Gang Leader for a Day Read online

Charlie knocked. The thin wooden door gave a hollow sound. All the other apartments on the floor had thick steel doors, but the CHA used wooden doors to designate which apartments were vacant. “Yo, nigger!” Charlie called out. “Hey, Bee-Bee! Taneesha says she wants to talk with you. Come on out. She says she’s cool with everything.” He looked back at us. C-Note waved his hands, signaling him to shout again. “Yo, Bee-Bee! Taneesha says she just wants to talk, nigger! I’ll take you up there.” Why would Bee-Bee need an escort to go back upstairs? I thought. And why on earth would he believe any of this?

  Just then a voice rang out from the stairwell above us. “He’s on eleven, and he’s coming down the stairs! Get him, he’s coming down!”

  C-Note instinctively pinned me against the gallery, letting Charlie and Blue go past. They stopped just inside the stairwell. C-Note and I crouched down a few feet behind them. The intense cold made me shiver. Charlie pressed his hand toward the floor a few times, motioning us to stand still. I had never heard the building so quiet. Apart from the wind and some cars in the distance, the only sound I could make out was a mouse or rat scratching around in the incinerator room.

  Then, from above, I heard some distant footsteps turning into a rumble. Someone was running down the stairs, breathing heavily. I found myself grabbing onto the back of C-Note’s jacket. Charlie and Blue were crouched just in front of us. I made out what was in Blue’s hand: brass knuckles.

  Just as the footsteps reached the fourth floor, Charlie jumped up and swung the crowbar, waist high. He struck Bee-Bee full-on, bowling him over.

  “Yeah, nigger!” Blue shouted, then jumped over and started pounding Bee-Bee in the side. His head hit the wall of the stairwell and snapped back. “Leave that bitch alone, you hear me?” Blue shouted, punching him repeatedly in the gut. “You better leave her alone, nigger!”

  Bee-Bee was tall and strong, and he threw Charlie off him. He stood up and began shouting, but Blue tackled him, smashing Bee-Bee into the wall. The two of them started tumbling down the stairs. Charlie grabbed Bee-Bee’s leg, so he, too, fell down the stairwell.

  “Grab his other leg!” Charlie yelled in our direction. C-Note jumped down the stairs and made a grab. Blue, meanwhile, was struggling to get out from under Bee-Bee, who had Blue’s head in a choke hold. I could see that Blue was struggling to breathe; he looked like he might pass out, or worse. I felt as if I had to do something. Running over to them, I kicked Bee-Bee in the stomach, which made him relax his grip on Blue. The other men smothered him, and I could hear his muffled words: “Okay, okay. All right, enough.”

  Blue, the strongest of them, bent Bee-Bee’s arms behind his back, bringing him to his knees. I don’t know whether it was the cold air, the adrenaline, or the swift kick I’d delivered, but I was badly out of breath. I leaned against the wall near the incinerator room. “Charlie, run back up the stairs and make sure he didn’t drop nothing,” C-Note said. “We’ll meet you at the office.”

  The rest of us walked Bee-Bee downstairs to Ms. Bailey’s office. She wasn’t in, so C-Note sent another squatter to fetch her. We all stood outside the office, silent. No one seemed to worry that Bee-Bee would run away.

  He sat down on the floor with his head pitched back, resting against the wall. This was my first opportunity to get a good look at him. He was young, his face light-skinned and boyish but with a menacing air. And he appeared to be aging fast. His nostrils were black, his eyes hollow and glazed, telltale signs of crack use. He wore a brown sweatshirt over a stained white tank top, with loose jeans and unlaced sneakers dirtied by the winter slush. I saw a gang tattoo on his neck, the crescent-and-star pattern of the Black P. Stone Nation. The Stones had been largely dismantled in the 1980s by the feds, with some remaining factions now aligned with the Black Kings. Why, I wondered, was Taneesha hanging around with this guy?

  C-Note had caught his breath by now. “You really fucked up this time, Bee-Bee.”

  Bee-Bee said nothing. He wiped the sweat from his face.

  I heard Ms. Bailey coming. I’d never seen her move so fast before-she was practically galloping, trailed by Catrina and a few older women in blue Tenant Patrol jackets.

