Iran into Ms. Bailey pretty regularly. Sometimes she accompanied J.T. as he made his rounds of the building; sometimes I’d see her with a police officer or a CHA official. She always said hello and politely introduced me to whomever she was with. But I didn’t really know what she did or how she did it. Although she was present at the backroom gang negotiation I witnessed at the Boys & Girls Club, she hadn’t gotten very involved. So I was curious to learn more about her.
Specifically, I wanted to know why residents spoke of her with a mixture of reverence and fear, much as they spoke of J.T. “Oh, you don’t want to mess with Ms. Bailey,” they’d say. Or, “Yeah, Ms. Bailey can tell you a lot about what’s happening, but make sure you have five dollars with you.” Even J.T., who agreed that I should spend some time with Ms. Bailey, vaguely hinted that I ought to be careful around her.
Part of my motivation to observe Ms. Bailey came from my advisersat the University of Chicago. Jean Comaroff, an accomplished ethnographer, said that I was spending too much time with men. Since two-thirds of the community were women raising children, she suggested that I try to better understand how women managed households, secured services from the CHA, and otherwise helped families get by. Bill Wilson told me that poverty scholars knew little about the role women played in community affairs, and he encouraged me to spend time with household leaders like Ms. Mae but also tenant leaders like Ms. Bailey. Wilson and Comaroff both advised me to exercise the same sort of caution with Ms. Bailey as I would with other powerful people, never taking what they told me at face value.
Ms. Bailey was of average height and stout. Because of arthritis in her knees, she walked slowly, but always looking straight ahead with great focus, like Washington crossing the Delaware. She had a tattoo on her right arm that read MO-JO-the nickname, Ms. Mae told me, of a son who’d passed away. Ms. Bailey had pudgy fingers and, when she shook your hand, the tightest grip I’ve ever felt.
Her title was building president of the Local Advisory Council (LAC). This was an elected position that paid a part-time wage of a few hundred dollars a month. The official duties of a building president included lobbying the CHA for better building maintenance, obtaining funds for tenant activities, and so on. Elections were held every four years, and incumbents were rarely deposed. Some LAC presidents were much more powerful than others, and from what I’d heard, Ms. Bailey was on the upper end of the power scale. She had actually fought for the creation of the LAC many years ago, and she kept her fighting spirit. I’d heard stories about Ms. Bailey getting medical clinics to give free checkups to the children in her building and local stores to donate food.
I witnessed this fighting spirit firsthand when I visited her small, decrepit office one day. I wanted to explain why I’d been hanging around her building and also explain my research. I began by discussing the prevailing academic wisdom about urban poverty and the factors that contributed to it.
“You planning on talking with white people in your study?” she snapped, waving her hand at me as if she’d heard my spiel a hundred times already.
I was confused. “This is a study of the Robert Taylor Homes, and I suppose that most of the people I’ll be talking to are black. Unless there are whites who live here that I’m not aware of.”
“If I gave you only one piece of bread to eat each day and asked why you’re starving, what would you say?”
I was thrown off by this seeming non sequitur. I thought for a minute. “I guess I would say I’m starving because I’m not eating enough,” I answered.
“You got a lot to learn, Mr. Professor,” she said. “Again, if I gave you one piece of bread to eat each day and asked why you’re starving, what would you say?”
I was getting even more confused. I took a chance. “Because you’re not feeding me?”
“Yes! Very good!”
I felt relieved. I hoped no more tests were coming my way, but Ms. Bailey kept going. “Let’s say I took away your house key and you had to sleep outside,” she said. “A man from the city comes over and counts you as ‘homeless.’ What would you say?”
“Umm.” This one seemed even harder. “I’d say you’re wrong. I have a place to stay, so… no! I’m not homeless!” I thought I had nailed this one.
But she looked exasperated at my answer. “Wow, have you ever had to do anything for yourself?” she said.
I was at least smart enough to know that she wasn’t literally asking me to reply.
“If I took your house key away,” she barked, “what does that make you?” She leaned across the desk, and I could feel her breath on my face.
“Well, I guess you robbed me. So I’m not homeless, I’m a victim.”
“Okay, we’re getting somewhere. Now let’s say I tell the police to stop coming to your block and to go only where I live. And then I write that you live in a crime-infested neighborhood, that there’s more crime on your block than mine. What would you say?”
“Well, I guess I’d say that it’s not really fair because you have all the police, so-”
“Mr. Professor, we’re really getting moving now!” Ms. Bailey threw up her hands in mock celebration. “Okay, so let’s go back to the original question. You want to understand how black folks live in the projects. Why we are poor. Why we have so much crime. Why we can’t feed our families. Why our kids can’t get work when they grow up. So will you be studying white people?”
“Yes,” I said. I understood, finally, that she also wanted me to focus on the people outside Robert Taylor who determined how the tenants lived day to day.
“But don’t make us the victim,” she said. “We’ll take responsibility for what we can control. It’s just that not everything is in our hands.”
Our subsequent meetings were much the same. I would walk in to discuss an issue-the 60 percent dropout rate, for instance, among the project’s high-school kids. “Research today says that if kids can get through high school, they have a twenty-five percent greater likelihood of escaping poverty,” I said, as if giving a lecture. “So early education-keeping them in school-is the key. Also-”
Ms. Bailey interrupted. “If your family is starving and I tell you that I’ll give you a chance to make some money, what are you going to do?”
“Make the money. I have to help my family.”
