“Who was it that jumped?”
“That’s the other thing, Barack!” Johnnie took a drag from his cigarette and let the smoke roll from his mouth. “It was
a young white girl, man, sixteen maybe, seventeen. One of these punk rock types, with blue hair and a ring through her
nose. Afterward, I’m wondering what she was thinking about while she was riding up the elevator. I mean, folks musta
been standing right next to her on the way up. Maybe they looked her over, decided she was a freak, and went back to
thinking about their own business. You know, their promotion, or the Bulls game, or whatever. And the whole time this
girl’s just standing there next to them with all that pain inside her. Got to be a lot of pain, doc, ’cause right before she
jumps, you figure she looks down and knows that shit is gonna hurt.”
Johnnie stamped out his cigarette. “So that’s what I’m saying, Barack. Whole panorama of life out there. Crazy shit
going on. You got to ask yourself, is this kinda stuff happening elsewhere? Is there any precedent for all this shit? You
ever ask yourself that?”
“The world’s a place,” I repeated.
“See there! It’s serious, man.”
We’d almost reached Johnnie’s car when we heard a small pop, compact and brief, like a balloon bursting. We looked
in the direction of the sound, and watched a young man appear from around the corner diagonal to us. I don’t clearly
recall his features or what he wore, although he couldn’t have been older than fifteen. I just remember that he ran at a
desperate pace, his sneakered feet silent against the sidewalk, his lanky limbs pumping wildly, his chest jutting out as if
straining for an imaginary tape.
Johnnie dropped flat onto a small plot of grass in front of one of the apartments, and I quickly followed suit. A few
seconds later, two more boys came around the same corner, also running at full speed. One of them, short, fattish, with
pants that bunched around his ankles, was waving a small pistol. Without stopping to aim, he let out three quick shots
in the direction of the first boy. Then, realizing that his target was out of range, he slowed to a walk, stuffing the
weapon under his shirt. His companion, skinny and big-eared, came alongside.
“Stupid motherfucker,” the skinny boy said. He spat with satisfaction, and the two of them laughed to each other
before continuing down the street, children again, their figures casting squat shadows on the asphalt.
Another fall, another winter. I had recovered from the disappointments of the asbestos campaign, developed other
issues and found other leaders. Johnnie’s presence had helped relieve my workload, and our budget was stable; what
I’d lost in youthful enthusiasm I made up for in experience. And in fact, it may have been that growing familiarity with
the landscape, the counsel of time, that gave me the sense that something different was going on with the children of
the South Side that spring of 1987; that an invisible line had been crossed, a blind and ugly corner turned.
There was nothing definite I could point to, no hard statistics. The drive-by shootings, the ambulance sirens, the night
sounds of neighborhoods abandoned to drugs and gang war and phantom automobiles, where police or press rarely
ventured until after the body was found on the pavement, blood spreading in a glistening, uneven pool-none of this was
new. In places like Altgeld, prison records had been passed down from father to son for more than a generation; during
my very first days in Chicago I had seen the knots of young men, fifteen or sixteen, hanging out on the corners of
Michigan or Halsted, their hoods up, their sneakers unlaced, stomping the ground in a desultory rhythm during the