There Are No Children Here (17 page)

Eleven

   
LAJOE, LAFEYETTE, PHAROAH, and the triplets walked through the guarded fence, past the man-made pond, through the revolving doors, and into the visitors’ waiting room of Division Four of the Cook County Jail. The fifty-four-acre complex sits on the city’s south side, conveniently set behind the Criminal Courts building. Built in 1929 to house twelve hundred prisoners, it now holds seven thousand, a thousand of whom sleep on mattresses on the floor. Nearly all the people here are awaiting trial. They stay an average of 138 days, though the jail authorities,
to relieve the overcrowding, under a controversial program first introduced in 1982 may release any inmate who has committed a crime against property. In 1988 alone, the jail set free twenty-five thousand accused criminals because it didn’t have room for them.

The jail has eight divisions. The oldest building, which is fortified with two-foot-thick concrete walls, houses those accused of such violent acts as murder and rape. Most inmates there have bonds of over $500,000. Division Four, where Terence now resided, houses those who have been assigned low- to medium-priced bonds, usually not more than $40,000. Terence’s bond was set at $20,000, which meant that to be released he’d have to post 10 percent of that, or $2000.

Built in 1975, the Division Four unit is, like Henry Horner, made of cinder block, which jail authorities quickly learned did not provide the best of security. Because prisoners scraped through the mortar with metal spoons, the jail switched to plastic utensils in 1979. And after several inmates used the top of their dressers to beat through the walls, some in as little time as a minute and a half, the dressers were finally removed in 1981. To outsiders, though, the place looked impenetrable.

After a twenty-minute wait, a guard pointed LaJoe and the children to a room on the right. They could meet Terence there, he told them. The children eagerly followed LaJoe. They hadn’t seen their brother since he’d been arrested two months earlier.

“Where’s my Terence? Where’s my Terence?” Tammie asked her mother in hushed tones.

“In there,” replied LaJoe.

The rectangular visiting room has a countertop running its full length. It could pass for a small diner, if it weren’t for the pane of inch-thick, bulletproof glass, which extends up to the ceiling, cutting the room in two. Six stools face each side of the glass.

Set into the glass is a circular metal grate about ten inches in diameter through which the inmates and the visitors communicate. To hear a person on the other side, you must place your ear flat against the cold metal while the other talks in a loud voice to compete with the other visitors and inmates in the room. There used to be telephones, but they were removed after many were ripped out by temperamental inmates. There was
also a handwritten sign that read
BEWARE OF PICKPOCKETS AND THIEVES
.

As LaJoe and the children crowded around the one free stool, Terence walked into the room on his side of the glass. He spotted his family, and broke into a huge grin. So did Lafeyette, Pharoah, and the triplets. Terence, who wore his long hair plaited tightly against his skull, stood still for a moment, reared his head back, and then pointed at each of his brothers and sisters as if to acknowledge their presence. They all pointed back. Then Terence sat down. Beaming.

Tiffany pulled herself onto the countertop and pressed her lips against the metal grate. “I love you,” she told her brother. “I love you, too,” he replied. Then they all, in turn, told Terence they loved him. Lafeyette shared the stool with LaJoe, trying to catch Terence’s every word. He was nursing a mild case of flu, so he sat quietly and uncomfortably through much of the visit. Pharoah stood on the other side of his mother. He fought to restrain Timothy, Tammie, and Tiffany, who, in their excitement, clamored for space on the countertop. Once Pharoah calmed them down, though, he found himself distracted by all the commotion in the room. He heard little of what Terence had to tell him and his siblings that morning.

Most distracting to Pharoah was a young girl, perhaps seventeen, who sat perched on the stool next to theirs. She was dressed in a denim miniskirt, which exposed a pair of shapely legs and which, one suspects, had the intended effect of teasing her incarcerated boyfriend, with whom she obviously was not at all pleased. She held a letter up to the glass. “This is bullshit,” she said, loud enough so that Pharoah turned his head to see what was going on. “I ain’t taking this crap no more.” She went on to dispute the missive, which apparently her lover had sent her from prison, calling her a “no good bitch” and other assorted names for not having visited him. “I got a job and more important things to do,” she lectured him. “I’m gonna get the last laugh.” Pharoah covered his mouth, embarrassed by the fighting and foul language. This lovers’ quarrel continued throughout the visit and made it necessary for LaJoe and the others to press their ears even closer to the metal grate to hear Terence.

As the joy of seeing his family wore off, Terence grew tense.
His smile disappeared. “I’m hurting,” he told LaJoe, his clenched left fist slowly and rhythmically drumming the countertop. LaJoe worried that Terence, whose pounding became harder and harder, was going to explode. “I wanna be outta here. I wanna be outta here,” he said, his pleading sometimes lost in the din. He rocked back and forth on his stool in rhythm with his drumming fist. “It’s bogus,” he asserted. He insisted repeatedly that he hadn’t robbed the Longhorn Saloon. LaJoe, who had seen Terence arrested many times before, believed him. So did Terence’s public defender, whom LaJoe would meet in coming weeks. Only once before, in his over three dozen arrests, had Terence professed his innocence. And that one time he had, indeed, been wrongly accused. “Don’t give up hope. Be a man,” LaJoe told him. She repeated it. She couldn’t think of anything else encouraging to say.