“But what about school?” she said.
“I guess it will have to wait.”
“Until what?”
“Until my family gets enough to eat.”
“But you should stay in school, right?” she said, sarcasm rising in her voice. “That’s what will help you leave poverty.” She paused. Then she smiled triumphantly and made no effort to hide her patronizing tone. “So… you said you wanted to talk with me about high-school dropouts?”
It took a while, but I eventually realized there was no point in trying to act even remotely authoritative around Ms. Bailey. There was part of me that felt like the expert researcher, but only a very small part. Once I learned that there was no way around Ms. Bailey’s Socratic browbeating, I decided to give in and just let her teach me.
I usually dropped by her office during the hours she reserved for open visitation from tenants; otherwise it could be hard to track her down. When a tenant came by, Ms. Bailey would ask me to step out. Our longest conversations, therefore, rarely lasted beyond fifteen minutes. Ms. Bailey remained formal with me, as if she were keeping her guard up. She never shared details about specific tenants; instead she spoke in generalities about “families who live around here.”
After a few months of this, I told J.T. that I was frustrated by my interactions with Ms. Bailey. I couldn’t tell if she trusted me.
J.T. enjoyed seeing me struggle. He had warned me that getting to know her wouldn’t be easy and perhaps wasn’t even worth trying. “It took a while before I let you talk with my boys,” he said.
“What makes you think she’ll just walk you around and show you everybody? Things don’t go so fast around here.”
He had a point. If Ms. Bailey needed time to feel comfortable with me, then I would just have to wait.
As the Chicago winter began to settle in, Ms. Bailey asked me to help her with a clothing drive. Tenants and squatters in her building needed winter coats, she said, as well as blankets and portable heaters. She wanted me to collect donations with her from several stores that had agreed to contribute.
A friend of mine let me borrow his car, a battered yellow and brown station wagon. When I went to collect Ms. Bailey at her building, she was carrying a large plastic bag. She grunted as she bent over to pick it up and again as she set it down on the floor of the car. With labored breaths, she directed me to our first stop: a liquor store a few blocks from her building.
She instructed me to drive around the back. She told me she didn’t want the manager to see me, but she didn’t explain why.
I parked in the alley as Ms. Bailey went inside. Five minutes later a few employees came out the back door and began loading the station wagon with cases of beer and bottles of liquor. Nothing expressly for winter, I noted, although a stiff bourbon could certainly help take the sting off the Chicago cold. Ms. Bailey climbed into the car. This donation, she told me, was made with the understanding that she would direct her tenants to visit this liquor store exclusively when they needed booze.
We drove a few miles to a grocery store on Stony Island Avenue. We went in the back way and met with a man who appeared to be the manager.
“Hey, sweetheart,” Ms. Bailey said. She introduced me to Mr.
Baldwin, a large, pear-shaped black man with a round face and a wide grin. He had a clipboard in his hand, marking off the sides of beef hanging from a ceiling rack.
Mr. Baldwin gave Ms. Bailey a hug. “I got what you want, babe,” he said. “All in the back. I got them ready for you yesterday.”
He pointed us toward a younger man, who led us over to a few big garbage bags filled with puffy black jackets. At first glance they looked exactly like the jacket the young man was wearing, which had the name of the grocery store prominently displayed on the sleeves and chest. Were they the same jackets? I wondered if Ms. Bailey’s tenants would wear clothing with a grocery store’s name on it.
As I hauled the bags to the car, Ms. Bailey shouted at me. “And bring three cases of beer in here, Sudhir!”
I did as I was told. Even I, middle-class naïf that I was, could sense a horse trade.
Back in the car, Ms. Bailey anticipated my question. “I know you’re wondering what we were doing at the food store,” she said. “Take a look at the jackets.” I reached into the backseat and grabbed one. It smelled distinctly of bleach, as if it had been disinfected. The store’s patch had been either removed or covered up with another, even larger patch. It read ROBERT TAYLOR PRIDE.
Ms. Bailey smiled. “Those jackets are warmer than what most families can buy in the stores. These workers are sitting in a meat locker all day, so you know they have to stay warm. The manager donates about twenty to me each Christmas.”
“And the patches?” I asked.
“The guy who makes the jackets for him does it for free-for us.”
“And the beer?”
Ms. Bailey just smiled and told me where to drive next.
We hit several more stores that day. At Sears, Ms. Bailey exchanged pleasantries with the manager, and they asked about each other’s families. Then he handed over a few boxes of children’s coats; Ms. Bailey directed me to put the rest of the beer in his car. At a dollar store, Ms. Bailey traded some of the liquor for a bundle of blankets. At a hardware store, Ms. Bailey gave the manager the heavy plastic bag she’d brought along, and he gave her three portable heaters.
“Don’t ask what’s in the bag,” she told me as I carried the heaters back to the car. “When I know you better, I’ll tell you.”
Only once did Ms. Bailey receive a donation that was actually a donation-that is, something for free. At one grocery store, she got some canned food without having to exchange any beer or liquor.
By the time we finished, we were on the far southern edge of the city. We hit traffic on the drive back to Robert Taylor, which gave me the opportunity to pepper Ms. Bailey with questions.
“When did you start doing this?” I asked.
Ms. Bailey told me that she had grown up in public housing herself. Back then, charities, churches, city agencies, and individual volunteers all helped out in the projects. “But the volunteers don’t come around anymore,” she said wistfully. “Have you seen any of those nice white people since you’ve been around? I didn’t think so. Nobody gives us money, nobody runs programs. Not a lot of people are doing the free-food thing anymore. Even the churches really don’t do what they did in the past.”