  Ms. Bailey hurried past without looking at me. Catrina, however, gave me one of her signature looks that I now recognized as meaning this: Ms. Bailey’s got the situation under control, and all will soon be right with the world. Ms. Bailey unlocked her office door and went inside. Blue and Charlie, who’d returned from upstairs, picked up Bee-Bee and brought him into the office. Bee-Bee seemed cooperative. The three of them entered the back room in Ms. Bailey’s office, and then someone shut the front door. I stayed outside, along with the other squatters and the Tenant Patrol women. C-Note, his work done, took off.

  Then Catrina poked her head out the door and waved me inside. Get in here! she mouthed silently. I did, and she pointed me to a chair.

  It was hard to make out the full conversation behind Ms. Bailey’s closed door, but once in a while her voice was loud enough for me to hear: “You got some nerve, young man!… Beat her like that… Where do you live, huh, where do you live?!… She’s a good girl. She owe you money? She wouldn’t fuck you? Why did you do that?… Say something!”

  Then came the beating. Charlie or Blue, or maybe both of them, started hitting Bee-Bee. I also heard Ms. Bailey cry out in a muffled tone. Maybe Ms. Bailey is hitting him as well, I thought. I heard chairs scuffing the floor. Then, for the first time, I heard Bee-Bee’s voice: “Oh, shit!… Get off me… Fuck that! She deserved it.”

  Ms. Bailey started to yell louder. “Deserved it?… You’ll get worse if you come around here… Don’t ever, don’t ever touch her again, you hear me? You hear me? Don’t ever come in this building again.”

  Ms. Bailey threw open the door. Blue dragged Bee-Bee out. His face was badly worked over; he was drooling and mumbling something unintelligible. Blue hustled him past Catrina and me and threw him to the floor on the gallery. Two other men grabbed him and led him toward the stairwell. Ms. Bailey followed them, with the members of the Tenant Patrol right behind.

  I started to get up, but Catrina stopped me. “Sudhir! No, let them go! They’re just taking him in the car, and they’ll leave him on State Street. Come up with me and see how Taneesha’s doing.”

  Taneesha’s aunt answered our knock. She and Taneesha’s mother told us that Taneesha was at the hospital; she had some bad bruises, but it seemed as if she’d be okay. “I don’t know what she’s going to look like, though,” said the aunt. “He beat her pretty good.” Taneesha’s mother promised to call Ms. Bailey later that night.

  We went back downstairs to Ms. Bailey’s office. She hadn’t returned yet-she was apparently visiting Taneesha at the hospital- so Catrina told me what she knew. Bee-Bee had been managing Taneesha’s modeling career, booking her at lingerie shows and dances. For this, he received a 25 percent cut-and, according to Catrina, he made Taneesha sleep with him. When Bee-Bee heard that Taneesha was going to sign up with a legitimate modeling agency, he got mad and started beating her. Today wasn’t the first time this had happened. In fact, Ms. Bailey had repeatedly warned Bee-Bee to stop. But he kept harassing Taneesha, even stealing money from her apartment. It was only because Ms. Bailey felt there was no other recourse, Catrina explained, that today she had rounded up C-Note and the others to form a sort of militia. In the projects this was a long-standing practice. Militias were regularly put together to track down stolen property, mete out punishment, or simply obtain an apology for a victim.

  In a neighborhood like this one, with poor police response and no shelter for abused women, the militias sometimes represented the best defense. “It’s hard when you can’t get nobody to come around,” Catrina said solemnly. She was sitting in Ms. Bailey’s chair, a soda in hand and her voice assured, seeming for all the world like the heiress to Ms. Bailey’s throne. “No police, nobody from the hospital. We can’t live like this! That’s why Ms. Bailey is so important. And especially for women. She makes sure w
e’re safe.”

  “I suppose,” I said. “But it’s a horrible way to live. And wouldn’t you rather have the police come around?”

  “I’d rather not live in the projects,” Catrina shot back. “But women are always getting beat on, getting sent to the hospital. I mean, you have to take care of yourself. Ms. Bailey makes these men take care of us. I don’t see what’s wrong with that. Unless you live here, you can’t judge us, Sudhir.”

  For some reason I couldn’t restrain the judgmental voice of my middle-class self. “You all didn’t call the police, did you?” I blurted out.

