Gang Leader for a Day (24 page)

So with the blessing of J.T. and Ms. Bailey, I began devoting my time to interviewing the local hustlers: candy sellers, pimps and prostitutes, tailors, psychics, squeegee men.

I also told J.T. and Ms. Bailey about my second problem, my legal obligation to share notes with the police.

“You mean you didn’t know this all along?” Ms. Bailey said. “Even
I
knew that you have to tell police what you’re doing—unless you give them information on the sly.”

“Oh, no!” I protested. “I’m not going to be an informant.”

“Sweetheart, we’re all informants around here. Nothing to be ashamed of. Just make sure that you get what you need, I always say. And don’t let them beat you up.”

“I’m not sharing my data with them—that’s what I mean.”

“You mean you’ll go to prison?”

“Well, not exactly. I just mean I won’t share my data with them.”

“Do you know what being in contempt means?”

When I didn’t reply, Ms. Bailey shook her head in disgust. I had seen this look before: she was wondering how I had qualified for higher education given my lack of street smarts.

“Any nigger around here can tell you that you got two choices,” she said. “Tell them what they want or sit in Cook County Jail.”

I was silent, trying to think of a third option.

“I’ll ask you again,” she said. “Will you give up your information, or will you agree to go to jail?”

“You need to know that? That’s important to you?”

“Sudhir, let me explain something to you. You think we were born yesterday around here. Haven’t we had this conversation a hundred times? You think we don’t know what you do? You think we don’t know that you keep all your notebooks in Ms. Mae’s apartment?”

I shuddered. Ms. Mae had made me feel so comfortable in her apartment that I’d never even entertained the possibility that someone like Ms. Bailey would think about—and perhaps even page through—my notebooks.

“So why let me hang out?” I asked.

“Why do you
want
to hang out?”

“I suppose I’m learning. That’s what I do, study the poor.”

“Okay, well, you want to act like a saint, then you go ahead,” Ms. Bailey said, laughing. “Of course you’re learning! But you are also
hustling.
And we’re all hustlers. So when we see another one of us, we gravitate toward them. Because we need other hustlers to survive.”

“You mean that people think I can do something for them if they talk to me?”

“They
know
you can do something for them!” she yelped, leaning across the table and practically spitting out her words. “And they know you
will,
because you need to get your information. You’re a hustler, I can see it. You’ll do anything to get what you want. Just don’t be ashamed of it.”

I tried to turn the conversation back to the narrow legal issue, but Ms. Bailey kept on lecturing me.

“I’ll be honest with you,” she said, sitting back in her chair. “If you
do
tell the police, everyone here will find you and beat the shit out of you. So that’s why we know you won’t tell nobody.” She smiled as if she’d won the battle.

So who should I be worried about?
I wondered.
The police or Ms. Bailey and the tenants?

When I told J.T. about my legal concerns, he looked at me with some surprise. “I could’ve told you all that!” he said. “Listen, I’m never going to tell you anything that’s going to land me in jail—or get me killed. So it don’t bother me what you write down, because I can take care of myself. But that’s really not what you should be worried about.”

I waited.

“What you should be asking yourself is this: ‘Am I going to be on the side of black folks or the cops?’ Once you decide, you’ll do whatever it takes. You understand?”

I didn’t.

“Let me try again. Either you’re with us—you feel like you’re in this with us and you respect that—or you’re just here to look around. So far these niggers can tell that you’ve been with us. You come back every day. Just don’t change, and nothing will go wrong, at least not around here.”

J.T.’s advice seemed vague and a bit too philosophical. Ms. Bailey’s warning—that I would get beat up if I betrayed confidences— made more sense. But maybe J.T. was saying the same thing, in his own way.

 
 

I decided to focus my study of the underground economy on the three high-rise buildings that formed the core of J.T.’s territory. I already knew quite a bit—that squatters fixed cars in the alleys, people sold meals out of their homes, and prostitutes took clients to vacant apartments—but I had never asked people how much money they made, what kind of expenses they incurred, and so on.

J.T. was far more enthusiastic about my project than I’d imagined he would be, although I couldn’t figure out why.

