There Are No Children Here (28 page)

It was a Thursday in late February, and in the cold and dreariness of a Chicago winter afternoon, Pharoah could be found locked in his bedroom. It was what he had begun to call his “brain day.”

Flopped face down on his bed, he had spread about him mimeographed sheets of words, hundreds of words. He was studying for the upcoming spelling bee.

“Dodgery
,” he asked himself out loud. Looking away from the paper, he spelled the word. Slowly. “D-O-D-G-E-R-Y.” If he started to stammer, he’d stop and take a breath. Slow down, he’d tell himself. Slow down. He was in training. Both to learn the words and to conquer his stutter.

One of the triplets, Timothy, banged on the door. “Who’s there?” Pharoah asked.

“Me,” Timothy said. Curious, like Pharoah himself, he wanted to know what those sounds were coming from the other side of the door. Why was his brother talking to himself?

“What you want?” Pharoah hollered.

“Let me in,” Timothy pleaded.

Pharoah opened the door slightly. “I’m studying, Timothy. Now get on outta here.” When Timothy took a step into the room, Pharoah swatted his younger brother on the back of his head, hard enough so that Timothy started to cry. It was out of character for Pharoah, but he wasn’t messing around. He was
going to do okay in this spelling bee. Nothing was going to distract him. Almost every day after school, Pharoah headed directly for his bedroom and went through his practice routine. Sometimes he’d have his mother bring him his dinner so that he didn’t have to interrupt his studying. On occasion, Lafeyette joined Pharoah on the bed and, as if he were a Marine drill sergeant, flung words at his brother, hoping to find particularly difficult ones to stump him with.
Obedient. Soybean. Hazardous
. He never asked Pharoah the same word more than twice. If he couldn’t get it on the first go-round, he thought, then he never would.

Pharoah also studied hard at school. This year Clarise, one of the school’s brightest, was chosen as the other class representative for the bee. An unusually mature fifth-grader, Clarise Gates had been the youngest Suder student selected to travel to Africa. When Pharoah had lost last year, she had pulled him aside and to try to cheer him up, whispering, “That’s all right, Pharoah. You know you’re gonna win next year.”

She and Pharoah liked each other. Both were curious and studious and forever cheerful. They both had wonderfully open smiles. Clarise, though, towered over Pharoah, who was almost six inches shorter than his friend. On Tuesday and Thursday mornings, the two got to school half an hour early so that they could test each other. There were some words Pharoah had trouble pronouncing because of his stutter. “I can’t say this right,” he’d cry out in frustration. “No such thing as can’t,” Clarise would remind him, like a mother encouraging her son. And the two would work at sounding out the word, syllable by syllable.

One morning Clarise, with a slight frown on her face, told Pharoah, “I ain’t even gonna be in it. I’m gonna let you win it yourself.”

“What?” Pharoah cried. He too began to frown. How could his friend desert him?

“Naw, Pharoah, I’m gonna be in it. I was only joking,” she assured him. The two giggled and kept at their studying. Over the weeks, as they prepared for the contest, Pharoah and Clarise came to call each other “partner.”

• • • •

The week before the spelling bee was a disturbing time for the family. On Friday, February 24, two men, neither of whom lived there, had a fight in the house. A neighbor from upstairs whom everyone knew as Tough Luck had accused a man named Willie, who sold fake jewelry with LaShawn’s boyfriend, of stealing a tire from his car. LaJoe had seen the dispute simmering for days—the men had exchanged heated words in the parking lot—so she warned LaShawn about letting Willie and his problems into the apartment.

On this afternoon, Paul and LaJoe’s mother were sitting on the sofa when Tough Luck stuck his head through the unlocked door. “Mister Paul,” he said, “I just wanna talk to the man who’s got my tire.” Tough Luck was from the Deep South and still addressed people as “mister” and referred to his car as a “skillet.” Willie, who was standing at the end of the hallway, shouted, “Man, I don’t have your tire. Just take a tire.”

“Mister, I don’t want no problem, but I be damned if I’ll let anyone take anything from me,” Tough Luck said diffidently.

“Willie,” Paul urged, “get on out of here with this thing. You too, Tough Luck.”

Willie ignored Paul. He got louder. “If you want it, take it. I ain’t got nothing. If you can see it, take it. If you insist I took it, I took it!”

Tough Luck’s calmness worried Paul. It was, he thought, like the lull before a storm. “Man, give me my tire. My skillet’s missing a tire. I ain’t gonna let no one take nothing from me,” Tough Luck said. He then reached into his back pocket, pulled out a pistol, and shot, almost randomly, at Willie. Paul dove over the couch. Lelia Mae, whose movement was constrained because of her recent stroke, rolled off the sofa onto the floor. “The kids!” she hollered. “The kids!” Pharoah and Lafeyette weren’t in the house at the time, but the triplets, who had been watching the argument, ran for the front bedroom, where they took refuge in the doorless closet. They pulled clothes over them as if the fabric offered some protection.

