“Alright, y’all line up behind me! We getting ready for the next take!”
At least half a dozen boys wearing their KOB T-shirts formed a semicircle behind me on the Curtis Elementary gym floor. A director who’d made videos for local rappers set up lights around us and told the cameraman where to stand. TO smirked as I smoothed my hair and tucked in my white shirt airbrushed with the KOB logo.
“Miss Diane, you really rappin’ in this video?” he laughed.
I rolled my eyes. “Boy, you hush before I prick you with my pen,” I said. “You know I can rap better than you.”
One of the new boys, Donnie, burst out laughing. “Man, you know she right.” Even TO’s fiercest look couldn’t shut him up.
“That ain’t rapping,” DaJuan said. “That’s perpetrating. She oughtta get locked up for rapping like that.”
I tried not to laugh. Those kids weren’t shy about telling me what they thought when I rapped at the top of my lungs in the van. And they weren’t wrong. I was under no illusions about my future as a rap star. But our producer was adamant. If I wanted to get my song “Save a Teen / Do Something” out into the world and encourage young people, I’d have to get a little uncomfortable.
I pulled the lyric sheet I’d printed that morning out of my pocket and looked at the lyrics one last time. With each word, the anger I’d felt two years earlier rushed back. I could still see Levi and Creson on my porch back in 2003 when KOB had only been going for a few months.
It was well past ten o’clock when I heard a knock. My front door was open to let some of the cool night air into the stuffy house, but the screen was locked since it was so late. I must have had at least twenty kids in the living room alone, so I’m not sure how I even noticed the noise.
I opened the door to find Levi flanked by his partner in crime, Creson.
“You boys want to come inside?” I asked.
They shook their heads. “Miss Diane, we need to talk to you,” Levi said in a hushed voice.
I’d known Levi since he and his family moved into the house next door a few months earlier. That boy was barely old enough to drive, but from morning until late at night, he did nothing but smoke weed and drink. Word spread around fast that anybody who stopped by could take a hit or grab a drink. Next thing I knew, boys who’d been at KOB every single day were stopping by his house instead.
I’d worked too hard with these kids to lose them now. No way was I going to let them go without a fight. I’d marched over there one day when I saw Levi outside and asked him to stop getting the kids in my program into trouble. Apparently, that was the wrong move. From then on, every time one of Levi’s sisters saw me, they were in my face, yelling and cussing and telling me to stay out of their business.
“Just go on over there in your house, old lady!” they’d yell. Now I had this kid luring my boys right back into the kind of life I had worked to save them from, plus a full-fledged family feud on my hands. Every night, I’d pace the floor, wringing my hands and lifting my prayers up to the Lord. I needed to stop this boy from poaching the kids from my program, but I had no idea how to do it.
This feud went on for weeks until one day, I noticed Levi’s thirteen-year-old brother, Darrell, out in the yard. When a few of my KOB boys told him they were headed inside to record one of their raps, he sighed.
“Man, I really wanna do some music.”
A lightbulb switched on in my head. Maybe I can win Levi over through his brother, I thought.
“Well, you oughtta come over here,” I called from the yard.
Darrell raised his eyebrows and twisted his mouth doubtfully. “Oh, you got something I can make music with?”
“We got a whole studio!” Now I had his attention. “Come on over here and see it.”
Darrell looked around for a moment, I guessed to make sure nobody in his family was looking. Satisfied that he was alone, he shrugged and followed me into the tiny room that used to be my spare bedroom.
His eyes lit up as I opened the door. It wasn’t much—just a track recorder, an electric piano, and a computer app with every instrument imaginable. A few pieces of foam hung on the dark blue walls to keep the sound of rowdy kids out of the recordings, and an old microphone and headphones sat on a tiny table. All of it was used and dusty, donated from a guy in Indiana who’d heard of us. None of it was shiny or impressive. But Darrell’s mouth hung open in awe, as if this little studio was the most beautiful sight he’d ever seen.
“That’s actually pretty cool,” he admitted.
“Go on and try it out if you want.” I pulled out a chair and motioned for him to sit down.
Minutes later, Darrell was behind the computer, the headphones on, lost in his music and oblivious to the world around him. This boy could create original music from scratch just as naturally as he brushed his teeth and washed his face. I couldn’t believe he was only thirteen.
“You got a gift,” I told him, my eyes sincere. “You can come back here anytime you want and hang out in my studio.”
