hadn’t seen any violence, it didn’t exist. Now I had seen a different side of his power, a far less polished presentation.
In the weeks afterward, I began to contemplate the possibility that I would see more beatings, perhaps even fatal incidents. I still felt exhilarated by my access to J.T.’s gang, but I was also starting to feel shame. My conviction that I was merely a sociological observer, detached and objective, was starting to feel false. Was I really supposed to just stand by while someone was getting beat up? I was ashamed of my desire to get so close to the violence, so close to a culture that I knew other scholars had not managed to see.
In reality I probably had little power to stop anyone from getting abused by the gang. And for the first time in my life, I was doing work that I truly loved; I was excited by my success. Back at the university, my research was starting to attract attention from my professors, and I certainly didn’t want to let that go. I told Wilson about the young men I had met and their involvement with gangs. I kept things pretty abstract; I didn’t tell him every detail about what I saw. He seemed impressed, and I didn’t want to lose his support, so I figured that if I could forget about the shame, maybe it would simply go away.
As time passed, I pretty much stopped talking about my research to friends and family. I just wrote down my notes and tried not to draw attention to myself, except to tell my advisers a few stories now and then.
When I went home to California on vacations or holidays and saw my parents, I told them relatively little about my work in the projects. My mother, who worked as a hospital records clerk, was already worried about my living so far from home, so I didn’t want to heighten her concern with stories of gang beatings. And I knew that my father would be upset if he learned that I hid things from my advisers. So I hid my fieldwork from him as well. Instead I just showed them my grades, which were good, and said the least I could get away with.
In retrospect the C-Note beating at least enabled me to view my relationship with J.T. more realistically. It made me appreciate just how deeply circumscribed my interactions with the Black Kings had been. What I had taken to be a fly-on-the-wall vantage point was in fact a highly edited view. It wasn’t that I was seeing a false side of the gang, but there was plainly a great deal I didn’t have access to. I knew that the gang made a lot of money in a lot of different ways- I had heard, for instance, that they extorted store owners-but I knew few details. All I saw was the flashy consumption: the jewelry, the cars, the parties.
And the gang obviously had an enormous impact on the wider community. It went well beyond telling residents they couldn’t hang out in the lobby. The C-Note beating made that clear. But if I was really going to write my dissertation on gang activity, I’d have to learn an awful lot more about how the gang affected everyone else in the community. The problem was figuring the way out from under J.T.’s grip.
THREE. Someone to Watch Over Me
C-Note’s friends took him to the hospital, where he received treatment for bruised ribs and cuts on his face. He spent the next couple of months recuperating in the apartment of a friend who lived nearby. Eventually he moved back into Robert Taylor. The building was as much his home as J.T.’s, and no one expected the beating to drive him away for good.
I wondered how J.T. would react the next time I saw him. Up to that point, he was always happy to have me follow him around, to have a personal biographer. “He’s writing about my life,” he’d boast to his friends. “If you-all could read, you’d learn something.” He had no real sense of what I would actually be writing-because, in truth, I didn’t know myself. Nor did I know if he’d be upset with me for having seen him beat up C-Note, or if perhaps he’d try to censor me.
I didn’t return to Robert Taylor for a week, until J.T. called to invite me to a birthday party for his four-year-old daughter, Shuggie.She was one of two daughters that J.T. had with his girlfriend Joyce; the other girl, Bee-Bee, was two. J.T. and Joyce seemed pretty close. But then again J.T. also seemed close with Missie and their son, Jamel. As much as J.T. seemed to trust me and let me inside his world, he was fiercely protective of his private life. Except for benign occasions like a birthday party, he generally kept me away from his girlfriends and his children, and he often gave me blatantly contradictory information about his family life. I once tried asking why he was so evasive on that front, but he just shut me down with a hard look.
