occurrences. Pharoah didn’t tell Clarise about it. Even the triplets, one of whom later found the bullet for the police, enjoyed recounting the events of that morning. As for DeShaun, both Lafeyette and Pharoah viewed the new addition to the family with a combination of worry and pleasure. They were concerned that yet another baby would stretch the family’s resources; it meant more money for things like diapers and clothes. It also worried LaJoe that the drugs might have had an effect on him. But LaJoe and both boys, Lafeyette in particular, adored small children, and the idea of another baby to cuddle excited them.

  Pharoah, perhaps in anticipation of the spelling bee, began having pleasant dreams, one of which he particularly liked to recall. In it, he was a grown man looking for employment, and people down the street were calling him because they thought they might have a job for him. Pharoah was so touched by the fantasy that he remembered the smallest of details, like the blossoming white roses he could see from his office window and his new clothes: a starched white shirt and blue tie with matching vest and pants, and spanking new black shoes. He had indeed gotten the job, and at work people started calling him “the brain.” He can’t recall what kind of work the job entailed, though he had “a big metal desk, a pencil sharpener, a paperweight, and papers spread all over.” He does, however, remember how good the dream made him feel: “I started thinking about if I do be a lawyer or something, then I’d make a better living and my mama be outta the projects.”

  He had also recently finished reading Old Yeller, a book about a boy and his dog. It was, he told his mother, one of his favorites because “Old Yeller used to fight other animals for [the boy]. I believe the others would be dead” had it not been for Old Yeller. Pharoah was also taken by “the way the boy talked so country,” and, trying not to giggle, he launched into a perfect imitation of a Southern accent: “Ain’t nawbody gonna take ma dawg.” LaJoe thought Pharoah was managing to control his stutter. Maybe he’d do better in the spelling bee this year. She knew how much it meant to him.

  Spring 1989

  Twenty

  ON THURSDAY, March 2, winter seemed intent on unleashing some of its final fury. The day began with a soft, comforting snowfall, but by midafternoon, when the temperature rose to the 20s, the swirling snowflakes turned to hard-driving droplets of frozen rain. Coupled with the thin layer of snow already covering the ground, it made for an icy and slippery turf. Had Craig Davis been able to foresee the ugly intersecting of forces that night—the wretched weather, official duty, and lonely fear—he might have stayed inside. But Craig wasn’t one to sit still.

  Craig left work that afternoon and headed directly to Henry Horner to visit his girlfriend. He had graduated from Cregier High School two months earlier and quickly landed a job as a stockboy at Order from Horder, a stationery store chain. He worked at one of the downtown stores, where he earned $4.50 an hour. Craig so impressed the manager there, Percy Anderson, that he was thinking of training Craig in sales. “He caught on fast,” said Anderson.

  That evening, Craig briefly visited with his girlfriend and then took the bus home. Craig lived with his uncle and his uncle’s girlfriend in a two-story row house in the ABLA Homes. ABLA differed from the other projects in that it included both high-rises and row houses. The latter, many felt, were preferable to the sixteen-story fortresses, but, like the tall buildings, they were in terrible physical condition. What’s more, they were laid out in such a confusing way that strangers walking through the maze often got hopelessly lost.

  With his customary high spirits, Craig greeted his uncle and his uncle’s girlfriend, and placed on a set of speakers two albums he had just purchased, Frankie Knuckles’s You Can’t Hide and Dada Nada’s Haunted House. He grabbed a turntable needle and two cassette tapes of rap and pop music he had assembled. He stuffed the tapes and needle in his pockets. Craig always had music with him. During lunch at his job, he would sit in back of the store listening to tapes on his headphones. Tomorrow night was his debut as a dee-jay at the Henry Horner Boys Club.

  “I’m going right out. To a friend’s. Be back real soon,” Craig yelled to his uncle.

  “Are you coming right back?” the uncle asked.

  “Yeah,” Craig replied as he trotted out the door.

  Craig was on his way to pick up two turntables and speakers from a friend’s for tomorrow night’s dance. His uncle, who knew Craig went to bed by eleven every night, left the door unlocked.

  Francis Higgins and Richard Marianos cruised the streets of ABLA in their unmarked sedan. Higgins, thirty-four, was a Chicago police officer assigned to a new gun task force devoted solely to investigating the illegal shipment of arms. In its first four and a half months, the unit, whose members called themselves the Gunbusters, had seized 334 guns. Marianos, twenty-three, was an agent for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, a division of the U.S. Treasury Department. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, or ATF, originated in the 1920s to battle Prohibition; the famed Eliot Ness was an ATF agent. But the last illegal still in Chicago was discovered in 1980. Tobacco no longer occupied much of the bureau’s time either. Occasionally, the agents captured illegal interstate shipments of cigarettes.

