With an ice cream stick in hand, Pharoah dug into the frozen ground. The stick cracked a little, but Pharoah reinforced it with his thumb and index finger, and kept digging until he had made a hole a couple of inches deep. He removed the once orange fish—in death, they had turned a cloudy gray—and gently lowered them into the ground.
“God bless these fish,” he recited solemnly. “Don’t let them go up to hell. Let them go to heaven.”
He had already cried for three hours when he found his pets floating belly up in their bowl the night before. (“I fed ’em too much,” he concluded.) They had been a Christmas present from his mother, and he had named them Abraham and Goldberg after characters on the television series Diff’rent Strokes. He wasn’t going to cry again. He silently covered the fish with the crusty soil.
With all that swirled about Pharoah this winter, the death of his two fish seemed incidental. But it was, at least, one crisis he could deal with himself, one that he could comprehend.
The apartment was too crowded, LaJoe knew, but she didn’t have the heart to kick anyone out. Her children had no place to go.
Shortly before Christmas, LaShawn, the oldest, had moved back home. She brought with her a small entourage: her boyfriend, her boyfriend’s brother, and her two children, Tyisha, who was seven, and Darrell, who had just turned one. Everyone called him Baldheaded except Pharoah, who insisted on calling him Sir Baldheaded.
LaShawn and her children had been renting a room in a tenement with friends, but they ended up not getting along. LaJoe worried that LaShawn might be harmed when her boyfriend, Brian, went to work. Brian sold fake gold jewelry to unsuspecting tourists at O’Hare Airport, where he worked every day. LaJoe had also been concerned about her daughter’s ability to take care of her two children, given her drug habit. She smoked Karachi, a potent mixture of Pakistini heroin and amphetamines. The drug was rarely injected, but rather smoked. It was particularly popular on the city’s west side.
Like many other public housing apartments, the Riverses’ overflowed with people, as many as thirteen if the boys’ father, Paul, stayed over. LaShawn, Brian, and Sir Baldheaded slept in one room, Terence and Paul, whom everyone called Weasel, in another. The triplets and Tyisha bedded down in the front bedroom. Lafeyette and Pharoah shared the back room with Brian’s teenage brother, Larry. Pharoah couldn’t adjust to the crowded apartment, and had trouble concentrating on his schoolwork. But he conceded that having all those people living there made him feel safer. “If someone snatch you, you’ll have a witness,” he explained. LaJoe usually slept on the couch or with the children.
It isn’t uncommon for a large number of people to pack into a public housing apartment. The Chicago Housing Authority estimated that in its nineteen developments, it has 200,000 tenants, 60,000 of whom aren’t listed on the leases. Another 60,000 families are on the housing authority’s waiting list, because there is such a shortage of low-rent housing in the city.
If LaJoe fretted too long about the jammed apartment, she had only to look around her to see what might happen if she didn’t give her grown children shelter. Three weeks before Christmas, a group of homeless men and women sledgehammered their way into Horner’s vacant apartments. Many tenants welcomed them. Better the homeless than the gangs, they reasoned. Also, it didn’t make sense to LaJoe and others to let heated apartments stand empty. Most of the units also had running water, though some were missing toilets and sinks, items stolen and then sold for scrap. The city’s fifty shelters were packed every night.
The Chicago Housing Authority said it was concerned about liability. In a game of cat and mouse that made the national evening news, private security guards searched out the squatters and physically removed them. As the guards flushed the homeless from one building, they would sneak into another, frequently with the aid of tenants, who directed them to the most habitable of the vacant units. This went on for weeks, until the housing authority and the press tired of the chase. The homeless, as they had done in previous winters (but with less brouhaha and publicity), continued to take refuge in Horner’s empty quarters. Tenants often prepared hot meals for their new neighbors.
LaJoe felt pressured that winter. On occasion and without much provocation, she would explode in anger, ordering her young ones to shut up or telling Lafeyette and Pharoah to clean their room. She rarely felt that she could sail through a day and enjoy such simple moments as the coming of spring or Pharoah’s smile or Lafeyette’s playful teasing. There was no time to reflect on the past or to plan for the future. If it wasn’t the shooting outside, it was her daughter’s drug habit or Lafeyette’s troubles at school or Pharoah’s stammer.