“I have a great idea,” he told me one day. “I think you should talk to all the pimps. Then you can go to all the whores. Then I’ll let you talk to all the people stealing cars. Oh, yeah! And you also have folks selling stolen stuff. I mean, there’s a whole bunch of people you can talk to about selling shoes or shirts! And I’ll make sure they cooperate with you. Don’t worry, they won’t say no.”

“Well, we don’t want to force anyone to talk to me,” I said, even though I was excited about meeting all these people. “I can’t
make
anyone talk to me.”

“I know,” J.T. said, breaking into a smile. “But
I
can.”

I laughed. “No, you can’t do that. That’s what I’m saying. That wouldn’t be good for my research.”

“Fine, fine,” he said. “I’ll do it, but I won’t tell you.”

J.T. arranged for me to start interviewing the pimps. He explained that he taxed all the pimps working in or around his buildings: some paid a flat fee, others paid a percentage of their take, and all paid in kind by providing women to J.T.’s members at no cost. The pimps had to pay extra, of course, if they used a vacant apartment as a brothel; they even paid a fee to use the stairwells or a parking lot.

As I began interviewing the pimps, I also befriended some of the freelance prostitutes like Clarisse who lived and worked in the building. “Oh, my ladies will love the attention,” Clarisse said when I asked for help in talking to these women. Within two weeks I had interviewed more than twenty of them.

Between these conversations and my interviews with the pimps, some distinctions began to emerge. The prostitutes who were managed by pimps (these women were known as “affiliates”) had some clear advantages over the “independents” who worked for themselves.The typical affiliate was beaten up far less frequently—about once a year, as against roughly four times a year for the independents. The affiliates also earned about twenty dollars per week more than the independents, even though their pimps took a 33 percent cut. (Twenty dollars wasn’t a small sum, considering that the average Robert Taylor prostitute earned only about one hundred dollars per week.) And I never heard of an affiliate being killed in the line of work, whereas in one recent two-year stretch three independents were killed.

But the two types of prostitutes had much in common. Both groups had high rates of heroin and crack use, and they were bound to the projects, where the demand for sex came mostly from low-income customers. At the truck stops on the other side of the Dan Ryan Expressway—barely a mile away from Robert Taylor but a different ecosystem entirely—a different set of pimps catered to a clientele of white truckers who paid more than the typical black customer in a housing project. Around Robert Taylor a prostitute usually earned ten to twenty dollars for oral sex, sometimes as little as twenty-five dollars for intercourse, and at least fifty dollars for anal sex. But if she was in need of drugs, she would drop her price significantly or accept a few bags of drugs in lieu of any cash.

Once my prostitute research was under way, I asked Ms. Bailey if she would help me meet female hustlers who sold something other than sex. I had casual knowledge of any number of off-the-books businesses: women who sold food out of their apartments or catered parties; women who made clothing, offered marital counseling or baby-sitting; women who read horoscopes, styled hair, prepared taxes, drove gypsy cabs, and sold anything from candy to used appliances to stolen goods. But since most of these activities were conducted out of public view, I needed Ms. Bailey to open some doors.

She was cautious. For the first week, she selectively introduced me to a few women but refused to let me meet others. I’d suggest a name, and she’d mull it over. “Well,” she’d say, “let me think about whether I want you to meet with her.” Or, just as often, “No, she’s not good. But I got someone else for you.” Once, after Ms. Bailey introduced me to a psychic, I asked if many other psychics worked in the building. “Maybe, maybe,” she said, then changed the subject and left the room.

I eventually figured out why she was reluctant to let me explore the underground economy. As it turned out, tenant leaders like Ms. Bailey always got their cut from such activities. If you sold food out of your kitchen or took in other people’s children to baby-sit, you’d better give Ms. Bailey a few dollars, or you might find a CHA manager knocking on your door. If you occasionally cut hair in your apartment, it was probably a good idea to give Ms. Bailey a free styling once in a while. In these parts Ms. Bailey was like the local IRS—and probably a whole lot more successful at collecting her due.