“But I don’t understand why the people we saw today want to give you things. I mean, how did you get to know them?”
“Well, first of all, most of them grew up in Robert Taylor or they have family in the projects. Lots of middle-class people don’t like to talk about it, but they came from the projects. It’s easy to forget where you came from. But I try and remind these people that they were once like us. And a few times a year, they do the right thing.”
“So why give them beer and liquor?” I asked. “If it’s a donation, it should be for free, no?”
“Well, things ain’t always that simple,” Ms. Bailey said. She brought up the incident I’d seen some months back, when the woman named Boo-Boo wanted to kill the Middle Eastern shopkeeper who’d slept with her teenage daughter. “That’s what a lot of women have to do around here to get some free food,” she said. “I don’t want to see it come to that. So if I have to give away a few bottles of gin, that’s fine with me.”
Back at her office, Ms. Bailey organized the winter gear and prepared large baskets filled with canned food and meat. Word spread quickly, and families from her building soon began to drop by. Some were shy, others excited. But everyone seemed happy, and I watched as children smiled when they tried on a new coat or a warm sweater.
I noticed that some people received food but no clothing. Others got a jacket but no food. And some people just stood around until Ms. Bailey told them, “We don’t have anything for you today.” She said this even though the food baskets and clothing were in plain view, so I didn’t know why she was withholding the gifts from them. Did she play favorites with some families?
One day Clarisse, the prostitute, walked into Ms. Bailey’s office. There were several women already in front of her. Ms. Bailey’s assistant, Catrina, was writing their names and noting exactly what each of them received.
“You got something for me today?” Clarisse asked, a lilt in her voice. Then her eyes landed on me briefly, but I didn’t seem to register. She smelled like liquor; her blouse was undone so that one of her breasts was nearly popping out. Despite the cold weather, Clarisse was wearing a black miniskirt and sliding around perilously on high heels. Her face looked vacant, and her mouth was frothy. I had never seen her in this condition before. She had told me herself that she didn’t do drugs.
“You’re messed up,” Catrina said, peering over her thick glasses. “You need to shower.”
Ms. Bailey was in the next room, speaking with a tenant. “Ms. Bailey, look who’s here!” Catrina called out. “Ms. Bailey, you need to tell her to get out of the office!” Catrina turned back to Clarisse and shot her a disapproving look.
Ms. Bailey came out and told Catrina to calm down. Then she motioned for Clarisse to come inside. As she closed the door, she rolled her eyes at me and sighed. I couldn’t make out the whole conversation-it was unclear, in fact, if Clarisse was talking at all- but some of Ms. Bailey’s proclamations were plainly audible.
“Get yourself clean or you ain’t getting nothing!… Don’t embarrass yourself, coming in here high on that shit!…You call yourself a mother? You ain’t no mother. You could be one, if you stopped smoking that junk!”
The door opened, and Clarisse stumbled out, tears in her eyes. She dropped her purse and then, as she stopped to pick it up, tripped and fell, ramming into the pile of donation baskets. As she tried getting up, Clarisse vomited, some of it landing on the baskets.
Catrina and I jumped over to help her. Both of us slipped on the vomit. A strong wind blew in from outside, and the smell filled the room. Clarisse resisted our help, but she couldn’t manage to get up by herself. Her pretty face had turned pale and pasty.
“Grab her and get her out of here!” Catrina yelled. She had to say this two more times before I realized that she was talking to me. “Sudhir! Grab her and take her home. Now!”
I tried being delicate with Clarisse. She was falling out of her clothes, and I didn’t quite know how to touch her. She began throwing up again, and this time it landed on my arm.
“Sudhir!” Catrina yelled.
Clarisse was on all fours by now. She was drooling and heaving, but nothing came out. This time I wrapped my arms around her stomach and yanked her up. I figured I’d better get her out of the office even if I had to drag her.
“That bitch don’t want me to feed my babies,” Clarisse moaned. “I need food to feed my babies!” She started looking around frantically-for her purse, I realized.
“Clarisse, just a few more feet,” I said. “I’ll get your bag, don’t worry. But let’s get you out of the office.”
“My bag!” she wailed. “My bag, I need my bag!”
She started kicking and flailing, trying to make her way back inside the office. With one last effort, I heaved her upright, causing us both to stumble and slam against the gallery’s chain-link fencing. She sank back to the floor. I hoped I hadn’t hurt her, but I couldn’t tell.
As I turned to retrieve her purse, I saw Ms. Bailey, standing in the doorway. She held the purse in her hands.
“Is this what she wants?” Ms. Bailey asked. “Is it?!” I nodded. “Look inside. You want to help this lady, then look and see why she wants her bag.”
I shook my head, staring at the floor.
“Look!” Ms. Bailey snapped at me. She strode over and held the bag up to my face. I saw a few condoms, some lipsticks, pictures of her daughters, and a few bags of either heroin or cocaine.
“Have to have that fix, don’t you, baby?” Ms. Bailey asked Clarisse, sneering. We all stood there for what felt like an hour but was probably only a few seconds. Catrina tried to interrupt, but Ms. Bailey waved her off.
“Go ahead, Sudhir, take her home,” Ms. Bailey said. She bent over to stare down at Clarisse. “If I see your babies coming over and telling me that they ain’t eaten no food in three days, I’m taking them away. You hear?”