The bullet, which missed Paul by inches, embedded itself in the wall. Tough Luck, who either wasn’t a good shot or, as was more likely the case, didn’t really want to wound anyone, started moving in on Willie, who jumped into the room with the triplets and pulled a dresser in front of the door. Tough
Luck, in his quiet determination, pushed open the door a few inches and stuck the gun through. Willie slammed the door on his hand. Tough Luck dropped the gun—and then, as calmly as he had entered, left.

When LaJoe arrived, shortly after the shoot-out and just when the police got there, she went into a spiraling rage. She took the elevator to Tough Luck’s apartment and banged on his door. “Open this door!” she screamed hysterically. “You came into my house and almost shot my kids. Open the door!” Her friend Rochelle and her neighbor Red had to restrain her. The two brought her back home.

A few days later, Lelia Mae moved out. The ceaseless activity in the apartment had become too much for her. She wished LaJoe wouldn’t leave to play cards or to visit Rochelle some nights. And the violence, both inside and outside, brought back memories of her daughter’s murder nearly ten years earlier. She made arrangements to live with another one of her daughters, who had her own house. “I already miss my grandma. I hope she come back,” Pharoah told his mother. “I don’t,” said Lafeyette. “There be too much danger over here.” LaJoe later covered the bullet hole with a small wicker wallhanging. It was, like much else, a bad memory to be papered over.

Five days later, LaShawn went into labor with her third child. In her seventh month of pregnancy, she had stopped smoking Karachi. She went cold turkey when she was arrested on an old warrant for stealing a car. During those days, she could feel the fetus in her curl up into a tight ball. It went through the withdrawal with her. She wanted a healthy baby.

On March 1, LaShawn went to Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke’s Medical Center, a private hospital where she had given birth to her first two children. She went in around midnight, and the next morning, when the new shift of doctors came on, they determined that she was not yet in labor and sent her to Mount Sinai Hospital, because, they said, that was where she had had her prenatal classes. It was not the first time Rush-Presbyterian had sent a patient elsewhere. Critics called it dumping. A doctor at Cook County Hospital, which sits just across the street from Rush and is the hospital of last resort for Chicago’s poor, told the story of a pregnant woman who, kicked out of Rush, presumably because she was on public aid, gave birth to her
child as she tried to walk across the street to the neighboring hospital.

A few days later, at Mount Sinai, LaShawn gave birth to a five-pound-fourteen-ounce boy, whom she named DeShaun. He was tested and found to have opiates and cocaine in his system and so had to stay six days at the hospital while the Department of Child and Family Services paid LaShawn a home visit. DCFS eventually permitted the child to go home. LaJoe and the boys helped care for him.

Despite this flurry of activity in the family, Pharoah remained remarkably focused on the spelling bee. He and Lafeyette talked about the Tough Luck shooting as if it were the most natural of occurrences. Pharoah didn’t tell Clarise about it. Even the triplets, one of whom later found the bullet for the police, enjoyed recounting the events of that morning. As for DeShaun, both Lafeyette and Pharoah viewed the new addition to the family with a combination of worry and pleasure. They were concerned that yet another baby would stretch the family’s resources; it meant more money for things like diapers and clothes. It also worried LaJoe that the drugs might have had an effect on him. But LaJoe and both boys, Lafeyette in particular, adored small children, and the idea of another baby to cuddle excited them.

Pharoah, perhaps in anticipation of the spelling bee, began having pleasant dreams, one of which he particularly liked to recall. In it, he was a grown man looking for employment, and people down the street were calling him because they thought they might have a job for him. Pharoah was so touched by the fantasy that he remembered the smallest of details, like the blossoming white roses he could see from his office window and his new clothes: a starched white shirt and blue tie with matching vest and pants, and spanking new black shoes. He had indeed gotten the job, and at work people started calling him “the brain.” He can’t recall what kind of work the job entailed, though he had “a big metal desk, a pencil sharpener, a paperweight, and papers spread all over.” He does, however, remember how good the dream made him feel: “I started thinking about if I do be a lawyer or something, then I’d make a better living and my mama be outta the projects.”

He had also recently finished reading
Old Yeller
, a book about
a boy and his dog. It was, he told his mother, one of his favorites because “Old Yeller used to fight other animals for [the boy]. I believe the others would be dead” had it not been for Old Yeller. Pharoah was also taken by “the way the boy talked so country,” and, trying not to giggle, he launched into a perfect imitation of a Southern accent: “Ain’t nawbody gonna take ma dawg.” LaJoe thought Pharoah was managing to control his stutter. Maybe he’d do better in the spelling bee this year. She knew how much it meant to him.

Spring 1989

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