As if to compensate for her free-spirited personality, Ms. Barone turned to her military training—two years in the Marines and three years in the Air Force reserve—to help maintain order in the classroom. And on this first day of school, she explained to her students that they had to follow a set procedure for getting to their desks. They must, she informed them, march single file to the back of the room and then down the appropriate aisle. If a student took home a book, the next morning he or she had to place it on the upper right-hand corner of the desk. Children could go to the bathroom no more than twice a day, and then only as an entire class; they could dispose of garbage only on the way out of the classroom.
“The kids want this orderliness,” Ms. Barone reasoned. “They appreciate it. They like it. It gives them a sense of being in an environment that is safe and comfortable.”
On the first day of school, Ms. Barone had the students introduce themselves. When it was Pharoah’s turn, she noticed his stammering. “M-m-mymy name … m-m-my name is Pharoah Rivers,” he told the class. She was struck by his determination. The words came hard sometimes, but that didn’t stop him. Ms. Barone urged Pharoah to slow down, to take his time talking. But Pharoah’s stutter that year, as his family ran into a series of problems, would only worsen.
Ms. Barone had an unusually talented fourth-grade class this year. Her top student was Clarise Gates, one of seven sisters attending Suder. The girls were well known at the school for their collective smarts; the seven of them had already won over a hundred awards. Clarise was the third oldest. Ms. Barone was taken with Clarise’s maturity; she seemed much older than the others. Ms. Barone had her tutor other students.
And then there was Pharoah. He flourished under Ms. Barone’s rigid discipline and high energy—and Ms. Barone, despite promises to herself to treat all students alike, quickly came to treasure Pharoah. “You try to treat everyone the same, no matter how partial you feel,” Ms. Barone would say in explaining her philosophy about teaching. “But Pharoah’s special. I’ll always have a little soft spot for Pharoah.”
Ms. Barone quickly learned that Pharoah, despite his stuttering, liked to talk in class. Sometimes he would answer questions out of turn; at other times he would simply start up conversation with his neighbor, often smack in the middle of a lesson. In all likelihood, Pharoah talked and moved freely at school because he felt protected there. With a sense of security comes comfort, and Pharoah, who in the streets often seemed withdrawn and flighty, livened up at school. There he gossiped and played with a freeness he rarely exhibited outside. Later in the year, his classroom chatter got so out of hand that Ms. Barone had to call in LaJoe to talk with her about it.
Ms. Barone insisted that Pharoah sit in the front row next to her desk so that she could keep an eye on him. Pharoah relished the idea. He would be sitting at the head of the class, next to the teacher and the blackboard.
Because of his size, Pharoah was often picked on by the other children. Once, in the middle of a test, a girl sitting next to him hit him on the neck with a spitball. Pharoah screeched, and then, to the delight of his classmates, hollered, “Old girl be hitting me! Old girl stop it.” Everyone in the class broke out in laughter. Pharoah was always referring to others as “old girl” and “old boy,” even the adults, and it never failed, though he couldn’t fathom why, to tickle everyone who heard him.
Pharoah often asked Ms. Barone to let him help collect papers in the class or to run errands to the principal’s office, anything that might give him some responsibility. He was earnest about everything, from talking to his neighbors to finishing his schoolwork.
But Pharoah most endeared himself to his teacher and his classmates by his imagination and writing. He loved words. He’d remember names of places like Ontonagon River and Agate Falls because he liked the way they sounded. When he could, he’d play Scrabble with friends, spelling out words like motel and quake. He was so proficient at spelling that later in the year, Ms. Barone would choose him to compete in the annual spelling bee, one of the school’s biggest honors.
The class was once asked to write an essay entitled “My Pet Monster,” and Pharoah’s composition won him classroom raves. He wrote about a monster who, like himself, had an uncontrollable sweet tooth. Pharoah knew that candy and cakes and soda pop were bad for him, but he couldn’t help himself. Sometimes his face would break out. If he couldn’t stop, at least he could laugh at himself—and that’s what he did in his essay. Ms. Barone asked Pharoah to read it to the class. He stuttered only occasionally, racing through parts of it, thinking that if he did so he wouldn’t trip over any words. It also helped that he was reading and didn’t have to think about what he was going to say.