  So, over the last ten years most of ATF’s work had been focused on firearms. With the rise in drugs, the weaponry had become sophisticated. The ATF had seen more and more automatic weapons, including Uzi machine guns, Mac 10s, and Intertec 9s. Only three weeks earlier, the ATF and the Gunbusters, working in tandem, had raided two suburban homes, where they confiscated twenty-three live grenades, ten fully automatic machine guns, thirty-one handguns, seven sawed-off shotguns, a semi-automatic weapon, a cluster bomb, and thousands of rounds of ammunition. The police believed these guns belonged to a west side gang that used the suburban homes as safe houses. This night, though, Marianos and Higgins were looking for someone they knew only as “Craig” and who they’d heard had purchased a sawed-off shotgun in recent days.

  While driving through the labyrinth of ABLA’s streets, the two officers came on three teenage boys, including Craig, on the 1300 block of Thirteenth Street. The boys were on their way to pick up the stereo equipment. It wasn’t clear why the police thought they looked suspicious or had any cause to stop them. It was only eight at night and, though dark, certainly early enough for teenagers to be walking about. One of the boys, Craig Davis, on seeing the two white officers, turned to one of his friends. “I ain’t going to no jail again,” he said.

  Five months earlier, Craig had been arrested with four others for allegedly stealing cookies from a delivery truck. It had been his first arrest and was such an upsetting experience, he had cried. He had been recording music tapes at a friend’s when the police
came in on another matter and saw boxes of chocolate chip cookies in the living room. The police arrested all five boys in the apartment. When Craig was released the next morning, he told his uncle’s girlfriend he hadn’t had anything to do with taking the cookies. He had just been at his friend’s mixing tapes. Now, Craig feared the police, so on this cold night he ran. Craig, everyone said, was always moving. He took off, and took off fast.

  Marianos, only a few years older than Craig, gave chase. Higgins meanwhile questioned the remaining two youths. In a later police report, Higgins said they told him the boy who had run was named Craig. They say, however, that they refused to give the police Craig’s name. Higgins let the two boys go and caught up with his winded partner a couple of blocks away. Craig had eluded Marianos.

  The boys saw Craig one more time. Having outmaneuvered Marianos, Craig was intent on picking up the stereo equipment for his big debut the next night. From about a half block away, Craig spotted his friends and hollered at them, “Let’s get them turntables!” At that point, the squad car turned the corner. Marianos got out of the car and resumed the chase.

  They ran down one street and up another, then through a darkened breezeway. Marianos lost sight of Craig for “a split second,” according to a later police investigation, and so unholstered his service revolver, a .357 Smith and Wesson. Craig turned to his left to get back to the safety of his uncle’s house. Marianos caught up with him there, grabbed him from behind, and shoved him up against the wall.

  Marianos had his revolver near Craig’s head. He later told homicide detectives that Craig struggled, that he “began to twist and turn his body and then reached over his shoulder and made contact” with Marianos’s right hand. But the medical examiner’s report later cited evidence of “soot staining within the wound,” which indicated that the barrel of the gun may have been pressed up against Craig’s skull when it discharged. Whatever the case, it appeared that Marianos slipped and fell backward onto the fresh sheet of ice, and when he did, the Smith and Wesson accidentally discharged.

  The pop of the pistol echoed off the brick row houses. But few paid much attention to it. There had, after all, been gunshots just about every night in recent weeks.

  Craig’s mother, Christine Davis, who lived on the fourteenth floor of a high-rise just a block away, heard the shot as she returned from buying cigarettes and a six-pack of beer at a local store. People started running around her. “They shot some nigger,” she heard someone say. She hurried to her apartment to avoid the scene that was sure to follow.

  Even Daniel Davis, Craig’s uncle, thought nothing of the noise outside his door. “When we heard the shot, we just figured it was more shooting,” he later said. “They got a lot of shooting around here.” Ten minutes later, when it was clear from the commotion that someone had indeed been wounded outside his apartment, he opened the door.

  There lay Craig face down in a pool of blood, which seemed startlingly red and thick against the thin layer of white snow and ice.

  The police had strung yellow tape from tree to tree to keep the angry spectators at a distance.

  “You shouldn’t done that!” someone yelled.

  “We see you ’round here, man, we’re gonna kill you!” The anonymous threats rose from the growing crowd.

  “Them sons of bitches shot him in cold blood,” one resident said to another. “They ain’t got no reason to have done that.”

  “Man, who care? They don’t. It’s just another nigger to them.”

  An acquaintance of Craig’s banged on his mother’s front door. At the same time, she received a phone call from a friend. They both told her, almost simultaneously, that her son had been shot. Christine raced downstairs to the low-rises, where she learned that Craig was being taken to Mount Sinai Hospital, the very place where she had given birth to him. Some friends offered to drive her there.

  The medical technicians in the ambulance had hooked Craig up to an IV and administered oxygen. They attached him to a cardiac monitor, which showed no activity. By the time they got him to the hospital, Craig had no blood pressure, pulse, or respiration. Four doctors administered cardiac massage. They injected him with adrenaline and atropine in the hope that they could stimulate the heart into pumping again. They then tried shocking the heart. No response. In the meantime, X-rays showed that the bullet, which had entered through the back of the head, had fragmented through both hemispheres of the brain. Craig Davis was pronounced dead at 8:48 P.M.