Ms. Bailey turned and left. Catrina, with a disinterested look, handed me some paper towels. I bent down to wipe the vomit and tears from Clarisse’s face. She didn’t resist this time when I helped her up.
I walked Clarisse upstairs to her apartment and led her to the couch. The apartment was dark, and I figured it would be best to let her sleep. In a back room, her two daughters were sitting on a queen-size bed. They looked to be about two and four years old and were watching the TV intently. I closed the door to their room and put a glass of water on the table next to Clarisse. The scene was a study in contrasts. The apartment was neat and cozy, with wall hangings and framed pictures throughout, some of Jesus Christ and some of family members. It smelled as if it had just been cleaned. And then there was Clarisse on the couch, breathing heavily, eyelids drooping, a total mess.
When I had first met her, on the gallery outside J.T.’s apartment, Clarisse had set herself apart from other prostitutes-the “hypes and rock stars”-who sold sex for drugs. Plainly, she had lied to me about not using drugs; I guess she’d wanted to make a decent impression. At this moment I wasn’t too concerned about her lies. She needed help, after all. But it was pretty clear that I had to be careful about blindly accepting what people told me.
I sat on a recliner next to the couch. “I’m afraid to leave you here alone,” I said. In the dim light, I couldn’t really make out her facial expression. But she was breathing heavily, as if she’d just gone through battle. “Let me call an ambulance.”
“I’m okay. I just need it to wear off.”
“What about the kids? Have they eaten?”
“Ms. Bailey wouldn’t give us nothing,” she whimpered, a stage past crying. “Why she treat me like that? Why she treat me like that?”
I felt a sudden urge to make sure her kids were fed. I went into the bedroom, asked them to grab their jackets, and walked them over to a local sandwich shop. I bought them cheeseburgers, chips, and soda, and on the way home we stopped at a small grocery store. I had only fifteen dollars with me, but I told the owner, a Middle Eastern man, that the family hadn’t eaten in a while. He shook his head- as if he’d heard this story a million times-and instructed me to get what I needed and just take it with me. When I told Clarisse’s girls that we were going to fill up a shopping cart, they looked like I’d just given them free passes to Disney World. While they grabbed candy, I tried to sneak in a few cans of spaghetti-alas, one of the most nutritious items on the shelves-and some milk, cereal, and frozen dinners. When we got back, Clarisse was asleep. I put the food away, broke out a few Ring Dings for the kids, and put them in front of the TV again. They fixed on the cartoon images as if they’d never been gone. Since Clarisse was still sleeping, I left.
Two days later I returned to the building. Walking through the crowded lobby, nodding at the people I knew, I felt someone grab my arm and pull me into a corner. It was Ms. Bailey.
“You’re sweet, you’re young, you’re good-looking, and these women will take advantage of you,” she said. “Be careful when you help them.”
“Her kids hadn’t eaten,” I said. “What could I do?”
“Her kids ate at my place that morning!” Ms. Bailey said. She tightened her grip on my arm and moved in even closer. “I make sure they eat. No children go hungry in my building. No, sir.” She tightened her grip even further, and it hurt. “These women need to do the right thing if they have a baby. You remember that if you have a child someday.”
“I will.”
“Mm-hmm, we’ll see about that. For now, be careful when you help the women. They’ll take advantage of you, and you won’t know what hit you. And I can’t be there to protect you.” I wasn’t sure exactly what Ms. Bailey meant.
I nodded anyway, mostly so Ms. Bailey would loosen her grip. When she finally let go, I walked up to J.T.’s apartment to wait for him. It was the second time I’d been warned that I couldn’t be “protected.” First J.T. and now Ms. Bailey. I decided not to tell anyone, including J.T., about the conversation I’d just had with Ms. Bailey. In fact, the conversation had put me so out of sorts that by the time I got upstairs, I told Ms. Mae I had some schoolwork to do and had to get going. She fixed me a plate of food for the bus ride home.
A few weeks later, Ms. Bailey invited me to the building’s monthly meeting. It was open to all tenants and posed one of the few opportunities for people to publicly voice their problems.
There were about 150 tenant families in Ms. Bailey’s building. That included perhaps six hundred people living there legally and another four hundred living off the books. These were either boarders who paid rent to the leaseholders or husbands and boyfriends who kept their names off the leases so the women qualified for welfare. There were likely another few hundred squatters or people living temporarily with friends, but they were unlikely to attend a tenant meeting.
Ms. Bailey didn’t seem all that enthusiastic about these meetings, but she let me know that she well understood their symbolic value. “They need to see that something is going on,” she said, “even if nothing is going on.”
The meeting was held in Ms. Bailey’s office on a Saturday afternoon in December. Although it wasn’t very cold outside, the radiator was at full blast and the windows were closed. Ms. Bailey entered the steaming room and calmly walked past the few dozen people assembled on folding chairs, parking herself up front. She always sat down in the same awkward way. Because she was so heavyset, and because she had arthritis in her legs, she usually had to grab someone or something to help ease herself into a chair.
I was surprised at the small turnout. The attendees were mostly women and mostly in their mid-fifties like Ms. Bailey. There were, however, a few younger women with children and a few men as well.
Ms. Bailey deliberately arranged a sheaf of papers in front of her. She motioned for a young woman to open up the window, but it wouldn’t budge.
“Okay, this meeting is in session,” Ms. Bailey said.
