you to leave, you go, right? You hear me?”
Eight of us made our way down the stairwell, our breath leaving trails of hot steam in the frigid air. There were a lot of questions I wanted to ask. Who was Bee-Bee and what was his relationship with Taneesha? Did C- Note and the other men know him? But we were moving too fast, and C-Note was preoccupied, his eyes ablaze.
We stopped just above the fourth-floor stairwell, since it was thought that Bee-Bee had taken refuge in Number 407. “Charlie, you and Blue go ahead,” C-Note said. “Shorty, you and them go to the other stairwell in case he runs past. Sudhir and me will stay in the back. Charlie, I’m right behind you, so if he got a knife, just let him go. I’ll get him.”
It struck me that I might not be as far out of the way as I’d planned.
All the men hurried to their positions. I could see the door to Number 407 from where I stood in the stairwell with C-Note. Charlie and Blue approached it. Like C-Note, they wore secondhand clothes and ill-fitting shoes. Charlie had a crowbar in his hand. Blue’s fist was clenched, but I couldn’t tell what he was holding.
Charlie knocked. The thin wooden door gave a hollow sound. All the other apartments on the floor had thick steel doors, but the CHA used wooden doors to designate which apartments were vacant. “Yo, nigger!” Charlie called out. “Hey, Bee-Bee! Taneesha says she wants to talk with you. Come on out. She says she’s cool with everything.” He looked back at us. C-Note waved his hands, signaling him to shout again. “Yo, Bee-Bee! Taneesha says she just wants to talk, nigger! I’ll take you up there.” Why would Bee-Bee need an escort to go back upstairs? I thought. And why on earth would he believe any of this?
Just then a voice rang out from the stairwell above us. “He’s on eleven, and he’s coming down the stairs! Get him, he’s coming down!”
C-Note instinctively pinned me against the gallery, letting Charlie and Blue go past. They stopped just inside the stairwell. C-Note and I crouched down a few feet behind them. The intense cold made me shiver. Charlie pressed his hand toward the floor a few times, motioning us to stand still. I had never heard the building so quiet. Apart from the wind and some cars in the distance, the only sound I could make out was a mouse or rat scratching around in the incinerator room.
Then, from above, I heard some distant footsteps turning into a rumble. Someone was running down the stairs, breathing heavily. I found myself grabbing onto the back of C-Note’s jacket. Charlie and Blue were crouched just in front of us. I made out what was in Blue’s hand: brass knuckles.
Just as the footsteps reached the fourth floor, Charlie jumped up and swung the crowbar, waist high. He struck Bee-Bee full-on, bowling him over.
“Yeah, nigger!” Blue shouted, then jumped over and started pounding Bee-Bee in the side. His head hit the wall of the stairwell and snapped back. “Leave that bitch alone, you hear me?” Blue shouted, punching him repeatedly in the gut. “You better leave her alone, nigger!”
Bee-Bee was tall and strong, and he threw Charlie off him. He stood up and began shouting, but Blue tackled him, smashing Bee-Bee into the wall. The two of them started tumbling down the stairs. Charlie grabbed Bee- Bee’s leg, so he, too, fell down the stairwell.
“Grab his other leg!” Charlie yelled in our direction. C-Note jumped down the stairs and made a grab. Blue, meanwhile, was struggling to get out from under Bee-Bee, who had Blue’s head in a choke hold. I could see that Blue was struggling to breathe; he looked like he might pass out, or worse. I felt as if I had to do something. Running over to them, I kicked Bee-Bee in the stomach, which made him relax his grip on Blue. The other men smothered him, and I could hear his muffled words: “Okay, okay. All right, enough.”
Blue, the strongest of them, bent Bee-Bee’s arms behind his back, bringing him to his knees. I don’t know whether it was the cold air, the adrenaline, or the swift kick I’d delivered, but I was badly out of breath. I leaned against the wall near the incinerator room. “Charlie, run back up the stairs and make sure he didn’t drop nothing,” C-Note said. “We’ll meet you at the office.”
The rest of us walked Bee-Bee downstairs to Ms. Bailey’s office. She wasn’t in, so C-Note sent another squatter to fetch her. We all stood outside the office, silent. No one seemed to worry that Bee-Bee would run away.