Sometimes, in addition to these constant concerns, LaJoe had prolonged episodes in her life that were sufficiently grave to affect her physically. She couldn’t sleep and battled persistent colds and headaches. Her temper grew shorter. She felt, she said, as if her insides were being shredded. During these times, she considered giving up or starting out on her own again. She once said that had she known all that her younger children, Lafeyette on down, would have to endure, she would have returned them to the womb.
She felt that way this winter. First, the police arrested Terence, charging him with armed robbery. Then, the Department of Public Aid informed her that it had proof that her husband stayed with the family, and it planned to cut off her benefits, leaving her and her children without any income. She began to feel that the only people she could count on were Lafeyette and Pharoah and, indeed, she leaned on the two boys, particularly Lafeyette, to get her through this time.
The problems started with Terence. He had been LaJoe’s closest child—and his failure was her biggest disappointment. For LaJoe, Terence became a kind of measuring stick for Lafeyette and Pharoah. She worried that they, like him, might let her down.
Born on January 31, 1970, Terence grew up during a difficult time for LaJoe and Paul. The two had met four years earlier at Swingville, a local dance hall. They still dispute who first asked the other to dance. But there’s a lot now they disagree about. When the two first met, LaJoe lied about her age. She told Paul she was sixteen. She was actually three years younger.
Paul, then seventeen, was—and still is—a handsome man. Like LaJoe, he was shy and small in stature, but because he boxed as an amateur bantamweight, he had a rugged, wiry build. What first caught LaJoe’s eye, though, was Paul’s natty dress. In his shiny leather shoes and freshly pressed pinstripe suit, he stood out from the other men, most of whom wore jeans and leather jackets. Paul’s trademark became a steel-gray Stetson with two dimples punched neatly in the crown.
Despite his pugilistic hobby, Paul was of a gentle nature and quick mind. He didn’t like to fight outside the ring and, indeed, had a nervous stomach disorder that incapacitated him at times. He read a lot, magazines and newspapers mostly, which he carried around in his hip pocket. He was also a connoisseur of jazz, and eventually collected over a hundred albums. Among his favorites were the recordings of Thelonious Monk and Miles Davis. He also loved to debate politics. He became involved peripherally with the Black Panthers, whose city headquarters was just two blocks from Horner, and then with the local Democratic Party machine. Major Adams, the leader of the Boys Club Drum and Bugle Corps and a kind of father figure for the neighborhood’s youth, thought Paul one of the smartest young men he’d ever met at Horner.
In their first few years together, Paul loved to listen to LaJoe dream aloud of the two of them growing old together. She would spin out soothing images of them raising a large family in a quiet neighborhood with back yards and picket fences. They would live in a wood-frame house where, in old age, they could pass the time in rocking chairs on the front porch.
Paul and LaJoe wasted little time in starting their family. Within a year of their meeting, LaJoe, only fourteen, gave birth to LaShawn and then, a year later, to Weasel. Soon after, they decided to get married. But on the day of the planned church wedding, Paul backed out and, instead, got stone d
runk. LaJoe’s mother, furious at the backpedaling groom, barred him from visiting LaJoe. The two continued to date surreptitiously and eventually moved in together. Their third child, Terence, soon arrived, and that’s when the dream began to fall apart.
Paul had already fathered a boy by another woman; the child was born within a few days of Terence. LaJoe says she learned of Paul’s philandering when she was in the hospital. She was admiring the day-old Terence through the glass when a woman came along and pointed out her new arrival. “Who’s the father?” LaJoe asked. “Paul Rivers,” the woman responded. Paul says LaJoe found out about his cheating later, weeks after she returned home with Terence. However LaJoe learned of it, she never quite forgave Paul. (In later years, LaJoe, unable to turn anyone away, became like a second mother to Ivan, Paul’s son by the other woman.)
