He told one young BK that there probably wouldn’t be another shooting for at least a few hours. “Get some of the older people out of here,” he ordered. “Take them to 2325.” A BK foot soldier told me that Price had made it to the emergency room but was said to be still bleeding badly.
J.T. came over and told me what he knew. The first car, the beat-up Ford, was a decoy to lure some Black Kings out of the building. The attack appeared to be a collaboration between the MCs and the Stones. They were deeply envious, J.T. told me, that the BKs had been able to attract so many customers to their territory. The MCs and the Stones were a constant source of worry for J.T., since they were led by “crazy niggers,” his term for the kind of bad businessmen who thought that a drive-by shooting was the best way to competein a drug market. J.T. much preferred the more established rival gangs, since a shared interest in maintaining the status quo decreased their appetite for violence.
Every so often J.T. sent out an entourage to buy food for people in the building. A few tenants carried on as usual, paying little attention to the Black Kings’ dramatic show of security in the lobby. But except for a couple of stereos and some shouting in the stairwells, the building was eerily quiet. We all baked in the still, hot air.
Occasionally one of J.T.’s more senior members would throw out a plan for retaliation. J. T. listened to every proposal but was noncommittal. “We got time for all that,” he kept saying. “Let’s just see what happens tonight.”
Every half hour Cherise called from the hospital to report on Price’s condition. J.T. looked tense as he took these reports. Price was a friend since high school, one of the few people J.T. allowed in his inner circle.
I was just nodding off to sleep on the floor when J.T. walked over.
“Thanks, man,” he said quietly.
“For what?”
“You didn’t have to get mixed up in this shit.”
He must have heard that I’d helped drag Price into the lobby. I didn’t say anything. J.T. slapped my leg, asked if I wanted a Coke, and walked off to the fridge.
There were no more shootings that night, but the tension didn’t let up. I never went home.
Within a few days, once he figured out exactly who was responsible for the attack, J.T. rounded up T-Bone and several other officers and went after the shooters. J. T. personally helped beat them up; the BKs also took their guns and money. Because these young rivals had “no business sense,” as J.T. told me later, there was no hope of a compromise. Physical retaliation was the only measure to consider.
Price stayed in the hospital for a few days, but the bullet caused no irreparable damage, and he was soon back in action.
T-Bone called me one day with big news: J.T. was on the verge of receiving another important promotion within the citywide Black Kings organization. If all went according to plan, J.T., T-Bone, and Price would be responsible for taking on even more BK factions, which meant managing a considerably larger drug-trafficking operation. I could hear the excitement in T-Bone’s voice. For him, too, the promotion meant more money as well as a boost in status. “Two years, that’s it,” he told me. “Two more years of this shit, and I’m getting out of the game.” Ever practical, T-Bone was saving for his future-a house, full-time college, and a legal job.
J.T. wouldn’t be around Robert Taylor much for the next several weeks, T-Bone told me, since his new assignment required a lot of preparation and legwork. But he had asked T-Bone to give me a message: “J.T. wants you to go with him to the next regional BK meeting. You up for it?”
I had been waiting for this phone call for a few years. I desperately wanted to learn about the gang’s senior leadership, and now that J.T. was one of them, it looked like I’d finally have my chance.
By this point in my research, I still felt guilty sometimes for being as much of a hustler, in my own way, as the other hustlers in the neighborhood. C-Note had called me on it, and C-Note was right. I constantly hustled people for information-stories, data, interviews,facts-anything that might make my research more interesting.
So I was happy whenever I had the chance to give a little bit back. The writing workshop hadn’t worked out as well as I’d wanted, and I was searching for another way to act charitably. An opportunity fell into my lap when the Chicago public-school teachers went on strike. Since BK rules stipulated that each member graduate from high school, J.T. asked Autry to set up a program during the strike so that J.T.’s members could stay off the streets and do some home-work. Autry had set up a similar program at the Boys & Girls Club, but gang boundaries forbade J.T.’s members to go there.
Autry agreed, and he asked me to run a classroom in J.T.’s building. I obliged, pretty sure that lecturing high- schoolers on history, politics, and math shouldn’t be too hard.
We met in a dingy, darkened apartment with a bathroom that didn’t work. On a given day, there were anywhere from twenty to fifty teenage gang members on my watch. The air was so foul that I let them smoke to cover the odor. There weren’t enough seats, so the kids forcibly claimed some chairs from neighboring apartments, with no promise of returning them.
On the first day, as the students talked loudly through my lecture on history and politics, J.T. walked in unannounced and shouted at them to pay attention. He ordered Price to take one particularly noisy foot soldier into the hallway and beat him.
Later I asked J.T. not to interrupt again. The kids would never learn anything, I insisted, if they knew that he was going to be monitoring them. J.T. and Autry both thought I was crazy. They didn’t think I had any chance of controlling the unruly teens without the threat of an occasional visit by J.T.
They were right. Within a day the “classroom” had descended into anarchy. In one corner a few guys were admiring a gun that one of them had just bought. (He was thoughtful enough to remove the bullets during class.) In another corner several teenagers had organized a dice game. The winner would get not only the cash but also the right to rob the homeless people sleeping in a nearby vacant apartment. One kid brought in a radio and improvised a rap song about their “Injun teacher,” replete with references to Custer, Geronimo, and “the smelly Ay-Rab.” (It never seemed to occur to anyone that “Arab” and “Indian” were not in fact interchangeable; in my case they were equally valuable put-downs.) The most harmless kids in the room were the ones who patiently waited for their friends to return from the store with some beer.
Things got worse from there. Some of my students started selling marijuana in the classroom; others would casually leave the building to find a prostitute. When I conveyed all this to J.T., he said that as long as the guys showed up, they weren’t hanging out on the street and getting into any real trouble.
Given that they were using my “classroom” to deal drugs, gamble, and play with guns, I wondered exactly what J.T. meant by “real” trouble.
My role was quickly downgraded from teacher to baby-sitter. The sessions lasted about two weeks, until news came that the teachers’ strike was being settled. By this time my admiration for Autry’s skill with the neighborhood kids had increased exponentially.
Despite my utter failure as a teacher, Autry called me again for help. The stakes were a little higher this time-and, for me, so was the reward.
Autry and the other staffers at the Boys & Girls Club wanted me to help write a grant proposal for the U.S. Department of Justice, which had advertised special funds being allocated for youth programs. The proposal needed to include in-depth crime statistics for the projects and the surrounding neighborhood, data that was typically hard to get, since the police didn’t like to make such information public. But if I took on the project, I’d get direct access to Officer Reggie Marcus-“Officer Reggie” to tenants-the local cop who had grown up in Robert Taylor himself and was devoted to making life there better. I jumped at the chance.
I had met Reggie on several occasions, but now I had an opportunity to work closely with him and cultivate a genuine friendship. He was about six feet tall, as muscular and fit as a football player; he always dressed well and carried himself with a quiet determination. I knew that Reggie often dealt directly with gang leaders in the hopes of keeping violence to a minimum and that he was a diplomatic force among the project’s street hustlers. Now I would be able to ask as many questions as I wanted about the particulars of his work.
Why, for instance, did he try to reduce gun violence by making sure that the gangs were the only ones who had guns?
“They don’t like gun violence any more than the tenants, because it scares away customers,” he explained. “So they try to keep things quiet.”
