No one back at the U of C had prepared me to feel such strong emotional connections to the people I studied. None of the ethnographicstudies I’d read offered much guidance about the relationships a researcher formed during fieldwork and how to manage them. The books talked about the right way to ask a question or address a respondent during an interview, but little about managing relationships with the people you hung out with. In time I would meet the anthropologist Jean Comaroff, who taught me about the benefits and dangers of getting personally attached to sources, but that was still a few years away.
Nor was Ms. Mae’s description of “community” something I was accustomed to from my own background. I don’t think I could name more than a few people who lived on the nearby streets in the suburb where I grew up, and we certainly never borrowed from one another or planned activities together. Suddenly I envisioned Ms. Mae coming to my apartment someday for a visit and eating bland pasta and steamed vegetables, the only meal I could conceivably cook for her.
She and I kept speaking. I learned that Ms. Mae was the daughter of sharecroppers, had spent two decades as a nanny and a domestic worker, and was forced to move into public housing when her husband, J.T.’s father, died of heart disease. He had been a quiet, easy-going man who worked for the city’s transportation department. Moving into Robert Taylor, she said, was her last-ditch effort to keep the family intact.
Finally J.T. walked into the apartment. He took one look at me and laughed. “Is that all you do around here?” he said. “I’m beginning to think the only reason you come over here is to eat!”
His mother told him to hush and brought over some more sweet potato pie for me.
“C’mon, Mr. Professor, finish your food,” J.T. said. “I need to survey the building.”
J.T had by now firmly established his reign over a group of three buildings, one on State Street and two on Federal, each of which he liked to walk through at least once a week. “You have the CHA, the landlord, but then we also try to make sure that people are doing what they’re told,” he explained as we walked. “We can’t have this place go crazy with niggers misbehaving. Because that’s when police come around, and then customers stop coming around, and then we don’t make our money. Simple as that.”
As we entered the lobby of one of his buildings, 2315 Federal Street, he grabbed a few of his foot soldiers and told them to follow us. The August heat made the lobby’s concrete walls sweat; they were cool to the touch but damp with humidity, just like all the people hanging around.
“I always start with the stairwells,” J.T. said. There were three stairwells per building, two on the sides and one running up the middle, next to the elevator. “And I usually have my guys with me, just in case.” He winked, as if I should know what “just in case” meant. I didn’t, but I kept quiet. The foot soldiers, high-school kids with glittery, cheap necklaces and baggy tracksuits, walked quietly about five feet behind us.
We began climbing. It was only eleven on a weekday morning, but already the stairwells and landings were crowded with people drinking, smoking, hanging out. The stairwells were poorly lit and unventilated, and they smelled vile; there were puddles whose provenance I was happy to not know. The steps themselves were dangerous, many of the metal treads loose or missing. Who were all these people? Everybody we passed seemed to know J.T., and he had a word or a nod for each of them.
On the fifth floor, we came upon three older men, talking and laughing.
J.T. looked them over. “You all staying on the eleventh floor, right?” he asked.
“No,” said one of them without looking up. “We moved to 1206.”
“To 1206, huh? And who said you could do that?” None of them answered. “You need to settle up if you’re in 1206, because you’re supposed to stay in 1102, right?”
The men just cradled their beer cans, heads down, stung by the scolding.
J.T. called out to one of his foot soldiers, “Creepy, get these niggers over to T-Bone.” T-Bone, I knew, was one of J.T.’s close friends and senior officers.
As we resumed our climbing, I a sked J.T. what had just happened.
“Squatters,” he said. “See, a lot of people who live around here don’t have a lease. They just hang out in the stairs ’cause it’s too cold outside, or they just need a safe place-maybe they’re running from the police, or maybe they owe somebody money. We provide them protection. Sometimes they get out of hand, but most of them are pretty quiet. Anyway, they’re here to stay.”
“The gang protects the squatters?”
“Yeah, no one fucks with them if they’re in here. I make sure of that. But we can’t have two million of these niggers, so we have to keep track. They pay us.”
