Category Archives: gangs

children, community, gangs, gardens, Uncategorized

Now and Then

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Things remain fairly quiet in the neighborhood, although there was some encroachment on the garden. Or, more accurately, the park. Because that’s what our lot came to be. You may remember, if you’ve been following our story, that a huge branch had fallen from the mulberry some time before we started Green on McLean. On our second workday, some of the neighborhood men used their chainsaws to cut it into “stumps” that we grouped under the magnolia for people to sit on. Soon, dog owners took to sitting on the stumps while their dogs ran around the grass. Mothers sat and talked with each other while their kids played tag. Then, at one of our garden parties, the father of a couple of young teenagers hung a tire swing from a high branch of the mulberry, and the neighborhood kids started to use it. We also had a few older guys who sat on the stumps in the early morning and drank their beer. They filled watering jugs and helped keep the lot cleaned up. The garden is a source of great pride and it gives the kids something to do, but the “park” has become equally important.

We were warned from the beginning that the gangs would co-opt the seats, but it didn’t happen, not for a long time. We learned that our particular gang leader, the older guy who was clearly in charge of the youngbloods, had been keeping them out of the garden. Then that leader disappeared, along with most of the gangbangers. It seemed to happen suddenly but was actually the last stage of a long, hard struggle.

However, there were a few of the younger guys who showed up on the corner from time to time. After awhile it became clear that they were on duty, probably to redirect potential customers to another selling point. It was two of these younger guys that the kids and I had to throw out. (Bits of the Neighborhood and Pieces of My Life) It was other guys like these who started sitting on the stumps under the magnolia when it was hot or when they got tired of standing on the corner. (The only other place to sit is the fire hydrant, and it’s not exactly comfortable.) Someone even put gang signs on the stumps with a Sharpie.

After three of the kids reported guys smoking dope while the kids were watering the garden, we decided the stumps had to go. Beth, one of our garden supporters, asked for a stay of execution and proposed scattering the stumps around the lot, more out in the open and not together. That seems to be working.

If you’re wondering why we have to throw out guys for smoking dope–especially when we let the older guys drink their beer in the garden in the morning–I’ve decided to put in another remembrance of things past. This is a bit of a journal I kept just a couple of years ago.

June 17th   I hate waking up to something that might, or might not, be gunshots. Especially in the early hours of the morning. Michael was sure they were, and I had to admit that they didn’t sound like firecrackers, so we called 911. They always ask how many shots. I wonder why. It makes sense that they ask how many people when we report that the gang guys are arguing or drinking or smoking dope in the street. The police have to know what they’re walking into. But when we call about shots, why is the first question “how many?”

About five minutes later, there was another volley. This time it was pretty clear that they were shots. We called 911 again.

June 18th   It was a night. The gang guys were “loud-talking” until the early hours. Mac says that’s what it’s called these days. It’s a fairly descriptive term. They don’t actually shout, but somehow they make their voices heard all over the neighborhood. And, of course, they use the f-word as though it were “the” or “and.” I don’t actually mind the obscenity. There’s no connection between their use of that word and anything resembling sex. I mind the anger and violence behind it.

Anyway, it was a long night. I was awake for way too much of it. I called 911 a few times and then did a lot of deep breathing. I thought about my book. I even worked out a new approach to the introduction. I fell asleep sometime before the sun rose.

 June 19   Michael had to leave for work at the crack of dawn. I slept too late and then called the doc and left a message asking him to call the pharmacy and okay my Paxil refill. The morning was cool and grey, and I decided to cook the pot roast I had thawing in the refrigerator. It’s some special grass-fed beef Michael got from one of his horticultural friends. I put it in the oven about 1:00 and an hour later the day had turned warm and muggy.

Michael left Mac and me the car today when he went downtown, so we abandoned the spelling program around 4 o’clock and went shopping. Mac picked up cat food at PetSmart while I bought half a yard of fabric that I may eventually make into a scarf. Then we went to the thrift shop. Michael met us there because it’s only two blocks from his El stop, and we drove home to eat pot roast. My shrink called on the way home to ask how I was doing before he okayed my Paxil refill. I was strongly tempted to refer him to Buddha [one of the gang leaders], but I just said I was getting better.

