There Are No Children Here (35 page)

The commotion began to subside. LaJoe sat at the kitchen table, an occasional tear running down her cheeks, apologizing to her friends and family for her outburst. Larry, Brian’s brother, walked through the door. “Clean the kitchen floor,” Lafeyette ordered. “Shut up, man,” Larry retorted. Lafeyette turned to his mother. “Pharoah and I ain’t the only people living here,” he told her.

LaJoe began privately to entertain the idea of leaving, of running
away with her five youngest, Lafeyette on down. But she had nowhere to go. She couldn’t afford the rents outside public housing. LaJoe had once described her three oldest children as red roses whose petals had wilted and fallen off. She wished she could give new life to those flowers. But she was tired of trying. And now she worried that her younger buds might never bloom.

But LaJoe, too, was wilting like an undernourished rose. Looking for a respite from her crowded household, she spent more nights away from the family, sometimes playing cards with her women friends, other times sitting up all night talking with Rochelle and her mother, drinking soda pop and smoking cigarettes. LaJoe often leaned on Rochelle and her mother for support, usually when she felt overwhelmed by her family’s problems. The card playing helped supplement her meager income, she reasoned. And being away gave her a chance to relax and pull herself together. It was her escape, the only way she knew how to recharge herself. At least, she thought, she’d be rested for her children.

The children understood, or so they said. In the mornings, if LaJoe had not yet returned, they managed without her. Weasel’s girlfriend fixed oatmeal for the kids. Lafeyette ironed his clothes and did the same for the triplets, whom he walked to school. LaJoe would be there for them when they got out of school—and they knew that. But the children felt her absence on the nights she was away. They remembered how she’d been mugged and her fingers slashed. They worried that something even worse might happen to her. Their mother, after all, was all they had.

On Tuesday, April 4, Terence was sentenced, and Richard M. Daley, the son of the infamous Richard J. Daley, was elected mayor. Not that the two had anything to do with each other. But LaJoe could remember the date. Sentencing Day and Election Day. The two had absolutely nothing to do with each other, and that’s what bothered LaJoe. Maybe if the politicians cared, some of the neighborhood’s lost children might have been saved. The politicians’ silence upset her greatly.

LaJoe had gone to the county jail a couple of weeks earlier to talk with Terence. She encouraged him to take the eight years,
to get it over with. She thought it would be easier on everybody. She couldn’t endure a trial and the possibility that he might be sent away for a longer time. Besides, she told Terence, with an eight-year sentence he could get out in four years, maybe three and a half years, if they counted the time already served. Terence listened to his mother. Always. He took the eight years.

Three days before his sentencing, Lafeyette and Pharoah, along with Tammie, Tiffany, Snuggles, Sir Baldheaded, and their father, visited Terence to say their good-byes. LaJoe went later in the day. Lafeyette donned Terence’s suit, the same one he had worn to Craig’s funeral. He wanted to show Terence that he was older, that he could take care of himself and the family, particularly their mother.

It tickled Terence to see his brother so grown. The suit made him look like a young man. He asked Lafeyette to back up against the wall so that he could view him in it. “It looks sharp, Laf,” he mouthed through the thick glass. All Lafeyette could bring himself to say to Terence was “I’m straight.” He sat and listened to Terence for the rest of the visit, his eyes fixed on his brother behind the glass. Pharoah told Terence, “I love you.” The visit, which was filled with awkward pauses, lasted maybe half an hour.

Terence insisted that no one come to his sentencing; he didn’t want them to see him sent away. He originally asked the judge if he would give him an extra two weeks in the jail so that his family might visit him once more, but then changed his mind and asked to be shipped off immediately. Other inmates had told him that had he stayed, he would have had to remain in prison two weeks longer.

LaJoe couldn’t stop thinking of Terence. She tried to rationalize his imprisonment. It would be good for him to get off the streets, to get away from the drugs and the shootings. If he were out here, he might just get in more serious trouble. He might get hurt, maybe even killed. But she knew, in her heart of hearts, that prison wasn’t much of an option. It would change Terence. He would lose his softness, his gentleness. In her efforts to hold on to Terence, she measured Lafeyette and Pharoah against him. She had expected so much from him, and
he had disappointed her. Not Pharoah or Lafeyette, she assured herself. She could see the differences.