As we continued our climb, we occasionally passed an older woman wearing a blue Tenant Patrol jacket. There were about a dozen of these women in each building, J.T. said. “They make sure that old folks are doing okay, and sometimes we help them.” Somewhere around the thirteenth floor, J.T. stopped when he saw a Tenant Patrol woman bent over a man who was squirming on the floor.
“Morning, Ms. Easley,” J.T. said. The man looked like he was just waking up, but I could also smell vomit, and he seemed to be in pain. He lay right outside the incinerator room, and the garbage smelled terrible.
“He’s coming down,” Ms. Easley told J.T. “He said someone sold him some bad stuff.”
“Hmm-hmm,” J.T. said disapprovingly. “They all say that when something goes bad. Always blaming it on us.”
“Can one of your boys take him to the clinic?”
“Shit, he’ll probably just be back tonight,” J.T. said, “doing the same thing.”
“Yeah, baby, but we can’t have him sitting here.”
J.T. waved over the remaining foot soldier, Barry, who was trailing us. “Get a few niggers to take this man down to Fiftieth.” Barry started in on his task; “Fiftieth” referred to the Robert Taylor medical clinic, on Fiftieth Street.
“All right, Ms. Easley,” J.T. said, “but if I see this nigger here tomorrow and he’s saying the same shit, Creepy is going to beat his ass.” J.T. laughed.
“Yes, yes, I know,” she said. “And let me talk to you for a second.” She and J.T. took a short walk, and I saw him pull out a few bills and hand them over. Ms. Easley walked back toward me, smiling, and set off down the stairwell. “Thank you for this, sweetheart,” she called to J.T. “The kids are going to be very happy!”
I followed J.T. out to the “gallery,” the corridor that ran along the exterior of the project buildings. Although you entered the apartments from the gallery, it was really an outdoor hallway, exposed to the elements, with chain-link fencing from floor to ceiling. It got its name, I had heard, because of its resemblance to a prison gallery, a metal enclosure meant to keep inmates in check. J.T. and I leaned up against the rail, looking out over the entire South Side and, beyond it, Lake Michigan.
Without my prodding, J.T. talked about what we had just seen. “Crackheads. Sometimes they mix shit-crack, heroin, alcohol, medicine-and they just can’t see straight in the morning. Someone on the Tenant Patrol finds them and helps.”
“Why don’t you just call an ambulance?” I asked.
J.T. looked at me skeptically. “You kidding? Those folks almost never come out here when we call, or it takes them an hour.”
“So you guys bring them to the hospital?”
“Well, I don’t like my guys doing shit for them, but once in a while I guess I feel sorry for them. That’s Creepy’s decision, though. He’s the one who runs the stairwell. It’s up to him-usually. But this time I’m doing Ms. Easley a favor.”
The stairwells, J.T. explained, were the one public area in the building where the gang allowed squatters to congregate. These areas inevitably became hangout zones for drug addicts and the homeless. J.T.’s foot soldiers, working in shifts, were responsible for making sure that no fights broke out there. “It ain’t a pretty job,” J.T. told me, laughing, “but that’s how they learn to deal with niggers, learn to be tough on them.”
The gang didn’t charge the squatters much for staying in the building, and J.T. let the foot soldiers keep most of this squatter tax. That was one of the few ways foot soldiers could earn any money, since they held the lowest rank in the gang’s hierarchy and weren’t even eligible yet to sell drugs. From J.T.’s perspective, allowing his foot soldiers to police the stairwells served another important function: It let him see which junior members of his gang showed the potential for promotion. That’s why he let guys like Creepy handle this kind of situation. “Creepy can take the man to the clinic, or he can just drag his ass out of the building and let him be,” J.T. said. “That’s on him. I try not to interfere, unless he fucks up and the police come around or Ms. Easley gets pissed.”
I realized this was what J.T. had done the night I first stumbled upon his foot soldiers and was held overnight
