There Are No Children Here Alex Kotlowitz Read Online

  Commencement Anchor Books Edition, February 1992

Copyright © 1991 by Alex Kotlowitz

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the The states by Anchor Books, a division of Random Business firm, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada past Random House of Canada Express, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the U.s. by Nan A. Talese / Doubleday in 1991. The Ballast Books edition is published by arrangement with Nan A. Talese / Doubleday.

Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

All dates, place names, titles, and events in this account are factual. However, the names of sure individuals have been changed in order to afford them a measure of privacy.

Grateful acknowledgments is made to the post-obit for permission to quote from copyrighted material:

Lyrics from "I Need Dear," past J. Todd Smith. Copyright © 1987 past Def Jam Music Inc. (ASCAP). Used by permission.

Lyrics from "Brand It Final Forever," by Keith Swear and Teddy Riley. Copyright © 1987 by Zomba Enterprises Inc./Donril Music (administered by Zomba Enterprises Inc.). Copyright © 1982 by WB Music Corp. All rights reserved. Used past permission.

Lyrics from "Superwoman," by Baby Face, L. A. Reid, and Daryl Simmons. Copyright © 1988 past Kear Music, Green Skirt Music and Epic/Solar Songs, Inc. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

The verse form "Dream Deferred," reprinted from The Panther and the Lash by Langston Hughes, by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Copyright © 1951 by Langston Hughes.

The articles "How Young Pair Beat out Odds in Public Housing" by Leslie Baldacci and "Gang Fellow member Killed" are reprinted with permission from the Chicago Sun-Times.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Kotlowitz, Alex.

There are no children hither / Alex Kotlowitz. — 1st Anchor Books ed.

p. cm.

"Originally published in hardcover by Nan A. Talese/Doubleday in 1991"—

T.p. verso.

1. Children—Illinois—Chicago—Social conditions—Case studies.

2. Family—Illinois—Chicago—Example studies. three. Inner cities—Illinois—

Chicago—Case studies. I. Title.

[HQ792.U5K683 1992]

305.23′09773′xi—dc20 91-28532

eISBN: 978-0-307-81428-ix

www.anchorbooks.com

v3.1

To my mother and father

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does information technology dry out upward

like a raisin in the dominicus?

Or fester like a sore—

And so run?

Does information technology stink like rotten meat?

Or crust and sugar over—

like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags

like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

—LANGSTON HUGHES

Ah! What would the world be to us

If the children were no more?

We should dread the desert behind us

Worse than the nighttime before.

—HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW

Contents

Encompass

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Preface

Summer 1987

Affiliate I

Affiliate Two

Affiliate Iii

Affiliate Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Autumn 1987–Spring 1988

Chapter Vii

Affiliate 8

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Affiliate Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Summer 1988

Chapter 13

Chapter Xiv

Chapter Fifteen

Fall 1988–Wintertime 1989

Affiliate Sixteen

Affiliate Seventeen

Affiliate Eighteen

Chapter 19

Bound 1989

Chapter Twenty

Affiliate Twenty-one

Affiliate Twenty-two

Chapter 20-3

Chapter Twenty-4

Chapter Twenty-five

Summer 1989

Affiliate Twenty-six

Affiliate Twenty-seven

Chapter Xx-eight

Chapter Twenty-nine

Chapter 30

September 29, 1989

Chapter Thirty-ane

Epilogue

A Note on Reporting Methods

Acknowledgments

Selective Bibliography

Virtually the Writer

Preface

I FIRST MET Lafeyette and Pharoah Rivers during the summertime of 1985. Lafeyette was then ten. Pharoah was 7. 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 ii boys and their mother through a local social services bureau 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. Ane photograph in item struck me: Lafeyette stood in a nighttime hallway of his building. He was wearing a striped tank top, amorphous jeans, and a Kangol cap that was too large for him; his loftier-tops were untied. In his hands was what appeared to be a baseball. And withal, despite the youthful attire, he looked like an old human being. There seemed bottled up inside him a lifetime'southward worth of horrors. His face revealed a restless loneliness.

When I went to meet him and his family, the interview didn't last long—possibly a few hours—considering I was writing simply a short essay to accompany my friend'southward photographs and had over a dozen families to interview in a couple of weeks' time. Merely even during my short stay with Lafeyette, I was unnerved by the relentless neighborhood violence he talked about. In fact, I had trouble assertive it all. And and so I asked Lafeyette what he wanted to be. "If I grow up, I'd similar to be a bus driver," he told me. If, not when. At the age of ten, Lafeyette wasn't sure he'd make information technology to adulthood.

