Their answer made perfect sense: When it became obvious that the housing authority supported a management system based on extortion and corruption, the women decided their best option was to shrug their shoulders and accept their fate.
I found it unconscionable that such a regime existed, but I wasn’t going to confront Ms. Bailey either. She was too powerful. And so while the women’s anger turned into despair, my disgust began to morph into bitterness.
The women’s list of survival techniques went well beyond ten. Keep cigarettes in your apartment so you can pay off a squatter to fix things when they break. Let your child pee in the stairwell to keep prostitutes from congregating there at night. Let the gangs pay you to store drugs and cash in your apartment. (The risk of apprehension, the women concurred, was slim.)
Then there were all the resources to be procured in exchange for sex: groceries from the bodega owner, rent forgiveness from the CHA, assistance from a welfare bureaucrat, preferential treatment from a police officer for a jailed relative. The women’s explanation for using sex as currency was consistent and pragmatic: If your child was in danger of going hungry, then you did whatever it took to fix the problem. The women looked pained when they discussed using their bodies to obtain these necessities; it was clear that this wasn’t their first-or even their hundredth-preference.
“Always know somebody at the hospital,” Tanya blurted out. “Always have somebody you can call, because that ambulance never comes. And when you get there, you need to pay somebody, or else you’ll be waiting in line forever!”
“Yes, that’s true, and the people at the hospital can give you free baby food,” Sarina said. “Usually you need to meet them in the back alley. And I’d say you should keep a gun or a knife hidden, in case your man starts beating you. Because sometimes you have to do something to get him to stop.”
“You’ve had to use a knife before?” I asked. No one had spoken or written about this yet. “How often?”
“Many times!” Sarina looked at me as if I’d grown up on Mars. “When these men start drinking, you can’t talk to them. You just need to protect yourself-and don’t forget, they’ll beat up the kids, too.”
Keisha started to cry. She dropped her head into her lap and covered up so no one could see. Sarina leaned over and hugged her.
“The easiest time is when they’re asleep,” Tanya said. “They’re lying there, mostly because they’ve passed out drunk. That’s when it runs through your mind. You start thinking, ‘I could end it right here. I could kill the motherfucker, right now. Then he can’t beat me no more.’ I think about it a lot.”
Keisha wiped her eyes. “I stabbed that nigger because I couldn’t take it no more. Wasn’t anybody helping me. Ms. Bailey said she couldn’t do nothing, the police said they couldn’t do nothing. And this man was coming around beating me and beating my baby for no reason. I couldn’t think of any other way, couldn’t think of nothing else to do…”
She began to sob again. Sarina escorted her to the bathroom.
“She sent her man to the hospital,” Tanya quietly explained. “Almost killed him. One night he was asleep on the couch-he had already sent her to the hospital a few times, broke her ribs, she got stitches and bruises all over her body. She grabbed that knife and kept putting it in his stomach. He got up and ran out the apartment. I think one of J.T.’s boys took him to the hospital. He’s a BK.”
Because the boyfriend was a senior gang member, Tanya said, J.T. refused to pressure him to stop beating Keisha. She still lived in fear that the man would return.
One day Ms. Bailey called and asked that I come to a building-wide meeting with her tenants. She hadn’t invited me to such a meeting in more than a year, so I figured something important was afoot.
I hadn’t been keeping up with Ms. Bailey’s tenant meetings in part because I’d already amassed sufficient information on these gatherings and also because, in all honesty, I’d grown uncomfortable watching the horse- trading schemes that she and other tenant leaders used to manage the community.
My own life was also starting to evolve. I had moved in with my girlfriend, Katchen, and we were thinking about getting married. Visiting our relatives-mine in California and hers in Montana- took time away from my fieldwork, including much of our summers and vacations. My parents were thrilled, and they pushed me to think seriously about starting a family along with a career. Katchen was applying to law school; neither of us was ready for children just yet.
And then there was the matter of my dissertation, which I still had to write. I began to meet more regularly with Bill Wilson and other advisers to see whether I could plausibly move toward wrapping up my graduate study.
Ms. Bailey’s office was packed for the meeting when I arrived, with a few dozen people in attendance, all talking excitedly. As usual, most of them were older women, but there were also several men standing in the back. I recognized a couple of them as the partners of women in the building; it was unusual to see these men at a public meeting. Ms. Bailey waved me up front, pointing me to the chair next to hers.
“Okay,” she said, “Sudhir has agreed to come here today so we can clear this up.”
I was taken aback. Clear what up? Everyone was suddenly staring at me, and they didn’t look happy.
“Why are you sleeping with my daughter?” shouted a woman I didn’t recognize. “Tell me, goddamn it! Why are you fucking my baby?”
“Answer the woman!” someone else hollered. I couldn’t tell who was talking, but it didn’t matter: I was in a state of shock.
One man, addressing me as “Arab,” told me I should get out of the neighborhood for good and especially leave alone their young women. Other people joined in:
“Nigger, get out of here!”
“Arab, go home!”
“Get the fuck out, Julio!”
Ms. Bailey tried to restore order. Amid the shouting she yelled out that I would explain myself.
I was still confused. “Let Sudhir tell you why he’s meeting them!”
Ms. Bailey said, and then I understood: It was the writing workshop. People had seen me picking up the young women and driving away with them. Apparently they thought I was sleeping with them, or maybe pimping them out.
As I tried to explain the writing workshop, I kept getting drowned out. I began to feel scared. I had seen how a mob of tenants nearly tore apart the Middle Eastern shopkeeper who’d slept with Boo-Boo’s daughter.
Ms. Bailey finally made herself heard above the riot. “He’s trying to tell you that he’s just helping them with homework!”
That quieted everyone down a little bit. But still, I was stung: Why weren’t any of the women from the workshop in attendance? Why hadn’t anyone come to defend me, to tell the truth?
After a few more minutes, things having calmed down a bit, Ms. Bailey told me to leave. There was other business to take care of, she said, laughing-at me-and clearly enjoying herself at my expense.
Leaving the building that night, I wondered how much more time I could afford to spend in J.T.’s territory. It was hard to think of any tenants who weren’t angry with me.
SEVEN. Black and Blue
Of all the relationships I’d developed during my time at Robert Taylor, it turned out that the strongest one by far was my bond with J.T. As unusual and as morally murky as this relationship may have been, it was also undeniably powerful. Our years together had produced a close relationship. This bond would become even more intimate, to the point that J.T. felt personally indebted to me, when I had the opportunity to help save the life of one of his closest friends.
It was a classic Chicago summer afternoon: a cloudless sky, the muggy air broken occasionally by a soft lake breeze. I was hanging around at Robert Taylor, outside J.T.’s building, along with perhaps a hundred other people. Tenants were barbecuing, playing softball, and taking comfort in the cool shadow of the building. Few apartments
