Sometimes at Henry Horner you can almost smell the arrival of death. It is the odor of foot-deep pools of water that, formed from draining fire hydrants, become fetid in the summer sun. It is the stink of urine puddles in the stairwell corners and of soiled diapers dumped in the grass. It is the stench of a maggot-infested cat carcass lying in a vacant apartment and the rotting food in the overturned trash bins. It is, in short, the collected scents of summer.
In mid-August of the summer of 1987, the Vice Lords and their rivals reached a temporary truce. Because of the season’s violence, the police had increased their presence at Horner. The gangs knew that more police would only disrupt their drug transactions, so they agreed among themselves to stop, in their own word, “clowning.” But for young members like Bird Leg, such business acumen seemed at odds with what had become almost instinctual for young gang members: Vice Lords got along with neither Gangster Stones nor Disciples. Truce or no truce.
On a Thursday night late in August, a rival gang member shot Bird Leg in the arm with buckshot. After being treated at the hospital, he joked with his older brother and cousin that if he were to die he wanted to be buried in his white jogging suit. They laughed and told him they would oblige him.
The next evening, August 21, Bird Leg, despite his mother’s protestations, left his north side apartment to visit friends at Horner. As he sat in the late day’s heat and watched two friends play basketball, a group of young Disciples started taunting him, tossing bricks and bottles at his feet. His thirteen-year-old sister, who also was at Horner visiting friends, pleaded with Bird Leg to come inside the building to their cousins’ apartment. “Get your ass upstairs,” Bird Leg ordered her. “I’m gonna kill some of these punks today or they’re gonna kill me.” It was tough talk for a fifteen-year-old; his sister ran inside, crying. By the time she climbed the six floors to her cousins’ apartment, a single pistol shot had echoed from below.
Twenty-four-year-old Willie Elliott had stepped from between two parked cars and aimed a pistol at Bird Leg. Only two feet away, the boy froze like a deer caught in the glare of a car’s headlights. The bullet tore through Bird Leg’s chest. He clutched his wound and ran through the breezeway of one high-rise. “Man, I’ve been shot!” he hollered in disbelief. He appeared to be heading for the safety of a busy street. He didn’t make it. The bullet, which had hit him at point-blank range, entered his chest and spiraled through his body like an out-of-control drill, lacerating his heart, lungs, spleen, and stomach. Bird Leg, struggling to breathe, collapsed beneath an old cottonwood, where, cooled by its shade, he died.
Word of death spreads fast in Henry Horner. Sometimes the killing happens late at night when most people are asleep. Then, since few witnesses are around, the incident can take on mythic proportions. A stabbing becomes a butchering. A shooting becomes an execution. Sometimes it can take days for the correct name of the victim to surface. But a daytime killing here draws a crowd, and as Bird Leg lay against the tree, a young boy mounted his bike to deliver the news.
From a friend’s second-floor window, Lafeyette heard the boy’s breathless rendering of the fight, but he decided not to join the other children who ran across Damen Avenue to the crime scene. “I just didn’t want to go,” he said later. He had already seen enough.
James, however, more adventurous, sprinted across Damen and snaked through the crowd that had already gathered around Bird Leg. He later told Lafeyette what he saw. On the grass, only ten feet from a small playground filled with young children, lay Bird Leg, his white jogging suit stained with blood. Wrapped around one of his closed fists was his only weapon, his belt.
“I was just shocked,” James told Lafeyette. “The eyes just rolled to the back of his head and he was gone.”
Within minutes after Bird Leg died, Jimmie Lee stepped through the crowd. It was, said one, like Moses parting the waters. People stepped back to let him through. He looked down at Bird Leg’s limp body, said nothing, and then walked back through the crowd, where he assembled a band of thirty teenagers. With Lee at their flank, the young militia marched west, looking for revenge. James and the rest of the crowd scattered.
Charlie Toussas, the plainclothes officer who knew Lee well, confronted Lee and his army. “Jimmie, this isn’t a good time for this.” Lee, according to Toussas, silently turned to his followers, lifted his hand, and pointed to the other side of Damen; and the contingent of Vice Lords, as if manipulated by puppeteers, turned and marched back to their own turf. In the weeks to come, Disciples were the targets of gunfire.