Mac and Michael dropped me at Armitage Produce because I needed some carrots. All I had at home were those expensive little baby carrots, and you don’t put them in a pot roast. On the way from Armitage Produce to our house, I passed a cluster of gang guys at the Quicker Liquor corner. They pretended they didn’t see me.

I only made one 911 call tonight.

 June 20   It was a green tarp night. The tarp went up over the yard across the alley at about 4 in the afternoon. Before long, the sound system had cranked up, and the oompah loompah music was blaring so loud it was hard to talk over it. Michael and I stayed outside as long as we could because the evening was pleasant and the garden was beautiful. Then we went inside and ate leftover pot roast while we did his show prep. Before I went upstairs, I found a window fan and took it up. With that in the bedroom window, and earplugs in my ears, the noise was pretty much bearable. I fell asleep.

 June 22 It was very quiet last night. At any rate, nothing got through the fan and the earplugs. This morning, Mac and I went to the diner on Western to have breakfast and work. I feel a lot better when I’m out of the neighborhood, even in the morning, when nothing’s going on anyway. From the diner, we went downtown.

Down at the County Archives, I looked through criminal records for our genealogical client. While I was staring at the microfiche reader, I struck up a conversation with a guy waiting for a divorce record for his buddy in Arizona. Or really, I think he struck up a conversation with me. He was waiting for the clerk to find his papers and he was bored. He was also mad because he was a cop and he’d been dissed by a CTA employee.

We ended up talking about the Imperial Gangstas because that’s what I do these days. I talk about the gang. I think about them, worry about them, hate them, and talk about them. The guy told me not to give up. He also said he was a scene of the crime officer and, when there wasn’t a scene of the crime for him to go to, he drove around the North Side. Sometimes he just parked and provided a “police presence.” He said he’d come to our neighborhood tonight. I felt like crying with gratitude. I also worried that there wouldn’t be any gang activity and he’d think I was a nut.

Olga called while Mac and I were coming out of the archives, and our phone connection was terrible, but I finally got the message. Olga had gone on the Chicago Police Department website to look for another number for the District. When she saw a place to click to see Chicago’s Most Wanted, she clicked. She recognized the first face that came up. She says it’s one of the new guys[older gang members who had just got out of prison] that are hanging out at 3516. She recognized him immediately. He’s wanted for murder.

Mac and I went across the street to get some tea and see if we could connect to the net. We did. Thank God for free WiFi. I went to the CPD site and found the Most Wanted. I didn’t recognize anybody. Of course, it hadn’t occurred to me to ask Olga for a name.

I’d feel hopeful, thinking maybe Olga’s imagination was burgeoning under the stress, but the fact is that I haven’t been making eye contact lately. Osama Bin Laden could be hanging out on the porch and I doubt that I would recognize him.

So, I came home and made myself a cold dinner and went out onto the front porch. Michael had a softball game and a Godot rehearsal. I accessed the CPD site and pulled up Chicago’s Most Wanted. Then I did some research on my book. When anyone showed up at 3516 or 3519, I went back and looked at the Most Wanted list. I felt ridiculous.

This evening there were only the younger guys.

. . . . . . .

That’s as far as I got on the journal. I realized that writing about the gang every day was starting to make me obsess. Now, you probably think I was obsessing already, but this was a whole new level. I didn’t need to be bringing my focus onto the gang once a day when they were always there, filling up the background of my life.

So I stopped writing the journal and just made notes from time to time. Most of it is way too clear in my memory anyway. Indelibly etched, to coin a phrase.

Anyway, I called Officer Torres at the 14th and told her about Mr. Most Wanted, Fernando X. She put me on hold while she called a detective, and I talked to him. He gave me his cell and told me to call him if there was any other information. Within a few days there was.

