Another Day in the Death of America: A Chronicle of Ten Short Lives (36 page)

By that time, Tyshon’s mother had come around to the idea of letting his younger brother stay with Regina. But it was too late. “He got suspended from school. . . . He’s thirteen years old. It’s the same pattern. And then she want to give them to me. I said, ‘I can’t control him now. You should have given me him when I asked. I bring them to Iowa, and all these white folks gonna be scared of your kids. It’s too late for that. You should have given me him then, when I coulda set values and morals. But you didn’t.’ So now she got me sitting there waiting at the phone for another funeral.”

CHAPTER 9

GARY ANDERSON (18)

Newark, New Jersey

2:32
A
.
M
.
EST

D
URING THE
G
REAT
M
IGRATION
,
WHEN
A
FRICAN
A
MERICANS
fled penury and political repression in the South in search of jobs and dignity up north, they often left surreptitiously. If anyone saw them leave, their flight might alert a posse of vigilantes, or even the local sheriff, to prevent their departure. So oftentimes they just vanished—if not under cover of darkness then under a shroud of mystery, without explanation or announcement. They took what they could carry and left the rest where it stood, as though they might return at any minute.

“The Delta today is dotted with nearly spectral sharecropper cabins,” writes Nicholas Lemann in
The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America.
“Their doors and windows gone, their interior walls lined with newspapers from the 1930’s and 1940’s that once served as insulation.”
¹
Much of Newark today has a similar feeling. Only
it wasn’t people who led the charge but capital, leaving behind an urban landscape abandoned somewhere between postindustrial and postapocalyptic. Since the Industrial Revolution, Newark had been one of the nation’s manufacturing hubs. “The trunk you travel with is, nine times out of ten, of Newark manufacture,” wrote the
New York Times
in 1872, around the time of the Newark Industrial Exhibition. “The hat you wear was made there, the buttons on your coat, the shirt on your back, your brush, the tinware you use in your kitchen, the oil-cloth you walk on, the harness and bit you drive with, all owe to Newark their origin.”
²

But with automation, suburbanization of industry, and then neoliberal globalization, Newark’s productive base went into inexorable decline. Those jobs that machines and then computers couldn’t do went primarily to the South, to suburbs, or abroad, where land and labor were cheaper, unions were weaker, and regulations more lax. They were the very same forces that destroyed the South Chicago neighborhood where Tyshon Anderson was shot. Only in this case they devastated an entire city, as they did cities like Detroit, Buffalo, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Gary. But, as Brad Tuttle points out in
How Newark Became Newark: The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of an American City,
Newark was exceptional. “It stood out for the extraordinary speed, depth, and viciousness of its decline, and for the monumental difficulties the city faced while attempting to dig itself out from the hole.”
³
And when capital fled, jobs and therefore workers were soon to follow. Between 1960 and 1990 Newark lost nearly one-third of its population.
⁴

What remains is a hollow vessel of depleted, diminished, and decrepit public space where working communities once thrived. Entire housing projects that once provided homes for several thousand people are now bricked up and boarded off. Former factories now house pigeons and growing trees. Abandoned. Derelict. Neglected.

T
HE AREA IN
N
EWARK
around the Kretchmer complex on Frelinghuysen Avenue, a warren of high-rise affordable-housing apartments not far from the airport, has just such a feel. On a warm day, life pours onto the
common lawn area between the complex’s towers. Young men and women hang out, teenagers flirt, old folks sit and watch—time rich and financially poor. Opposite sits a McDonald’s between scrap-metal yards and mechanics’ garages. And just a short walk away, another whole complex stands uninhabited, windows that once offered a view of the cranes and freight on Newark Bay now stuffed with cinder blocks. This is by far the poorest place where anybody in this book died on November 23, 2013. According to the census, the median income in this tract is just $10,307—that’s less than half of what it was in the next-most impoverished area depicted in this book, which was in the part of Houston where Edwin Rajo was shot.

It was here, not long after midnight, that Gary Anderson, eighteen, and his girlfriend went to McDonald’s. Gary had been staying at his mother’s for the weekend while his father took his youngest brother, Tasheem, to a basketball tournament in Maryland. Gary’s father (also named Gary) had had sole custody of Gary Jr. since he was five. But in recent years Gary Jr. had started to get to know his mother again.

They had bonded, in part, over his hair. Although he’d worn it cropped for most of his life, his mom liked to braid it for him. Gary’s braids did not frame his face on each side like Tyshon’s did but hung back in light strings over his neck and shoulders, showcasing his high forehead and full-cheeked face. He was a big lad—stocky and tall. His father didn’t like the hairstyle but had let it go. “That was his world with his mother,” he says. “I keep saying to him, ‘You need to get to know your mama.’ So whatever they did they did. I kept telling him I didn’t like ’em and didn’t want him to have ’em. But it was something between him and his mother, so I just wanted to leave it alone.”

