There Are No Children Here Read online

  First Anchor Books Edition, February 1992

  Copyright © 1991 by Alex Kotlowitz

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Nan A. Talese / Doubleday in 1991. The Anchor Books edition is published by arrangement with Nan A. Talese / Doubleday.

  Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  All dates, place names, titles, and events in this account are factual. However, the names of certain individuals have been changed in order to afford them a measure of privacy.

  Grateful acknowledgments is made to the following for permission to quote from copyrighted material:

  Lyrics from “I Need Love,” by J. Todd Smith. Copyright © 1987 by Def Jam Music Inc. (ASCAP). Used by permission.

  Lyrics from “Make It Last Forever,” by Keith Swear and Teddy Riley. Copyright © 1987 by Zomba Enterprises Inc./Donril Music (administered by Zomba Enterprises Inc.). Copyright © 1982 by WB Music Corp. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

  Lyrics from “Superwoman,” by Baby Face, L. A. Reid, and Daryl Simmons. Copyright © 1988 by Kear Music, Green Skirt Music and Epic/Solar Songs, Inc. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

  The poem “Dream Deferred,” reprinted from The Panther and the Lash by Langston Hughes, by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Copyright © 1951 by Langston Hughes.

  The articles “How Young Pair Beat Odds in Public Housing” by Leslie Baldacci and “Gang Member Killed” are reprinted with permission from the Chicago Sun-Times.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Kotlowitz, Alex.

  There are no children here / Alex Kotlowitz. — 1st Anchor Books ed.

  p. cm.

  “Originally published in hardcover by Nan A. Talese/Doubleday in 1991”—

  T.p. verso.

  1. Children—Illinois—Chicago—Social conditions—Case studies.

  2. Family—Illinois—Chicago—Case studies. 3. Inner cities—Illinois—

  Chicago—Case studies. I. Title.

  [HQ792.U5K683 1992]

  305.23′09773′11—dc20 91-28532

  eISBN: 978-0-307-81428-9

  www.anchorbooks.com

  v3.1

  To my mother and father

  What happens to a dream deferred?

  Does it dry up

  like a raisin in the sun?

  Or fester like a sore—

  And then run?

  Does it stink like rotten meat?

  Or crust and sugar over—

  like a syrupy sweet?

  Maybe it just sags

  like a heavy load.

  Or does it explode?

  —LANGSTON HUGHES

  Ah! What would the world be to us

  If the children were no more?

  We should dread the desert behind us

  Worse than the dark before.

  —HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Preface

  Summer 1987

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Fall 1987–Spring 1988

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Summer 1988

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Fall 1988–Winter 1989

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Spring 1989

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Summer 1989

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  September 29, 1989

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Epilogue

  A Note on Reporting Methods

  Acknowledgments

  Selective Bibliography

  About the Author

  Preface

  I FIRST MET Lafeyette and Pharoah Rivers during the summer of 1985. Lafeyette was then ten. Pharoah was seven. I was working as a freelance journalist at the time and had been asked by a friend to write the text for a photo essay he was doing on children in poverty for Chicago magazine. He’d met the two boys and their mother through a local social services agency and had spent a number of days taking photographs of them at the Henry Horner Homes, a public housing complex.

  Before I ever met Lafeyette and Pharoah, I had seen their likenesses. One photograph in particular struck me: Lafeyette stood in a dark hallway of his building. He was wearing a striped tank top, baggy jeans, and a Kangol cap that was too big for him; his high-tops were untied. In his hands was what appeared to be a baseball. And yet, despite the youthful attire, he looked like an old man. There seemed bottled up inside him a lifetime’s worth of horrors. His face revealed a restless loneliness.

  When I went to meet him and his family, the interview didn’t last long—maybe a few hours—because I was writing only a short essay to accompany my friend’s photographs and had over a dozen families to interview in a couple of weeks’ time. But even during my short stay with Lafeyette, I was unnerved by the relentless neighborhood violence he talked about. In fact, I had trouble believing it all. And then I asked Lafeyette what he wanted to be. “If I grow up, I’d like to be a bus driver,” he told me. If, not when. At the age of ten, Lafeyette wasn’t sure he’d make it to adulthood.

  Two years later, I returned to the Henry Horner Homes to write a story for The Wall Street Journal on the toll inner-city violence takes on the children who live there. I spent the summer at Henry Horner, playing basketball with the kids, going to lunch with them, talking with their parents, and just hanging out. Over those weeks, I became good friends with Lafeyette and his brother Pharoah, and our friendship lasted long after the Journal story appeared and, I’m sure, will continue well beyond the publication of this book. We have spent time together nearly every weekend. We visit museums, play video games, take walks in the country, go to the movies, and browse in bookstores. Each summer we take a fishing trip to northern Michigan. And we keep talking. I’ve been encouraged by their resilience, inspired by their laughter, and angered by their stories.