Once I had a pet and his name was “My Pet Monster” and he loved sugar milk more than any other thing. He always was getting into trouble, and every time he get into trouble I’ll lock him up with some hand cups and then he’ll try to con me to let him out but I wouldn’t until a certain time.
One day the stores had closed down for a week. Then “My Pet Monster” found out the stores were closed down and started thinking, he started thinking about his sugar milk. He started running around everywhere to find out if a store was open in the town. He found out there was no store open in the town. “My Pet Monster” was unhappy and he didn’t talk to nobody. That’s how unhappy he was.
The week passed and the stores were now open and “My Pet Monster” was the first to enter the store. He got two gallons of milk and two quarts of sugar, and “My Pet Monster” said “the only reason I got two of each so if the stores closed I will have an extra gallon and wouldn’t have to worry.”
The kids laughed uproariously at the tale, and Ms. Barone brought it home that evening to read to her husband. She then tacked it to one of the bulletin boards, where all the students and passing teachers could see it. It was a treasured moment for Pharoah, who had often been teased about his studiousness. Some students called him a nerd; others made fun of his buck teeth. The taunting upset Pharoah—and he knew he wouldn’t always be able to deflect it with humorous stories. Early that school year, though, he found a friend who helped keep his tormentors at bay.
Eight
PHAROAH FIRST MET RICKEY at school, where they were classmates. Rickey asked Pharoah for a favor. Rickey had developed a crush on Pharoah’s cousin Dede. “Pharoah,” he said one day at school, “ask Dede if she’d go out with me.” Pharoah giggled, delighted to be entrusted with such a task. When he delivered the message to Dede, she told him, “No way.”
“Ask her again,” Rickey implored. Pharoah did, and this time Dede said she would date Rickey, at least give it a try. Before too long, graffiti began appearing in Pharoah’s building: RICKEY LS DEDE. Rickey and Pharoah became friends after that.
Rickey, whom the adults called Richard, lived in Henry Horner with his mother, Gloria, and a younger brother and two older sisters. His father had left when Rickey was three, and the boy last saw him two years ago.
Rickey lived just two buildings west of Pharoah, but his house seemed much farther away, because it was on the other side of Damen Avenue. Damen acts as the dividing line between the Vice Lords’ and the Disciples’ turfs. It also divides the housing complex in half. Although younger children freely cross the four-lane street, teenagers and even adults take considerable care in crossing the gang boundary. Most children living west of Damen, in what is called the “new projects” because the buildings were a second stage of Horner, don’t hang out at the Boys Club, which is in Vice Lords’ territory. Rickey lived one building west of Damen; Pharoah, two buildings east of the line.
So, for starters, it seemed strange that a boy from the new projects would befriend a boy from the old projects. But more surprising was that Rickey and Pharoah would find some bond despite the startling differences between them. Not even Ms. Barone suspected that her two students spent time together.
Where Pharoah was slight, Rickey, in the words of one local policeman, was “buil
t like a pit bull.” For an eleven-year-old, he had unusually solid muscles; he looked far older than his age.
Where Pharoah adored school, Rickey shunned it. He could barely read, and had already been held back a year. He was a year and a half older than Pharoah. Moreover, he had been written up so many times for bad behavior that his anecdotal history at Suder, a compilation of past incidents, was nearly the thickness of a phone book. Once, the police had to be called in to handle him. He frequently got into fistfights, and because he was stronger than most of the other boys, he could do them considerable harm. When he got angry, he used foul language, even with the adults. He once told Ms. Barone to “fuck off.” Ms. Barone sometimes took a nap after school just to recover from her encounters with the class bully.