Obed Garcia told his wife that she was right. X was visiting 3516. As a father. The four beautiful children next door were his, and while he was in hiding, wanted for murder, he came by to see them. Obed got the information from one of the guys hanging out there. I passed it on to the detective.

And then, for a long time, nothing happened. That is, no progress was made. Plenty happened. I continued to watch drug deals going down in front of our house, standing two or three feet behind the beveled glass in our Victorian-era wooden door, under the crystal chandelier I had restrung with bright green and dark amber beads. Michael and I continued to wake up at 3:00 AM under the quilt my mother made and the bedspread my grandmother crocheted and grope for the phone to call 911.

We learned how to get the 911 dispatcher to pay attention and get the squad cars there. We had long since stopped using words like “kids,” “guys,” and “people.” We said “gang member.” “Gang members on the corner of St. Louis and McLean.” “Gang members hanging out on the porch of 3516 W. McLean.” “Gang members in the street, 3500 block of McLean.” Now we also stressed escalating arguments and potential violence. “No, I can’t see whether they have weapons, but it’s starting to sound pretty scary.”

And that was true. It was scary. But less than two months later came the event that would begin the change in our neighborhood. It started with a CAPS meeting held on our corner. Two squad cars, three police officers, thirty neighbors and friends, and State Representative Luis Arroyo met and talked. I’ll go into more detail about how that happened and what followed in the next blog.

children, gangs, gardens, Uncategorized

Bits of the Neighborhood and Pieces of My Life

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I was standing in the darkening garden next to Jose from down the street as Michael projected our garden videos, one after another, for the three dozen or so neighbors who had come to the party. A few of the kids were still playing on the swing that Marco’s family hung from one of the branches of the mulberry tree, and their squeals interrupted the strains of Jean Goldkette & Orchestra’s 1927 recording of “I’m Looking over a Four-Leaf Clover” playing in the background of one of the videos. I looked over at Jose and said, “It’s really been quiet lately.” He nodded.

“Of course, they might come back,” I went on, not wanting to seem foolish to a man who has lived in the neighborhood longer than I have and has had to raise a son here.

He looked over at me and said, “How long have you lived here?”

“Eleven years.”

“It’s never been like this before. I’ve been here since 1996. It’s never been like this before.”

. . . . . . . . . .

Yesterday, I was taking the Fullerton bus back from a chiropractor’s appointment. Four Latino boys of fourteen or fifteen were sitting near me, laughing and joking with each other, passing chips back and forth, and generally having a good time. They weren’t loud, just happy. Beside one of them sat a middle-aged woman who looked a great deal like African American presidential candidate Shirley Chisholm. She was beaming at the boys for blocks and then miles. At Kedzie, she stood up to leave the bus. But first, she turned in the aisle to face the boys.

“I have been listening to you, and you have not used any vulgar language. Good job. Keep up the good work.” Still beaming, she got off at her stop.

One of the boys turned to another and said, “What did she mean?”

“She meant we weren’t cursing.”

“We’re too smart,” said the first boy, laughing. And it occurred to me that he was absolutely right. The understanding that cursing on the bus is not cool is a major survival tool.

. . . . . . . . . .

It was Tuesday afternoon a week ago, I think, when four of the garden kids, boys between the ages of five and ten, came to our door. They told me with considerable concern that some guys were smoking in the garden. I have to admit that this didn’t seem all that terrible to me, but the boys practically pulled me to the garden. When we got there, I saw two young gangbangers about fourteen years old, sitting on the stumps under our magnolia tree. They were both familiar to me, and I actually knew one of them from when he very occasionally came for books several years ago.

I began my explanation of why it was important to keep the garden a safe place, but Florian  broke in. He is a serious, sturdy boy of nine years whose father moved to South Dakota to get away from his own gang involvement. Florian spoke directly to the boy I knew a little.

“Our mom won’t let us come down here if anything bad happens here. And we’ve worked really hard on this garden. We need to be able to come here. Do you understand?”