A well-dressed man toward the back of the room immediately jumped up. “I thought you said you’d talk with those boys!” he said. “They’re still hanging out there, making all that damn noise. I can’t get no sleep.”
I assumed he was talking about the parties the Black Kings threw inside and outside the building.
“Did you make a note of that, Millie?” Ms. Bailey asked an old woman to her left. She was the official LAC recording secretary. Millie nodded while scribbling away.
“Okay,” Ms. Bailey said, “go on, young man.”
“Go on? I’ve been going on. I’m tired of going on. Each time I come here, I go on. I’m tired of it. Can you do something?”
“You got that, Millie?” Ms. Bailey asked, looking over the rims of her glasses.
“Mm-hmm,” Millie answered. “He’s tired of it, he’s been going on, and he wants you to do something.”
“You can probably leave out the tired part,” Ms. Bailey said in a serious tone.
“Yes, okay,” Millie said, scratching away in her notes.
“Will there be anything else, young man?” Ms. Bailey asked. He didn’t say anything. “Okay, then, I’m figuring you don’t want to talk about the fact that you’re living here illegally. Is that right? Now, who’s next? Nobody? Okay, then, we have some serious business to discuss. Before I take questions, let me tell you that Pride will be here on Tuesday registering all of you to vote. Please make sure to show up. It’s very important we have a good turnout for them.”
Pride was the organization I’d come across earlier, made up of ex-gang members and devoted to gang truces and voter registration. Ms. Bailey had already told me that she worked closely with them.
“What are we voting for?” asked a young woman in the front row.
“We’re not actually voting, sweetheart. You need to register first. If you’re already registered, you don’t need to come. But I want every apartment in this building registered.”
“Ain’t you even a little bit concerned that we’re just helping J.T. and the rest of them?” an older woman asked. “I mean, they’re the only ones who seem to be getting something out of this.”
“You want these boys to turn themselves around?” Ms. Bailey answered. “Then you got to take them seriously when they try to do right. It’s better than them shooting each other.”
“The voting hasn’t done a damn thing for us!” someone cried out. “So why are you so accepting of what they’re doing?” A chorus of “oohs” followed the question.
Ms. Bailey shushed the crowd. “Excuse me, Ms. Cartwright,” she said. “If you’re suggesting that I may be benefiting in any way by the voting stuff going on, you can just come out and say it.”
“I’m not saying you may be benefiting,” Ms. Cartwright said. “I’m saying you are benefiting. You get that new TV on your own, Ms. Bailey?”
This produced some more “oohs” and a round of outright giggling.
“Let me remind you,” Ms. Bailey yelled, trying to reestablish order, “that we ain’t had no harassment, no shooting, no killing for six months. And that’s because these young men are getting right. So you can help them or you can just sit and moan. And about my TV. Who was the one that give you fifty bucks for your new fridge? And you, Ms. Elder, how exactly did you get that new mattress?”
No one answered.
“That’s what I thought. You-all can keep up the bitchin’ or you can realize that every one of us is benefiting from me helping these young men.”
The rest of the meeting was similarly animated and followed this same pattern. Tenants accused Ms. Bailey of going easy on J.T.’s gang and personally benefiting from her alliance with them. She replied that her job was to help the tenants, period, and if that meant finding creative solutions to a multitude of problems, then she needed to be allowed such flexibility. To nearly every resident who complained, Ms. Bailey could cite an instance of giving money to that person for rent, for a utility bill, or to buy food or furniture. She plainly knew how to play the influence game. I’d been to her apartment a few times and, although she never let me stay for long, it was a testament to her skills: There were photos of her with political officials, several new refrigerators from the CHA, and cases of donated food and liquor. One bedroom was practically overrun with stacks of small appliances that she would give to tenants in her favor.
At one point during the meeting, Ms. Bailey mentioned the “donations” that she regularly procured from the gang, to be applied to various tenants’ causes. J.T. had repeatedly told me that he had to keep Ms. Bailey happy-having his junior members carry out her orders, for instance, and paying her each month for the right to sell drugs in the lobby. But this was the first time I ever heard Ms. Bailey admit to this largesse. In fact, she discussed it with a measure of pride, highlighting her ability to put the gang’s ill-gotten gains to good use. Although none of the tenants said so, I also knew from J.T. that some of them received payoffs from the gang-in exchange for their silence or for allowing the gang to stash drugs, cash, or weapons in their apartments. For a poor family, it was hard to turn down the gang’s money.
“Why are we even talking about J.T.?” asked an older man. “Why don’t we just go to the police? Can you tell me what you get from taking their help-or their money?”
“You-all want this place clean,” Ms. Bailey said. “You want this place safe. You want this and that. And you want it right away. Well, the CHA ain’t doing nothing. So I have to find ways to take care of it.”
“But we can’t walk around safely,” the man said. “My car got the windows shot out last year.”
“Right,” Ms. Bailey countered. “That was last year, and sometimes that happens. But you see this place getting cleaned up. You see people getting rides to the store. Who do you think is doing that? Before you go yelling at J.T. and the rest of them, you better understand that they’re family, too. And they’re helping-which is more than I can say for you.”