And where Pharoah tried to keep a distance from the neighborhood’s violence, Rickey was in the thick of it. Rickey had been with Bird Leg when he died. The two were second cousins. Rickey was one of the younger children whom Bird Leg had befriended, and, like Lafeyette, he had loved being around Bird Leg’s dogs. On the day of the shooting, Bird Leg asked Rickey to hold his radio while he gave chase to the bottle-throwing Disciples. Rickey, though, wanting to help in the chase, put the radio down and joined the battle, hurling bricks at Bird Leg’s assailants. He had heard the lone gunshot and watched his cousin stumble and fall by the cottonwood and die. He then sat on a nearby bench and wept. For the next two days, Rickey stayed in his apartment, refusing to talk or eat. He vomited throughout the weekend. His mother worried that he was ill, but by Monday he started eating again and venturing back outside. The anger about Bird Leg’s death, though, didn’t subside; instead, it simmered and stewed within him. It was two years before he talked to anyone about watching his cousin die.
“I felt like I lost a big brother. I used to think they should of shot him in the leg,” Rickey said later. “Seem like I don’t care no more. I don’t feel sorry for people no more ’cause when they killed Bird Leg, the peoples who shot him mustn’t of felt sorry for him. Like I be playing basketball or something, it seems like I can’t sometimes get it off my mind. It just stay on my mind.”
Often, when Rickey became embroiled in a fight, he began to relive Bird Leg’s last minutes, and as he did so, his anger turned to rage. In class, he once choked another child so long and hard that, in the words of Pharoah, “he put him to sleep.” These flashbacks, which were not unlike those of a traumatized war veteran, haunted Rickey for well over a year after Bird Leg’s death.
“Now, it seems like if I get in a fight, I don’t care if I kill or something. I don’t even care. It be like, we be fighting, we be fighting other people. Someone be telling me in my mind, ‘Hurt him, just don’t worry about it.’ Shhh. I just be thinking about hurting him. It just be pressure on my mind. Things that I be seeing, flashbacks. I just see when Bird Leg just bent down and almost tripped over the chain, then just lay down. I just catch myself right there. If I kill someone, it seems like I’m taking them on for the person who killed Bird Leg.”
Pharoah and others were unaware of the effect that Bird Leg’s death had had on Rickey. Beneath the raw exterior lay a tender child who addressed many adults as “sir” and “ma’am” and who took the hands of younger children to help them cross the street. LaJoe thought his eyes were filled with sweetness. But it was a guarded softness. When he smiled, he seemed uncomfortable, as if he might be judged as being fragile or accused of being a sissy. There were times, later on, after numerous entanglements with the law and flirtations with the gangs, that Rickey would be standing with older friends on the back stoop of Pharoah’s building, and he couldn’t bring himself to say hello to passing adults or to young children. He would act distant and tough. But at eleven, Rickey didn’t try to—perhaps he couldn’t—hide his kindness.
What cemented Pharoah and Rickey’s friendship was an incident that took place during gym class one day, shortly after Rickey started dating Dede. Another boy, Cortez, had snatched a basketball from Pharoah’s hands. Pharoah was furious. “Give … give … give … it to me!” he demanded. Cortez smiled and dribbled the basketball, taunting Pharoah. Pharoah, who didn’t like to fight, did nothing. Rickey, bigger and stronger than the other fourth-graders, had been watching the dispute from a distance.
“I don’t know, they was arguing in the room. I didn’t pay no attention,” he later recalled. “I was just shooting basketball. Then I looked. He tried to hit Pharoah.” Rickey grabbed the basketball from Cortez and gave it to Pharoah. All seemed settled until a few minutes later, when Cortez went over to Pharoah as he shot baskets and threw him to the ground.
“Cortez, man, why you do that?” Rickey demanded. He walked slowly up to Cortez and, before he could resist, put him in a headlock until he begged Rickey to let him go. Rickey then pummeled him. “Poom! Poom! Poom! Then I stopped,” he recalled. “Everybody picks on Pharoah ’cause he’s so short and he doesn’t like to fight. It just feel like he’s a little brother to me.” Cortez left Pharoah alone after that.
To the adults of the neighborhood, Rickey’s friendship with Pharoah seemed odd. Perhaps Rickey considered Pharoah family, since he was now dating his cousin. Or maybe, torn between his desire to bully and to embrace, Rickey felt he had found someone with whom he had no choice but to be friends. Pharoah, after all, would have been no match for Rickey in a fight. Most likely, both reasons explain Rickey’s attraction to Pharoah.