Sean, Florian’s equally sturdy and serious seven year-old brother, spoke then. “Yeah, Alexander. We worked really hard.”

As he talked, Sean patted Alexander’s shoulder, comforting him as he told him that he had to get out of the garden. Then Florian, Sean and I went back to my house, where LeDaryl and Damian were waiting on the stoop. They all started talking and suddenly I heard the word marijuana.”

“They were smoking weed?” I asked. The boys looked at me as though I was a little slow, which I clearly was. Then they assured me that what the gangbangers had been smoking was not a tobacco product.

I lit out back to the garden and there they were, Alexander passing a Swisher Sweet to his fellow banger. (That’s how marijuana is smoked in our neighborhood. The guys use tweezers to pull out a good part of the tobacco and then put in the weed.)

“Get out of the garden,” I said. “Now. Get out of the garden. You heard what the boys said, and now you do this. Go on. Get out.”

They got up, moving slowly, as only two teenaged boys saving face could move, walked their bikes out of the garden and rode off. They haven’t been in there since, but Florian made me promise that, if they come back, I’ll call the cops. I’d rather put my hand in a bucket of hot lead, so I talked to Mabel and Juan. They’re both former gangbangers who continue to have friends in the gangs. Both of them assured me that they would take care of it. When I saw Alexander a couple of days later, he smiled and waved . . . from outside the garden. Let’s just hope.

children, gangs, gardens

Gang Kryptonite

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My last post was about the dark night of this neighborhood’s soul.  I’ll have to go back to that dark night again as I write, but you should know that the worst of it ended for us about two years ago. I’ll explain that later, probably soon. And I don’t mean that all the danger has ended, but something else has begun. We made a garden.

The corner of St. Louis and McLean has been a gang/drug selling corner since the 1960s. The neighborhood and the cops have been trying to clean it up for almost that whole time. Trying to get rid of a long established sales point is not easy. Buyers know where it is and just keep showing up, ready to buy. So the gangs just keep showing up to sell. There’s a great deal of money at stake. To make things worse, there was a vacant lot on the southwest corner of the intersection. For ten years, after the building at that location burned to the ground, the double lot was a home to weeds, junk trees, trash . . . and gangbangers.

Then Michael, my friend Mac, and our neighbor Olga decided to make a community garden. They were joined by some people they’d met at the CAPS (Chicago Alternative Policing Strategy) meetings–Libby, Sean, Gin, Beth, James, and others. They wanted the vacant lot as a garden site, but it took awhile to get permission from the owner, and then he agreed to let the garden group have it only until he sold it.  The group agreed.

Cleanup began in May. Creating beds and planting happened on Memorial Day in the sweltering heat. And the rest, as they say, is history.  Amazingly, everyone in the neighborhood immediately recognized that the garden was, as Michael put it, gang Kryptonite. All the neighbors felt free to come onto the lot, sit on the stumps we provided under the magnolia, plant things in the garden when no one else was around, including tomatoes and a small blue pinwheel. Parents who otherwise kept their children in their own backyards allowed the kids to come down to the garden.

The gangbangers stood and watched. Sometimes, they talked to us as we worked, but they did not come onto the lot.

One day early on, I was talking to a former gangbanger I knew who had got a job so he would be allowed to see his kids. Let’s call him Joe. As we talked, a current gangbanger–let’s call him Jack–came up to join us. Joe and I were talking about fences. We hadn’t put any up, and I explained that some of the kids were worried about the garden. About someone hurting the garden.

Jack, who is big and tough and not the sharpest tack in the box, immediately said, “Why’d anybody hurt this? This is good. This is a good thing.” Shades of Martha Stewart.

Joe looked at me and then at Jack. “Young ones,” he said. “You know, young kids.” We both knew this wasn’t about crazy young kids, but there are a lot of things that don’t get said when you’re talking with gangbangers.

“Oh, yeah,” said Jack. “Kids. But you don’t wanna put up a gate. I hate gates. There’s gates everywhere. You put up gates, nobody can see the good things. They just feel shut out. No gates means trust.” I am not making this up. That’s what he said, in words I made a note of as soon as I got home.