I was nervous as I rode the bus toward Robert Taylor, but my reunion with J.T. was anticlimactic. The party was so big, with dozens of friends and family members, that it was split between Ms. Mae’s apartment and another apartment upstairs where J.T.’s cousin LaShona lived. Ms. Mae had cooked a ton of food, and there was a huge birthday cake. Everyone was having a good, loud time.
J.T. strode right over and shook my hand. “How you feel?” he asked-one of his standard greetings. He stared me down for a moment but said nothing more. Then he winked, handed me a beer, and walked away. I barely saw him the rest of the party. Ms. Mae introduced me to some of her friends-I was “Mr. Professor, J.T.’s friend,” which conferred immediate legitimacy upon me. I stayed a few hours, played some games with the kids, and then took the bus home.
J.T. and I resumed our normal relationship. Even though I couldn’t stop thinking about the C-Note beating, I kept my questions to myself. Until that incident I had seen gang members selling drugs, tenants taking drugs, and plenty of people engaged in small-time hustles to make money. While I was by no means comfortable watching a drug addict smoke crack, the C-Note affair gave me greater pause. He was an old man in poor health; he could hardly be expected to defend himself against men twice his size and half his age, men who also happened to carry guns.
What was I, an impartial observer-at least that’s how I thought of myself-supposed to do upon seeing something like this? I actually considered calling the police that day. After all, C-Note had been assaulted. But I didn’t do anything. I am ashamed to say that I didn’t even confront J.T. about it until some six months later, and even then I did so tentatively.
The confrontation happened after I witnessed another incident with another squatter. One day I was standing outside the building’s entryway with J.T. and a few other BKs. J.T. had just finished his weekly walk-through of his high-rise. He was having a quick meeting with some prostitutes who’d recently started working in the building, explaining the rules and taxes. The tenants, meanwhile, went about their business-hauling laundry, checking the mail, running errands.
A few of J.T.’s junior members came out to tell him that one of the squatters in the building, a man known as Brass, refused to pay the gang’s squatting fee. They had brought Brass with them down to the lobby. I could see him through the entryway. He looked to be in his late forties, but it was hard to say. He had only a few teeth and seemed in pretty bad shape. I’d heard that Brass was a heroin addict with a reputation for beating up prostitutes. He was also known for moving around from building to building. He wasn’t a regular squatter like C-Note, who was on familiar terms with all the tenants. Brass would anger the tenants in one building and then pack up and move along.
J.T. dispatched Price, one of his senior officers, to deal with Brass. Unlike C-Note, who offered only a little resistance, Brass decided to fight back. This was a big mistake. Price was generally not a patient man, and he seemed to enjoy administering a good beating. I could see Price punching Brass repeatedly in the face and stomach. J.T. didn’t flinch. Everyone, in fact-gang members and tenants alike- just stood and watched.
Brass started to crawl toward us, making his way outside to the building’s concrete entryway. Price looked exhausted from hitting Brass, and he took a break. That’s when some rank-and-file gang members took over, kicking and beating Brass mercilessly. Brass resisted throughout. He kept yelling “Fuck you!” even as he was being beaten, until he seemed unconscious. A drool of blood spilled from his mouth.
Then he began flailing about on the ground in convulsion, his spindly arms flapping like wings. By now his body lay just a few feet from us. I g roaned, a nd J.T. pulled me away. Still no one came to help Brass; it was as if we were all fishermen watching a fish die a slow death on the floor of a boat.
I leaned on J.T.’s car, quivering from the shock. He took hold of me firmly and tried to calm me down. “It’s just the way it is around here,” he whispered, a discernible tone of sympathy in his voice. “Sometimes you have to beat a nigger to teach him a lesson. Don’t worry, you’ll get used to it after a while.”
I thought, No, I don’t want to get used to it. If I did, what kind of person would that make me? I wanted to ask J.T. to stop the beating and take Brass to the hospital, but my ears were ringing, and I couldn’t even focus on what he was telling me. My eyes were fixed on Brass, and I felt like throwing up.
