Four years deep into my research, it came to my attention that I might get into a lot of trouble if I kept doing what I’d been doing.
During a casual conversation with a couple of my professors, in which I apprised them of how J.T.’s gang went about planning a drive-by shooting-they often sent a young woman to surreptitiously cozy up to the rival gang and learn enough information to prepare a surprise attack-my professors duly apprised me that I needed to consult a lawyer. Apparently the research I was doing lay a bit out of bounds of the typical academic research.
Bill Wilson told me to stop visiting the projects until I got some legal advice. I tried to convince Wilson to let me at least hang out around the Boys & Girls Club, but he shot me a look indicating that his position was not negotiable.
I did see a lawyer, and I learned a few important things.
First, if I became aware of a plan to physically harm somebody, I was obliged to tell the police. Meaning I could no longer watch the gang plan a drive-by shooting, although I could speak with them about drive-bys in the abstract.
Second, there was no such thing as “researcher-client confidentiality,” akin to the privilege conferred upon lawyers, doctors, or priests. This meant that if I were ever subpoenaed to testify against the gang, I would be legally obligated to participate. If I withheld information, I could be cited for contempt. While some states offer so-called shield laws that allow journalists to protect their confidential sources, no such protection exists for academic researchers.
It wasn’t as if I had any intention of joining the gang in an actual drive-by shooting (nor would they ever invite me). But since I could get in trouble just for driving around with them while they talked about shooting somebody, I had to rethink my approach. I would especially have to be clearer with J.T. We had spoken several times about my involvement; when I was gang leader for a day, for instance, he knew my limits and I understood his. But now I would need to tell him, and perhaps a few others, about the fact that I was legally obligated to share my notes if I was ever subpoenaed.
This legal advice was ultimately helpful in that it led me to seriously take stock of my research. It was getting to be time for me to start thinking about the next stage: writing up my notes into a dissertation. I had become so involved in the daily drama of tagging along with Ms. Bailey and J.T. that I’d nearly abandoned my study of the broader underground economy my professors wanted to be the backbone of my research.
So I returned to Robert Taylor armed with two objectives: let people know about my legal issues and glean more details of the tenants’ illegal economic activities.
I figured that most people would balk at revealing the economics of hustling, but when I presented the idea to J.T., Ms. Bailey, and several others, nearly everyone agreed to cooperate. Most of the hustlers liked being taken seriously as businesspeople-and, it should be said, they were eager to know if they earned more than their competitors. I emphasized that I wouldn’t be able to share the details of anyone else’s business, but most people just shrugged off my caveat as a technicality that could be gotten around.
So with the blessing of J.T. and Ms. Bailey, I began devoting my time to interviewing the local hustlers: candy sellers, pimps and prostitutes, tailors, psychics, squeegee men.
I also told J.T. and Ms. Bailey about my second problem, my legal obligation to share notes with the police.
“You mean you didn’t know this all along?” Ms. Bailey said. “Even I knew that you have to tell police what you’re doing-unless you give them information on the sly.”
“Oh, no!” I protested. “I’m not going to be an informant.”
“Sweetheart, we’re all informants around here. Nothing to be ashamed of. Just make sure that you get what you need, I always say. And don’t let them beat you up.”
“I’m not sharing my data with them-that’s what I mean.”
“You mean you’ll go to prison?”
“Well, not exactly. I just mean I won’t share my data with them.”
“Do you know what being in contempt means?”
When I didn’t reply, Ms. Bailey shook her head in disgust. I had seen this look before: she was wondering how I had qualified for higher education given my lack of street smarts.
“Any nigger around here can tell you that you got two choices,” she said. “Tell them what they want or sit in Cook County Jail.”
I was silent, trying to think of a third option.
“I’ll ask you again,” she said. “Will you give up your information, or will you agree to go to jail?”
“You need to know that? That’s important to you?”
“Sudhir, let me explain something to you. You think we were born yesterday around here. Haven’t we had this conversation a hundred times? You think we don’t know what you do? You think we don’t know that you keep all your notebooks in Ms. Mae’s apartment?”
I shuddered. Ms. Mae had made me feel so comfortable in her apartment that I’d never even entertained the possibility that someone like Ms. Bailey would think about-and perhaps even page through-my notebooks.
“So why let me hang out?” I asked.
“Why do you want to hang out?”
“I suppose I’m learning. That’s what I do, study the poor.”
“Okay, well, you want to act like a saint, then you go ahead,” Ms. Bailey said, laughing. “Of course you’re learning! But you are also hustling. And we’re all hustlers. So when we see another one of us, we gravitate toward them. Because we need other hustlers to survive.”
“You mean that people think I can do something for them if they talk to me?”
“They know you can do something for them!” she yelped, leaning across the table and practically spitting out her words. “And they know you will, because you need to get your information. You’re a hustler, I can see it. You’ll do anything to get what you want. Just don’t be ashamed of it.”