  In 1988, I suggested to their mother, LaJoe, the possibility of my writing a book about Lafeyette, Pharoah, and the other children of the neighborhood. She liked the idea, although she hesitated, and then said, “But you know, there are no children here. They’ve seen too much to be children.”

  One of every five children in the United States lives in poverty—an estimated twelve million children, according to the Children’s Defense Fund. In cities like Chicago, the rate is considerably higher: one of every three children. Many grow up in neighborhoods similar to Lafeyette and Pharoah’s. By the time they enter adolescence, they have contended with more terror than most of us confront in a lifetime. They have had to make choices that most experienced and educated adults would find difficult. They have live
d with fear and witnessed death. Some of them have lashed out. They have joined gangs, sold drugs, and, in some cases, inflicted pain on others. But they have also played baseball and gone on dates and shot marbles and kept diaries. For, despite all they have seen and done, they are—and we must constantly remind ourselves of this—still children.

  LaJoe was not only agreeable to the project, she felt it important that their stories be told. She had once said to me that she occasionally wished she were deaf. The shooting. The screaming. Babies crying. Children shrieking. Sometimes she thought it would all drive her insane. So maybe it would be best if she couldn’t hear at all. Her hope—and mine—was that a book about the children would make us all hear, that it would make us all stop and listen.

  This book follows Lafeyette and Pharoah over a two-year period as they struggle with school, attempt to resist the lure of the gangs, and mourn the death of friends, all the while searching for some inner peace. During this time, both boys undergo profound changes. They are at an age when, through discovery of themselves and their world, they begin to form their unique identities. Consequently, it is a story that doesn’t have a neat and tidy ending. It is, instead, about a beginning, the dawning of two lives. Most of all, it is a story about two friends.

  Summer 1987

  One

  NINE-YEAR-OLD Pharoah Rivers stumbled to his knees. “Give me your hand,” ordered his older brother, Lafeyette, who was almost twelve. “Give me your hand.” Pharoah reached upward and grabbed hold of his brother’s slender fingers, which guided him up a slippery, narrow trail of dirt and brush.

  “C’mon, man,” Lafeyette urged, as his stick-thin body whirled around with a sense of urgency. “Let’s go.” He paused to watch Pharoah struggle through a thicket of vines. “Man, you slow.” He had little patience for the smaller boy’s clumsiness. Their friends had already reached the top of the railroad overpass.

  It was a warm Saturday afternoon in early June, and this was the children’s first visit to these railroad tracks. The trains passed by at roof level above a corridor of small factories on the city’s near west side. To reach the tracks the children had to scale a steep mound of earth shoved against one side of the aging concrete viaduct. Bushes and small trees grew in the soil alongside the tracks; in some places the brush was ten to fifteen feet thick.

  Pharoah clambered to the top, moving quickly to please his brother, so quickly that he scraped his knee on the crumbling cement. As he stood to test his bruised leg, his head turned from west to east, following the railroad tracks, five in all, leading from the western suburbs to Chicago’s downtown. His wide eyes and his buck teeth, which had earned him the sobriquet Beaver and kept his lips pushed apart, made him seem in awe of the world.

  Looking east, Pharoah marveled at the downtown skyline. With the late afternoon sun reflecting off the glass and steel skyscrapers, downtown Chicago glowed in the distance. As he looked south a few blocks, he glimpsed the top floors of his home, a red brick, seven-story building. It appeared dull and dirty even in the brilliant sun. Farther south, he could just make out his elementary school and the towering spire of the First Congregational Baptist Church, a 118-year-old building that he’d been told had been a stop on the Underground Railroad. The view, he thought, was pretty great.

  But he soon was distracted by more immediate matters. A black-and-yellow butterfly wove effortlessly through the wind. Fixed on its dance, Pharoah stared silently for minutes, until a rising summer breeze carried it away. The abundant clumps of white and lavender wildflowers that grew along the rails soon won his attention, so he bent down to touch the soft petals, to finger the vines as if to measure their growth. He breathed in the scent of the blossoming wood anemones, then licked a salty drop of perspiration that had dropped from his brow. The humidity had already begun to tire him.

  Lafeyette jostled his brother from behind. “Stop it,” Pharoah screeched, swatting at his brother as if he were an annoying pest. Lafeyette reached for Pharoah, but the younger one scampered away. Lafeyette laughed. He could be rough in his play, which annoyed Pharoah. Sometimes, their mother called Lafeyette “Aggravatin’,” as in “Aggravatin’, get over here,” or “Aggravatin’, stop aggravatin’ your brother.” Lafeyette took the ribbing good-naturedly.

  He thrust a crowbar into Pharoah’s hands, one of four they and their six friends had dragged to the top of the viaduct. They had ventured onto these railroad tracks only once before, and then just to explore. Back then, though, they hadn’t had a mission.