That a tenant leader-one who was respected by politicians, shop owners, the police, and others-would praise a crack gang and work so closely with its leader made me realize just how desperate people could become in the projects. But I was learning that Ms. Bailey’s compromising position also arose out of her own personal ambitions: in order to retain her authority, she had to collaborate with the other power groups, in this case the gangs, who helped shape the status quo. This resulted in the bizarre spectacle of Ms. Bailey’s publicly defending the very people who were shooting and causing trouble for her tenant families. Even though it was obvious that tenant leaders had few good choices, I still wasn’t convinced that they needed to operate in such murky ethical waters. Nevertheless I found myself wondering how much Ms. Bailey’s actions were actually a response to hardships that limited her options and how much arose from her own desire to have power.
As the meeting broke up, people approached Ms. Bailey for one-on-one conversations. They all had their grievances: no hot water or a broken sink, a child getting in trouble, prostitutes taking clients into the stairwell, crack addicts partying the whole night.
Afterward Ms. Bailey motioned me into her office. Catrina was looking over some notes she’d taken at the meeting. Ms. Bailey asked her to get together with Millie, the LAC secretary, to prepare a list of tenant concerns to pass along to the CHA.
Ms. Bailey opened a small refrigerator and took out sodas for all of us. Grabbing a small blue rag, she wiped her sweaty forehead. “Did that live up to your expectations?” she asked me with a wink.
“Well, I thought you were just going to make a few announcements!” I said, laughing. “What do you do with everything you heard? I mean, a lot of it was directed at you. They were saying some pretty harsh things.”
“We tell the CHA that things ain’t working in the building, and we try to get them to fix it. That’s it.”
“And do you tell them about residents accusing you of taking gang money?”
“We tell the CHA that things ain’t working in the building, and we try to get them to fix it.”
She smiled cunningly and looked over to Catrina, who returned the dutiful glance of an ever-loyal junior officer.
“Sudhir, you have to remember something,” Ms. Bailey continued. “In the projects it’s more important that you take care of the problem first. Then you worry about how you took care of the problem.” I opened my mouth to object, but she stopped me. “If no one dies, then all the complaining don’t mean nothing, because I’m doing my job. If all I got to worry about is a few people wondering where the money’s coming from, then around here that’s a good day! No one dies, no one gets hurt, I’m doing my job.”
“That’s an awful way to live,” I blurted out.
“Now you’re starting to understand,” she said in a tone somewhere between pedantic and patronizing. “Maybe you’re even starting to learn.”
Someone knocked on the door, and Ms. Bailey got up to answer it. Catrina leaned in toward me. “Watch how she helps people,” she whispered. “She says it don’t matter, but she’s amazing. Have you seen how she gets apartments fixed around here?”
I told her that I hadn’t.
“Have you seen how she helps women around here?” Catrina pushed her glasses up the bridge of her nose and kept her voice low. I felt as if we were in high school and I was sneaking a conversation with the teacher’s pet.
“Well, Ms. Bailey gives away food to the mothers, right?” I whispered back.
Catrina shook her head and inhaled deeply, looking disappointed in me. “That’s not what I’m talking about. You watch what she does when she helps women. Pay attention to that.” Her voice was insistent, but she offered no more details. “She is the most amazing person I know.”
As I spent more time with Ms. Bailey over the coming months, I found that most tenants were less suspicious of me than they’d been in the past. Sometimes, when a tenant came into Ms. Bailey’s office to talk about a problem, the tenant would say, “It’s okay, I don’t mind if Sudhir listens.”
Like J.T., Ms. Bailey seemed to enjoy the fact that I was interested in her. Perhaps she, too, thought I was going to be her personal biographer. I could see why she might make this assumption. I took every opportunity to express my fascination for her life, which seemed more fascinating the more I hung around.
One cold winter morning, I sat in Ms. Bailey’s office with Catrina. It was a slow day, and only a few tenants visited. Ms. Bailey asked if I would go out and get her some coffee, and Catrina came with me. We bundled up and trudged through eight inches of fresh snow. The wind was nearly strong enough to blow you over; it was too cold for even a conversation. Catrina and I just concentrated on stepping in the footprints of people who’d made a first pass in the snow. Catrina wondered aloud what kind of God would make the earth so cold.
As we slogged our way back to the building, coffee and doughnuts in hand, a young woman hurried over to us as best as she could. “Catrina, you got to come quick,” she said. “Ms. Bailey ran upstairs to Taneesha’s apartment. She said you have to call Officer Reggie.”
Catrina shoved the coffee at me and ran off as fast as possible under the circumstances. Since tenants had a tough time getting the police to respond, Ms. Bailey summoned Officer Reggie, the cop who’d grown up in Robert Taylor, when the situation warranted.
“Where’s Taneesha live?” I yelled.
The young woman who’d summoned Catrina shouted back over her shoulder, “Twelve-oh-four!”
Approaching the building, I encountered a couple of J.T.’s gang members. They wore brown work boots and thick down jackets with the Oakland Raiders’ distinctive silver-and-black insignia. To me it seemed too cold for business, but I could see a steady stream of cars coming down the alley to buy drugs. White and black addicts jumped out of their cars and ran into the lobby to buy crack. As I walked inside, one of J.T.’s men shouted to me, “They’re up on the twelfth. Elevator’s broken.”
The stairwells were brutally cold. I had to stop a few times to catch my breath. I came across quite a few other people, all of them upset by the broken elevators. “Merry fucking Christmas,” one said to me bitterly as he passed by with a heavy laundry bag.
As I stepped into the gallery on the twelfth floor, I saw a group of men standing outside Apartment 1204. I recognized C-Note and a few other squatters among them. They were all moving about, trying to keep warm, some of them jumping up and down. The gallery floor was concrete, so even if you were wearing thick-soled shoes, the cold still shot up your legs.