We never did put up any fences. Or gates. And the gang guys never came into the garden.

Then one day it looked as though the Kryptonite might be losing its power. Mac and I were sitting in the garden one morning talking about our next work session when a teenager and his pregnant girlfriend came into the garden. Mac and I smiled and kept on talking. They sat on stumps not far from us and started passing back and forth a Swisher Sweet. The boy tried to start up a conversation. Mac and I were pleasant but went on with our discussion. Then, under the smell of the little cigar, I was 90 percent sure I smelled dope. Mac and I got up to leave and I turned to the boy, who had introduced himself as, say, Charlie.

“Charlie, I’m going to talk straight to you. Nothing bad can happen in this garden, do you understand? It’s important that the parents let their kids come down here, and they won’t if bad things are happening here. Okay?”

He nodded and they left the garden in one direction as we left in the other.

It wasn’t much, but I felt I had to follow up on it. So, the next day, when I saw the gang leader, let’s call him “Jerry,” I invited him to come into the garden to talk with me. I explained what I was concerned about.

“I know that,” he said. “I been keeping the guys out. This place is for the kids. I tell them that. This place is for the kids, not you. You go over to the park.” Then he went on to tell me that he wouldn’t bring his own kids into our neighborhood and said a few very frank things about gangbanging and violence.

We shook hands and he went back to his group. Later that day, I was limbing up junk trees on the west side of the lot. Jerry crossed the lot and asked if I needed some help. I told him I only had one pair of loppers, but thanks anyway. He hasn’t come into the garden since.

I don’t think we could have made the garden two years ago, when the worst of things were happening. But the gangs came back this year after a quiet year and a half, and the people were ready for some way to show that it was not okay, that this was their place. In fact, the day I was limbing up those junk trees, two teenaged girls were weeding the sun garden a little ways away. A mother went by pushing a stroller and said something I didn’t hear. I went over and asked Veranice and Vanessa what she said.

“She thanked us,” said Veranice, “for making the garden to show the gangbangers its our place before its theirs.”

Everybody  knew. The garden wasn’t about tomatoes.

If there’s any point to this blog at all, it’s to say that people actually can reclaim their neighborhoods. The gangs do not always win. They’re nowhere near as powerful as people who are willing to keep fighting them. And the weapons are as varied as murals, 911 calls, visits to the alderman, CAPS meetings, and gardens.

And to give you a taste of the garden, here’s a little video of one of our early workdays.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZjy6ZW9Bxs&w=425&h=349]

If you want to see more about the garden, you can go to Green on McLean.

children, gangs

The Start of the Gang House Era

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For the first couple of years we lived here, the gangbangers were at the corner. They seldom came to the middle of the block, where our house is. But they were a constant presence, affecting our lives in many ways beyond the obvious. My friend and collaborator, Mac Austin, didn’t feel completely comfortable walking to and from our house in the evening. There was often a cloud of marijuana smoke between us and the corner store. And then there were the kids.

For a time, the kids in the neighborhood came running into our backyard when they heard us there, showing off their latest skills or looking for praying mantids (Michael attached an egg sac to one of our bushes). A friend threw a bridal shower in our backyard and the children invaded it. After being fed petit fours, they ran away and then reappeared with notes and pictures for the bride-to-be. When one of the boys, Julian, found a wounded bird, he brought it to our yard to recover. From time to time, one of the kids would just come in and sit.

Sometimes they drove us crazy. I liked to have an occasional cigarette with my friend Mac, but I was completely unwilling for the kids to see the booklady smoking, so I crushed more than one three-inch butt into the sod as I heard kid feet in the gangway. Michael yearned for a little more peace but never had the heart to shoo the kids away. All in all, though, they were our main connection to the neighborhood, and we enjoyed them.

