There Are No Children Here

Preface

   
I FIRST MET Lafeyette and Pharoah Rivers during the summer of 1985. Lafeyette was then ten. Pharoah was seven. I was working as a freelance journalist at the time and had been asked by a friend to write the text for a photo essay he was doing on children in poverty for
Chicago
magazine. He’d met the two boys and their mother through a local social services agency and had spent a number of days taking photographs of them at the Henry Horner Homes, a public housing complex.

Before I ever met Lafeyette and Pharoah, I had seen their
likenesses. One photograph in particular struck me: Lafeyette stood in a dark hallway of his building. He was wearing a striped tank top, baggy jeans, and a Kangol cap that was too big for him; his high-tops were untied. In his hands was what appeared to be a baseball. And yet, despite the youthful attire, he looked like an old man. There seemed bottled up inside him a lifetime’s worth of horrors. His face revealed a restless loneliness.

When I went to meet him and his family, the interview didn’t last long—maybe a few hours—because I was writing only a short essay to accompany my friend’s photographs and had over a dozen families to interview in a couple of weeks’ time. But even during my short stay with Lafeyette, I was unnerved by the relentless neighborhood violence he talked about. In fact, I had trouble believing it all. And then I asked Lafeyette what he wanted to be. “If I grow up, I’d like to be a bus driver,” he told me.
If
, not
when
. At the age of ten, Lafeyette wasn’t sure he’d make it to adulthood.

Two years later, I returned to the Henry Horner Homes to write a story for
The Wall Street Journal
on the toll inner-city violence takes on the children who live there. I spent the summer at Henry Horner, playing basketball with the kids, going to lunch with them, talking with their parents, and just hanging out. Over those weeks, I became good friends with Lafeyette and his brother Pharoah, and our friendship lasted long after the
Journal
story appeared and, I’m sure, will continue well beyond the publication of this book. We have spent time together nearly every weekend. We visit museums, play video games, take walks in the country, go to the movies, and browse in bookstores. Each summer we take a fishing trip to northern Michigan. And we keep talking. I’ve been encouraged by their resilience, inspired by their laughter, and angered by their stories.

In 1988, I suggested to their mother, LaJoe, the possibility of my writing a book about Lafeyette, Pharoah, and the other children of the neighborhood. She liked the idea, although she hesitated, and then said, “But you know, there are no children here. They’ve seen too much to be children.”

One of every five children in the United States lives in poverty—an estimated twelve million children, according to the Children’s Defense Fund. In cities like Chicago, the rate is considerably
higher: one of every three children. Many grow up in neighborhoods similar to Lafeyette and Pharoah’s. By the time they enter adolescence, they have contended with more terror than most of us confront in a lifetime. They have had to make choices that most experienced and educated adults would find difficult. They have lived with fear and witnessed death. Some of them have lashed out. They have joined gangs, sold drugs, and, in some cases, inflicted pain on others. But they have also played baseball and gone on dates and shot marbles and kept diaries. For, despite all they have seen and done, they are—and we must constantly remind ourselves of this—still children.

LaJoe was not only agreeable to the project, she felt it important that their stories be told. She had once said to me that she occasionally wished she were deaf. The shooting. The screaming. Babies crying. Children shrieking. Sometimes she thought it would all drive her insane. So maybe it would be best if she couldn’t hear at all. Her hope—and mine—was that a book about the children would make us all hear, that it would make us all stop and listen.

This book follows Lafeyette and Pharoah over a two-year period as they struggle with school, attempt to resist the lure of the gangs, and mourn the death of friends, all the while searching for some inner peace. During this time, both boys undergo profound changes. They are at an age when, through discovery of themselves and their world, they begin to form their unique identities. Consequently, it is a story that doesn’t have a neat and tidy ending. It is, instead, about a beginning, the dawning of two lives. Most of all, it is a story about two friends.

Summer 1987