  For the first time since I knew Catrina, she couldn’t look me in the eye. “No, we didn’t.”

  “Why?”

  She took a deep breath and raised her head. “Because we’re scared of them.”

  “You are scared? Women are scared? Everyone is scared?” I asked. “Who exactly is scared? I hear this all the time.”

  “Everybody. But for women it’s different. You wouldn’t understand.” She paused. “At least we have C-Note and the rest of them when things go crazy.” It was clear that Catrina didn’t want to talk further. I decided to ask Ms. Bailey about this when things calmed down.

  I’d seen some police around the neighborhood, and I’d seen them work with Autry at the Boys & Girls Club. But since most tenants were so distrustful of the cops, I kept my interactions with them to a minimum, since I didn’t want to be thought of as being “with” the cops.

  Still, I had a hard time accepting the idea that tenants wouldn’t call the police for something as serious as an assault. I also found it tough to believe that the police wouldn’t show up-or, for that matter, that an ambulance wouldn’t respond either. But as Catrina sat now in total silence, staring at me expressionlessly, I realized I might well be wrong.

  I told her that I’d better get back to my apartment. She didn’t acknowledge me. I wanted to do something to help her.

  “Would you like to get something to eat?” I asked meekly.

  She shook her head.

  “Do you want to write me another essay?” I asked. “Do you want to write about what just happened?”

  Catrina liked to write essays, which I read so that we could discuss them. This was a good way for her to talk through her aspirations as well as the shadows of her past: intense poverty and a bad family situation that I was just starting to learn about.

  She shrugged. I couldn’t tell if that meant yes or no.

  “Well, I’m happy to read it if you do write something. Whenever.”

  “Thanks,” she said. The barest hint of a smile came to her face, and she pushed her thick, black-framed glasses up on her nose. She started sniffling and reaching for a tissue. She looked no more than twelve years old. “I’ll see you around,” she said. “I’m sure things will be okay.”

  With Catrina having gone quiet and Ms. Bailey at the hospital and C-Note and the other squatters nowhere to be seen, there wasn’t anyone left for me to talk with. I thought about visiting J.T., but every time I asked him anything about Ms. Bailey, he’d shut me down. “You want to know what she’s like, you hang out with her,” he said. “I ain’t telling you shit.” J.T. didn’t care much for Ms. Bailey’s authority, as it occasionally challenged his own. It was well within her power, for instance, to close off the lobby to his sales crew. J.T. wanted me to experience Ms. Bailey for myself to see what he had to deal with.

  I took the bus back to my apartment but decided to stop first at Jimmy’s, a local bar where a lot of U of C professors and students hung out. No one knew me there, and I could sit quietly and process what had just happened in my fieldwork. Sometimes I would go there to write up my notes, but more often I just sat and stared blankly into my glass. With increasing frequency, Jimmy’s was a ritual stop on my way home. At Jimmy’s, as at the best bars, no one cared what troubles I brought to the table. Most of the people were sitting alone, like me, and I figured they were dealing with their own problems.

  Jimmy’s gave me a place to take off one hat (the fieldworker) and put on the other (the student). I needed this break, because I was starting to feel schizophrenic, as if I were one person in the projects-sometimes I caught myself even talking in a different way-and another back in Hyde Park.

  Increasingly I found that I was angry at the entire field of social science-which meant, to some degree, that I was angry at myself. I resented the fact that the standard tools of sociologists seemed powerless to prevent the hardships I was seeing. The abstract social policies that my colleagues were developing to house, educate, and employ the poor seemed woefully out of touch. On the other hand, life in the projects was starting to seem too wild, too hard, and too chaotic for the staid prescriptions that social scientists could muster. It struck me as only partially helpful to convince youth to stay in school: what was the value in giving kids low-paying, menial jobs when they could probably be making more money on the streets?

  In the poverty seminars that Bill Wilson sponsored, where some of the best academic minds congregated to discuss the latest research, I acted as if I had a unique insight into poverty by virtue of my proximity to families. I prefaced my questions by blurting out a self-serving objection: “No one here seems to have spent much time with the poor, but if you did, you would see that…” or, “If you actually watched poor people instead of just reading census tables, you would understand that…” I felt as though the other scholars were living in a bubble, but my arrogant tone did little to help anyone hear what I was trying to say. I worried that my behavior might embarrass Wilson, but I was too bitter to take a moderate stance.