And then we figured out that our gangway was the only escape route on the block for gangbangers fleeing the police. Everyone else had a fence or a locked gate, so the bangers ran down our gangway and through our backyard to the alley, usually in the middle of the night. If we didn’t want to abet the gang, we needed to put in a locked gate. We did, and life changed. The kids lost the freedom of the garden, we lost the kids in the garden, and the gang may have had a little more trouble getting away from the cops. Hard to tell.

On the morning of September 11, 2001, Michael and I experienced the same range of shock and horror that the rest of the country did. Since both of us are free-lancers and didn’t have an office to go to, we went to LifeSource blood center. Many, many others had the same impulse. The parking lot was full of people lined up to give blood. I bought a disposable camera at the Walgreen’s across the street. Black and white. It seemed right to me to record history with a black and white camera. I took pictures of the college students, old hippies, and others who didn’t know whether their blood would be needed or not but who had to do something. We stayed there all day, waiting to give, and then we went back to the neighborhood.

I had the camera in my hand when the kids ran up to our porch, laughing and wanting me to come up with a game for them. At that moment I could think of nothing I wanted more than watching them play circus animals. As the elephants swung their trunks and the lions roared, I took pictures of them. This was the real historical moment, the last evening these children would have before they went to school and were told that the world had changed forever. I didn’t know that’s what it was until the next day. They came home from school with solemn faces and all used the same words. “The world will never be the same.” That evening I just held onto their innocence as to a lifeline.

Somewhere along the way–I think it was 2003–the police finally got the gang off the corner. When winter came that year, we sank with relief into the quietness. When summer came, and the gang was not on the corner, we believed they were gone. But we soon found out otherwise. They had moved into a house four doors east of us, off the street and into a house. We entered a new stage.

gangs

The Senora and the Plumber

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Yesterday, the battle against gangs in our neighborhood entered a new phase because of a smart, brave woman and a plumber.

Maria, down at 3506, had the idea to get permit parking in our neighborhood. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Chicago, this simply means that people who are residents of a block get stickers to put on their windshields, and cars without stickers are banned from parking on the block for all or part of the day. I believe this was originally instituted because of parking problems near busy commercial or entertainment areas, like Rush Street or Broadway. But it works just as well to keep gangbangers from parking their vans, opening the side doors and setting up camp on the parkway. Or pulling in and hanging out until a drug customer drives up and begins negotiations.

Now, Michael and I have been working against the gangs for eleven years and we never thought of this. Olga and Obed have fought the good fight for eighteen and they never thought of it. Noel and Carolina . . . you get the idea.

Maria had already proven her dedication to the campaign. A few years ago, the guy who lived in 3508 put in a large raised garden bed around the tree on his parkway. In addition to dooming the tree, this provided a bench where hardworking gangbangers could rest and chat with each other and their girlfriends. And drink and smoke dope and carry on loud, obscenity-filled conversations.

Well, after a particularly rough Saturday night a couple of weeks ago, Michael and Mac and I went to talk to the alderman. Maria, on the other hand, took apart the bench and moved the wood over to the community garden to provide a border for the vegetable beds.

She simply took it apart. Her husband and her sister helped her. And they did ask the current resident of 3508 for permission, which was gratefully given. But, if you’ve never lived in a gang-infested neighborhood, you may not appreciate the courage this act required.

I remember sitting on the front porch one morning back in about 2005, talking with one of my book kids, Erika. She asked me whether I’d heard the shooting the night before. I told her that I had and that I’d called 911. She looked at me earnestly and said, “You can’t call the cops. The gangs will kill you.”

I assured Erika that the gangs were not going to kill me, but she believed what a lot of other people in the neighborhood believe. That’s because gangs are terrorists. They create an aura of violence around themselves, using language and gesture and appearance. Gang signs scrawled on neighborhood buildings contribute to the effect. Sneakers hanging from electrical wires are not just a signal to potential customers, but a way of flaunting the gang’s presence. And then there’s minor vandalism. We find a fair number of hyacinths and lilies beheaded in our front garden every season.

