Copyright © Miles Harvey
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means,
or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written
permission of the publisher, except
to review.
Published by
Big Shoulders Books
DePaul University
Smashwords Edition
Chicago, Illinois
First Edition
ISBN: 978-1-62890-155-9
Library of Congress
Control Number 2013949113
Cover photo by Carlos Javier Ortiz
www.carlosjortiz.com
Big Shoulders Books logo design
by Robert Soltys
Table of Contents
Introduction
Foreword
Love Without Condition
My Life Was Only Worth A Few Guns
Why Should I Harass People For Standing On The Corner?
Four Bullets
My Son Lazarus
What The Watchman Saw
Don’t Trust Nobody
Meet The Juju-Man
Like Walking Through Baghdad
God, Are You Trying To Get My Attention?
A Message For Stupid People
Defending The Goners
The Whole World Stopped
Death Is Contagious
Unanswered Prayers
A Twig In a Tornado
Everything About Me Is Tainted
What’s One Bullet?
You Live By It, You Die By It
Tomrrow Is Not Promised
The Dream Club’s Chief Dreamer
Trying to Break the Cycle
The Girl Was a Fighter
Where In This Community Does It Say We Care?
Hell Broke Loose
I Only Work Here
The Walk Home
When a Bullet Enters a Body
Both Feet Out
How Dare I Still Be Happy?
Home Was The Three of Us
The Funeral Home Lady
The Scar Tells a Story
How Do You Learn to Live Again?
Final Words: Take a Risk
Acknowledgements
Resource Guide
Study Guide
About the Editors
VOICES OF
YOUTH VIOLENCE
Miles Harvey
Editor
Chris Green and Jonathan Messinger
Associate Editors
Lisa Applegate and Molly Pim
Managing Editors
Bethany Brownholtz,
Rachel Hauben Combs and
Stephanie Gladney Queen
Associate Managing Editors
Becky Maughan
Copy Editor
Published by Big Shoulders Books
DePaul University
About Big Shoulders Books
Big Shoulders Books aims to produce one book each year that engages intimately with the Chicago community and, in the process, gives graduate students in DePaul University’s Master of Arts in Writing and Publishing program hands-on, practical experience in book publishing. The goal of Big Shoulders Books is to disseminate, free of charge, quality anthologies of writing by and about Chicagoans whose voices might not otherwise be shared. Each year, Big Shoulders Books hopes to make small but meaningful contributions to discussions of injustice and inequality in Chicago, as well as to celebrate the tremendous resilience and creativity found in all areas of the city.
The views and opinions expressed in this book do not necessarily reflect those of DePaul University or the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences, and should not be considered an endorsement by DePaul for any purpose.
About This Book
THIS BOOK IS FREE. The editors ask that by taking a copy, you agree to support groups working on anti-
violence efforts in Chicago. Please donate money—or your time—to one of the organizations listed at the end of this volume. When you’re done, pass the book along to someone else (for free, of course), so that he or she can give. It adds up
About Our Funders
This book was made possible by
grants from the Vincentian
Endowment Fund at DePaul and the William and Irene Beck Foundation. Additional support came from
Steppenwolf Theatre Company and Now Is The Time, a citywide call
to action against youth violence. Funding for Now Is The Time was
provided by the Hive Chicago Learning Network, through the Smart Chicago Collaborative, a joint project of The Chicago Community Trust, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the City of Chicago.
The Richard H. Driehaus Foundation provided funding for educational
programming connected to this book.