At the time, though, LaJoe, in her youthful determination to make things right, got Paul to marry her. LaJoe wanted her children to have a father. She didn’t want to bring them up alone. “I didn’t have a corner I could run to,” she said later. Paul too wanted the children to grow up with a man around the house. On August 22, almost seven months after Terence was born, they took the bus down to City Hall, where they were wed.
In a neighborhood where men fathered children and then disappeared into the gangs and the street corners and death, Terence and his siblings had an unusual family situation. Their mother remained married to the same man, and he fathered all eight children. They began to fall out of love, though, when LaJoe learned of Paul’s drug habit.
Paul, unbeknown to LaJoe, began to dabble with drugs in the early 1970s, shortly after they were married. He already drank and, in fact, avoided being sent to Vietnam by purposely arriving at his draft board inebriated. He had downed Robitussin, a cough syrup that was a popular quick high at the time. He also began popping pills, mostly barbiturates called Red Devils and Christmas Trees. By the age of twenty-two, when a poolroom friend introduced Paul to heroin, he started shooting up the drug; the habit, which he has bucked at times, has stayed with him for the better part of twenty years.
LaJoe first learned for certain of Paul’s habit—she had earlier suspected it—around 1978, when Terence was eight. She was sitting in the front bedroom when she heard Paul collapse in the bathroom. He had wedged himself between the door and the bathtub. Finally, after minutes of pushing and shoving the door, trying not to injure her husband, LaJoe managed to squeeze into the bathroom. Paul lay there unconscious; blood filled the syringe bulging from his forearm. He had overdosed and, in falling, had cracked his head against the steam pipe. LaJoe yanked the needle out of his arm and called for an ambulance. After he had been taken to the hospital, she cried for hours.
Paul survived and a couple of years later made it through yet another overdose. LaJoe hated him for it. Although she knew he drank and dabbled with drugs, she never thought he’d become dependent on them. Most of the money he spent on heroin was financed by his good-paying jobs with the city. After working eight years as an upholsterer, Paul was rewarded for his work with the local Democratic machine by a job in the city’s sewer department. There, he earned $350 to $450 every two weeks. He then went to work as a garbage collector and, more recently, as a city bus driver.
LaJoe wanted to kick him out for good. But she also strongly wanted her children to have a father—and, as she readily admitted, she had trouble saying no to people. So she let him come around and even allowed him to stay over, though they rarely slept together. Nonetheless, Paul fathered the triplets. LaJoe, who had gone back to school to earn her high school equivalency, worked off and on for five years as a clerk for the Miles Square Health Center. She also flirted briefly with a modeling career, which quickly foundered. For a while she displayed pictures of herself in flowing gowns and stylish African turbans, but in time she threw them away. The disappointment lingered, and it was one of the few things LaJoe refused to discuss with anyone. During the times she was unemployed, she received welfare.
As LaJoe became more distressed by Paul’s drug habit, they talked less, sometimes not at all, and the strain led to awkward moments when Paul came around. If he came into the house high, the children scattered to the bedrooms.
In Paul’s absence, LaJoe found comfort in her children. Particularly Terence. As a young boy, Terence was built almost exactly like Lafeyette, rail-thin and gangly. When he was sixteen, he weighed only 110 pounds and was five-feet-five. He wasn’t a gifted athlete, nor was he much of a fighter. If anything, he was an anxious child; the corner of his mouth sometimes twitched nervously.
Terence wanted to fit in, to be accepted by his peers. Once, a group of children climbed to the second floor of a two-story building and dared each other to jump onto a pile of mattresses. None would jump until, to the surprise of all, Terence volunteered. Eleven at the time and the youngest among them, he leaped out the window onto the mattresses a good thirty feet below.
Always by LaJoe’s side, Terence seemed to some a mama’s boy. LaJoe did pamper the child—and at times, she concedes, she acted more like a big sister than a parent. Terence received a weekly allowance, and once a month LaJoe treated him and his older brother and sister to a dinner at the South Pacific, a downtown restaurant. She so adored Terence that she even promised him she would have no more children, that he would be the last.