The door of 1204 was partially open. Ms. Bailey stood over the sofa and, when she caught sight of me, beckoned me inside. I had met Taneesha a few times, most recently at her twenty-first birthday party, which J.T. had thrown. She was tall and very pretty, with long, straight black hair, and she was trying to make a career as a model. She currently modeled clothes at various nightclubs-so-called lingerie parties-and also went to college at night. She had a baby boy, Justin, named for her favorite high-school teacher, who had encouraged her to pursue modeling.
Everyone suspected that J.T. was the baby’s father. He had told me never to ask him about the baby.
The light in her apartment was dim, but bright enough to show that her face was beaten badly and her white T-shirt was stained with blood. Her breathing was labored, her eyes closed; you could hear the blood gurgling in her mouth. Another young woman held her hand and comforted her. “They’re coming,” she said, “the ambulance is coming. Just relax, ’Neesha.”
Ms. Bailey pulled me aside and asked if I would drive Taneesha to the hospital.
“I don’t have a car, Ms. Bailey,” I said. “Didn’t you call the ambulance?”
“Okay, then, do me a favor,” she said. “Ask C-Note to tell the boys in the lobby to take her.”
“What about the ambulance?”
“Oh, no, baby,” Ms. Bailey said softly. “They never come.”
I wasn’t sure whether to believe her, but at least fifteen minutes had passed since I’d arrived and there was no ambulance. Provident Hospital was only two miles away.
I walked out to the gallery and told C-Note, who simply leaned over and yelled down to the street twelve floors below. “Cheetah! Yo, Cheetah! Ms. Bailey says bring the car ’round! You got to take her to the hospital!”
“C-Note!” Ms. Bailey shouted out. “Don’t yell! He’s still in the building. Damn, we can’t have him leaving the building.”
I was confused. Whom didn’t she want to leave the building? Before I could ask, she rounded up the men and addressed them as if she were a general and they, however ragged, were her troops. “She got hurt pretty bad. She’ll make it, but she don’t look so good. I need you-all to find him. He goes by ‘Bee-Bee.’ He may be in 407, inside that vacant apartment, or at his cousin’s. I want to see him before you do anything to him.”
I figured out that the man who had beat up Taneesha was hiding in the building.
“What if he starts to run or gets crazy?” one of the men asked. “Can we get him then?”
“Yeah, I suppose, but don’t hurt him too bad before I talk to the fool. And don’t let him get away. Sudhir, could you call J.T.?”
I nodded and followed C-Note and the others as they made for the stairwell. I recognized most of them as squatters who helped C-Note fix cars in the warmer months.
As soon as we were out of Ms. Bailey’s earshot, I told C-Note I wanted to come with him.
“Call J.T.,” he said, shaking his head. “Don’t mess around with this. Do what Ms. Bailey says, boy.”
C-Note had called me “boy” only a few times, the last one when a friend of his was caught in a knife fight and C-Note instructed me to watch from inside a car, where I couldn’t get hurt.
“I will, I will,” I insisted. “But I want to go.”
C-Note realized I wouldn’t take no for an answer. “Just stay near me,” he said. “But if shit gets crazy and I tell you to leave, you go, right? You hear me?”
Eight of us made our way down the stairwell, our breath leaving trails of hot steam in the frigid air. There were a lot of questions I wanted to ask. Who was Bee-Bee and what was his relationship with Taneesha? Did C-Note and the other men know him? But we were moving too fast, and C-Note was preoccupied, his eyes ablaze.
We stopped just above the fourth-floor stairwell, since it was thought that Bee-Bee had taken refuge in Number 407. “Charlie, you and Blue go ahead,” C-Note said. “Shorty, you and them go to the other stairwell in case he runs past. Sudhir and me will stay in the back. Charlie, I’m right behind you, so if he got a knife, just let him go. I’ll get him.”
It struck me that I might not be as far out of the way as I’d planned.
All the men hurried to their positions. I could see the door to Number 407 from where I stood in the stairwell with C-Note. Charlie and Blue approached it. Like C-Note, they wore secondhand clothes and ill-fitting shoes. Charlie had a crowbar in his hand. Blue’s fist was clenched, but I couldn’t tell what he was holding.
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 we’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 little 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.
Catrina was leaving as I entered. She said nothing, just shook her head as if in disapproval. I stepped into Ms. Bailey’s office. “Ms. Bailey, I have to apologize.” I told her about my involvement with Bee-Bee.
She stared at me for a while. I fidgeted.
“That’s not really what bothers me, Sudhir,” she finally said. “What bothers me is that you are seeing things and you may not be ready for it.”
“I’m not sure I understand.”
“See, if you were in a war and you were a reporter, you could just say what’s going on. No one would be mad at you. But this ain’t a war. I try to tell you that all the time. It’s every day. Every day something happens like what happened to ’Neesha. And you’re getting yourself in the middle. People are saying, ‘Sudhir’s tough, he beat up that man almost by himself. He’ll do things for us.’ You understand why that’s a problem?”
“I’m not sure. You think they’ll hire me to beat up people?”
“They might, they might not. But they will start talking about you. Sometimes they’ll give you credit, and sometimes they’ll blame you. Understand?”
I didn’t answer.