Lafeyette pushed his way through the triplets and leaned the full weight of his body on the countertop; he pressed his lips against the dirty cold metal. “Hi, Terence,” he said meekly. Terence smiled, shaking his head and pointing. “Hey, homey, you look good,” Terence told him as he launched into a ten-minute lecture, urging Lafeyette to stay in school and to keep to himself. Lafeyette listened raptly, his head pressed firmly against the grating, so hard that the angled metal strips left marks on his cheeks and forehead.

“Lafie, you know, don’t never come to jail ’cause this ain’t no place to be,” Terence told his younger brother. “It’s hard. You go to school. Get your education. Do what Mama tell you to do. And stay away from crooked people. If they come at you to do something with them, tell them no. That ain’t the way to go. I’m telling you, Lafie, stay in school and do something positive. Get you a successful job. I don’t want you to follow my footprints. The things that I did. I want you to be better. You won’t be like me. You’ll be better than me.”

Lafeyette nodded. Terence, who seemed eager to impart these guidelines to his brother, rambled on. By the time he finished, Pharoah had taken a seat on the floor in the corner, away from the hubbub, tending a headache. Tiffany and Tammie had gone to the bathroom down the hall. And Timothy, with his thumb in his mouth, sat perched next to Lafeyette, trying to eavesdrop on the conversation between his older brothers.

“Time to go,” a guard called to Terence. Nearly an hour had passed. “Keep the house clean. Do your homework. When you’re through, read a book,” Terence urged Lafeyette in a rush. “And watch out for Mama.”

“I will,” replied Lafeyette.

“Mama, come here.” Terence gestured to LaJoe. He gave her lengthy instructions to say hello to his three children and their mothers.

“Man, it’s good seeing you,” he said, shaking his head from side to side.

“Time to go,” the guard said again.

“Okay, man!” Terence yelled.

He stood up from his stool and blew kisses to Lafeyette, Pharoah, and the triplets. “Send me some pictures!” he hollered. They could understand him only by reading his lips. He turned and walked back toward the cells.

As LaJoe and the children walked out the revolving doors and across the front lawn, Tiffany tugged at her mother’s coat. “Mama,” she asked, “how does Terence get out from behind that glass?” Before LaJoe could think of how to answer her, Lafeyette cuffed the back of her head. “Shut up,” he ordered.

A couple of weeks later, Lafeyette and Pharoah curled up on the sofa, watching Saturday morning cartoons. The beige couch collected dirt and odors quicker than any other piece of furniture in the house. The pillows were so dirty, it was hard to make out their original color. LaJoe had placed an old lavender sheet over the seat cushions in an effort to hide the smells, particularly the scent of urine. A relative of LaJoe’s had passed out here from drinking and, in his drunken stupor, peed in his pants. Some of it had leaked onto the couch.

LaJoe sat on a nearby chair talking with Rochelle. “When’s Terence getting out of jail?” Lafeyette interrupted his mother.

“I don’t know,” she replied.

“Guess,” he demanded. “By the summer?” His already high-pitched pubescent voice rose even higher.

“Lafie, I don’t know,” she said.

“When’s he coming home? Could he come home tomorrow?” he persisted.

“I don’t think so, Lafie,” she repeated. “I just don’t know. Stop asking.”

Lafeyette let out a low grunt of dissatisfaction, and went back to watching cartoons. Since Terence had been arrested, Lafeyette asked about him regularly. This conversation, in one form or another, had been repeated often. He had even been having dreams about Terence, dreams that woke him in the middle of the night, dreams he refused to share with anyone.

Pharoah, too, thought a lot about Terence. It especially upset him that he might be serving time for something he didn’t do. Pharoah’s sense of justice, of right and wrong, was so powerful that it sometimes took the form of righteousness. No one could get away with doing anything, including himself. This past Christmas, he had awakened early, before the other children, and stolen a look at the presents piled in the back room. Among the wrapped games and toys, he couldn’t find one with his name on it. He burst into tears and ran to his mother, complaining that she had forgotten him. Of course she hadn’t, LaJoe assured him. His gifts had been squirreled away in the front closet. For weeks afterward, Pharoah apologized to his mother for questioning her love for him. “It bothered my conscience,” he explained.

At school, he sometimes raised his hand to tell on himself. If he’d been chattering and Ms. Barone asked who’d been talking, he’d confess quickly. LaJoe would say of Pharoah, “That’s a doll. He got a heart. He couldn’t do nothing and get away with it. He’ll tell on himself.”

Pharoah knew that Terence had once before been locked up for something he hadn’t done. Two years ago, nineteen-year-old Maggie Atlas told the police that Terence had shot her in the stomach. He spent five months in the county jail awaiting trial on charges of attempted murder. In January of 1987, shortly before Terence was to go to trial, Atlas called the Public Defender’s Office and said that she had lied: Terence had not shot her. A friend who was a Vice Lord had tried to kill her and then had told her to finger Terence, a rival gang member. But the friend had since been killed, so she had decided to come forward. It was a harrowing experience for the family. They knew Terence wouldn’t have shot a girl. He didn’t have it in him.

“What would you do if someone said you did something and
you didn’t do it?” Pharoah asked a friend. “What would you do if they still said you did it?” He paused. “If the judge said you did it?” He paused again. “If they didn’t believe you?” The incident so unsettled Pharoah that he cried whenever he recounted it.

Terence’s arrest had shaken both boys. In a neighborhood of losses, it was yet another family member or friend gone: an aunt murdered, their brother Paul jailed, their neighbor William shot accidentally, their friend Bird Leg killed, and now Terence. LaJoe tried to reassure both boys about him. Maybe, she told them, he was better off in jail. He’s off the streets and can’t get in more trouble, she told them. But they wanted him home.