Ii years afterwards, 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 at that place. I spent the summer at Henry Horner, playing basketball with the kids, going to luncheon with them, talking with their parents, and only hanging out. Over those weeks, I became proficient friends with Lafeyette and his brother Pharoah, and our friendship lasted long after the Journal story appeared and, I'thousand 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, get to the movies, and browse in bookstores. Each summertime we take a fishing trip to northern Michigan. And we go along 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 and then said, "Simply you lot know, there are no children hither. 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'due south Defence force Fund. In cities like Chicago, the rate is considerably higher: i of every iii children. Many grow up in neighborhoods similar to Lafeyette and Pharoah's. By the fourth dimension they enter adolescence, they have contended with more terror than most of united states face up in a lifetime. They have had to make choices that most experienced and educated adults would find difficult. They have lived with f

ear and witnessed death. Some of them take lashed out. They take joined gangs, sold drugs, and, in some cases, inflicted pain on others. But they take also played baseball game 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—however 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 bulldoze 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 the states all hear, that it would make us all stop and listen.

This book follows Lafeyette and Pharoah over a two-year menstruum equally they struggle with schoolhouse, 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, information technology is a story that doesn't have a corking and tidy ending. It is, instead, about a beginning, the dawning of two lives. Well-nigh of all, it is a story most two friends.

Summertime 1987

Ane

Nine-Yr-OLD Pharoah Rivers stumbled to his knees. "Give me your hand," ordered his older blood brother, Lafeyette, who was about twelve. "Give me your hand." Pharoah reached upward and grabbed concur of his brother'due south slender fingers, which guided him upward a slippery, narrow trail of dirt and brush.

"C'mon, homo," Lafeyette urged, as his stick-sparse trunk whirled around with a sense of urgency. "Permit's become." He paused to watch Pharoah struggle through a thicket of vines. "Human being, you lot slow." He had little patience for the smaller male child'southward awkwardness. Their friends had already reached the top of the railroad overpass.

It was a warm Saturday afternoon in early June, and this was the children'due south showtime visit to these railroad tracks. The trains passed past at roof level above a corridor of small factories on the urban center'due south near due west side. To reach the tracks the children had to scale a steep mound of earth shoved confronting 1 side of the aging concrete viaduct. Bushes and pocket-size trees grew in the soil aslope the tracks; in some places the brush was ten to fifteen feet thick.

Pharoah clambered to the top, moving apace to please his blood brother, so quickly that he scraped his articulatio genus on the crumbling cement. Equally he stood to test his bruised leg, his head turned from due west to east, following the railroad tracks, 5 in all, leading from the western suburbs to Chicago'south downtown. His wide optics and his cadet teeth, which had earned him the sobriquet Beaver and kept his lips pushed apart, fabricated him seem in awe of the globe.

Looking east, Pharoah marveled at the downtown skyline. With the late afternoon lord's day reflecting off the glass and steel skyscrapers, downtown Chicago glowed in the distance. As he looked south a few blocks, he glimpsed the top floors of his dwelling, a carmine brick, 7-story building. It appeared dull and dirty fifty-fifty in the brilliant sun. Further southward, he could simply brand out his elementary school and the towering spire of the First Congregational Baptist Church, a 118-year-old building that he'd been told had been a stop on the Underground Railroad. The view, he thought, was pretty great.

Just he presently was distracted by more immediate matters. A black-and-yellow butterfly wove effortlessly through the air current. Stock-still on its dance, Pharoah stared silently for minutes, until a rising summertime breeze carried it away. The arable clumps of white and lavender wildflowers that grew forth the rails soon won his attention, and so he aptitude downward to bear on the soft petals, to finger the vines as if to measure their growth. He breathed in the smell of the blossoming wood anemones, then licked a salty drop of perspiration that had dropped from his brow. The humidity had already begun to tire him.

Lafeyette jostled his brother from behind. "Stop it," Pharoah screeched, swatting at his brother as if he were an abrasive pest. Lafeyette reached for Pharoah, only the younger one scampered away. Lafeyette laughed. He could be rough in his play, which annoyed Pharoah. Sometimes, their mother chosen Lafeyette "Aggravatin'," every bit in "Aggravatin', get over hither," or "Aggravatin', stop aggravatin' your blood brother." Lafeyette took the ribbing good-naturedly.

He thrust a crowbar into Pharoah'due south hands, one of four they and their six friends had dragged to the height of the viaduct. They had ventured onto these railroad tracks only in one case before, and and so merely to explore. Dorsum and so, though, they hadn't had a mission.

The eight boys carve up into pairs, trying to be soft itinerant, simply in the excitement their whispers speedily turned to muffled shouts every bit their arms hacked away at the high weeds. One male child walked tightrope forth a rail, his young limbs angle and twisting with each gust of wind. His companions ordered him down.

