Gang Leader for a Day (27 page)

I was also still reeling from the fact that I had alienated so many people around J.T.’s territory. I was feeling guilty, and I needed to get people back on my side again.

Of all the people in the projects, I had the least experience spending time with young women, particularly single mothers. I was a bit nervous, particularly because Ms. Bailey, Ms. Mae, and other older women warned me not to get too close to the young women. They felt that the women would begin looking to me as a source of support.

In the beginning the group convened wherever we could—in someone’s apartment, at a diner, outside under a tree. At first there were five women in the group, and then we grew to roughly a dozen as more people heard about it. The meetings were pretty casual, and attendance could be spotty, since the women had family and work obligations.

From the outset it was an emotional experience. The women wrote and spoke openly about their struggles. Each of them had at least a couple of children, which generally meant at least one “baby daddy” who wasn’t in the picture. Each of them had a man in her life who’d been either jailed or killed. They spoke of in-laws who demanded that the women give up their children to the father’s family, some of whom were willing to use physical force to claim the children.

Their material hardships were overwhelming. Most of them earned no more than ten thousand dollars a year, a combination of welfare payments and food stamps. Some worked part-time, and others took in boarders who paid cash or, nearly as valuable, provided day care so the young women could work, run errands, or just have a little time for themselves.

The most forceful stories were the tales of abuse. Every single woman had been beaten up by a boyfriend (who was usually drunk at the time), some almost fatally. Every one of them had lived in fear for days or weeks, waiting for the same man to return.

One cold autumn evening, we congregated at a local diner. We found a large table in the back, where it was quiet. The owner was by now accustomed to our presence, and he didn’t mind that we stayed for hours. If business was particularly good, he’d feed us all night long and then waive the tab. He and I had struck up a friendship—I often came to the diner to write up my field notes— and he liked the fact that I was trying to help tenants.

The theme of this week’s essay was “How I Survive.” Tanya was the first to read from her journal. She was twenty years old, a high-school dropout with two children. She’d stayed with her mother after the first child was born but eventually got her own apartment in the same building, then had a second baby. She didn’t know the whereabouts of the first father; the second had died in a gang shooting. In her essay she bragged about how she earned twice her welfare income by taking in boarders.

“But sometimes it doesn’t go so well, Sudhir,” said one of the other women, Sarina, who liked to be the voice of reason. She stared down Tanya as she spoke. Sarina had three children, the fathers of whom were, respectively, in jail, dead, and unwilling to pay child support. So she, too, had taken in boarders. “I remember when my brother came into the house, he started dealing dope and they caught him. Almost took my lease away.”

“Yeah, but that’s just because you didn’t pay the building manager enough money,” Tanya said. “Or I think that it was because you didn’t sleep with him!”

“Well, I’m not doing either one of those things,” Sarina said in a moralistic tone, shaking her head.

“You got some nerve,” interrupted Keisha. “Sarina, you put your ass out there for any man who comes looking.” At twenty-six, Keisha was one of the oldest women in the group. Even though she had grown angry with me for sharing information about hustlers with Ms. Bailey, she hadn’t held the grudge for long. She had two daughters and was the best writer in the group, a high-school graduate now planning to apply to Roosevelt College. “Hell, there ain’t no difference between some ho selling her shit and you taking some man in your house for money.”

“Hey,
that’s
survival!” Tanya said. “I mean, that’s what we’re here to talk about, right?”

“Okay,” I jumped in, trying to establish some order. “What’s the best way for you to take care of whatever you need to? Give me the top ten ways you survive.”

Sarina began. “Always make sure you know someone at the CHA you can turn to when you can’t make rent. It helps, because you could get evicted.”

“Yeah, and if you have to sleep with a nigger downtown, then you got to do it,” said Keisha. “Because if you don’t, they
will
put your kids on the street.”

Sarina went on, ignoring Keisha. “You got to make sure you can get clothes and food and diapers for your kids,” she said. “Even if you don’t have money. So you need to have good relations with stores.”

