There Are No Children Here (19 page)

His ambitions in life were to be a good father—he had two daughters by another girl—and to be a disc jockey. He told Lafeyette he planned to get a job once he graduated from high school so that he could buy a house in a quiet neighborhood where he could raise his kids.

Craig was currently enrolled at Cregier High School. Though slowed down by a slight learning disability, which his school’s psychological report identified as “a problem with audio-visual coordination and poor memory,” Craig had managed
to make it to his senior year, something three fourths of his freshman class had failed to do. He particularly impressed his teachers with his creative writing.

But Craig lived for his music. Whenever he had a spare moment, he wrote raps, which he sent to local radio stations in the hope that they would be read on the air. He shared some of them with Lafeyette and would often ask for his opinion. He had told Lafeyette he was planning to apply to a broadcasting school, where he could learn to be a radio dee-jay.

Craig was different from all the other teenage boys Lafeyette knew. Here was an older boy who not only paid attention to him, but took him seriously. What’s more, Craig had thought about the future, something most young men in this neighborhood rejected—often for good reason—as a waste of time. He had the grandest of dreams: a home out in a safe and neat neighborhood and a family. He warned Lafeyette to stay away from the gangs.

“I liked how he thought,” Lafeyette later said. “He used to talk about a lot of good things.”

Lafeyette often admired Craig from a distance, watching him walk through the projects, headphones hugging his head, his hands knocking out a beat, his long legs striding smoothly and quickly, always as if he had a destination and purpose in mind.

On this particular afternoon, as Craig would do numerous times through the summer, he set up two turntables and a speaker in front of Lafeyette’s building, on what tenants there generously referred to as “the porch.” In reality, it was a slab of concrete about ten feet deep and twenty feet across that led into the building’s dark breezeway. The corners where the slab met the building bore the unmistakable smell of urine; it was a nook where drunks could relieve themselves without being seen. Since an overhang covered the entrance, tenants from the upper floors couldn’t watch the activities on the porch, where gang members dealt drugs. The overhang, like the porch, was made of concrete. It served as a landing place for junk thrown from the upper floors—a black vinyl car seat, a baby bottle, Coca-Cola bottles, a suitcase, shoes of various sizes—that might otherwise have struck the children below.

The overhang had the acoustical effect of directing the music outward, into the playground, so that people in the three surrounding
buildings could hear of Craig’s arrival. Like the Pied Piper’s followers, they drifted to the front of 1920 West Washington, lured by the blasting beat of pop stars, rap groups, and soul singers. Paul Rivers could hear the music even a block away, where he was hanging out with friends on the street corner.

As the evening wore on and the crowd swelled, Craig persuaded even the shyest of friends to start dancing. “Mama,” Pharoah yelled over the rowdy raps of the group El Jabbar, “W-w-watch … w-w-watch me. It’s the w-w-wop.” Pharoah’s shoulders and arms began to move in military syncopation as his legs, which he jerkily bent at the knees, propelled his upper body up and down. Adding to the frenzy of the new dance, he thrust his small chest forward and back, like the proudest of peacocks. LaJoe poked Rochelle. “Will you look at the old boy,” she said, laughing with a freedom she hadn’t felt in a long while.

Next to LaJoe and Rochelle stood Rickey, Lafeyette, and James. James, who on occasional weekends still came back to visit Horner with his mother, didn’t like to dance with adults around. He mischievously circled the crowd, tapping friends on the shoulder or back. Then, before they could turn to see who had beckoned them, he ran to another part of the crowd to blend in among his friends. James, too, adored Craig. “Look at how he makes all these people laugh,” he said to Lafeyette. “Man, people enjoy him.”

Rickey seemed to revel in the joy and energy of the dancers. A self-conscious child, he buried his hands deep in his pockets and smiled nervously. “Hey, Lafie, man, look at Pharoah,” he said, pointing to the writhing youngster. Lafeyette looked and laughed. “Man, he don’t know what he doing,” Lafeyette said, launching into an exaggerated imitation of his brother’s rendition of the wop.

As Rickey came to spend more time with Pharoah, Lafeyette began to accept him. The three boys played tag or basketball, and Lafeyette enjoyed having Rickey around. He could be generous if he had any money and would occasionally buy a hot dog or a soda pop for Lafeyette or Pharoah. If Pharoah trusted Rickey, Lafeyette now figured, so could he.

