The problem with Chicago is geography.
It is a giant, sprawling, segregated city where men cannot cross forbidden streets, alleyways, or expressways. To do so is to gamble recklessly with one’s life.
Yet still, men gamble. After trending downward for some years, murder and gunplay in the city were back in fashion. There had been more than two hundred killings so far in Chicago—a 15 percent increase and summer had not yet officially begun. Good thing they can’t shoot straight in the Windy City, one cop told me, because there had also been more than a thousand nonfatal shootings. We get one gun off the street, two more come, he said.
One astute statistician calculated that more Americans had been murdered in Chicago in the last fifteen years than had died in Iraq and Afghanistan combined. Much of the mayhem was happening on the South and West sides. The black and brown sides. What they were now calling with metaphorical flair Chi-Raq, thanks to the work of that number-cruncher.
Police in America knocking black heads, racially profiling, turning out pockets, manipulating evidence, killing under the flimsiest of circumstances. Big historic problems magnified by the technological innovations of cell phones and live streaming and social media that can put any situation out to the world in seconds along with directions and a Google map to the unrest.
But there was also the other side of things: A black person in the United States is six times more likely as a proportion of his population to be the victim of a murder than a white person, and eight times more likely to be the murderer. Black-on-black violence results in a huge police presence. The police presence results in the stuff of headlines. Black-on-black crime received little analysis I noticed, no mention beyond the “bleeds it ledes” offerings of local TV news.
Chicago too was going off the rails. The smoke from the urban core was thick this season. Something substantial, interconnected was happening. As much as we were tired of death and disorder, we made the drive from Detroit, a city with a murder rate more than twice that of Chicago.
Whenever I travel, I avoid the corridors of power, the clubs of high importance, the restaurants with starched tablecloths. You’ll get no answers to real life there. You have to go to the alley. And so a meeting with a group of men was arranged on a South Side back street by Jedidiah Brown, a young, energetic bordering on high-strung black man doing triple duty as a minister, social worker, and candidate for city council.
Brown made it his business to be at every shooting on the South Side, thinking his mediating presence might somehow improve things. His telephone, it was easy to see, was radioactive, a repository of contacts for cops and robbers, priests and dope pushers. The chief of police himself was one call away.
In fact, the cops called him as we were driving around, taking a look at the landscape of the rugged West Side. They were giving him directions to a shooting on the South Side. The reporter in me marveled at his access. The cops calling like a Chinese restaurant calling to tell him his Szechuan beef was ready for pickup.
I am not the best gauger of destitution, my judgment having been warped by years of reporting in Detroit. By comparison, in cities like St. Louis and Chicago and Los Angeles, the “ghettos” appear relatively nice. Livable. No falling-in porches. In West Side Chicago, the streets were paved and swept. The apartment buildings occupied. The grass cut and the stores full. What was more, there was foot traffic. Women walking freely about their business, shopping bags hanging from their forearms. A child riding a tricycle. How normal. How tranquil. A beguiling mirage of American middle-class life.
As we turned left off the boulevard onto a wide side street, the leftovers of a crime scene unfolded. A yellow caution ribbon, squad cars, an elderly man hanging out his window. Somebody had been shot in the vestibule of the apartment building. This was our proverbial Chinese restaurant. Brown, by virtue of his telephone, slipped under the police tape, spoke with detectives, slipped back out from the shooting scene, and made a direct line to the dope boys on the corner. He’d make a great reporter, I thought.
Nobody seen nothing, said one teenager.
That’s how it goes, homey, said another.
Getting few answers, and no converts to his unsolicited offers of mediation, an exasperated Brown climbed back in his sedan and drove us toward the beleaguered Woodlawn neighborhood where we were to meet some men. He took the southbound Dan Ryan Expressway. Shoot-to-thrill riflemen were having their fun this season, the count so far being nine random shootings on city freeways in twenty-two days, some during rush hour.
On we drove. Once known as White City and the “city of a million electric lights” for the magnificent amusement park there with plaster-of-Paris buildings, the Woodlawn community like so many other South Side neighborhoods was awash in darkness and violence.