So the people she let me talk to were the ones she probably trusted most not to speak out of line. But I didn’t have much choice: Without Ms. Bailey’s say-so,
no one
was going to speak with me about any illegal activities.

Truth be told, nearly everyone Ms. Bailey introduced me to had a fascinating story to tell. One of the most fascinating women I met was Cordella Levy, a close friend of Ms. Bailey. She was sixty-three years old and had lived in public housing her entire life, the past thirty years in Robert Taylor. (She had a Jewish surname, she said, because her grandmother had married a Jewish man; someone else in her family, however, told me that they were descended from black Hebrew Israelites.) Cordella had raised seven children, all but one of whom had moved out of Robert Taylor. Although she used a walkingcrutch to get around, Cordella had the fight of a bulldog inside her.

She now ran a small candy store inside her apartment. All day long she sat on a stool by the door and waited for children to stop by. Her living room was barren except for the candy: boxes and boxes of lollipops, gum, and candy bars stacked invitingly on a few tables. If you peeked around the corner, you could see into the back bedroom, where Cordella had a TV, couches, and so on. But she liked to keep her candy room sparse, she told me, because if customers saw her furniture, they might decide to come back and rob her.

“You know,” she told me, “I didn’t always sell candy.”

“You mean you didn’t go to school for this?” I joked.

“Sweetheart, I never made it past the fourth grade. Black folks weren’t really allowed to go to school in the South. What I meant was that I used to be somebody different. Ms. Bailey didn’t tell you?” I shook my head. “She told me you wanted to know how I used to hustle.”

“I’d love to hear,” I said. Cordella seemed itching to tell her story.

“Sweetheart, I’ve made money around here every which way you can. You know, I started out working for Ms. Bailey’s mother, Ella Bailey. Ella was a madam, used to have parties in the building. Oh, Lord! She could throw a party!”

“Ms. Bailey’s mother was a madam?” I laughed. “That explains a lot!”

“Yes, sir, and when she passed, I took over from her. Three apartments on the fourteenth floor. Cordella’s Place, they used to call it. Come in for a drink, play some cards, make a friend, have a nice time.”

“Make a friend? Is that what they used to call it?”

“Ain’t nothing wrong with friendship. And then I started making clothes, and then I sold some food, drove people around for a while to the store. My mother taught me how to sew wedding dresses, so I was doing a lot of—”

“Wait!” I said. “Slow down, please. Let’s get back to helping people make friends. I’m curious why you stopped running the parties. What happened? I ask because all the people doing that today are men: J.T. and the pimps. I haven’t heard about any women.”

“That’s because they took over. The men ruined everything for us. The first one was J.T.’s mama’s cousin, Miss Mae’s cousin. He just decided to start harassing all the women who were making money. I think it was around 1981. He would beat us up if we didn’t pay him money to work out of the building. I had to pay him a few dollars each week to manage my women and throw my parties. He nearly killed my friend because she wouldn’t give him money for doing hairstyling in her apartment. He was real awful. On heroin, used to carry around a big gun, like he was in the movies. And he was a very violent man.”

“So what happened, he took over your parties?”

“Well, all of a sudden, he told me I had to give him fifty percent of what I was making, and he’d protect me—keep the cops away. But I knew he couldn’t keep any cops away. The man was a thug and wasn’t even no good at that. I figured I had been doing it for a while, and so I just gave up and let him have the whole thing. But what I’m saying is that the women ran things around here, before the gangs and the rest of them took over. It was different, because we also helped people.”

“How?”

“See, people like me had a little power. I could get your apartment fixed or get you out of jail, because the cops were my best customers. These folks today, like J.T., they can’t do that.”

“What about Ms. Bailey?”

“Yeah, she can, but she’s just one person. Imagine if you had about fifty people like her doing their thing! Now, that was a sight. Fifty women, all powerful women with no shame. It was a different time. It was a time for women, a place for women.”

For several days after I interviewed Cordella, I kept thinking of what she said: “It was a time for women, a place for women.” Her nostalgia reminded me of how Catrina, Ms. Bailey’s assistant, spoke so reverently of women helping each other in the building.