It started with a knock on the front door.
I opened it to find police officers, hats perched on their heads, their arms crossed. Oh, Lord, what are they doing here? I thought. Was our music really that loud?
“Is everything alright here?” one of the officers said.
I nodded as politely as I could. “Yes, sir,” I said. “We fine.” They barely said another word before they turned to leave.
Now what was that about? I wondered. You don’t see the police in my neighborhood unless there’s some kind of problem. I’ve never been shy about calling the police. I know a lot of folks around Roseland would rather take care of their own business. The kids say, “Snitches get stitches.” Our community’s relationship with the police has always been complicated. But as for me, I don’t play. I will call the police in a heartbeat, and I make sure the kids in my program understand that too. Still, I’d be lying if I said my heart didn’t pound a little faster when I opened my door to find two cops standing there on the porch.
I chalked it up to the kids being especially loud that night. “Everybody quiet down,” I instructed them. “You want somebody to call the police again?” And I moved on.
But only a couple weeks went by before I saw a police car roll slowly by my house and shine its spotlight onto my porch. After another couple weeks, we got another knock on the front door.
Something’s going on here, I thought. I started looking around my street, eyeing my neighbors suspiciously. Back when the kids first showed up at my house and we were all outside together, I’d shout hello to my neighbors as they walked to their cars or watered their flowers. “Yeah, I’m trying to help these kids,” I’d tell them in between comments about the weather or how our families were doing.
“That’s real nice!” they’d say, smiling at me.
But maybe some of that goodwill had worn off. After all, I had as many as seventy-five kids running in and out of my house at all hours of the night, making trips to the gas station at three in the morning and banging on my door without giving a thought to how late it was.
Are my neighbors calling the police on me? I wondered.
Then one night, two detectives burst through my front door. I knew what a detective looked like when I saw one. I’d seen plenty walk through my neighborhood over the years. But I’d never seen these two.
The detectives didn’t say a word as they strode into the house. The kids scrambled like cockroaches when the kitchen light gets switched on. Nobody made a sound, but I could see panic in their eyes as they ran from the living room, ducking into bathrooms, closets, out the back door, anywhere they thought they could get away from the detectives.
“Just be still!” I shouted. These kids hadn’t done a thing wrong, but I was terrified that all this scrambling would make the detectives suspicious. I’d heard of too many people who had been shot for making sudden movements in a police officer’s presence. I didn’t want anybody to get arrested or worse. “Don’t move. It’s alright.”
I tried to keep an eye on the detectives and the kids all at once. I watched the detectives walk to the back of the house, turn on their heels, and walk to the front again. What are these people doing here? Why aren’t they talking to me?
“What’s going on?” I demanded, following the detectives to the door. They didn’t even acknowledge me as they walked onto the porch and slammed the door behind them.
My house erupted into a roar as soon as the detectives were gone. Every noise the kids had held inside, every fear that gripped them, everything came pouring out as they ran to me from their hiding places. They peppered me with questions so quickly I couldn’t respond.
“Miss Diane, what was going on?” somebody yelled.
“Who was they looking for? I’m telling you, Miss Diane, they was looking for somebody.”
“I know that one detective, Miss Diane. He bad!”
I forced myself to let go of my own fears, my own panic. The kids didn’t need me to freak out. They needed me to be a calming presence. So I put my hands on their shoulders.
“They didn’t do anything,” I said in the most soothing voice I could muster. “They left. Nobody got hurt. We okay.”
I sat with the kids for hours, listening to their fears and their feelings. The whole time, one thought was in the back of my mind. The police commander is gonna hear about this.
I climbed into my 1996 Cadillac Sedan DeVille the next morning and drove over to 111th Street to the police district office. “Sending detectives to my house, scaring these kids to death,” I muttered under my breath as I steered my car down Michigan Avenue and waited at the stoplight. Those kids told me they honestly thought they might get shot when the detectives walked through my house. Whatever was going on, Commander Ball would fix it. I’d met him several times at Neighborhood Recovery Initiative events, and I’d even had my picture taken with him. He was a great guy. I didn’t have an appointment, but I knew he’d take the time to speak with me anyway.
I marched into the commander’s office, startling him out of his chair. I wasn’t sure if he was surprised to see me or if he had just never seen me look that upset. I was too heated to sit down. I launched into my tirade, telling him all about how those detectives walked in and out of my house without so much as a hello. Commander Ball promised he’d look into it, but I could tell from the creases in his forehead that something else was going on.
The commander sighed. “Miss Latiker, your neighbors are calling the police on you,” he said.