I didn’t need to tell him twice. Darrell was back the very next day, helping the other boys create tracks for their raps and manning the studio like he’d been running it his whole life. Every day, he was there. He couldn’t have resisted the music if he’d tried.
I wasn’t surprised when Levi showed up on my doorstep a few days later. He cut right to the chase without so much as a hello.
“Where Darrell at?” he asked flatly.
I pointed behind me. “He over there in the studio,” I said. I’ll admit I was short with him. I’d had too many arguments with Levi to welcome him with open arms and give him a big smile. But I let him come in.
Levi made his way to the back room and went inside. I kept checking the door, waiting for him to come out. I figured he just wanted to make sure his little brother was okay. But minutes ticked by, and there was still no sign of him.
Finally, I stuck my head inside the studio to check on them. There was Levi, sitting next to Darrell, grinning and bobbing his head to the music. Darrell leaned into the computer with his headphones on, focused on the notes and beats. When the music stopped, Levi burst into applause.
“That was great, bro!” he said, patting Darrell on the back. He beamed at him like a little kid, smiling from ear to ear.
“It was okay.” Darrell tried to shrug away his brother’s compliment.
“Naw, I’m serious. You good at this. You need to keep it up.”
From then on, when Darrell showed up at KOB, Levi was with him. There were no more arguments, no more disagreements. He and I had made peace. I still kept my eye on him. The other kids whispered he was a trigger man, someone who would shoot if he had the opportunity. They said he was in a gang back in wherever he was from before he moved to Chicago, which meant he had no protection here on the streets. When he wasn’t at KOB, he was into it with one of the gangs—that is if he wasn’t drinking or getting high. But when he was in my house, he followed the rules. He played it cool. He even let me cast him in a play as a gang leader named Big O.
Until he showed up on my porch that night with his buddy Creson. They looked around, like they were making sure nobody was listening.
Levi and Creson were quite the pair. Levi was fearless, tough, hotheaded. Creson just wasn’t made from the same stock, much as he tried to be. He wanted to be in the mix, to prove that he was just as hard as Levi. But when it came right down to it, he was scared. He needed Levi because if he actually got into a dangerous situation, he didn’t have what it took to pull the trigger.
“What are you boys doing out here?” I said to them. “Don’t y’all realize how late it is?”
“Miss Diane, we gotta tell you something.” Levi’s voice was quiet as he looked over my shoulder to see who was close by.
“Well, what is it?”
Creson motioned for me to come outside. Now I was worried. I closed the screen door behind me and stepped closer to the boys.
Levi leaned toward me like he was about to tell me a secret. “We got that meat, Miss Diane.”
I stepped back and frowned. “You got what?” I’d been surrounded by teenagers for months, and I’d still never heard anything like that.
“We got the gun, Miss Diane.” Creson was practically smiling, like he was proud. “We gonna get ’em.”
A thousand questions flew through my head. Who gave these teenagers a gun? What were they thinking? And why in the world would they tell me about it? Did they think I’d give them a high-five and send them on their way? Or, deep down, did they want me to stop them?
“Oh, no you not,” I said, confused.
Both boys stumbled all over themselves in protest. “Miss Diane, they shouldn’t have did what they did!” Levi sputtered.
“They came at us.” Creson waved his hands around, as if somehow he could make me understand his point of view. “They was finna do something. So now we finna show them—”
“You ain’t finna do nothing,” I shouted over them as my heart pounded. I could feel the blood rising in my cheeks. I’d turned my whole world upside down just to get kids off the street. I wanted them out of gangs, away from the violence that kept our community trapped indoors like we lived in a war zone. Hearing these boys talk about running out and shooting somebody like it was nothing made me feel like I cared more about keeping them alive than they cared about keeping themselves alive.
“Are you trying to go to jail?” I demanded. Their eyes grew wide, and I could tell they wished they’d never knocked on my door. “Are you trying to die? You don’t bring that mess here. This is my house. You want to go out and get yourselves killed, go ahead. But get off my porch.”
“Oh, Miss Diane!” they protested. By now, a few kids had appeared in the doorway to find out what was going on. I knew I had to get them out of there. The last thing I wanted was another kid to get ideas from these fools.