I’m down with the struggle, Brown said as we pulled onto a street that was indeed boarded up and had mammoth speed bumps designed to slow down dope deals and drive-bys. But the struggle has so many branches, he continued. The politicians, the churches, the streets themselves. It’s really difficult sometimes to keep your focus on the trees. There’s just a vacuum of leadership. Honestly, nobody seems to care unless it’s in the news.
On a street not far from a playground, we pulled up to a group of older men. They were not the young street employee entrepreneur types, but the next rung up. Lieutenants, not soldiers. Like Brown, they exuded a calm, cold desperation, hoods and ball caps covering their heads.
I got to give you credit, one of the men said, noticing Bob’s pasty calves beckoning from his camo shorts. You got some balls coming here.
Why are black men slaughtering each other? I nakedly asked one of the men who was dressed in a dark hoodie and sweatpants. He was handsome, goateed, and worn. Not old, but not young. Sullen and intense. He gave me no name. So I called him Dude.
We’re bust in our communities, Dude said. We’re overpopulated. Look around. Do you see any stores? Do you see any places where anybody can work? It’s not enough jobs for a third of us . . . any of us. We’re standing in front of an abandoned building.
We in fact were standing in front of an empty brick building. But it was well kept in its way. It did not appear as though it had been stripped of its copper wiring or hot-water tank. It didn’t look like junkies used it as a shooting gallery. It wasn’t pissed on with graffiti. There was a park across the street. Children played. The grass of the adjacent building was mowed. No, this was “nice.” Nothing compared to Detroit.
Dude, who described his occupation as a minder of his own business, was an informed man. Consider: Black unemployment tops 25 percent in Chicago, as compared to 7 percent for whites and 12 percent for Latinos. That number skyrockets to 92 percent for black teenagers.
Another man, this one much larger than Dude, said a man’s gonna do.
Do what? I didn’t have to ask. I knew the answer, but I did just the same.
A man is going to do whatever he thinks he’s got to do to eat. And if he has to eat another man or another man’s children to feed himself, then bon appétit, motherfucker. I stood there thinking of the good ol’ boy I’d met in Alabama. The one with the freezer full of squirrel. A man’s gonna eat. Same with Ciro, wearing flip-flops in the reeds of the Rio Grande. ¡Buen provecho, cabrón!
A third member of the crew, a man with a tattooed neck who was dressed in a Captain America T-shirt, explained the attractiveness of warring with your own. Black men couldn’t fight city hall. They couldn’t fight police. They couldn’t fight globalization. But they could battle the shadow across the alley. They could fight him for control of low-slung buildings with their windows smashed out. They could fight him for title to the local playground. They could war for the drug business of black and white customers alike. The arithmetic is basic: You do him before he does you.
Some people gotta die, said Captain America.
Some of the men had done time. Two-thirds of the inmates at Chicago’s Cook County Jail were black and doing a bid for drug sales or drug possession, according to Sheriff Tom Dart. The intake cells there smelled like horse paddocks. It was a dank and gray facility with no natural light penetrating the walls. The jail is the largest in the United States and so overcrowded that it has been under federal oversight since 1980. It is also the largest mental health hospital in the country, where one in three inmates suffers some sort of mental disorder. Men incarcerated along with their demons make the Cook County jailhouse a very dangerous place.
Jails are for violent people, and we have a lot of those, Dart said. But what about the nonviolent people, the mentally ill? They don’t need to be here. And honestly, I don’t know why they are.
The branch of government with which black Chicagoans most frequently dealt seemed to be the criminal justice system. Police who drove through South Side neighborhoods were routinely greeted by teenagers with a wave of the middle finger.
Recently there had been well-chronicled reports of abuse in the Chicago Police Department: a commander sticking his firearm into the mouth of a suspect, police dropping teenagers into rival gang territories, and so on. Adding to the dissonance were the denials of Chicago’s superintendent of police, Garry McCarthy. When asked about the ongoing violence, McCarthy got snippy.