“C’mon out here. Let’s dance,” Rochelle urged Lafeyette.
“C’mon, Chicken Legs.” Rochelle had nicknamed him that because he was so skinny.

Lafeyette shook his head. “Go ahead,” said Rickey, who himself was not about to leave the sidelines.

“C’mon. You don’t never dance,” Rochelle insisted. She grabbed one of Lafeyette’s hands and began to drag him into the group of dancers.

“I don’t wanna. I just wanna look,” he protested. But children and adults alike began a quiet chant: “Dance, Lafie, dance. Dance, Lafie, dance.” He did. Reluctantly. His long arms moved tentatively and awkwardly as his upper body moved back and forth in time with the music. Rochelle edged him slower and slower into the middle of the dance floor, where, for just a moment, he let loose, his legs and torso moving with surprising grace to El Jabbar’s raps.

For those few minutes, he was at peace with himself, his facial muscles relaxed into a full, unencumbered smile. His eyes focused on Craig, whom he considered a friend, not an “associate.” He idolized the teenager. Craig’s energy and joy had made even Lafeyette momentarily forget about his troubles.

From the porch, Craig smiled and waved at Lafeyette, which made him feel self-conscious about dancing. “That’s all,” he told Rochelle. She reached out to grab him, but he snaked through the crowd to watch from the sidelines with Rickey and James. The dancers continued to gyrate and whirl through the hot, humid night. LaJoe, Lafeyette, and Pharoah would remember this night and the others that Craig dee-jayed as some of the most spontaneous and spirited fun they had ever had at Horner.

When Audrey Natcone, a public defender, first met Terence she was struck by how young he seemed. A skinny, painfully shy boy among strangers, Terence, seemed much younger than eighteen, Audrey thought, not much older than her own son, who had just turned fourteen. She felt sorry for him, as she did for many of her clients. He was nervous, his right leg often bouncing nervously. He was so reserved that he never corrected her when she called him by his alias, Bobby. She discovered his real name from reading court papers. Going to prison, she thought, would quickly change this adolescent.

Audrey, thirty-six, had been a public defender for three years.
Her political roots were in the 1960s, when she had been active in the antiwar movement and had picketed in support of the United Farm Workers. She had run a crisis-intervention hotline and worked at a battered women’s shelter before going to law school, where she decided to do criminal work. She was now thinking of teaching. “I don’t really enjoy the combat,” she said. “It’s too destructive—for the client usually.” She had for months been battling on behalf of another young man who was from Henry Horner and was accused of murder. She felt he was being framed.

With more cases than she could properly handle, she couldn’t spend enough time on Terence’s. Moreover, unlike some of her other clients, Terence rarely questioned or challenged her about his case, and he didn’t have a phone, which made it impossible for her to get quick answers to questions that came up. She had to reach him through a neighbor’s phone. The only time they could meet was at each court date before his case was called.

In May a friend had helped bail Terence out of jail. He spent most of the summer inside the apartment, sequestered in one of the back rooms. On occasion, though, he and a friend took the El to O’Hare Airport, where they shined shoes at a dollar a polish. On a good day, Terence earned as much as $100. Frequently, though, the airport police booted them out for not having a vendor’s license.

What most impressed Audrey about Terence was his close family ties. Usually, parents and siblings didn’t visit her clients or show up on court dates. With Terence, it was different. His case had been assigned to the county’s criminal court branch in Skokie, a northern suburb. Because of the huge burden at the main Criminal Courts building on the city’s south side—the number of cases jumped from thirteen thousand in 1982 to eighteen thousand in 1987—four judges in the suburban courts now handled Chicago cases. In order to get to the Skokie branch, Terence had to find a friend to drive him or take three trains and a bus. Each time he had a court date, LaJoe was sure to join him—and the three, Terence, LaJoe, and Audrey, could discuss the case together before or after the court session.

Because of LaJoe’s unbending loyalty to her son, Audrey paid closer attention to the case. LaJoe strongly believed that Terence hadn’t robbed Ann’s Longhorn Saloon. And as Audrey
spoke to Terence about it, she too began to believe that he may have been wrongly accused. It wasn’t that Terence wasn’t capable of participating in the caper at the bar. After all, he’d been arrested numerous times as a juvenile for similar crimes. It was just that the evidence didn’t point unwaveringly to his presence there. Moreover, Audrey was struck by Terence’s earnest and seemingly genuine assertions of his innocence.