  • • • •

  A spokesman for the ATF told reporters that Craig was a Black Gangster Disciple and suspected gun runner. Two days later, a one-paragraph account of the shooting appeared in The Chicago Sun-Times:

  A reputed street gang member was fatally shot Thursday night when a federal agent’s revolver discharged during a scuffle, investigators said. Craig Davis, 19, of 1262 S. Throop, who was shot once in the head, was pronounced dead at Michael Reese Hospital [sic]. A spokesman for the federal Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms Bureau said the agent and a Chicago police gang crimes officer approached Davis to interview him about illegal firearms trafficking and Davis grabbed the agent, touching off the scuffle.

  Twenty-one

  ON FRIDAY, March 3, the day of the spelling bee, Pharoah looked his best. The night before he had washed his good clothes in the bathtub and then dried them with a fan. This morning, he ironed his evergreen-colored sweater and a pair of new blue jeans on the family’s makeshift ironing board, a broken microwave oven. And he shined his Fila high-tops with white shoe polish. After he was dressed, he sneaked into his brother Weasel’s room to use some of his cologne; he patted the strong fragrance on his neck and cheeks. If he was going to be in front of a big crowd, he wasn’t going to let people talk nasty about him. He appraised himself in the mirror and turned to the side, fidgeting with his sweater. He looked okay.

  When Pharoah got to school, Clarise couldn’t believe her eyes. She’d never seen Pharoah looking so natty. And that smell! What was he doing, wearing cologne? Clarise giggled to herself. “I couldn’t believe that was Pharoah that day,” she said later. Clarise had dressed up, too, though she didn’t look quite as spiffy as her friend. She wore yellow jogging pants and a clean white shirt with an emblem of a small mouse. She had curled her hair for the occasion.

  The two contestants, Clarise and Pharoah, led their fifth-grade class into the gymnasium, and as they entered Clarise leaned over to whisper, “Pharoah, if I miss, you keep on going for our class.”

  “You do the same,” he replied.

  Pharoah seemed surprisingly calm. He wasn’t wringing his hands or balling them up under his sweater as he’d done last time. Nor was he bouncing from foot to foot as he was apt to do when he got antsy. Yet, though nobody could tell, he was nervous. He didn’t want to stutter and mess up again. He felt confident he could spell well enough to win, but he reminded himself all morning to take his time and to speak slowly.

  Their teacher, Mr. Rogers, who was at Suder only temporarily, promised them a party if either of them won. “Good luck,” he said, patting the two children on their backs. Pharoah and Clarise marched onto the wooden stage.

  The judge ran through the rules, though Pharoah and Clarise hardly listened. Pharoah was too busy thinking about not stuttering. When his turn came, he stood poised and ready.

  “Acceptable,” the judge said. “Acceptable.” Pharoah drew a deep breath and took his time.

  “Acceptable,” Pharoah repeated. “A-C-C-E-P”—he pulled the microphone down toward him so that his voice would be amplified—“T-A-B-L-E. Acceptable.” He went to the back of the line.

  Clarise, shaking slightly from nerves, was given the word abdicate.

  “Abdicate,” she repeated, in a forceful voice that carried through the gymnasium. She almost shouted the individual letters into the microphone. “Abdicate.”

  By the third round, four students had missed words. It was Pharoah’s turn again. As the contest progressed, he felt more self-assured. Nar
y a stutter, and the competition was nearly half over.

  “Aerial,” the judge said. “Aerial.” Pharoah wasn’t sure how to spell it. He’d never seen the word in print. He wasn’t even quite sure what it meant. He paused and then guessed.

  “A,” he said tentatively, almost asking. No buzzer. Fifteen seconds elapsed. E-R-I-A-L.” He thought he’d gotten it wrong and, his head bowed, started to head for the steps off the stage.

  “Come back. That was right,” the judge yelled out to him.

  “It was?” Pharoah said in disbelief. Mr. Rogers gave him an okay sign with his hand. Students giggled. Pharoah put his hands over his eyes in embarrassment.

  The words kept coming, round after round, until there were only three contestants left: Pharoah, Clarise, and a boy named William. William went first.

  “Amendment,” the judge said. “Amendment.”

  “Amendment,” William repeated. “A-M-E-N-D-M-A-N-T. Amendment.” The buzzer sounded, and William walked off the stage. Pharoah broke into a big grin and, as if he’d just scored the final point of a basketball game, threw a fist into the air. He quickly caught himself and pulled his hand down. But he didn’t stop smiling. He was guaranteed at least second place. Now it was between him and Clarise. Both wished they could have stopped right there and shared first place, neither wanted the other to lose.

  Clarise got the word catbird.

  “Catbird.” She enunciated each letter with precision and punctuation. She liked compound words; they were easier to sound out in your head. “Catbird.”

  The judge gave Pharoah cellblock.

  “Cellblock. S-A-L-E-B-L-O-C-K. Cellblock.” The buzzer sounded. Clarise now had to spell it right to win. She stepped up to the microphone and twisted it so that she didn’t have to bend over.

  “Cellblock. S-A-I-L-B-L-O-C-K. Cellblock.” The buzzer sounded again. They would get one more word, the judge told them. Otherwise, he’d declare it a tie.