Pharoah glued himself to his cousin Leonard Anderson, whom everyone chosen Porkchop. A couple of years younger than Pharoah, Porkchop was unusually quiet and shy, though filled with a nervous energy that kept him in constant motion. He grinned rather than talked. The cousins were inseparable; when they met after school—each attended a different one—they frequently greeted each other with a warm embrace.

Lafeyette wandered off with James Howard, a shut friend, who lived in the aforementioned building. They had grown up together and knew each other well, though James, a wiry, able-bodied boy, was a yr older than Lafeyette and was much more active. He also was a more than easygoing boy than Lafeyette; his mischievous grin spanned the width of his face in the shape of a crescent moon.

Lafeyette and James found what they thought might be a good spot, a pocket-size blank patch in the brown dirt. Lafeyette plunged the short stop of the crowbar into the footing. He did it again. And again. The soil gave manner but a couple of inches with each plunge of the makeshift shovel. James fell to his knees. His small hands unearthed a few more inches, taking over for Lafeyette and the crowbar. Zippo.

"Daaag," muttered James, clearly disappointed. "There ain't zip up here." Again, they noisily plowed through the weeds.

The boys were looking for snakes. For another 60 minutes, they dug hole subsequently pigsty in the hard soil, determined not to become dwelling house empty-handed. They figured that a garter serpent would do well at home as a pet; later all, they thought, the snake neither bites nor grows to a great length. The boys had got the idea for this urban safari when last year an older friend named William had nabbed a garter snake and showed it off to all the kids. William allow them affect information technology and agree it and spotter it slither across the brownish linoleum tiles of their building's breezeway. Lafeyette had never touched such an animal before, and he and the others had eagerly crowded around William's pet, admiring its yellow-and-black coat and its darting orange tongue. William died a few months later when a friend, fooling around with a revolver he thought was unloaded, shot William in the back of the head. Lafeyette never learned what happened to the snake.

The boys' search turned upwards picayune, though that might have been expected; they had never seen a serpent in the wild and didn't actually know where to expect. Merely they did discover iii small white eggs resting on the basis, and debated whether they held infant reptiles or birds. James spotted the only animal of the afternoon, a pes-long rat. It had scampered alongside the tracks, sniffing for a treasure of its own.

Bored past the fruitless search, Pharoah and Porkchop had long ago wandered to a stretch along the tracks where there was a ten-foot-loftier stack of worn automobile tires. The cousins scrambled in and out of the shallow rubber tunnels created by the tires. Porkchop, the more daring of the two, climbed to the top of the pile, bouncing off the tires with abandon. Pharoah stood to the side, watching his cousin's antics, until a sparrow began to wing over his head in what seemed like threatening loops. Pharoah screamed with a mixture of fear and delight every bit he tried to avert the dive-bombing playmate.

James, who had also given up the chase, hoisted himself into an empty boxcar on one of the sidetracks. As Lafeyette tried to follow, a friend sighted a driver railroad train budgeted from dow

ntown. "In that location'due south a railroad train!" he yelled. James aimlessly helped Lafeyette climb into the open boxcar, where they found refuge in a dark corner. Others hid behind the boxcar'southward huge wheels. Pharoah and Porkchop threw themselves headlong into the weeds, where they lay motionless on their bellies. "Keep repose," came a phonation from the thick bushes. "Shut upward," another barked.

The youngsters had heard that the suburb-bound commuters, from behind the tinted train windows, would shoot at them for trespassing on the tracks. One of the boys, certain that the commuters were crack shots, burst into tears as the train whisked by. Some of the commuters had heard similar rumors near the neighborhood children and worried that, similar the cardboard lions in a funfair shooting gallery, they might be the target of talented snipers. Indeed, some sat away from the windows equally the train passed through Chicago'southward blighted cadre. For both the boys and the commuters, the unknown was the enemy.

The train passed without incident, and soon near of the boys had joined James and Lafeyette in the boxcar, sitting in the doorway, their rangy legs dangling over the side. Lafeyette and James giggled at a private joke, their thin bodies shivering with laughter.

Pharoah was too small to climb into the car, so he crouched in the weeds nearby, his legs tucked underneath him, and picked at the vegetation, which at present reached his neck. He was lost in his thoughts, thoughts then private and fanciful that he would have had trouble articulating them to others. He didn't want to leave this identify, the sweet smell of the wildflowers and the diving sparrow. There was a certain tranquillity here, a peacefulness that extended into the horizon like the straight, silvery runway. In later months, with the memory of the identify made that much gentler by the passage of time, Pharoah would come to savor this sanctuary even more than.

None of the boys was quite prepare to call it a day, but the lord's day had descended in the sky, and nighttime here was unsafe. Reluctantly, they gathered the crowbars, slid down the embankment, and, as Lafeyette took Pharoah's hand to cross the ane decorated street, began the short trek home.

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