“Make sure Ms. Bailey’s always getting some dick!” Keisha shouted, laughing hard.

“You know, one time I had to let her sleep with
my
man so I wouldn’t get kicked out of the building,” Chantelle said.

“That’s awful,” I said.

“Yeah,” Chantelle said. “And he almost left me, too, when he found out that Ms. Bailey could get him a job and would let him stay up there and eat all her food.” Chantelle was twenty-one. Her son had learning disabilities, so she was struggling to find a school that could help him. She worked part-time at a fast-food restaurant and depended on her mother and grandmother for day care and cash.

Chantelle’s hardships weren’t uncommon in the projects. Unfortunately, neither was her need to appease Ms. Bailey. The thought that a tenant had to let the building president sleep with her partner was alarming to me. But among these women such indignities weren’t rare. To keep your own household intact, they said, you had to keep Ms. Bailey happy and well paid. As I heard more stories similar to Chantelle’s, I found myself growing angry at Ms. Bailey and the other LAC officials. I asked Chantelle and the other women why they didn’t challenge Ms. Bailey. Their answer made perfect sense: When it became obvious that the housing authority supported a management system based on extortion and corruption, the women decided their best option was to shrug their shoulders and accept their fate.

I found it unconscionable that such a regime existed, but I wasn’t going to confront Ms. Bailey either. She was too powerful. And so while the women’s anger turned into despair, my disgust began to morph into bitterness.

The women’s list of survival techniques went well beyond ten. Keep cigarettes in your apartment so you can pay off a squatter to fix things when they break. Let your child pee in the stairwell to keep prostitutes from congregating there at night. Let the gangs pay you to store drugs and cash in your apartment. (The risk of apprehension, the women concurred, was slim.)

Then there were all the resources to be procured in exchange for sex: groceries from the bodega owner, rent forgiveness from the CHA, assistance from a welfare bureaucrat, preferential treatment from a police officer for a jailed relative. The women’s explanation for using sex as currency was consistent and pragmatic: If your child was in danger of going hungry, then you did whatever it took to fix the problem. The women looked pained when they discussed using their bodies to obtain these necessities; it was clear that this wasn’t their first—or even their hundredth—preference.

“Always know somebody at the hospital,” Tanya blurted out. “Always have somebody you can call, because that ambulance never comes. And when you get there, you need to pay somebody, or else you’ll be waiting in line forever!”

“Yes, that’s true, and the people at the hospital can give you free baby food,” Sarina said. “Usually you need to meet them in the back alley. And I’d say you should keep a gun or a knife hidden, in case your man starts beating you. Because sometimes you have to do something to get him to stop.”

“You’ve had to use a knife before?” I asked. No one had spoken or written about this yet. “How often?”

“Many times!” Sarina looked at me as if I’d grown up on Mars. “When these men start drinking, you can’t talk to them. You just need to protect yourself—and don’t forget, they’ll beat up the kids, too.”

Keisha started to cry. She dropped her head into her lap and covered up so no one could see. Sarina leaned over and hugged her.

“The easiest time is when they’re asleep,” Tanya said. “They’re lying there, mostly because they’ve passed out drunk. That’s when it runs through your mind. You start thinking, ‘I could end it right here. I could kill the motherfucker, right now. Then he can’t beat me no more.’ I think about it a lot.”

Keisha wiped her eyes. “I stabbed that nigger because I couldn’t take it no more. Wasn’t anybody helping me. Ms. Bailey said she couldn’t do nothing, the police said they couldn’t do nothing. And this man was coming around beating me and beating my baby for no reason. I couldn’t think of any other way, couldn’t think of nothing else to do. . . .”

She began to sob again. Sarina escorted her to the bathroom.

“She sent her man to the hospital,” Tanya quietly explained. “Almost killed him. One night he was asleep on the couch—he had already sent
her
to the hospital a few times, broke her ribs, she got stitches and bruises all over her body. She grabbed that knife and kept putting it in his stomach. He got up and ran out the apartment. I think one of J.T.’s boys took him to the hospital. He’s a BK.”

