Read There Are No Children Here Online
Authors: Alex Kotlowitz
There Are No Children Here (20 page)
Lafeyette and Pharoah revered Dawn. Lafeyette told her he would do twice as many years of college as she. “I have to do a lot of studying to bring up my grades,” he said. “I wanna be like my cousin D’won.” Pharoah told her he’d beat her reading scores. But however proud they were of their older cousin, both boys were emphatic about one thing: they didn’t want to attend Crane.
Crane is one of the city’s worst high schools. It stretches for an entire city block just a quarter of a mile south of Horner, a grim, squat stone structure with pillars marking its entrance. Since the early 1960s, when the school changed from 85 percent white to 93 percent black, it has been a troubled institution. As far back as 1965, a newspaper series on the school showed that because of de facto segregation in the school system, Crane had been forced to enroll fifteen hundred more students than its capacity. Nearly 60 percent of the freshman class never made it to their senior year. The series described the fear felt at Crane by both faculty and students. In one three-month period, six teachers had been attacked by students, and after a small riot
broke out in the lunchroom, the school ordered plastic utensils in place of the metal ones.
It hadn’t necessarily gotten worse at Crane, but it certainly hadn’t gotten much better. Today, about half the entering freshmen never makes it through the senior year. In 1985, the seniors’ reading tests were in the eighteenth percentile nationwide. One semester, the school decided to raffle off a bicycle among those who passed all their classes. That involved only 287 of its 1220 students.
Security was still a problem. In Dawn’s yearbook, two full pages were devoted to photos of the school’s eleven security guards, some of whom were moonlighting Chicago police officers. Students were prohibited from wearing jackets in the lunchroom because they might use them to conceal weapons. James, Lafeyette’s friend, so feared going to Crane that he tried to get held back at Suder. “ ’Cause I was real short and I know a lot of tall people be there so I thought they’ll probably try to beat me up, take my jacket and stuff, and make me pay peon fees,” he said. So, James figured, if he messed up his standardized reading test, maybe Suder wouldn’t graduate him from the eighth grade. James filled in test answers randomly, and received scores that showed him over a year below grade level, despite his having a perfect attendance record. But that was hardly bad enough to keep him from graduating. Suder gave James his diploma. James, however, chose to attend Westinghouse, another local high school whose reputation was not quite as bad as Crane’s. Some children went to live with relatives in other neighborhoods and even other states to avoid attending Crane and the area’s other high schools.
Dawn was in a special honors program at Crane in which she took courses with other good students. They were given special attention and, as a result, were resented by some of the other students. Dawn had thought of dropping out numerous times. But LaJoe pushed her. “You can’t stop, girl. You got too far,” LaJoe would tell her. “Continue to go, just go. Whenever you don’t want to go to school, D’won, just go ’cause it’s going to pay off. You’re going to live like the people on the south side, like in Beverly [a south suburb].” Dawn’s persistence culminated in her graduation—and the party thrown by LaJoe.
Cousins, aunts, and friends piled into the apartment, where
they drank beer and wine coolers and filled their stomachs with LaJoe’s homemade dishes. Pharoah told his mother that when he graduated he planned to rent four white horses and a carriage to take him to his prom. Even five-year-old Timothy told his mother he intended to get his diploma. Everyone seemed almost giddy at Dawn’s accomplishment. Toasts were made to Dawn’s future and her health.
“She got to make it,” LaJoe said. “She got to. She got to get a job. If they don’t see her life take her nowhere after finishing school, it will be the truth. Only thing out here left is to sell drugs. D’won got to be the one to prove it’s not true.”
LaJoe, who is not a very religious woman (a minister once made a sexual advance to her, which turned her away from the church), nonetheless offered a prayer: “God gave D’won a gift and she carried it on. And that gift, I hope she shares it so it’ll go on within the family. Thank God for making it possible.” Glasses and bottles clinked in celebration.
A month later,
The Chicago Sun-Times
, as part of a series on education, published a short article about Dawn and Demetrius under the headline
HOW YOUNG PAIR BEAT ODDS IN PUBLIC HOUSING
.
She was 13. He was 16. They were at an arcade.
“Can I have a quarter?” she asked him. He forked it over. Love blossomed.
Now she’s 18 and he’s 21. Their kids are 4, 2, 1, and 3 months.
They are still in love. And together, they wrote one of the rare success stories of Henry Horner Homes.
Dawn Anderson, 18, mother of four, graduated from Crane Vocational High School. She is planning to start college in the fall.
“Everybody says I made history. I never stopped going to school. He took care of the kids while I was at school,” she said.
Says the children’s father, Demetrius Nance, “I’ve taken care of them all—from the first little girl up to her”—the baby, 3-month-old Demeca.
Dawn was seven months pregnant when she graduated from eighth grade. A mother
at 14, she lived with her own mother in the Henry Horner Homes.
Demetrius would pick up the children—Demetra, now 4, and later sons Demetrius Jr., 2, and Demond, 1—at Horner in the morning and take them to his mother’s Northwest Side home to watch them while Dawn was in school.
“I’d have one in the front of the buggy, one in the back of the buggy, and I’d hold one in my arms,” he said. “The only thing I’d hate was when it was cold. But it was important. I didn’t get to finish high school like I wanted to. (He earned a GED.) I wanted Dawn to finish.”
“All I ever wanted was to get my diploma,” said Dawn. “I had to prove to them that I could do it. I am not a loser.”