  I wouldn’t say that I was disillusioned with the academic life per se. I still attended classes, worked with professors and met my dead-lines, earned pretty good grades, and even received a few prestigious fellowships. I still saw myself on the road to being a professor like Wilson. But day by day, it was getting harder to reconcile my life at the U of C with my life in the projects.

  Rather than sharing my frustration with my girlfriend, my room-mates, and my friends-most of whom were actually quite supportive and curious about my research-I just kept my experiences to myself. How could I explain the vigilante justice that C-Note and the others had just delivered? How could I explain my own role in the beating? I didn’t understand it myself, and I feared that I’d open myself up to my friends’ advice: You need to call the police if they don’t… You’re getting too involved… You’ve gone too far…

  When I did try talking about my fieldwork, I felt awkward. In fact, I sometimes came off as defending the gangs and their violent practices or as romanticizing the conditions in the projects. So, to stay sane, I’d usually just tell people about Autry’s work at the Boys & Girls Club or, if pushed, a few stories about life in the gang.

  I was growing quieter and more solitary. My fellow graduate students and even some faculty members thought of me as unapproachable. Rumors circulated that I was too ambitious, too aloof, but I figured I’d just have to live with them. A small part of me hoped that life would get back to normal once my fieldwork was over. But the end didn’t seem very near, so I just kept to myself.

  I was eager to know more about the incident with Bee-Bee. Why had Ms. Bailey sicced the squatters on him instead of leaving it to the police? Had the police been called-Catrina said they hadn’t, but I wanted to be sure-and if so, why didn’t they respond? What were the consequences for Ms. Bailey of taking such matters into her own hands?

  I waited until “check day” to go see Ms. Bailey. That’s when welfare checks were distributed, which meant that most tenants were out buying food and clothing and household items-and not, therefore, coming to Ms. Bailey with demands.

  On the way up to her office, I stopped in to see J.T. He was lying on the sofa, watching TV. Ms. Mae gave me a big hug and told me to sit down for lunch. She had cooked some of my favorites-okra, greens, mac and cheese-and so I gladly obliged. J.T. quipped that I was eating his share of food. “You’re becoming the l
ittle brother I never wanted,” he said.

  I told him about Ms. Bailey and the Bee-Bee incident. “Oh, man!” he said with a laugh. “That’s why she’s so upset. She keeps asking if I’ve seen you.”

  “Why’s she upset at me?”

  “Because you beat the shit out of that man, the one who beat Taneesha. I told you to be careful with Ms. Bailey, not to do things for her.”

  “First of all, I didn’t do anything. Blue was choking, so I kicked the guy to help him.”

  “That’s not really why she’s upset.” J.T. sat up. “She thinks that you were spying for us. Remember when I said that she doesn’t use us as much anymore? We could’ve taken care of the man who did that, but she didn’t ask us. She asked those fools, C-Note and those crackheads.”

  I knew that J.T. had tried to persuade Ms. Bailey to call him when a woman in the building got beat up. But I also knew, from Catrina, that Ms. Bailey wouldn’t call J.T. because his gang members were known to physically and sexually abuse women.

  By now J.T. was in lecture mode. “That’s why I told you not to do things with her. Because I can’t be there to protect you. She already knows that you’re with me, so she doesn’t trust you.” According to this theory, Ms. Bailey must have thought I was spying for the gang, keeping track of how often she used non-gang affiliates for enforcing justice in the building.

  I was taken aback when J.T. said that I was “with” him. I hadn’t thought my relationship with J.T. would affect my work with Ms. Bailey-and I certainly wouldn’t have predicted she would see me as a spy. His casual aside left me unsure of how to talk with different people in the projects. Once again I was being asked to pick sides. Was it possible, I wondered, to be in the projects for any length of time and remain neutral, an outsider, an objective observer?

  J.T. urged me to go see Ms. Bailey immediately. “You might as well deal with this shit,” he said. “It’s not going away.” He changed the channel.

  As I headed for Ms. Bailey’s office, I thought that I should probably just confess the truth: I hadn’t asked her permission to join C-Note, and I had participated-however minimally-in the beating of Bee-Bee.