“Terence was quiet, almost like Pharoah,” she would say. “But the difference between Terence and Pharoah is that Pharoah’s more open. If Pharoah do something wrong, he won’t let you forget it even though you forgived him.” Or, she would note, “Lafie ain’t going to be like that, he ain’t going to be like that. If anything Lafie do, he going to leave the projects if he has to leave on his own. I’m not worried about that. The only thing I worry about Lafie is getting hurt.”

LaJoe kept her grief to herself. She had no one, except Rochelle, to share it with. She didn’t talk to her husband. And she no longer wanted to burden Lafeyette with her worries. Her insides, she said, “don’t be nothing but threads.

“My children are my strength. They’re my love. They’re what I didn’t have and I had them in order to get it. And when they go away, it’s like taking from me a part of me. Like, now, I’m getting real weak. You know, I don’t feel good. My heart broke ’cause of what happened to Terence. It ain’t too much more I could take.”

Three days later, after his arrival at the Joliet Correctional Center, a maximum security facility an hour’s drive south of Chicago, Terence wrote to his mother. She showed the letter to Lafeyette and Pharoah.

April 7, 1989

Dear Mom,

How are you and the family doing? Fine I hope. Well, I just made it to Joliet and I want you to no that I love you and them good things you did for me. And another thing. Don’t worry about me. I’m going to be fine … When you send me some money, make sure it be 50 dollars money order so I can get my tv and radio … Be strong. I would like some pictures of the family and some pictures of my kids … Don’t never worry about me. You got 7 other kids to worry about. I’m going to be okay.

From your truly son, Terence. I
U. Write back soon.

Both Lafeyette and Pharoah missed Terence. But they both now realized he was gone for a while. They stopped asking when he was coming home, though Pharoah had a dream.

“I dreamed every time I did something like when I get married Terence’d get married. Then a monster was chasing me. My brother was the only one who controlled the monster, so he told the monster to settle down. I woke up and started to call my brother’s name but remembered he was in jail and I started worrying again.”

Twenty-five

   
PHAROAH WARNED FRIENDS of the human-headed cats in his building’s basement. It didn’t take much, given all that was found down there, to make that leap of imagination.

When Gwen Anderson, the newly appointed housing manager of Horner who had been entrusted to help turn the troubled complex around, ventured into the basements of Horner’s high-rises, she vomited. On April 20, Ms. Anderson wrote the following memo to her superiors at the CHA:

It was anybody’s worst nightmare, a basement full of scurrying rats and dead cats and dogs. For fifteen years, people had been living over this stench, and the CHA had only now discovered it. These were the basements where LaJoe and her sisters learned to sew with the Girl Scouts. As children, they had attended dances and roller-skating parties here. Politicians had visited with residents in these basements to listen to their complaints and to get their votes. Now these were the last places on earth anyone would want to spend time.

The rotting carcasses explained the putrid odor rising from the Riverses’ toilet. It wasn’t aborted fetuses, as LaJoe had thought. It was dead animals, the stench of rotting flesh rising through the pipes.

The pools of water in the basement explained LaJoe’s backed-up kitchen sink. Sewage had risen up through the pipes and been regurgitated into the sink. A maintenance man rigged a temporary stopper for LaJoe. He wedged a three-foot-long plank of wood between a pot, which covered the drain, and the cabinets above. The secured pot kept the raw sewage from escaping into the sink. For two weeks, this ugly sculpture remained; LaJoe washed the dishes in the bathtub.

But what most infuriated LaJoe were the brand-new ranges wasting away just a floor below her. For nearly a year, her oven and broiler rarely worked. She had no toaster, so when the broiler was out, the children toasted bread in a skillet. It was a long while since she had made corn bread or cakes, since she couldn’t rely on the oven. And to think, just a floor below her sat possible replacements. But they were now beyond repair. The CHA would have to throw them all out.