For months, the police delayed providing photographs of the lineup from which the victim had identified Terence. Audrey had requested them so many times without success that the judge had threatened to issue a contempt order if they weren’t produced. It raised the defender’s suspicions that all was not right. Was there something about the lineup that would have made it particularly easy for a witness to pick out Terence? she wondered. She had already suspected that the police had shown Ann Mitchell, the owner of the saloon, snapshots of Terence before she picked him out of the lineup. If that was the case, she planned to argue that that had prejudiced Ann. Audrey would move to suppress the prosecution’s main evidence.

What Audrey didn’t know was that Johnny Adams, the young man who orchestrated the robbery, could have testified that Terence was not with him the night he robbed Ann’s Longhorn Saloon. But Johnny didn’t come forward because in doing so he would have incriminated himself; he would have had to put himself at the scene of the crime. It is the law of the streets. You watch out for yourself first, then family, and then friends. It wasn’t until an interview a year later, after he’d been convicted for his part in the robbery, that Johnny Adams talked openly about the crime and said that Terence had not been with him.

Even without such testimony, though, Audrey felt confident that she could win the case.

It was a Friday afternoon in late June, and a swirl of adults and children filled LaJoe’s apartment. The kitchen table, a recent hand-me-down from a friend, was loaded with platters of food; the guests could barely see the tabletop. Baked ham. Spaghetti with meat sauce. Macaroni and cheese. Collard greens. Corn bread. Sweet potato pies. “It was,” LaJoe later said, “the happiest moment in my house.”

There was much to celebrate.

Terence, it appeared, would beat his case. That particularly relieved Lafeyette and Pharoah, who knew, as did most of the children, that prison consumed and mangled its inhabitants quicker than the neighborhood. They were also glad to have him home, out on bond, out of the overcrowded Cook County Jail. Their family was whole again.

Also, LaJoe had reapplied for welfare, which is an option for those who feel they have unjustly been denied benefits. The caseworker had accepted her application and told her she would soon have her benefits restored. Public Aid could no longer claim that Paul supported the family. He was still out of work, and as the months passed his chances of returning seemed slimmer and slimmer. He continued to drink and take drugs, though with some moderation since his release from the rehabilitation center. Knowing she would start receiving benefits next month, LaJoe felt a huge burden lifted from her shoulders. Public Aid, however, didn’t reinstate her medical benefits; she would have to use the Cook County Hospital as her family doctor. With the family’s income restored, LaJoe promised her five youngest children new bunk beds. I’ll get them on layaway, she assured them. You’ll have them by Christmas.

And there was Craig Davis. His very presence seemed to calm Lafeyette. Lafeyette had found an older boy who could serve as his model, who articulated much that he felt. LaJoe was sure that Craig could be nothing but a good influence on her son.

But the reason for the feast had nothing to do with Terence or Public Aid’s decision to restore her benefits or Craig’s friendship with Lafeyette. Dawn Anderson, LaJoe’s niece and Porkchop’s older sister, was to graduate from the Richard T. Crane High School. She was to be only the second of Lafeyette and Pharoah’s generation in the Anderson family to graduate from high school. Nine children had already dropped out.

LaJoe was very close to Dawn. The girl, whose name everyone pronounced “D’won,” leaned on her aunt for advice and support. She could open up to her and know that LaJoe wouldn’t reveal her troubles to her mother, LaJoe’s younger sister.

Dawn was a feisty, scrappy girl, who was quite pretty. Broad-shouldered
and strong, she backed down from no one—and had had her share of fights in the neighborhood. But it was that determination and fearlessness which had got her this far and, everyone hoped, would carry her even farther.

Dawn’s accomplishment was made even more notable by the fact that she had, at the age of eighteen, four children, aged four, two, one, and three months. She raised the kids with the help of her boyfriend, the children’s father, Demetrius Nance. Earlier this year, deciding she wanted to be on her own, she had moved out of her mother’s home to a third-floor apartment in LaJoe’s building. She, Demetrius, and the children lived there illegally, since the rightful tenant had moved out and had let Dawn take over the unit and pay the rent. (Such illicit arrangements are frequently made in Chicago public housing because the waiting list for units is so long. In addition, because the CHA is so strapped for funds, once an apartment becomes vacant chances are the authority won’t have the money to fix it up for a new tenant. The vacancy rate at Horner alone had ballooned to 40 percent.) LaJoe helped Dawn get through her senior year by baby-sitting for the children on occasion.