  The eight boys split into pairs, trying to be soft afoot, but in the excitement their whispers quickly turned to muffled shouts as their arms hacked away at the high weeds. One boy walked tightrope along a rail, his young limbs bending and twisting with each gust of wind. His companions ordered him down.

  Pharoah glued himself to his cousin Leonard Anderson, whom everyone called Porkchop. A couple of years younger than Pharoah, Porkchop was unusually quiet and shy, though filled with a nervous energy that kept him in constant motion. He grinned rather than talked. The cousins were inseparable; when they met after school—each attended a different one—they frequently greeted each other with a warm embrace.

  Lafeyette wandered off with James Howard, a close friend, who lived in the same building. They had grown up together and knew each other well, though James, a wiry, athletic boy, was a year older than Lafeyette and was much more agile. He also was a more easygoing boy than Lafeyette; his mischievous grin spanned the width of his face in the shape of a crescent moon.

  Lafeyette and James found what they thought might be a good spot, a small bare patch in the brown dirt. Lafeyette plunged the short end of the crowbar into the ground. He did it again. And again. The soil gave way only a couple of inches with each plunge of the makeshift shovel. James fell to his knees. His small hands unearthed a few more inches, taking over for Lafeyette and the crowbar. Nothing.

  “Daaag,” muttered James, clearly disappointed. “There ain’t nothing up here.” Again, they noisily plowed through the weeds.

  The boys were looking for snakes. For another hour, they dug hole after hole in the hard soil, determined not to go home empty-handed. They figured that a garter snake would do well at home as a pet; after all, they thought, the snake neither bites nor grows to a great length. The boys had got the idea for this urban safari when last year an older friend named William had nabbed a garter snake and showed it off to all the kids. William let them touch it and hold it and watch it slither across the brown linoleum tiles of their building’s breezeway. Lafeyette had never touched such an animal before, and he and the others had eagerly crowded around William’s pet, admiring its yellow-and-black coat and its darting orange tongue. William died a few months later when a friend, fooling around with a revolver he thought was unloaded, shot William in the back of the head. Lafeyette never learned what happened to the snake.

  The boys’ search turned up little, though that might have been expected; they had never seen a snake in the wild and didn’t really know where to look. But they did find three small white eggs resting on the ground, and debated whether they held baby reptiles or birds. James spotted the only animal of the afternoon, a foot-long rat. It had scampered alongside the tracks, sniffing for a treasure of its own.

  Bored by the fruitless search, Pharoah and Porkchop had long ago wandered to a stretch along the tracks where there was a ten-foot-high stack of worn automobile tires. The cousins scrambled in and out of the shallow rubber tunnels created by the tires. Porkchop, the more daring of the two, climbed to the top of the pile, bouncing off the tires with abandon. Pharoah stood to the side, watching his cousin’s antics, until a sparrow began to fly over his head in what seemed like threatening loops. Pharoah screamed with a mixture of fear and delight as he tried to avoid the dive-bombing playmate.

  James, who had also given up the hunt, hoisted himself into an empty boxcar on one of the sidetracks. As Lafeyette tried to follow, a friend sighted a commuter train approaching
from downtown. “There’s a train!” he yelled. James frantically helped Lafeyette climb into the open boxcar, where they found refuge in a dark corner. Others hid behind the boxcar’s huge wheels. Pharoah and Porkchop threw themselves headlong into the weeds, where they lay motionless on their bellies. “Keep quiet,” came a voice from the thick bushes. “Shut up,” another barked.

  The youngsters had heard that the suburb-bound commuters, from behind the tinted train windows, would shoot at them for trespassing on the tracks. One of the boys, certain that the commuters were crack shots, burst into tears as the train whisked by. Some of the commuters had heard similar rumors about the neighborhood children and worried that, like the cardboard lions in a carnival shooting gallery, they might be the target of talented snipers. Indeed, some sat away from the windows as the train passed through Chicago’s blighted core. For both the boys and the commuters, the unknown was the enemy.

  The train passed without incident, and soon most of the boys had joined James and Lafeyette in the boxcar, sitting in the doorway, their rangy legs dangling over the side. Lafeyette and James giggled at a private joke, their thin bodies shivering with laughter.

  Pharoah was too small to climb into the car, so he crouched in the weeds nearby, his legs tucked underneath him, and picked at the vegetation, which now reached his neck. He was lost in his thoughts, thoughts so private and fanciful that he would have had trouble articulating them to others. He didn’t want to leave this place, the sweet smell of the wildflowers and the diving sparrow. There was a certain tranquillity here, a peacefulness that extended into the horizon like the straight, silvery rails. In later months, with the memory of the place made that much gentler by the passage of time, Pharoah would come to savor this sanctuary even more.

  None of the boys was quite ready to call it a day, but the sun had descended in the sky, and nighttime here was dangerous. Reluctantly, they gathered the crowbars, slid down the embankment, and, as Lafeyette took Pharoah’s hand to cross the one busy street, began the short trek home.