When someone at Henry Horner is killed, mimeographed sheets usually go up in the buildings’ hallways, giving details of the funeral. Bird Leg’s family, though, avoided this procedure. Having heard that the Disciples planned to storm the funeral home and turn over the casket, they didn’t want to publicize the funeral’s location. They not only moved it from a nearby mortuary to a distant south side church, they also called the police, who assigned two plainclothesmen to sit through the service and, in effect, keep watch over the dead.
Bird Leg’s swollen face made him look twice his age. But the new red-trimmed white jogging suit, which his mother had bought to honor his wishes, and a small gold friendship pin bearing his initials were reminders that Bird Leg had been only fifteen.
Lafeyette, Pharoah, and James were the first to file up to the open casket, where Lafeyette ran his fingers along Bird Leg’s jogging suit. At first hesitantly and then with great affection, he caressed the boy’s puffy face. James also gently touched the body, pulling back before his fingers reached his friend’s rounded cheeks. Pharoah, barely tall enough to see into the casket, stood on tiptoe but kept his hands to his side. He had hardly known Bird Leg; he was here to be with his big brother.
“It looks like he’s breathing,” James whispered to Lafeyette, desperately wanting to be told he was wrong.
“He ain’t breathing,” Lafeyette assured him.
James glanced at Bird Leg again and, to no one in particular, muttered, “I’m figuring to cry.” He wiped the tears from his face with the back of his hand.
Except for its plush red-cushioned pews, the one-story Zion Grove Baptist church, formerly a barbershop and before that a grocery store, seemed tired and worn. It adjoined an abandoned hamburger stand and faced a vacant lot. Inside, the church was sparsely decorated. A nearly lifesize rendering of The Last Supper covered the back wall; an American flag, wrapped around its pole, was draped in clear plastic.
The low ceiling and cinder-block walls did little to discourage the late August heat. The two bright floral arrangements, one at each end of the casket, struggled to retain their beauty through the hour-long service. Friends and relatives and fellow gang members, about 150 in all, shifted uncomfortably in the pews, fanning themselves with the mimeographed programs in a futile attempt to keep from perspiring.
The humidity put everyone on edge. Bird Leg’s sister, in her grief, wailed in a pained, high-pitched voice that echoed through the small church like a stiff wind through a canyon. “I wanna kiss him. He ain’t dead, HE AIN’T DEAD,” she cried. Months later, her protestations would echo in Pharoah’s head; it was the one moment he would vividly recall from the funeral.
The three boys found seats off to the side, positioned so that one of the numerous thin pillars wouldn’t obstruct their view of the lectern. Lafeyette wore faded gray corduroy pants and a shimmery silver-colored nylon jacket; Pharoah wore matching navy blue corduroy pants and sweatshirt. Both outfits were in sharp contrast to the tight suits and carefully cocked fedoras of most of the men. James himself looked like a young man, in his own purple high-waisted suit and black fedora. Three of Bird Leg’s relatives, including a brother, wore T-shirts that read I BIRD LEG. Jimmie Lee, dressed in a charcoal-black sport coat, sat unobtrusively in the crowd. He had been asked to be a pallbearer.
To the deep, sorrowful spirituals played on the church’s organ, the Reverend C. H. Stimage, an elderly minister who had been preaching here fo
r over thirty years, climbed to the lectern. “God needs some young soldiers among the old soldiers,” he consoled the gathered mourners. His message in funerals for the young was usually the same: he warned of the evils of drinking and drugs, and sometimes, when he felt comfortable about it, cautioned them against the lure of the gangs. When young gang members die, other youngsters attend church; it was, reasoned the minister, the only time he could preach to them about the love of God.
Carla Palmore, a sturdy, self-assured seventeen-year-old who had been a friend of Bird Leg’s, followed the minister to the lectern. Carla wanted to be upbeat, to be hopeful, and, as if to proclaim her intent, sported a matching pink skirt and blouse that, amid the mourners’ somber suits and dark dresses, seemed all the more cheerful. Despite her efforts, though, her speech underlined the general feeling among her peers that many of them, like Bird Leg, might not make it to adulthood. During her impromptu sermon, Lafeyette and James and the others in the church nodded in assent.