Additional financial, logistical and/
or administrative support was
provided by the following organizations at DePaul University:
Irwin W. Steans Center for
Community-based Service Learning
Egan Urban Center
Beck Research Initiative
Women’s and Gender Studies
Program
Office of Institutional Diversity
and Equity
Department of English
College of Liberal Arts and
Social Sciences
The following DePaul University
students participated in this project:
Emily Ce Anderson
Lindsey Anderson
Mickie Anderson
Leah Andrews
Ruben Anzures Oyorzabal
Lisa Applegate
Steve Barclay
Zachary Baron
Nicole Bartoloni
Meredith Boe
Ashley Bowcott
Ashley Braun
Bethany Brownholtz
Nathan Brue
Kevin Cahalin
Borja Cabada Anon
Matthew Caracciolo
Mariah Chitouras
Adam Cohen
Rachel Hauben Combs
Teresa Cronin
David Cueman
Emma CushmanWood
Mollie Diedrich
Anna Dron
Jerae Duffin
Lynneese Duckwiley
Rose Gregory
Mellissa Gyimah
Shawn Haynes
Bridget Herman
Bethanie Hestermann
Timothy Hillegonds
Maria Hlohowskyj
Rachel House
Stefanie Jackson-Haskin
Tannura Jackson
Megan Jurinek
Olivia Karim
Haileselassie Keleta
Bryan Kett
Danielle Killgore
Marc Leider
Christopher Lites
Brittany Markowski
Genna Mickey
Adrienne Moss
Ashley Mouldon
LaDawn Norwood
Michael O’Malley
Miriam Ofstein
Sara Patek
Molly Pim
Robin Posavetz
Stephanie Gladney Queen
Sydney Riebe
Ariel Ryan
Jacob Sabolo
Genevieve Salazar
Tyler Sandquist
Amy Sawyer
Samantha Schamrowski
Jason Schapiro
Kristin Scheffers
Monica Schroeder
Michael Shapiro
Barbara Sieczka
Erika Simpson
Kendall Steinle
Annelise Stiles
Ann Szekely
&n
bsp; Molly Tranberg
Jaida Triblet
Danielle Turney
Michael Van Kerckhove
Sarah Vroman
James Walsh
Colleen Wick
Alexis Wigodsky
Nora Williamson
Kaitlyn Willison
For those who died and those who are still bleeding.
Introduction
By Miles Harvey
This book began with a brutal murder, a viral video and a cup of coffee.
The murder took place on Sept. 24, 2009, in the Roseland neighborhood on Chicago’s Far South Side. On that Thursday afternoon, a fight broke out between two groups of students from the nearby public high school, Christian Fenger Academy High School. There had been a shooting outside the school earlier in the day, and now tensions exploded into a wild melee near a local community center. Acting “out of impulse,” as one of the participants later put it, about 50 young people swarmed toward each other, a few of them wielding huge pieces of lumber as weapons.
Somebody slammed one of those boards into the skull of a 16-year-old named Derrion Albert; somebody else punched the honor student in the face; somebody else swung another board down on him like an ax; somebody else stomped on his head and left him to die; somebody else shot a video, laughing while he filmed. And when that video went viral on the Internet, it caused a national uproar. U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan described the killing as “terrifying, heartbreaking and tragic,” while Attorney General Eric Holder, who traveled to Chicago with Duncan shortly after the incident to call for a “sustained national conversation” on youth violence, claimed the murder had left an “indelible mark” on the American psyche.
I normally don’t pay much attention to the platitudes of politicians, but by that time I was beginning to realize that Derrion Albert’s death had left an indelible mark on my psyche, too. Chicago is the most racially segregated city in the country,1 and it’s easy for those of us who live here to think of other neighborhoods as distant planets. Before that video, I had pretty much viewed youth violence as someone else’s problem. But now I could no longer turn away. I wondered how such carnage could happen in my own city, and then I began to wonder how I could stand around and let it happen. But what was one white, middle-aged creative-writing professor supposed to do about it? What was anybody supposed to do, for that matter? The problem just seemed too big and scary and complex.
Then one day I happened to have coffee with Hallie Gordon, an old friend. As the artistic and educational director of Steppenwolf for Young Adults, Hallie produces plays aimed at teenage audiences. She spends a lot of time with young people, and she’s passionate about their problems. Like me, she was frustrated and angry about Derrion Albert’s death; unlike me, she had a plan. Her dream, she explained, was to produce a documentary theater piece about youth violence in Chicago, a production that would weave together the real stories of real people, told in their own words. The trouble, she said, was that she didn’t have anyone to go out and do the interviews. For me, it was one of those aha! moments. “What would you think,” I asked her, “about the possibility of my students doing those interviews?”
Our plans were modest at first, but things quickly snowballed. Before long, Hallie had not only received the enthusiastic backing of Steppenwolf Artistic Director Martha Lavey, but she had also enlisted the support of other arts and cultural organizations in Chicago. The result was Now Is The Time, a citywide initiative aimed at inspiring young people to make positive change in their communities and stop youth violence and intolerance. Partner organizations eventually included the Chicago Public Library, Facing History and Ourselves, and more than 15 of Chicago’s finest theater companies.
