the heiress to Ms. Bailey’s throne. “No police, nobody from the hospital. We can’t live like this! That’s why Ms. Bailey is so important. And especially for women. She makes sure we’re safe.”
“I suppose,” I said. “But it’s a horrible way to live. And wouldn’t you rather have the police come around?”
“I’d rather not live in the projects,” Catrina shot back. “But women are always getting beat on, getting sent to the hospital. I mean, you have to take care of yourself. Ms. Bailey makes these men take care of us. I don’t see what’s wrong with that. Unless you live here, you can’t judge us, Sudhir.”
For some reason I couldn’t restrain the judgmental voice of my middle-class self. “You all didn’t call the police, did you?” I blurted out.
For the first time since I knew Catrina, she couldn’t look me in the eye. “No, we didn’t.”
“Why?”
She took a deep breath and raised her head. “Because we’re scared of them.”
“You are scared? Women are scared? Everyone is scared?” I asked. “Who exactly is scared? I hear this all the time.”
“Everybody. But for women it’s different. You wouldn’t understand.” She paused. “At least we have C-Note and the rest of them when things go crazy.” It was clear that Catrina didn’t want to talk further. I decided to ask Ms. Bailey about this when things calmed down.
I’d seen some police around the neighborhood, and I’d seen them work with Autry at the Boys & Girls Club. But since most tenants were so distrustful of the cops, I kept my interactions with them to a minimum, since I didn’t want to be thought of as being “with” the cops.
Still, I had a hard time accepting the idea that tenants wouldn’t call the police for something as serious as an assault. I also found it tough to believe that the police wouldn’t show up-or, for that matter, that an ambulance wouldn’t respond either. But as Catrina sat now in total silence, staring at me expressionlessly, I realized I might well be wrong.
I told her that I’d better get back to my apartment. She didn’t acknowledge me. I wanted to do something to help her.
“Would you like to get something to eat?” I asked meekly.
She shook her head.
“Do you want to write me another essay?” I asked. “Do you want to write about what just happened?”
Catrina liked to write essays, which I read so that we could discuss them. This was a good way for her to talk through her aspirations as well as the shadows of her past: intense poverty and a bad family situation that I was just starting to learn about.
She shrugged. I couldn’t tell if that meant yes or no.
“Well, I’m happy to read it if you do write something. Whenever.”
“Thanks,” she said. The barest hint of a smile came to her face, and she pushed her thick, black-framed glasses up on her nose. She started sniffling and reaching for a tissue. She looked no more than twelve years old. “I’ll see you around,” she said. “I’m sure things will be okay.”
With Catrina having gone quiet and Ms. Bailey at the hospital and C-Note and the other squatters nowhere to be seen, there wasn’t anyone left for me to talk with. I thought about visiting J.T., but every time I asked him anything about Ms. Bailey, he’d shut me down. “You want to know what she’s like, you hang out with her,” he said. “I ain’t telling you shit.” J.T. didn’t care much for Ms. Bailey’s authority, as it occasionally challenged his own. It was well within her power, for instance, to close off the lobby to his sales crew. J.T. wanted me to experience Ms. Bailey for myself to see what he had to deal with.
I took the bus back to my apartment but decided to stop first at Jimmy’s, a local bar where a lot of U of C professors and students hung out. No one knew me there, and I could sit quietly and process what had just happened in my fieldwork. Sometimes I would go there to write up my notes, but more often I just sat and stared blankly into my glass. With increasing frequency, Jimmy’s was a ritual stop on my way home. At Jimmy’s, as at the best bars, no one cared what troubles I brought to the table. Most of the people were sitting alone, like me, and I figured they were dealing with their own problems.
Jimmy’s gave me a place to take off one hat (the fieldworker) and put on the other (the student). I needed this break, because I was starting to feel schizophrenic, as if I were one person in the projects-sometimes I caught myself even talking in a different way-and another back in Hyde Park.
Increasingly I found that I was angry at the entire field of social science-which meant, to some degree, that I was angry at myself. I resented the fact that the standard tools of sociologists seemed powerless to prevent the hardships I was seeing. The abstract social policies that my colleagues were developing to house, educate, and employ the poor seemed woefully out of touch. On the other hand, life in the projects was starting to seem too wild, too hard, and too chaotic for the staid prescriptions that social scientists could muster. It struck me as only partially helpful to convince youth to stay in school: what was the value in giving kids low-paying, menial jobs when they could probably be making more money on the streets?
In the poverty seminars that Bill Wilson sponsored, where some of the best academic minds congregated to discuss the latest research, I acted as if I had a unique insight into poverty by virtue of my proximity to families. I prefaced my questions by blurting out a self-serving objection: “No one here seems to have spent much time with the poor, but if you did, you would see that…” or, “If you actually watched poor people instead of just reading census tables, you would understand that…” I felt as though the other scholars were living in a bubble, but my arrogant tone did little to help anyone hear what I was trying to say. I worried that my behavior might embarrass Wilson, but I was too bitter to take a moderate stance.
I wouldn’t say that I was disillusioned with the academic life per se. I still attended classes, worked with professors and met my dead-lines, earned pretty good grades, and even received a few prestigious fellowships. I still saw myself on the road to being a professor like Wilson. But day by day, it was getting harder to reconcile my life at the U of C with my life in the projects.
Rather than sharing my frustration with my girlfriend, my room-mates, and my friends-most of whom were actually quite supportive and curious about my research-I just kept my experiences to myself. How could I explain the vigilante justice that C-Note and the others had just delivered? How could I explain my own role in the beating? I didn’t understand it myself, and I feared that I’d open myself up to my friends’ advice: You need to call the police if they don’t… You’re getting too involved… You’ve gone too far…
When I did try talking about my fieldwork, I felt awkward. In fact, I sometimes came off as defending the gangs and their violent practices or as romanticizing the conditions in the projects. So, to stay sane, I’d usually just tell people about Autry’s work at the Boys & Girls Club or, if pushed, a few stories about life in the gang.
I was growing quieter and more solitary. My fellow graduate students and even some faculty members thought of me as unapproachable. Rumors circulated that I was too ambitious, too aloof, but I figured I’d just have to live with them. A small part of me hoped that life would get back to normal once my fieldwork was over. But the end didn’t seem very near, so I just kept to myself.
I was eager to know more about the incident with Bee-Bee. Why had Ms. Bailey sicced the squatters on him instead of leaving it to the police? Had the police been called-Catrina said they hadn’t, but I wanted to be sure-and if so, why didn’t they respond? What were the consequences for Ms. Bailey of taking such matters into her own hands?
I waited until “check day” to go see Ms. Bailey. That’s when welfare checks were distributed, which meant that most tenants were out buying food and clothing and household items-and not, therefore, coming to Ms. Bailey with demands.
On the way up to her office, I stopped in to see J.T. He was lying on the sofa, watching TV. Ms. Mae gave me a big hug and told me to sit down for lunch. She had cooked some of my favorites-okra, greens, mac and cheese-and so I gladly obliged. J.T. quipped that I was eating his share of food. “You’re becoming the little brother I never wanted,” he said.
I told him about Ms. Bailey and the Bee-Bee incident. “Oh, man!” he said with a laugh. “That’s why she’s so upset. She keeps asking if I’ve seen you.”
“Why’s she upset at me?”
“Because you beat the shit out of that man, the one who beat Taneesha. I told you to be careful with Ms. Bailey, not to do things for her.”