“Anything I asked my mama for, I got it,” recalled Terence. “Out of all, I got it. My mama loved all of us the same, but it seemed to me that I was the favorite one out of all.”
But when she later gave birth to Lafeyette, then Pharoah, and then the triplets, Terence became jealous of the new arrivals and withdrew from the family. His mother had let him down. The attention once directed toward him slowly turned to the younger children, and LaJoe grew impatient with Terence’s clinging.
“Terence was the one maybe I should have paid more attention to. He always wanted to be under me,” LaJoe recalls. “This is how Terence went: it was always me and Terence. Wherever I went, Terence went. He was my baby then. And I don’t think Terence never wanted to turn me loose. As the other kids came, Terence never wanted that ’cause he used to tell me all the time, ‘You should of just had me.’ And then I would tell him, I shouldn’t of just had him. I had Shawnie and Weasel before I had him and I love you and I love Shawnie and Weasel.
“I would always have to repeat myself with Terence. Over and over, too. All the time. But Terence just left one day. He was about nine. No, he was about ten. He left one day. I couldn’t find him. The police were looking for Terence. When I saw him, it was three months later. I couldn’t do nothing ’cause I didn’t know.”
What LaJoe didn’t know was that a local drug dealer, Charles, had taken Terence under his wing. Charles used the youngster, who had not yet entered sixth grade, to sell what were called T’s and Blues, a mixture of Talwin and antihistamines, at the time a popular substitute for heroin.
It was 1981, about the time drug prices began to drop and the trade blossomed. Terence would stand on Madison Street among the liquor stores and pawnshops, just two blocks south of the projects. He hid his wares in the steel pillars that supported the El tracks. Using juveniles is popular among drug dealers, since children tend to be treated less harshly than adults by the courts. What’s more, once found guilty, they can’t be held past their twenty-first birthday. Most are rarely held beyond twenty days.
Terence was not only earning as much as $200 a day, but Charles virtually adopted him, setting him up with his own room, complete with bed and television. Sometimes, Charles entrusted Terence with as much as $10,000 in cash, which he had him hold, knowing that neither the police nor extortionists would suspect an eleven-year-old of carrying that kind of money. Charles also taught Terence to shoot a .45 caliber revolver. They took target practice at night in the back alleys of the neighborhood. Terence was so small that he had to hold the gun with both hands; he eventually traded it for a smaller gun, which he could handle more easily. Though Terence carried the
revolver with him, stuffing it in the waistband of his pants, he pulled it out only once, when he and Charles threatened to shoot some men who planned to rob them. Terence had little need for school. He dropped out in the seventh grade and was recorded as “lost” by the school system. Because he left before the legal age of sixteen, he wasn’t considered a dropout.*
By the time LaJoe learned what had become of Terence, she couldn’t win him back. Friends would inform her if they sighted her son, but when she got to the specified location, Terence was long gone. Once, she confronted Charles.
“I want my son,” she told him.
“Terence is my son. He belongs to me,” Charles replied.
LaJoe tried everything. She even went to the police. If they could find him, they would bring him home; there he stayed for a few weeks before taking off again. She asked a friend of hers who was a social worker and from the neighborhood whether she’d talk with Terence. But LaJoe couldn’t get Terence to visit the friend.
Paul also tried. Despite his estrangement from LaJoe and his habit, he never stopped caring about the children. For a short period, he owned a car and took the children on a Saturday or Sunday outing to a nearby park. He didn’t think Terence or the others knew about his involvement with drugs—Terence didn’t—and, more than anything, he didn’t want his children to repeat his mistakes.
One afternoon, early during the time of Terence’s wanderlust, Paul grabbed his son by the collar. “C’mon, Terence, we’re going up there and I’m going to talk to this son of a bitch. He ain’t going to put nothing else in your hands when I get through with him.” A friend offered Paul a pistol for protection. He turned it down and dragged Terence to the diner where he had heard Charles hung out.
In the parking lot, Terence stood silent, his eyes riveted to the pavement. “Is this Charles?” Paul asked. “That him? He the one that give you the drugs and what-not?”
“Yeah,” Terence muttered. He couldn’t lie to his father.