colder months, stripped down to T-shirts in the summer, answering their beepers on the corner pay phones: a knot that
unraveled, soon to reform, whenever the police cars passed by in their barracuda silence.
No, it was more a change of atmosphere, like the electricity of an approaching storm. I felt it when, driving home one
evening, I saw four tall boys walking down a tree-lined block idly snapping a row of young saplings that an older
couple had just finished planting in front of their house. I felt it whenever I looked into the eyes of the young men in
wheelchairs that had started appearing on the streets that spring, boys crippled before their prime, their eyes without a
trace of self-pity, eyes so composed, already so hardened, that they served to frighten rather than to inspire.
That’s what was new: the arrival of a new equilibrium between hope and fear; the sense, shared by adults and youth
alike, that some, if not most, of our boys were slipping beyond rescue. Even lifelong South Siders like Johnnie noticed
the change. “I ain’t never seen it like this, Barack,” he would tell me one day as we sat in his apartment sipping beer. “I
mean, things were tough when I was coming up, but there were limits. We’d get high, get into fights. But out in public,
at home, if an adult saw you getting loud or wild, they would say something. And most of us would listen, you know
what I’m saying?
“Now, with the drugs, the guns-all that’s disappeared. Don’t take a whole lot of kids carrying a gun. Just one or two.
Somebody says something to one of ’em, and-pow!-kid wastes him. Folks hear stories like that, they just stop trying to
talk to these young cats out here. We start generalizing about ’em just like the white folks do. We see ’em hanging out,
we head the other way. After a while, even the good kid starts realizing ain’t nobody out here gonna look out for him.
So he figures he’s gonna have to look after himself. Bottom line, you got twelve-year-olds making their own damn
rules.”
Johnnie took a sip of his beer, the foam collecting on his mustache. “I don’t know, Barack. Sometimes I’m afraid of
’em. You got to be afraid of somebody who just doesn’t care. Don’t matter how young they are.”
After I was back in my own apartment, I thought about what Johnnie had said. Was I afraid? I didn’t think so...at least
not in the way Johnnie had meant it. Wandering through Altgeld or other tough neighborhoods, my fears were always
internal: the old fears of not belonging. The idea of physical assault just never occurred to me. Same thing with the
distinction Johnnie made between good kids and bad kids-the distinction didn’t compute in my head. It seemed based
on a premise that defied my experience, an assumption that children could somehow set the terms of their own
development. I thought about Bernadette’s five-year-old son, scampering about the broken roads of Altgeld, between a
sewage plant and a dump. Where did he sit along the spectrum of goodness? If he ended up in a gang or in jail, would
that prove his essence somehow, a wayward gene...or just the consequences of a malnourished world?
And what about Kyle: How did one explain what he was going through? I leaned back in my chair, thinking about
Ruby’s son. He had just turned sixteen; the two years since my arrival had given him several inches, added bulk, and
the shadow above his upper lip, first efforts at a mustache. He was still polite to me, still willing to talk about the Bulls-
this’d be the year Jordan took ’em to the finals, he said. But he was usually gone whenever I stopped by, or on his way
out with his friends. Some nights, Ruby would call me at home just to talk about him, how she never knew where he
was anymore, how his grades had continued to drop in school, how he hid things from her, the door to his room always
closed.
barré
(Barré)
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