“Neighbors? Like, more than one? Well, what are they calling the police for?”
“You’ve got teenagers hanging around your house. They’re probably scared.” He said it as kindly as he could, but the words still hurt. All these people, these neighbors who acted like they thought it was so great that I was helping these kids, were actually scared of them.
“Try to keep the kids inside,” Commander Ball said. “Then I don’t think you’ll see any more detectives.”
I shook my head slowly. “They come and go,” I told him. “I can’t lock them in my house. And I’m not going to stop them from coming in.”
Commander Ball raised his eyebrows. “Well, they’ll probably keep calling then.”
I walked out of that office feeling completely alone. Even a good man like Commander Ball couldn’t help me. He couldn’t make me any promises. And I couldn’t exactly ask my neighbors to stop calling. The last thing I wanted was for them to know I’d visited the district and found out they’d called.
It took every ounce of willpower I had to smile and wave over the chain-link fence like nothing had happened whenever I saw my neighbors outside. I couldn’t hide from them. Anytime I was outside with the kids, I’d see neighbors leaving for work or coming home, heading to the grocery store or going for a drive. I wanted to shout, “You hate children! You should be over here helping me, not calling the police!” But I held my tongue. What good would it do to start a war with my neighbors? And truth be told, I might have done the same thing if I were in their shoes.
The police kept stopping by. They kept shining their spotlight at my house. I tried my best to shut down each incident with my most respectful tone. And when I saw my neighbors, I kept smiling and waving just like nothing had happened.
Inside my house, tensions were just as high as they were outside. James still didn’t like what I was doing. He never made that a secret. I kept hoping he would see what it meant to the kids, that he would learn to love them too.
He tolerated the kids tearing up our living room furniture, eating his food, and taking over every room but our bedroom. There was just one thing off limits—his big-screen TV.
James had wanted a big screen for his football games and Sanford and Son reruns for as long as I’d known him. When I started doing hair, we decided to make it happen. We’d put away a hundred dollars here, fifty dollars there, until we’d finally saved up enough. James was so proud when we hauled it home from the store. This was long before the days of flat-panel big screens that one person can lift on their own. This thing practically needed a moving crew to carry it up our front steps and into the dining room. It took up half the room, but James didn’t care. He set up his La-Z-Boy recliner in front of it and kicked back like he was king of the castle.
But after I started KOB, I started eyeing that TV like a cash cow. Now that the kids were back in school, they needed computers and printers to write papers, research topics, and get help with homework. I figured I needed at least ten computers and a few printers. And I needed some money to get them.
Oh, Lord, I gotta ask James if I can sell the TV, I thought. I waited until I fixed him a nice breakfast on Saturday, hoping to butter him up. But James cut me off as soon as I asked the question.
“Uh-uh,” he said shortly. “Nope.”
I don’t give up that easily. So a few days later, I tried again. And again. And again. Over and over for about two weeks. James’s answer never changed.
“Don’t you touch that TV,” he said. But James knew me. He knew that when I wanted to do something, I’d do it and suffer the consequences.
So one day, after James left for work, I picked up the phone and dialed the number of a TV resale store. The man who answered the phone said he couldn’t tell me how much he’d give me for the TV without looking at it, but he’d stop by in an hour. I looked at the clock and felt my forehead start to sweat. “Well, you gotta hurry up,” I told him.
True to his word, the man showed up and gave James’s TV the once-over.
“I’ll give you $600 for it,” he said.
“Sold,” I said. I signed some papers, he gave me the money, and a crew hauled the TV away. Now I was left to wait on pins and needles until James got home. I paced across the empty space where the TV once stood. James is gonna kill me, I thought.
That evening, James opened the door and immediately noticed it was gone. I expected him to yell. Instead, he gave me a look I’ve only seen maybe three times in our marriage. We carried on this wordless conversation, James’s face saying, “You better not have sold that TV,” and mine saying, “I sold the TV—I’m so sorry!” That big empty space between us where the TV once stood felt like the Grand Canyon.
When James opened his mouth to speak, it wasn’t quiet. James is loud to begin with, but in twenty years I’d never heard him yell like this.
“Why the so-and-so did you do that?” he shouted. He never uses profanity unless he’s truly angry. “I asked you not to do this. You did it anyway. I should divorce you for this.” Sweat beaded on his forehead. “I’m thinking about it, anyway, because I can’t take this anymore.”
All I could do was stand there like a child, taking my whooping. Nothing I said would matter until he calmed down. All I could say was, “I’m sorry,” over and over.
I tried popping my head in the bedroom later that night, when I thought he’d cooled off.
