gang, he would routinely strike up a conversation with me. He was attending Kennedy-King College, a South Side community college, majoring in accounting. That’s why J.T. had put him in charge of the gang’s finances. T-Bone had two talkative, precocious children and the appearance of a nerd: he wore big, metal-framed glasses, always carried a notebook (which contained the gang’s financial records, I would later learn), and constantly asked me about life at the U of C. “Hope it’s harder than where I’m at,” he’d say. “I’m getting A’s, and I haven’t had to pay nobody off yet!”
A commotion rose up from the parking lot where Kris was working: he had gotten into a fight with a customer. Even from afar I could see the veins popping on Kris’s face. He kept trying to grab the other man’s neck, and the other man kept pushing Kris backward. The other man kneed Kris in the stomach, sending him to the ground, and then Kris picked up a rock and hit his combatant in the head. Now both of them were on the ground, writhing and yelling.
Michael and T-Bone hurried over. “Nigger, not around here!” T-Bone said, laughing at the fairly pathetic display of fighting. “I told you about keeping this shit peaceful.”
“It will be peaceful as long as he pays up,” Kris said.
“Pays up?” the other man said. “He can finish, then I’ll pay. Twenty bucks to fix my radiator? Fuck that! He got to do more than that for twenty.”
“Nigger, I already washed the damn car,” Kris said. He stood up, wincing. “You took this shit too far. I’m not doing nothing else for twenty bucks.” Kris picked up a wrench and hit the man in the leg. The man groaned in pain, his face swollen with anger, and it looked as if he was going to go after Kris.
T-Bone grabbed Kris, even though he could barely keep himself from laughing. “Damn! What did I tell you? Lay that shit down. Now come over here.”
T-Bone walked the two men over to the edge of the parking lot. They were both limping. Soon after, Kris started washing T-Bone’s car while the other man sat on the ground, nursing his leg.
“I’ll teach that nigger!” Kris said to himself loudly. “No one messes with me.”
T-Bone walked over to Michael and me. “Nigger was right,” he said, pointing to Kris. “He washed the man’s car and fixed the radiator. And that costs twenty dollars. He don’t need to do nothing else. I got the money for you. And five bucks extra for the hassle.”
T-Bone handed Michael the money, slapped my face gently, winked, and hummed a song as he walked off. Michael didn’t say anything.
That night, once it was too dark to work on cars, I sat with Michael and Kris by their beat-up white Subaru, and we drank some beers. Michael told me that T-Bone often settled customer disputes for them.
“Why would he do that?” I asked.
“Because we pay him to!” Michael said. “I mean, we don’t have a choice.”
Michael explained that he and Kris paid T-Bone 15 percent of their weekly revenue. Just as J.T.’s foot soldiers squeezed a little money from squatters and prostitutes, his higher-ranked officers supplemented their income with more substantial taxes. In return, the gang brought Kris and Michael customers and mediated any disputes. This occasionally included beating up a customer who became recalcitrant or abusive. “That happens once a month,” Kris said with satisfaction. “Best way to teach people not to fuck with us.”
I asked Michael and Kris whether beating one customer might in fact deter other customers. The reply taught me a lot about the Black Kings.
“When you got a problem, I bet you call the police, right?” Michael said. “Well, we call the Kings. I call T-Bone because I don’t have anyone else to call.”
“But you could call the police,” I said. “I don’t understand why you can’t call them if something goes wrong.”
“If I’m out here hustling, or if you’re in the building hustling, there’s no police officer who’s going to do what T-Bone does for us,” Michael said. “Every hustler tries to have someone who offers them protection. I don’t care if you’re selling socks or selling your ass. You need someone to back you up.”
“See, we were both Black Kings when we were younger,” Kris said. “Most of the people you see, the older ones who live right here? They were Kings at one time. So it’s complicated. I mean, if you own a business on Forty-seventh Street, you pay taxes and you get protection-from the police, from the aldermen-”
I interrupted Kris to ask why they’d need protection from the aldermen. He looked at me as if I was naive- which I was-and explained that the aldermen’s line workers, or “precinct captains,” liked to tax any off-the-books entrepreneurial activity. “So instead we pay the gang, and the gang protects us.”