When they finally left and walked back to Levi’s house, I slammed the door behind me. All I felt in that moment was anger. Anger at their complete lack of respect for themselves and others. Anger that the violence that should have scared them had become normal. Anger that shooting somebody seemed like a reasonable way for them to solve a disagreement.
Summer is always bloody in Chicago. When the weather heats up, so do tensions between gangs. Crosses pop up on street corners like perennial flowers. Families stay inside, scared of getting caught in the cross fire. During the summer of 2003, we’d seen so many people shot that our city became the homicide capital of the country.
Nobody was untouched by it. Every kid in KOB had a brother, cousin, uncle, father, friend, friend of a friend, somebody who had been shot—if they hadn’t been shot themselves. Even on my own street, my family and I had hit the floor during drive-by shootings. This was Roseland. This was the world as the kids knew it. It was normal to expect that you’d probably get shot or locked up before your twenty-fifth birthday. It was normal that if somebody said something you didn’t like, you’d ride by their house shooting out their windows. It was normal not to bother dreaming of a life beyond selling drugs and riding with your gang. They didn’t know life could be any different. Some of these kids had literally never even been to downtown Chicago. They’d never left the four blocks that surrounded them. This was their whole world.
I’d seen the terror on these kids’ faces. I was there when Kenneth Easton ran into my house and slammed the door behind him, panic written all over his face. He told me his friend had been killed, and he was terrified that whoever shot his friend was after him too. This wasn’t some kid feeling paranoid. At the same time I was consoling him, I was looking out the window, wondering if the guys with guns might follow him to my house.
The people in charge had written off every block and left them to rot. These kids had no hope. No power. No power but a gun, in their minds. That’s why Levi and Creson looked proud to tell me they got that meat. Somebody, whatever they did, had made them feel scared, small, powerless. Now nobody would dare mess with them. Now they had something.
I pictured Levi’s face and felt the rage rising inside me all over again. I thought about how they’d practically smiled as they told me about their big plans to go throw away their lives and take away somebody else’s in the process. And for what? Because they were mad? These boys were off their rockers. Yet they were looking at me like I was crazy because I wanted them to stay alive, stay out of trouble, and make good lives for themselves. I felt alone, like I was the only one who cared about saving these kids.
I marched past the other kids and into my bedroom. My hands shook as I pulled my raggedy spiral notebook out of my nightstand drawer and picked up a pen. All the rage, all the frustration, came pouring out in that moment. I didn’t know exactly what I was writing or what I would do with it. I just needed to get these feelings out.
I’d never planned to show anyone what I’d written. But when my music-producer brother-in-law caught me hunched over my notebook, I ended up reading it to him. That winter, we put my poem to music. And two years later, there we were in the gym, making a music video, waiting for the cameraman to roll the tape.
The director yelled, “Action!” I forgot where I was. I forgot how the kids laid out laughing at my attempts at rapping. The only thing in my head was the lyrics. I swayed as the track played behind me.
Come on, people, let’s do something
Don’t you wanna do something?
Save a teen.
The song told the story of the night Levi and Creson stood on my porch telling me they got that meat. I rapped everything I’d said that night and everything I wished I had said.
I asked them, do they know what it means for their finger to be on the trigger . . .
Giving it a sexy name like, “I got that meat”
Letting everybody know they gon’ ride or die
Willing to let their blood run in the streets for a concrete block that don’t belong to them
Every nerve or ounce of self-consciousness disappeared. I looked straight into the camera and yelled that these kids were wasting their lives getting high and riding with their crew.
It’s not cool to be successful and do good
You know it’s true when the drug dealer is the hero in your neighborhood
At the end of the song, I wasn’t rapping anymore. I was preaching. It was everything I had ever wanted to say to these kids, to their parents, to the world. This was my plea, my passion, my mission.
Man, it makes me mad
Because what we have done is set our children up to be disgraced
Losing a whole generation
Our young men are leaving this nation
Where’s our marching, protest, outrage at the loss of our teens?
Don’t you wanna do something?
Don’t you wanna do anything?
When we finished recording, the kids and I laughed and high-fived one another. I smiled at the boys in the semicircle. That day, I didn’t know that some of the kids standing behind me couldn’t be saved. I didn’t know some of them would be gunned down before they were old enough to vote. I didn’t know some of them would spend decades of their lives locked up for murder. I was blissfully unaware of what lay ahead. We headed back to my house like it was a normal day of KOB. Because as far as we knew, it was.