There are a lot less shootings than there were last year, he said. I don’t know if you are aware of that?
I wasn’t aware of that, because according to numbers supplied by McCarthy’s own Chicago Police Department, shootings were up 20 percent. Spouting dumb shit like that in the midst of a crime wave can cost a man his job. And eventually it did. McCarthy was fired a few months later, with murder spiraling out of control and the emergence of a videotape that the city had tried to suppress showing a police officer shooting unarmed teenager Laquan McDonald sixteen times, killing him.
McDonald was a ward of the state, a dropout who enrolled himself in an alternative high school in an attempt to get his life together. But Chicago’s schools, already underperforming and underfunded, especially in black sections of the city, weren’t the places to get your life together. Mayor Rahm Emanuel had closed nearly fifty public schools, many on the South Side. Now the school buildings sat empty, mocking, while the students went off to other classrooms that were already overcrowded. One elementary had a kindergarten class with fifty-one children and a first-grade class with forty-eight.
More outrageous, the superintendent of schools had recently resigned under a federal corruption probe, having allegedly steered $20 million in no-bid contracts to her own company. Stealing from the future of her own students.
And then there were the sweeteners siphoned off for the politically connected. A hotel chain received $55 million of the city’s property tax money to help subsidize a skyscraper it was building downtown. One of Mayor Emanuel’s contributors owns a hedge fund that is part owner of that hotel chain.
Hizzoner was no stranger to high finance. In fact, he was brilliant at it. Consider that in between stints at the Clinton White House and the U.S. House of Representatives, Emanuel worked as an investment banker. In just thirty months, he reportedly raked in $18 million in compensation despite the fact that he had absolutely no experience in finance. So no doubt, Rahm—who also served as Obama’s chief of staff before being elected the mayor of Chicago—knew money, or at least knew where to find it.
And property tax money, it is worth remembering, goes to pay for public schools. And, again, the schools on the South Side were being shuttered as in Baltimore and Detroit and Philly. The business community and the mayor argued that the skyscraper would bring jobs. Maybe. But that’s not how they were seeing it from the South Side.
The mayor’s people promised us an interview at a hotel where he was giving a speech. After the speech, the mayor decided to drive away. One of his security people stumbled over the curb trying to keep us at bay. I was getting the picture. Downtown Chicago was doing great. Public money pumped into private development projects. But few jobs went to South Siders.
This was by no means the Chicago of 1919. The city was not in flames. The beaches were integrated. Roaming bands of white marauders were not pulling people off of streetcars and murdering them. Blacks were not sniping at white motorists driving through the neighborhoods. (The rash of freeway shootings notwithstanding.) People’s homes certainly were not on fire. Imagine today what that would look like through the amplifiers of TV and social media.
Chicago was not on fire, but fumes were steaming from the neighborhood streets. Blacks originally made the great migration north to Chicago for the work and the better material life that factory jobs brought. But today, the manufacturing jobs were scarce, and one of the few careers left is holding down the corner. Nabisco announced it was eliminating half the jobs at its biggest Chicago-based plant and spending millions of dollars to upgrade its Mexican facility. Good for business. Bad for the neighborhood. A never-ending swirl toward the drain.
Guns are a problem, and they flood in illegally from nearby Indiana. The courts and prosecutors are a problem, cutting back on weapons cases because the jails are so full. But the real color problem is green, one of the men on the corner said, echoing men on the corner everywhere. People around here don’t got it. Then you’re fighting like rats.
And so the corner must be defended.
Can’t you just get away? I asked Dude. I may as well have been asking if he had the power of resurrection.
By what method? he hissed. By what means?
The rain started falling like marbles. The men began to scatter.
Remember us, one said, pulling up his hood. Somebody ain’t gonna be here in the future. Death, son. That’s the way it goes.
That man was a prophet.
Because the following week, one of the crew who went by the name Chubb stepped out on the wrong side of town. Chubb caught a bullet and then Chubb caught a ride in an ambulance. His buddy was not so lucky. He caught a ride to the morgue.