“And when you say, ‘No, I can’t help you with that,’ they’ll say, ‘But you helped ’Neesha, so why won’t you help me?’ Then they’ll say, ‘Sudhir don’t care about us,’ or ‘Sudhir is ’Neesha’s manager.’ Then they’ll say, ‘Sudhir is working for Ms. Bailey, and he don’t do nothing unless he gets paid.’ Get it?”
“I think I get it.” I sat silently and stared into my hands. “When do you think I should see these things?”
“Well, why do you want to see what we do? I mean, why don’t you hang around the police? You should figure out why they don’t come.”
“Ms. Bailey, I wanted to ask you about that. Did you really call the police? Or the ambulance?”
“Sudhir, the hardest thing for middle-class white folk to understand is why those people don’t come when we call.”
Ms. Bailey didn’t think I was actually white, but she always tried to show me how my middle-class background got in the way of understanding life in the projects.
“They just don’t come around all the time. And so we have to find ways to deal with it. I’m not sure how much better I can explain it to you. Why don’t you watch out for the next few months? See how much they come around.”
“What about Officer Reggie?”
“Yes, he’s a friend. But can I tell you how he can be helpful? Not by coming and putting Bee-Bee in jail. Because he’ll be out in the morning. But Officer Reggie can visit Bee-Bee after we’re through with him. Maybe put the fear in him.”
“Put the fear in him? I don’t understand.”
“He could visit Bee-Bee and tell him that we won’t be so nice the next time he does that to ’Neesha. If Bee-Bee knows that the cop don’t care if we kick his ass, that may make him think twice. That is what we need Officer Reggie for.”
“Ms. Bailey, I have to tell you that I just don’t get it. I’ve been watching you for a while, and it just seems to me that you shouldn’t have to be doing everything you’re doing. If you got the help you needed, you wouldn’t have to act like this.”
“Sudhir, what’s the first thing I told you when you asked about my job?”
I smiled as I thought of something she’d told me months earlier: “As long as I’m helping people, something ain’t right about this community. When they don’t need me no more, that’s when I know they’re okay.”
But she’d been helping for three decades and didn’t see any end in sight.
One day in the middle of February, the Wilson family lost their front door. The Wilsons lived on the twelfth floor, just down the hall from Ms. Bailey. Their door simply fell off its hinges, leaving the family exposed to the brutal cold of a Chicago winter.
Even with a front door, the Robert Taylor Homes weren’t very comfortable in the winter. Because the galleries are outdoors, you can practically get blown over by the lake wind as you walk from the elevator to your apartment. Inside, the winter wind inevitably finds its way through the seams in the doorframe.
Chris Wilson worked for the city and moved in and out of Robert Taylor, living off-the-lease with his wife, Mari, and her six children. Chris and Mari were, unsurprisingly, pretty anxious when they lost their door. It wasn’t just the cold; they were worried about being robbed. It was common knowledge that drug addicts would pounce on any opportunity to steal a TV or anything else of value.
The Wilsons tried calling the CHA but got no response. They put up a makeshift door of wooden planks and plastic sheeting, but it didn’t keep out the cold. Neighbors who said they’d keep an eye on the apartment didn’t show up reliably. So after a few days, the Wilsons called Ms. Bailey.
Ms. Bailey leaped into action. She asked J.T. to station a few of his gang members in the twelfth-floor stairwells to keep out potential burglars. As a preventive measure, J.T. also shut down a nearby vacant apartment that was being used as a crack den. Then Ms. Bailey contacted two people she knew at the CHA. The first was a man who obtained a voucher so the Wilsons could stay at an inexpensive motel until their door was fixed. The second person was able to speed up the requisition process for obtaining a new door. It arrived two days after Ms. Bailey placed her first call.
The door didn’t come cheap for the Wilsons. They had to pay Ms. Bailey several hundred dollars, which covered the fees that she paid to her CHA friends, as well as an electrician’s bill, since some of the wiring in the Wilsons’ apartment went bad because of the cold. Ms. Bailey presumably pocketed the rest of the money. Mari Wilson was, on balance, unperturbed. “Last summer we didn’t have running water for a month,” she told me, “so one week without a door was nothing.”
Having watched Ms. Bailey help women like Taneesha and families like the Wilsons, I was left with deeply mixed feelings about her methodology-often ingenious and just as often morally questionable. With such scarce resources available, I understood why she believed that the ends justified the means. But collaborating with gangs, bribing officials for services, and redistributing drug money did little to help the typical family in her building. Ms. Bailey had told me that she would much rather play by the rules if only the rules worked. But in the end I concluded that what really drove Ms. Bailey was a thirst for power. She liked the fact she could get things done (and get paid for it), and she wasn’t about to give that up, even if it meant that sometimes her families might get short shrift. Many families, meanwhile, were too scared to challenge her and invite the consequences of her wrath.
I was left discouraged by the sort of power bestowed upon building presidents like Ms. Bailey. People in this community shouldn’t have to wait more than a week to get a new front door. People in this community shouldn’t have to wonder if the ambulance or police would bother responding. People in this community shouldn’t have to pay a go-between like Ms. Bailey to get the services that most Americans barely bother to think about. No one in the suburb where I grew up would tolerate such inconvenience and neglect.
But life in the projects wasn’t like my life in the suburbs. Not only was it harder, but it was utterly unpredictable, which necessitated a different set of rules for getting by. And living in a building with a powerful tenant leader, as hard as that life could be, was slightly less hard. It may have cost a little more to get what you needed, but at least you had a chance.