The administration at DePaul, meanwhile, proved equally enthusiastic, allowing me to set up special courses for both graduates and undergraduates and providing the project with financial and logistical support through the Irwin W. Steans Center for Community-based Service Learning, the Egan Urban Center, the Beck Research Initiative, the Vincentian Endowment Fund and other programs.
Soon my students started coming back with stories—amazing, heartbreaking, brutal, beautiful stories, far more stories than we could fit into a single play. Long before How Long Will I Cry?: Voices of Youth Violence premiered at Steppenwolf Theatre on Feb. 26, 2013, we knew we needed to collect as many of those stories as possible in a book.
The interviews for this volume were conducted over the course of two years. While more than 900 Chicagoans were being murdered in 2011 and 2012, creative-writing students from DePaul fanned out all over the city to speak with people whose lives were directly affected by the bloodshed.
Most of the interviews lasted one or two hours, after which students took their audio recorders home and transcribed the entire session word-for-word, a hugely time-consuming task. Whenever possible, the student then went back for a second interview, attempting not just to firm up facts but to pin down whatever it was that made the participant tick, even if it was hard for that person to articulate.
Often, these second interviews produced remarkable results. Young people who had denied gang involvement in the first interview, for example, opened up about their lives on the streets—and about their anxieties. Parents of victims began to talk more frankly about their murdered children. Community activists and public officials set aside their well-rehearsed talking points and spoke from their hearts.
Once the interviews were complete, students began shaping the raw transcripts into narratives for this book—a process that the legendary oral historian Studs Terkel once likened to “the way a sculptor looks at a block of stone: inside there’s a shape which he’ll find, and he’ll reveal it by chipping away with a mallet and a chisel.”
In our case, it wasn’t just one sculptor at work, but a team of artisans. All the narratives in this book have gone through several rounds of careful revision and editing by graduate students—a gifted group that included Lisa Applegate, Bethany Brownholtz, Rachel Hauben Combs, Stephanie Gladney Queen, Molly Pim and the members of Professor Chris Green’s editing course. Our goal was always the same—to make every piece as coherent and compact as possible, without losing the poetry of the speaker’s voice.
One of the trickiest issues we struggled with was dialect. It was true, for example, that some of the African-Americans we interviewed said “ax” instead of “ask.” But it was equally true that white interviewees, with their nasal Chicago accents, often pronounced the same word “ee-yask.” And if we used a phonetic spelling of one ethnic group’s pronunciation of a word, shouldn’t we do the same for all groups? Linguists, after all, insist that everyone speaks with a dialect. Keeping this in mind, I urged my students to steer clear of nonstandard spelling and try instead to capture the cadences, speech patterns, inflections and slang of their subjects. Nonetheless, we found that some words and phrases sounded too formal in standard English, while others simply got lost in translation. The terms “finna” and “fitta,” for example, no doubt derive from “fixing to,” but they now have taken on linguistic lives of their own. In the end, we decided to use dialect on a case-by-case basis, but only sparingly and always with the dignity of the speaker in mind.
Once the narratives were close to completion, we sent them to the respective interviewees for fact-checking and review. I confess that this part of our plan did not sit well with me in the beginning. Years of training and experience as a journalist had taught me that allowing a source to see a story in advance was questionable on an ethical level and often unwise on a practical one. But the students convinced me that we had a special obligation to the people who had opened their lives and hearts to us. If we were planning to present these narratives as their stories, told in their words, didn’t they deserve to have creative control over the material?
It took weeks—and in some cases, months—to track down all the people whose stories appear on these pages. Nonetheless, this book is deeper and richer as a result of that final r
ound of give-and-take with participants, many of whom supplied vivid new details that helped make the material come alive on the page. And it’s a tribute to their courage and honesty that relatively few of them ended up asking to remove, alter or otherwise sanitize things they had said, no matter how sensitive or controversial.
This book contains crude language and graphic descriptions of violence—the result of our decision not to censor the narratives. There was only one exception to this rule: protecting the safety of our subjects. Toward that end, we have changed the names of several people who risk retaliation under “no snitch” codes or might otherwise be endangered by identifying themselves. In a couple of cases, other minor details have also been fudged to protect the security of certain participants. As with all of the narratives in How Long Will I Cry?, however, their stories remain faithful to the speakers’ words and have been verified to the best of our abilities.