He sat down on the floor with his head pitched back, resting against the wall. This was my first opportunity to get a good look at him. He was young, his face light-skinned and boyish but with a menacing air. And he appeared to be aging fast. His nostrils were black, his eyes hollow and glazed, telltale signs of crack use. He wore a brown sweatshirt over a stained white tank top, with loose jeans and unlaced sneakers dirtied by the winter slush. I saw a gang tattoo on his neck, the crescent-and-star pattern of the Black P. Stone Nation. The Stones had been largely dismantled in the 1980s by the feds, with some remaining factions now aligned with the Black Kings. Why, I wondered, was Taneesha hanging around with this guy?
C-Note had caught his breath by now. “You really fucked up this time, Bee-Bee.”
Bee-Bee said nothing. He wiped the sweat from his face.
I heard Ms. Bailey coming. I’d never seen her move so fast before-she was practically galloping, trailed by Catrina and a few older women in blue Tenant Patrol jackets.
Ms. Bailey hurried past without looking at me. Catrina, however, gave me one of her signature looks that I now recognized as meaning this: Ms. Bailey’s got the situation under control, and all will soon be right with the world. Ms. Bailey unlocked her office door and went inside. Blue and Charlie, who’d returned from upstairs, picked up Bee-Bee and brought him into the office. Bee-Bee seemed cooperative. The three of them entered the back room in Ms. Bailey’s office, and then someone shut the front door. I stayed outside, along with the other squatters and the Tenant Patrol women. C-Note, his work done, took off.
Then Catrina poked her head out the door and waved me inside. Get in here! she mouthed silently. I did, and she pointed me to a chair.
It was hard to make out the full conversation behind Ms. Bailey’s closed door, but once in a while her voice was loud enough for me to hear: “You got some nerve, young man!… Beat her like that… Where do you live, huh, where do you live?!… She’s a good girl. She owe you money? She wouldn’t fuck you? Why did you do that?… Say something!”
Then came the beating. Charlie or Blue, or maybe both of them, started hitting Bee-Bee. I also heard Ms. Bailey cry out in a muffled tone. Maybe Ms. Bailey is hitting him as well, I thought. I heard chairs scuffing the floor. Then, for the first time, I heard Bee-Bee’s voice: “Oh, shit!… Get off me… Fuck that! She deserved it.”
Ms. Bailey started to yell louder. “Deserved it?… You’ll get worse if you come around here… Don’t ever, don’t ever touch her again, you hear me? You hear me? Don’t ever come in this building again.”
Ms. Bailey threw open the door. Blue dragged Bee-Bee out. His face was badly worked over; he was drooling and mumbling something unintelligible. Blue hustled him past Catrina and me and threw him to the floor on the gallery. Two other men grabbed him and led him toward the stairwell. Ms. Bailey followed them, with the members of the Tenant Patrol right behind.
I started to get up, but Catrina stopped me. “Sudhir! No, let them go! They’re just taking him in the car, and they’ll leave him on State Street. Come up with me and see how Taneesha’s doing.”
Taneesha’s aunt answered our knock. She and Taneesha’s mother told us that Taneesha was at the hospital; she had some bad bruises, but it seemed as if she’d be okay. “I don’t know what she’s going to look like, though,” said the aunt. “He beat her pretty good.” Taneesha’s mother promised to call Ms. Bailey later that night.
We went back downstairs to Ms. Bailey’s office. She hadn’t returned yet-she was apparently visiting Taneesha at the hospital- so Catrina told me what she knew. Bee-Bee had been managing Taneesha’s modeling career, booking her at lingerie shows and dances. For this, he received a 25 percent cut-and, according to Catrina, he made Taneesha sleep with him. When Bee-Bee heard that Taneesha was going to sign up with a legitimate modeling agency, he got mad and started beating her. Today wasn’t the first time this had happened. In fact, Ms. Bailey had repeatedly warned Bee-Bee to stop. But he kept harassing Taneesha, even stealing money from her apartment. It was only because Ms. Bailey felt there was no other recourse, Catrina explained, that today she had rounded up C-Note and the others to form a sort of militia. In the projects this was a long-standing practice. Militias were regularly put together to track down stolen property, mete out punishment, or simply obtain an apology for a victim.
In a neighborhood like this one, with poor police response and no shelter for abused women, the militias sometimes represented the best defense. “It’s hard when you can’t get nobody to come around,” Catrina said solemnly. She was sitting in Ms. Bailey’s chair, a soda in hand and her voice assured, seeming for all the world like