From Pharoah’s perspective, the friendship was easier to understand. Rickey offered Pharoah protection; he was a trusted friend. When Rickey had money, he would give some to Pharoah. Though he never said as much to Pharoah, it was understood that he wouldn’t let anything happen to him.
Lafeyette was wary of his brother’s new friend. “I worry about Pharoah a lot,” Lafeyette explained. “I don’t want anything to happen to him, because he’s my little brother. I’m supposed to watch after him. He makes me mad at times but I still love him.”
He was proud of how well Pharoah did at school. A smart child himself, Lafeyette never took school as seriously as Pharoah did. He had already been held back a year. His attendance record at times was woeful: in 1986, he missed thirty-five days and received a D average. The excuses varied: flu, stomachache, chicken pox, no clean clothes to wear. Sometimes he missed days because of suspensions resulting from fights in school. He secretly wished his mother would push him more, make him go to sleep early, make him do his homework. LaJoe conceded that she could be too soft on her children, though she wanted nothing more than to see Lafeyette and Pharoah graduate from high school.
Despite his poor attendance record, however, Lafeyette tested particularly well in his favorite subject, math. When he did attend school with some regularity, as in fourth grade, he earned a B—average. And when he reached seventh grade, he would earn A’s in math and science. His teacher this fall, in sixth grade, Ruby Everage, liked him. She found that when Lafeyette came to school, he wanted to learn and was earnest about his work. Lafeyette grew fond of Mrs. Everage and, toward the second half of the year, attended school with greater regularity and helped throw a surprise party for her. She was about to leave to have a child.
On occasion, Lafeyette skipped gym class to talk privately with Mrs. Everage about problems at home or in the neighborhood. Lafeyette told her how he sometimes found himself daydreaming in class, worrying about his brothers and sisters. He struck her as a sensitive child, as someone who had a lot on his mind. She told him, as she would others, that there was hope, that indeed there was a life outside Horner. She’d take her students on numerous field trips to places like the Museum of Science and Industry and the Robert Crown Center for Performing Arts to prove her point.
It especially frustrated Lafeyette that his younger brother refused to fight. He worried that if Pharoah couldn’t stand up for himself, he’d get mauled by the older boys. So Lafeyette believed he had an obligation to toughen him up. He’d badger Pharoah—sometimes calling him “fag” and “punk”—and slap him
until he could take it no longer and would begin to flail back.
“You gotta fight,” Lafeyette would tell him. “I ain’t gonna be there all the time to fight for you. C’mon. C’mon. Hit me.”
Pharoah would beg his brother to let him be and, if that didn’t succeed, would appeal to their mother for help. He didn’t want to fight.
“It ain’t right,” Pharoah said to Lafeyette. “Why’s people fighting people?”
“That’s stupid,” Lafeyette countered.
Lafeyette talked to his mother. Wasn’t there something she could do to keep Pharoah away from Rickey, who undoubtedly would get Pharoah into trouble? It was, to be sure, a peculiar match: the bully and the bookworm. And so it came as no surprise to Pharoah that his brother would disapprove of his friendship with Rickey.
“Hey, man, he only gonna get you in trouble,” Lafeyette warned Pharoah.
“You … you … you ain’t my father,” Pharoah retorted, walking away from his brother.
“He too old for you to be with,” Lafeyette yelled after him.
But the friendship persisted despite Lafeyette’s efforts to keep the two boys apart—and, ironically, in the end it was Lafeyette who would be more influenced by Rickey than Pharoah was.
Nine
THE JANUARY SUN had barely risen above the Loop’s glass skyscrapers when Pharoah, who had just awakened, picked the two dead goldfish from their bowl and dropped them into a plastic bag. As he walked through the building’s breezeway into the early morning quiet, he stopped to look around for an appropriate resting place. He chose a spot just to the left of the breezeway, a piece of lawn that edged right up to the building. Few people walk here, he figured; the grave, might remain untrampled.