“You still love me?” I asked. He just stared at me blankly.
It wasn’t until the next night that he eased up. He told me he was still mad. I said I was sorry, that it wouldn’t happen again. We fell back into our routine. I got some computers, and the kids had a place to do homework. I wondered if I’d hurt my case for KOB with James for good. I had thought for sure he’d stop tolerating KOB and start supporting it. Now that I’d sold his TV, that might never happen.
Now, I knew there were some rumblings among my children. A few of them had made it known over those first couple of months of KOB that they weren’t exactly thrilled. One of my older daughters let me know in no uncertain terms that she thought the KOB kids were a bunch of thugs and gangbangers who had no business in my house. Even Aisha was nursing a grudge. I didn’t find out she didn’t like sharing me with the other kids until she told a reporter who was doing a story on KOB.
After a little while, the waves settled. Aisha and I found our groove. I stopped seeing that little jealous frown on her face. And none of my other kids had complained, at least not in a while.
And then, five of them staged a coup. It was the winter after I’d started KOB, and one of my daughters was visiting from out of state. I didn’t have a thought in my mind beyond being happy to see her and my grandchildren. When my other kids gathered at my house one night, I figured they just wanted to visit their sister. I didn’t think anything of it.
My whole house was filled to bursting with young people doing homework, rapping, singing, and dancing. It was the best of both of my worlds. I had my own kids and my KOB kids all under one roof. Then one of my daughters walked into the living room, her arms crossed.
“Ma, could you ask the kids to step outside for a minute?” she asked.
I looked at her like she was crazy. It was winter in Chicago, and half these kids showed up with nothing but a hoodie. “I’m not doing that,” I told her.
Her eyes narrowed. “Fine. Can you come to your bedroom then?”
I had a sinking feeling as I sat on the bed. Five of my older children were crowded around me as one of them shut the door.
“Mom, we been talking,” one of them said when everybody quieted down.
That’s what they always say when they’ve been gabbing about something behind my back. “Oh yeah?” I asked calmly, pretending I didn’t know what was coming. “What’s going on?”
“Ma, I ain’t got nothing to do with this!” my second oldest daughter said, waving her arms.
Another daughter took a deep breath. “We feel that what you’re doing is dangerous. You need to take another look at what you’re doing and really think about whether this is a good idea.”
I willed my eyes not to roll back in my head like a pouty teenager’s.
“You know those kids are in gangs,” she continued. “They might hurt you.”
“I keep telling Mama that!” another daughter said. “They shouldn’t be in her house. It’s okay for her to help them, but they shouldn’t be in her house. It ain’t good for her, and it ain’t good for Aisha.”
Two of my boys jumped in. Once they get to going, there’s no shutting them up. I kept as composed as I could, nodding here and there, but inside I was screaming, This is my life! My boys and girls had all moved out, gotten married, had kids, made lives for themselves. I felt like they wanted me to sit around in my house, waiting on James and Aisha hand and foot and twiddling my thumbs until they decided to visit me. They didn’t want me to be anything more than their middle-aged mom. I was changing, and they didn’t like it—even though it meant I was happy. You’re gone, I thought. This is my life. I’m entitled to live my own life.
But I didn’t say any of that. I just listened until they quieted down and looked at me, waiting for me to speak. Finally, I cleared my throat.
“You guys got some good points,” I said slowly. “But I started this. I gotta see where it goes.”
“But Mama—”
“I believe God gave this to me,” I said as I held up my hand to shush them. “If I believe He gave it to me, I believe He will protect me.”
The room was suddenly quiet. My oldest finally shook her head. “Mama ain’t listening.”
She was right. I wasn’t. I believed they were dead wrong.
Sometimes I wondered why I kept going when nobody liked what I was doing. Nobody but my mom. I was overworked, exhausted, stressed about what my kids and husband thought about me. But the kids who walked through my front door didn’t see any of that. They didn’t notice the bags under my eyes or my rumpled hair. All they cared about was that I was there for them when they needed me. And somebody always needed me.
“Miss Diane, I need a ride to school.”
“Miss Diane, I’m cold, and I don’t got a coat. Can you help me get one?”
“Miss Diane, could I just sit in here for a while?”
I always said yes. Helping them gave me this high I couldn’t explain, a high that got me through the exhaustion and stress. My family may not need me as much anymore, but these kids did. I was a safe place for my community, a place where any kid could come, no matter where they came from or what struggles they carried. It didn’t matter if nobody else understood, if nobody supported me, if nobody wanted to help me. I was living out God’s will. I couldn’t stop now.