And now that she has her diploma, the two are looking at new horizons. Besides college plans, they are thinking about joining the Army. They are looking for jobs. And they are eager to leave public housing far behind.
“I’ve been around this all my life. It’s time to get out,” Dawn said.
“I hate this, I hate the hell out of this. I’ll come home from the park with the kids and see this and I get so angry. I want better for them, for us.”
How has this young pair survived so far?
“We’ve struggled. We’ve had good times and bad times,” Dawn said. “I take half and he takes half. We never let anyone break that bond between us. I respect and trust him. He respects and trusts me. That was all we needed. We’ve always communicated. We’ve always been understanding.”
The wedding is set for Oct. 15.
An accompanying photograph showed the happy couple walking their children in Horner’s playground. Dawn was wearing a pantsuit; Demetrius a tank top and jeans. The photograph, were it not adjacent to the story, might be mistaken for that of a suburban family out for a morning stroll. One line in the story stood out: “And together, they wrote one of the rare success stories of Henry Horner Homes.” Lafeyette and Pharoah each held on to a Xeroxed copy of the article and showed it off to friends.
Fourteen
THE 1988 INVENTORY for the Cook County Criminal Courts included 14 perjuries; 103 briberies, 23 impersonations of physicians, judges, and government officials; 260 indictments for official misconduct; 20 charges of obstruction of justice; 3647 aggravated and heinous batteries; 8 charged with possession of explosive devices; 993 caught with burglary tools; 162 home repair frauds; 380 home invasions; 1312 charges of unlawful restraint; 830 kidnapings; 84 jail escapes; 8419 rapes; 1584 armed robberies; 1351 accused of unlawful use of a weapon; 10 police officers disarmed; 73 gambling
charges; 5 food stamp frauds; 3101 thefts; 232 attempted burglaries; 6160 burglaries; 81 charged with intimidation; 1 unlawful discharge of hazardous waste; 1219 bail bond violations; 867 forgeries; 388 arsons; 156 charged with deceptive practice; 429 retail thefts; 2568 auto thefts; 2569 incidents of armed violence; 104 reckless homicides; 3 solicitations for murder; 953 attempted murders; 1905 murders; 6 charges of endangering the life of a child; 4 child abandonments; 36 charges of cruelty to children; 1 reckless homicide of an unborn baby; 2 involuntary manslaughters of unborn children; 7 intentional homicides of unborn children; 53 child abductions; 7 solicitations of juveniles; 1 juvenile pimping charge; 174 child pornography charges; 27 charged with taking indecent liberties with children; 14 incest charges; 10,518 drug charges—24,390 cases and 56,204 charges heard by thirty-two judges.
Of those, two held special significance for the residents of Henry Horner. One case had to do with an eight-year-old girl, Urica Winder; the other, Jimmie Lee. Both cases involved drugs, and both cases, unlike most incidents at Horner, made the newspapers. And yet, despite the publicity, the people of Horner refused to talk about them.
Eight-year-old Urica Winder leaned over the witness stand, her braided head poking above the top. The jurors and others in the packed courtroom, which included reporters, Urica’s family, and lawyers intrigued by the case, could just make out her face, which, given the gravity of the event, seemed unusually calm. The prosecutor had rehearsed the testimony with the girl many times, so she was perhaps the only one in the courtroom who didn’t show much emotion.
“Did you notice anything unusual about Lawrence Jackson, the man you have identified here in court today?” Paula Daleo, the prosecutor asked her.
“Yes,” replied Urica confidently.
“What was that?”
“He had a knife in his hand.”
“And can you show the ladies and gentlemen of the jury how big that knife was?”
Urica held her hands about a foot apart.
“And who was Lawrence Jackson facing at that time?”
“Shirley.”
“What did you see Lawrence Jackson do?”
“Stab her in the heart.”
“And what did—Did Shirley say anything to Lawrence before that?”
“Yes.”
“What did Shirley say?”
“I love you.”
“And did Lawrence Jackson reply to that?”
“Yes.”
“What was—What did he say?”
“I don’t love you.”
“And then what did he do?”
“Stabbed her in the heart.”
“Did you see what happened to Shirley after she got stabbed in the heart?”
“Yes.”
“What happened?”
“She started sliding down the wall …”
Urica also testified that she had watched Lawrence Jackson and his partner, Bobbie Driskel, kill her mother, her mother’s boyfriend, and her four-year-old sister. Shirley had been a friend of the family’s. The quadruple murder happened on September 24, 1986, in a second-floor apartment across the street from the Riverses’.
At one point in the trial, the prosecution asked Urica to show her scars to the jurors. She unself-consciously opened her black-and-white dress with ruffles, uncovering an ugly wound that ran from just below her left armpit to her navel. She had been stabbed forty-eight times and left for dead. Two things saved her. So much blood had collected in her body cavity that it virtually stopped the bleeding from her punctured aorta and heart. Also, from the time of the murders, around midnight, until the next morning, when she was discovered, she remained amazingly calm. A cousin found her the next morning, still conscious.
The prosecutor, Daleo, asked Urica about Bobbie Driskel. She had already established that he, like Jackson, had a knife in his hand.
“What did he do?”
“Stabbed me.”
“Where did he stab you, Urica?”
“In my stomach.”
“Do you know how many times?”
“No.”
“Did he have anything else in his hands?”
“Yes.”
“What?”
“A pen.”
“And what did he do with that pen?”
“Digged my guts out.”
Urica’s grandmother left the courtroom, shaken. A juror wept. A newspaper reporter turned to a colleague and whispered incredulously, “Did she really say that?”