They augment all this with an occasional genuinely violent act, usually against one of their own but sometimes against a young woman who has not been sufficiently protected against them or someone who has no recourse against them, such as an illegal alien. But most of the atmosphere of violence is created by cowardly acts committed undercover. As Michael once said, “These guys are really tough. They can cut the blooms off tulips.” That’s the thing about terrorism. It’s one percent violence and ninety-nine percent scare tactics.

At any rate, when we talked to the alderman, he told us we could get permit parking–and speed bumps (Tony’s idea)–if seventy percent of the neighborhood would sign a petition asking for them. We got the petition forms and left, wondering whether our neighbors would sign. One of the first people we went to was Maria, since it was her idea. She took a page of the petition and, about an hour later, her daughters returned it completed. Twelve signatures from the northeast quadrant of the block.

A few days later, Alberto from across the street at 3519 stopped in to look at a small plumbing problem we had. He signed the petition and then asked us if he could please take it with him to get the people on the south side of the street to sign. Yesterday after our community garden picnic, he brought his page back. Another twelve signatures. And he took another page.

By next Monday, when Alderman Maldonado has his office hours, we expect to present him with the petitions. Wish us luck.

Oh, and here’s a little reminder of why we have to keep doing all this.

children, gangs

Surviving is a Form of Resistance

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Junior’s sunflower had brown petals and a yellow center. Lizette’s red tulips stood in a row like sentries. Laura painted a white rose with full, open petals. Michelle contributed the Mexican flag and a rainbow, even though we had specified flowers only on our garage mural. This is how, when we first moved into the neighborhood, I decided to deal with the Almighty Imperial Gangstas.

We became aware of the drug dealing on the corner of St. Louis and McLean almost as soon as we were moved in. It quickly took the bloom off the first, and so far only, house we have ever owned.We didn’t have a clue what a gang neighborhood was like. We simply assumed that there would be a higher level of crime than we experienced in Andersonville and Edgewater and that some of it might easily be directed towards us, as white interlopers. I think we imagined rocks through our windows and gang signs on the sides of our house.

It did not occur to either Michael or me that we would ever actually engage with the gangbangers, that we would actively battle, alongside our neighbors, for the soul of our community. Long nights of 911 calls and watching drug deals go down in front of our house were still in the future and not something we could conceive at the time. So I decided to go about protecting ourselves in a different way. We would engage with the neighborhood. If we carved out a place for ourselves and actually came to belong here, perhaps we would not be a target for hostility and, possibly, violence. Since many of the adults in the neighborhood did not speak much English, and we spoke absolutely no Spanish, I decided to start with the children. Besides, I’m more comfortable with children.

Michael had little faith in this approach. All right, he had no faith in it. But we’re a partnership and we back each other up.

My first move was to go out onto our front porch with some paper and magic markers and start drawing. It was near Halloween, so I drew a scary face. I had scarcely taped it to the front door when I had three kids looking at me from my stairs. Our door was covered with drawings in a hour or so. From then on, any time I wanted to draw a crowd of kids, I went onto the porch with art supplies.

Then, my friend Mac told me about a man in Boston or Philadelphia who gave away books. He had a basement full of them and just gave them to people. I was pretty sure I couldn’t pull that off, but I decided I could buy books in thrift shops and give them away to the neighborhood kids. A theory began to form in my head.

My theory was that children who live with poverty, crime and violence can make a different future for themselves only if they can imagine a different future. Reading is what allowed me to imagine a future outside Oklahoma City, a future as a writer. So perhaps, if could encourage these children to read, I could help them imagine good futures for themselves. Let me be clear on one point. There were and are a lot of kids in my neighborhood whose families provide them with plenty of books and faith in the future. They come to the “booklady’s house” anyway, because they just like books. Others, though, are clearly in danger, including the children of the gangbangers themselves.

So I bought books at nearby thrift shops for a dime or a quarter and began handing them out–one book per kid per day. No snatching books from each other. No hitting. No swearing. No skates on the porch. I soon had a batch of kids who came by regularly. My friend Mac joined us often. Michael passed out books when I wasn’t around.