“Tomorrow is not promised for us. So let’s take advantage of today,” she urged them. “Sometimes we take tomorrow for granted. Oh, I’ll do this tomorrow or tomorrow this will happen. And we forget that tomorrow’s not promised to us and we never get a chance to tell those people that we love them or how we feel about them and then, when they’re gone, there’s so much pain that you feel because you didn’t get to do that.” Carla caught her breath; her audience remained silent and attentive.
“Bird Leg wasn’t a perfect person, but he wasn’t a terrible person, and people are going to say that he was a great person or some people are going to say he deserved it, that he was a terrible person. We can’t pass judgment on him, because whatever he’s doing, there’s somebody who’s doing more or somebody who’s doing less. He cared about his family and I don’t think he was deep into it as much as people thought. All of you are here to pay your tribute to him as Bird Leg or as a gang member and maybe you’re here for both or either one of them, but it could be you. You take tomorrow for granted and it could be you tomorrow. We just never know what’s going to happen. You all need to get your lives together before it’s too late.”
Jimmie Lee hugged her as she stepped down. “You did a good job,” he told her. “I appreciate what you said. I heard you.” Meanwhile, another family friend led the congregation in a spirited rendition of the pop song “Lean on Me,” a song that always stirred Pharoah’s emotions. Here, in the company of other sobbing children and adults, large tears slid down his plump cheeks. He clutched his rolled-up sweatshirt to his chest for security, and, as often happened to him in tense situations, he found himself battling a piercing headache.
James cried too. It looked to some as if he might be doubled over in pain, but he hid his teary face in his black felt hat, which he held between his legs so that others wouldn’t see him cry. Lafeyette stared hard at the whirling blades of the long-stemmed electric fan behind the lectern, his eyes sad and vacant, his right arm slung over the pew in front of him so that he could hold the hand of his two-year-old nephew, Terence’s child, Snuggles. “Look,” Snuggles said to his young uncle, “Bird Leg’s asleep.” Lafeyette shushed him, his chin buried in his free hand. “I cried on the inside,” he said later. “I didn’t have enough in me to cry.”
As the service closed and the mourners moved forward to pass the casket for one last look at the body, Pharoah, still gripping his balled-up sweatshirt, asked of Lafeyette, “What’s up in heaven? Do they have stores?”
“Shut up,” Lafeyette said. “You don’t know what you talking ’bout.”
As the boys waited to file out of their aisle, they heard a mother, two rows back, scold her son: “That could have been you if I’d let you go over there. They would have killed you, too.” When gang members passed the casket for the last time, they flashed the hand signal of the Conservative Vice Lords at Bird Leg’s stiff body, their thumbs and index fingers forming the letter C. The boys didn’t speak until they were outside the church.
“We’re gonna die one way or the other by killing or plain out,” James said to Lafeyette. “I just wanna die plain out.”
Lafeyette nodded. “Me too.”
Six
LAFEYETTE FROZE, then stabbed at a fly resting on the stove. “Got it.” He shook his fist a couple of times and threw the startled insect into the hot, stagnant air. “C-c-c-c’mon, Lafie, let’s … let’s … let’s go,” Pharoah pleaded. Lafeyette reached out again, this time swatting the back of his brother’s head. “Shut up, punk. I ain’t going.”
Pharoah begged his brother to take him back to the railroad tracks. He wanted to get away from his suffocating home, from Horner, from the Vice Lords, from the summer. It was the only place that offered him a respite. He thought a lot about the fun they had had there hunting for snakes, the momentary peace of mind it had given him.
The summer’s violence had woefully unnerved Pharoah, and his stutter, which only a few months before had been nearly imperceptible, had become a real impediment to communicating. Words tangled in his throat. Once, unable to speak, he had to write a question to a friend on a napkin. Sometimes he would struggle so hard to get a sentence out that LaJoe could see his neck muscles constricting; it was as if he were trying to physically push the words up and out. It was painful for LaJoe to hear Pharoah stumble over his thoughts. When he was younger, he had talked so proper, she thought. Friends used to joke that he talked like a white person. Embarrassed by his stammer, Pharoah kept to himself, hanging out mostly with Porkchop, who followed his cousin everywhere, silently, like a shadow.