But his dad thinks Gary Jr. also liked to go to his mother’s because she kept him on a longer leash. At home, his son was always trying to push the boundaries, but Gary Sr. laid down the law. Junior had to be home by nine o’clock. “The problem with him is he always wanted to go to his friend’s house because he liked to sit on his friend’s porch,” said his dad. “His friends sit on the porch till, like, eleven, twelve o’clock at night. But I’d tell him, ‘You’ve got to be home by nine o’clock. Because I know how it is in the streets.’ He’d say, ‘I’m just sitting on the porch.’ And I’d say,
‘I don’t care. It’s late. The streets are not where you’re supposed to be.’ So that was the biggest issue I had with him. He just wanted to sit out on the porch with his friends.”

His mother, however, was less strict. “They have a complex, and they sit outside or on the balcony. I guess that’s what they do,” Gary Sr. says. “So that’s why he liked to go down there. Because he could stay out until ten, eleven o’clock and hang out on the balcony with his mother.”

The McDonald’s is just a short walk across the main road from Kretchmer. As Gary walked back to his mother’s apartment building at about one a.m. on November 24, three young men jumped out of a car and shot him. Family members say he was trying to protect his girlfriend. “He tried to shield her,” said his older sister, Linda Bradley. The police conceded this may well have been what happened. “There were some indications that he may have pushed another person out of the way,” Thomas Fennelly, the Essex County chief assistant prosecutor, told the Newark
Star-Ledger
.
⁵

Either way, he fell in a shower of bullets and was rushed to University Hospital, where he was pronounced dead an hour and a half later.

“He don’t have a gun. He don’t have nothing,” says his dad. “They say it was a mistaken identity. But he never had a gun on him.” “Do you wish he had?” I asked. His father paused. “No, he still would have got killed.”

Gary’s fatal mistake that night was not that he was out late but that he was wearing a red hoodie. His father explains. “The day before there was a guy who had a red hoodie just like my son who killed somebody up the street. And that was one of their friends he shot. So they came back looking for him the next day, and my son had on a red hoodie. And they shot him.” The feud, some told the local media, was over an escalating turf war connected to the drug trade on Frelinghuysen Avenue.
⁶

“This place is like the Wild West,” forty-seven-year-old Hassan Taylor, who was one of Gary’s mother’s neighbors, told the
Star-Ledger.
“It’s not a bad place to live. It’s just that these young people, they’ve just got this mind-frame that that’s the way it is.”
⁷

According to Gary Sr., a few days after his son was killed, the boy in the red hoodie for whom the bullet was allegedly intended came up to Gary
Jr.’s mother, hugged her, and apologized. “You know that was meant for me,” he said. On the night of the shooting, the police would not confirm whether the bullets that hit Gary had been intended for somebody else. “I can’t confirm that, other than to say the investigation is continuing at this time,” Fennelly told the
Star-Ledger.
“Whenever we have a crime we always look at whether it’s connected to another crime or a pattern.”
⁸

Gary Sr. says the police think they know who killed his son. But the boy in the red hoodie—currently in jail on a drug charge—won’t say because it will implicate him in the other shooting. So six months after Gary’s death, the police had not charged anyone. “They can’t arrest him because they have no witness and they have no evidence, so [the suspect] can just say, ‘I didn’t do it.’ I don’t know who it is, and they won’t tell me because it’s an ongoing investigation. They’re hoping that by the time summer gets here somebody’s going to get tired and just tell,” explains his father. “Soon as it gets hot somebody’s going to tell, or one of these guns is going to pop up soon. Because they know who they looking for, so they’ve got people sitting and watching these people until they make a mistake.”

Gary Sr. expressed more confidence in the Newark Police Department—or indeed any part of the city’s polity—than others I spoke to. Although Chicago has relatively recently taken up the unenviable baton of murder capital of the country, Newark has failed to relinquish its reputation as a violent and dysfunctional city for the best part of forty years. During the seventies,
Newsweek
described it as “a classic example of urban disaster,” the
New York Times Magazine
referred to it as “a study in the evils, tensions, and frustrations that beset the central cities of America,” and
Harper’s
branded it “The Worst American City.” Other cities have vied for this tarnished mantle. DC, New York, New Orleans, Los Angeles have all been in the running at various times. But what makes Newark particular is that, despite several attempts, there has been no successful makeover since the problems took hold.
⁹

Between 1954 and 2006, Newark had just four mayors. Three of them faced indictments on corruption charges either while they were in office or just after they’d left it. A city once known primarily for industry and manufacturing became infamous for decrepitude and kleptocracy. The
Harper’s
article pointed out that in a 1975 study of twenty-four major cities, Newark came in last in the percentage of high school graduates, college graduates, percentage of home ownership, acreage of public parks per resident, and amusement and recreation facilities per person. The study concluded, “The city of Newark stands without serious challenge as the worst of all. Newark is a city that desperately needs help.”
¹⁰

Like Detroit, it soon became referred to not so much as a city but as a failed state—an incorporated entity so crippled with intractable social woes and political pathologies that it was incapable of supporting itself and protecting its citizens. Starbucks wouldn’t even set up there until 1999—the same year they came to China.