And then, at the beginning of the first summer in our new house, the gangs got louder and more threatening, something we would become accustomed to with the first warm days each year. We had moved into the house in October, and the gangs had been much quieter then.We talked about whether to stay, but we knew we couldn’t face another move. (I won’t tell you how many boxes of books and audiotapes and accumulated treasures we still had in the basement, not yet unpacked.) That’s when I had another idea. I told Michael I wanted the kids in the neighborhood to paint a mural on our garage.

He had some qualms.

You see, Michael was about to transform a flat, empty stretch of grass into his first real garden, where he could do anything he wanted and plant anything he wanted. It was a blank canvas with sun. (The garden Michael was allowed to plant at our last rental had what he called”3-flat shade,” or “can’t see my trowel in front of my face shade.” He craved sun, although he would eventually plant six trees in our new yard and create a woodland fantasy.)

In the meantime, Michael wasn’t sure he wanted the backdrop for his dream garden to be paint slapped on a garage by a bunch of strange kids, but I explained that we could always paint it over when the garden began to take shape.

So my idea might be silly, naive, and ultimately futile–“The gangs are getting louder, so let’s paint a mural”–but at least it was an idea. I put the word out, and nine kids showed up to paint.

And this is the mural a few years later, right before we began painting it over. We did frame a number of flowers and paint around them, including Junior’s sunflower.

As for the kids, Jennifer’s parents sent her and her brother back to Mexico a year or so later, to keep them safe. Lizette’s family moved to the suburbs, as did Michelle and Junior’s. Carolina was kidnapped, taken to Mexico and impregnated. I don’t know what happened to the others.

gangs

Life with a Gang

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We were not young. Call it early middle age. Baby boomer free-lance artist types, we had rented apartments in every lakefront neighborhood in Chicago. We’d just lost another great place to increasing property values and increasing rents and decided it was time to buy our first house. We looked carefully, found a place we could afford in an “improving” neighborhood, and moved in.

We chose the wrong block. We had just moved in with the Almighty Imperial Gangstas.

In this blog I’ll be talking about our first eleven years living in “Devilside,” one of the AIG neighborhoods in the area known to more innocent Chicagoans as Logan Square. Our cross streets—McLean and St. Louis—are featured on the Chicagogangs.org website, and drugs have been sold here since the 1960s. If the real estate boom had gone on a few more years, the block might have been worth more as property than as a drug shopping mall. As it is, the wall of money stalled a couple of blocks east of us before it subsided altogether. Because of the glut of foreclosures on the market, our house is worth considerably less than we owe on it. So we and the Gangstas are stuck with each other. They’re not any happier about it than we are, but they don’t have any more choice than we do, either.

I’ll be talking about drugs and shootings and thousands of 911 calls. About one girl murdered in a playground and another kidnapped and impregnated. About a Gangsta dumped on our porch by his pals after he’d done some of the toxic heroin that was going around a few years ago.

I’ll also talk about sharing the evening of September 11, 2001, with a bunch of neighborhood kids who had not yet understood what they would be told in school the next day—that life had changed forever. About thousands of books handed out to hundreds of kids in the faint hope that kids who read will be a hair less likely to become kids who kill, and anyway reading is better than not reading. About foot races on the sidewalk and standing-on-one-foot contests and anything else I could come up with to occupy children on a hot summer night.

I don’t plan to do much analyzing of causes. Our story is far too close and personal for that. Let those who have never watched a young woman hurl a brick through a car window while she was talking on her cell phone try to understand what massive failure of our social and economic system has led to this dark world my partner Michael and I are living in. We’re trying just to survive it.

But when you’re standing in your bathrobe in the dark at the bottom of the stairs looking out at eight or nine guys who have just wakened you at 2:00 AM with shouted obscenities, you can’t help wondering. You pick up the phone and dial the cops because every 911 report gets your block a little more attention when the cars are scheduled. But you also think about why life has to be like this.

Then you take a walk and run into something like this and you laugh your ass off.