Pharoah now trembled at any loud noise. LaJoe worried about his vulnerability. And then a few weeks ago, while bullets tore past the living room window, Pharoah had pleaded with her, “M-m-m-mama, M-m-m-m-mamma, make’em, make’em stop!” As the gunfire continued, he fainted.
Earlier in the summer, Lafeyette, along with James, had given in to Pharoah’s pleadings and agreed to go back to the railroad tracks. But on a Saturday afternoon, as the boys gathered in the breezeway, a band of teenagers from across the street ran wildly through the corridor, pummeling the three youngsters. Mimicking the behavior of some of the older gang members, they pulled Lafeyette’s and James’s jackets over their heads and hit them in their stomachs. Pharoah refused to fight back and ran into the apartment before “the shorties,” as these young gang members were called, could grab hold of him. James and Lafeyette followed when they realized they were hopelessly outnumbered and outsized. No one was hurt, just shook up.
The next day, the three heard that someone had got trapped under a train and lost his legs while hunting for snakes. Rumor here is often taken for truth. Given the brutality of Horner, almost everything is believable. So the boys, particularly the older ones, decided not to take any chances with their own limbs.
“Man, you … you lied,” Pharoah whined, as he ducked yet another blow from his brother.
“I ain’t lied. Don’t tell no stories,” Lafeyette countered.
“Let’s … let’s …”
Pharoah pushed his head forward as if that might help the words travel up his throat and out his mouth. But Lafeyette grew impatient and walked away without letting Pharoah finish his thought. He just wasn’t going. That was it. It wasn’t safe.
“Mama,” Lafeyette said to LaJoe, “I ain’t going back there. Tell Pharoah that. I ain’t going.”
The summer—and particularly Bird Leg’s death—had begun to change Lafeyette. He kept his worries to himself now. LaJoe couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen him cry. She scolded Lafeyette for being cruel or too hard on Pharoah, but she knew it was only because he felt protective of the younger boy. For a twelve-year-old, he felt too responsible. She remembered one afternoon when Lafeyette, braving gunfire, tried to get a young friend to take cover. Nine-year-old Diante was the younger brother of William, the successful snake hunter who had been killed last spring. When the gunfire erupted, Diante had remained glued to the swing, repeating over and over, “I
wanna die. I wanna die.” Lafeyette wouldn’t leave him there alone.
And then in early September, Lafeyette witnessed a firebombing, or “cocktailing,” as it’s called, but he refused to talk about it. He knew better. Lafeyette watched as three teenagers hurled three Molotov cocktails through the windows of the apartment next door. The people who lived there ran a makeshift candy store, selling candy and soda pop through the first-floor window. Lafeyette wouldn’t discuss the cocktailing until two years after it happened, and even then with much circumspection. That evening he had desperately wanted to get away from the commotion. To witness such acts is upsetting, but to talk about them, or even to acknowledge that they happened, can only bring trouble, possibly injury to yourself or a member of your family. Denial is simply a means of survival here. So as he walked onto the stoop and passed the shattered windows where earlier in the day he had bought a soda pop, he turned his head away from the burning apartment. “I didn’t wanna be nosy,” Lafeyette later explained. Luckily, the family, who apparently expected such an attack, had moved in with some friends, so nobody was hurt. The newspapers reported nothing. The apartment remained boarded up for over two years.
(Pharoah didn’t learn of the firebombing until the next morning when he walked out onto the stoop. He had apparently slept through it and the efforts by the fire department to douse the flames. “It was stanky in there. Everything was burned,” recalled Pharoah, who stuck his head through the opening where the windows once had been. “I saw a Teddy bear busted open with all the cotton on the floor. The couch was turned upside down. It was black on the walls, like burned black stuff on the walls. Their windows were knocked out. The floor tiles was torn up. The sink, I don’t know where that was. It was gone. It was a disgrace, a plain disgrace. They shouldn’t of done it. People wouldn’t want their house to be done like that.”)