“But it’s more than that,” Michael said. “I mean, you’re stuck. These niggers make your life hell, but they’re family. And you can’t choose your family!” He started to laugh so hard that he nearly spilled his beer.
“Just imagine,” Kris prodded me. “Let’s say another gang came by and started shooting. Or let’s say you got a bunch of niggers that get into the building and go and rob a bunch of people. Who’s going to take care of that? Police? They never come around! So you got J.T. and the Kings. They’ll get your stuff back if it was stolen. They’ll protect you so that no niggers can come and shoot up the place.”
Kris and Michael really seemed to believe, although with some reservations, that the gang was their extended family. Skeptical as I may have been, the gang plainly was looked upon as something other than a purely destructive force. I remembered what J.T. had told me a while back, a pronouncement that hadn’t made much sense at the time: “The gang and the building,” he had said, “are the same.”
One hot afternoon, while hanging out in the lobby of J.T.’s build-ing with some tenants and a few BKs, I saw another side of the relationship between the gang and the community. Outside the building a car was blasting rap music. A basketball game had just finished, and to combat the heat a few dozen people were drinking beer and enjoying the breeze off the lake.
I heard a woman shouting, maybe fifty yards away, in a small grove of oak trees. It was one of the few shady areas on the premises.The trees predated Robert Taylor and would likely be standing long after the projects were gone. The music was too loud for me to make out what the woman was saying, and so I-along with quite a few other people-hurried over.
Several men were physically restraining the woman, who looked to be in her forties. “Let go of me!” she screamed. “I’m going to kick his ass! Just let me at him. Let go!”
“No, baby,” one of the men said, trying to calm her down. “You can’t do it that way, you can’t take care of it like that. Let us handle it.”
“Hey, Price!” another man shouted. “Price, come over here.”
Price had been a Black Kings member for many years and had a wide range of expertise. At present he was in charge of the gang’s security, which matched up well with his love of fighting. He was tall and lanky, and he took his job very seriously. He strode over now to the screaming woman, trailed by a few Black Kings foot soldiers. I waved at Price, and he didn’t seem to mind that I had put myself close to the action.
“What’s going on?” he asked the men. “Why is Boo-Boo screaming like that?”
“She said the Ay-rab at the store fucked her baby,” one man told him. “He gave her baby some disease.”
Price spoke softly to her, trying to calm her down. I asked a young woman next to me what was going on. She said that Boo-Boo thought the proprietor of a nearby corner store had slept with her teenage daughter and given her a sexually transmitted disease. There were several such stores in the neighborhood, all of them run by Arab Americans. “She wants to beat the shit out of that Ay-rab,” the woman told me. “She was just on her way over to the store to see that man.”
By now about a hundred people had gathered around. We all watched Price talking to Boo-Boo while one of the men locked Boo-Boo’s arms behind her back. Suddenly he let her go, and Boo-Boo marched off toward the store, with Price beside her and a pack of tenants following behind. “Kick his ass, Boo-Boo!” someone hollered. There were other riled shouts: “Don’t let them Ay-rabs do this to us!” and “Price, kill that boy!”
We arrived at a small, decrepit store known as Crustie’s. The name wasn’t posted anywhere, but the usual signs were: CIGARETTES SOLD HERE and FOOD STAMPS WELCOME and PLEASE DO NOT LOITER. By the time I arrived, Boo-Boo was already inside yelling, but it was hard to hear what she was saying. I moved closer to the entrance. Now I could see Boo-Boo taking boxes and cans of food off the shelves and throwing them, but I couldn’t see her target. Price leaned against the refrigerator case, wearing a serious look. Then Boo-Boo reached for a big glass bottle, and Price grabbed her before she could throw it.
A few minutes later, a man ran outside. He looked to be Middle Eastern; he waved his arms and shouted in