Because the boyfriend was a senior gang member, Tanya said, J.T. refused to pressure him to stop beating Keisha. She still lived in fear that the man would return.

 
 

One day Ms. Bailey called and asked that I come to a building-wide meeting with her tenants. She hadn’t invited me to such a meeting in more than a year, so I figured something important was afoot.

I hadn’t been keeping up with Ms. Bailey’s tenant meetings in part because I’d already amassed sufficient information on these gatherings and also because, in all honesty, I’d grown uncomfortable watching the horse-trading schemes that she and other tenant leaders used to manage the community.

My own life was also starting to evolve. I had moved in with my girlfriend, Katchen, and we were thinking about getting married. Visiting our relatives—mine in California and hers in Montana— took time away from my fieldwork, including much of our summers and vacations. My parents were thrilled, and they pushed me to think seriously about starting a family along with a career. Katchen was applying to law school; neither of us was ready for children just yet.

And then there was the matter of my dissertation, which I still had to write. I began to meet more regularly with Bill Wilson and other advisers to see whether I could plausibly move toward wrapping up my graduate study.

 
 

Ms. Bailey’s office was packed for the meeting when I arrived, with a few dozen people in attendance, all talking excitedly. As usual, most of them were older women, but there were also several men standing in the back. I recognized a couple of them as the partners of women in the building; it was unusual to see these men at a public meeting. Ms. Bailey waved me up front, pointing me to the chair next to hers.

“Okay,” she said, “Sudhir has agreed to come here today so we can clear this up.”

I was taken aback. Clear
what
up? Everyone was suddenly staring at me, and they didn’t look happy.

“Why are you sleeping with my daughter?” shouted a woman I didn’t recognize. “Tell me, goddamn it! Why are you fucking my baby?”

“Answer the woman!” someone else hollered. I couldn’t tell who was talking, but it didn’t matter: I was in a state of shock.

One man, addressing me as “Arab,” told me I should get out of the neighborhood for good and especially leave alone their young women. Other people joined in:

“Nigger, get out of here!”

“Arab, go home!”

“Get the fuck out, Julio!”

Ms. Bailey tried to restore order. Amid the shouting she yelled out that I would explain myself.

I was still confused. “Let Sudhir tell you why he’s meeting them!”

Ms. Bailey said, and then I understood: It was the writing workshop. People had seen me picking up the young women and driving away with them. Apparently they thought I was sleeping with them, or maybe pimping them out.

As I tried to explain the writing workshop, I kept getting drowned out. I began to feel scared. I had seen how a mob of tenants nearly tore apart the Middle Eastern shopkeeper who’d slept with Boo-Boo’s daughter.

Ms. Bailey finally made herself heard above the riot. “He’s trying to tell you that he’s just helping them with homework!”

That quieted everyone down a little bit. But still, I was stung: Why weren’t any of the women from the workshop in attendance? Why hadn’t anyone come to defend me, to tell the truth?

After a few more minutes, things having calmed down a bit, Ms. Bailey told me to leave. There was other business to take care of, she said, laughing—at me—and clearly enjoying herself at my expense.

Leaving the building that night, I wondered how much more time I could afford to spend in J.T.’s territory. It was hard to think of any tenants who
weren’t
angry with me.

SEVEN

Of all the relationships I’d developed during my time at Robert Taylor, it turned out that the strongest one by far was my bond with J.T. As unusual and as morally murky as this relationship may have been, it was also undeniably powerful. Our years together had produced a close relationship. This bond would become even more intimate, to the point that J.T. felt personally indebted to me, when I had the opportunity to help save the life of one of his closest friends.

It was a classic Chicago summer afternoon: a cloudless sky, the muggy air broken occasionally by a soft lake breeze. I was hanging around at Robert Taylor, outside J.T.’s building, along with perhaps a hundred other people. Tenants were barbecuing, playing softball, and taking comfort in the cool shadow of the building. Few apartments had a working air conditioner, so on a day like this the lawn got more and more crowded as the day wore on.