I tried to turn the conversation back to the narrow legal issue, but Ms. Bailey kept on lecturing me.
“I’ll be honest with you,” she said, sitting back in her chair. “If you do tell the police, everyone here will find you and beat the shit out of you. So that’s why we know you won’t tell nobody.” She smiled as if she’d won the battle.
So who should I be worried about? I wondered. The police or Ms. Bailey and the tenants?
When I told J.T. about my legal concerns, he looked at me with some surprise. “I could’ve told you all that!” he said. “Listen, I’m never going to tell you anything that’s going to land me in jail-or get me killed. So it don’t bother me what you write down, because I can take care of myself. But that’s really not what you should be worried about.”
I waited.
“What you should be asking yourself is this: ‘Am I going to be on the side of black folks or the cops?’ Once you decide, you’ll do whatever it takes. You understand?”
I didn’t.
“Let me try again. Either you’re with us-you feel like you’re in this with us and you respect that-or you’re just here to look around. So far these niggers can tell that you’ve been with us. You come back every day. Just don’t change, and nothing will go wrong, at least not around here.”
J.T.’s advice seemed vague and a bit too philosophical. Ms. Bailey’s warning-that I would get beat up if I betrayed confidences- made more sense. But maybe J.T. was saying the same thing, in his own way.
I decided to focus my study of the underground economy on the three high-rise buildings that formed the core of J.T.’s territory. I already knew quite a bit-that squatters fixed cars in the alleys, people sold meals out of their homes, and prostitutes took clients to vacant apartments-but I had never asked people how much money they made, what kind of expenses they incurred, and so on.
J.T. was far more enthusiastic about my project than I’d imagined he would be, although I couldn’t figure out why.
“I have a great idea,” he told me one day. “I think you should talk to all the pimps. Then you can go to all the whores. Then I’ll let you talk to all the people stealing cars. Oh, yeah! And you also have folks selling stolen stuff. I mean, there’s a whole bunch of people you can talk to about selling shoes or shirts! And I’ll make sure they cooperate with you. Don’t worry, they won’t say no.”
“Well, we don’t want to force anyone to talk to me,” I said, even though I was excited about meeting all these people. “I can’t make anyone talk to me.”
“I know,” J.T. said, breaking into a smile. “But I can.”
I laughed. “No, you can’t do that. That’s what I’m saying. That wouldn’t be good for my research.”
“Fine, fine,” he said. “I’ll do it, but I won’t tell you.”
J.T. arranged for me to start interviewing the pimps. He explained that he taxed all the pimps working in or around his buildings: some paid a flat fee, others paid a percentage of their take, and all paid in kind by providing women to J.T.’s members at no cost. The pimps had to pay extra, of course, if they used a vacant apartment as a brothel; they even paid a fee to use the stairwells or a parking lot.
As I began interviewing the pimps, I also befriended some of the freelance prostitutes like Clarisse who lived and worked in the building. “Oh, my ladies will love the attention,” Clarisse said when I asked for help in talking to these women. Within two weeks I had interviewed more than twenty of them.
Between these conversations and my interviews with the pimps, some distinctions began to emerge. The prostitutes who were managed by pimps (these women were known as “affiliates”) had some clear advantages over the “independents” who worked for themselves.The typical affiliate was beaten up far less frequently-about once a year, as against roughly four times a year for the independents. The affiliates also earned about twenty dollars per week more than the independents, even though their pimps took a 33 percent cut. (Twenty dollars wasn’t a small sum, considering that the average Robert Taylor prostitute earned only about one hundred dollars per week.) And I never heard of an affiliate being killed in the line of work, whereas in one recent two-year stretch three independents were killed.
But the two types of prostitutes had much in common. Both groups had high rates of heroin and crack use, and they were bound to the projects, where the demand for sex came mostly from low-income customers. At the truck stops on the other side of the Dan Ryan Expressway-barely a mile away from Robert Taylor but a different ecosystem entirely-a different set of pimps catered to a clientele of white truckers who paid more than the typical black customer in a housing project. Around Robert Taylor a prostitute usually earned ten to twenty dollars for oral sex, sometimes as little as twenty-five dollars for intercourse, and at least fifty dollars for anal sex. But if she was in need of drugs, she would drop her price significantly or accept a few bags of drugs in lieu of any cash.
Once my prostitute research was under way, I asked Ms. Bailey if she would help me meet female hustlers who sold something other than sex. I had casual knowledge of any number of off-the-books businesses: women who sold food out of their apartments or catered parties; women who made clothing, offered marital counseling or baby-sitting; women who read horoscopes, styled hair, prepared taxes, drove gypsy cabs, and sold anything from candy to used appliances to stolen goods. But since most of these activities were conducted out of public view, I needed Ms. Bailey to open some doors.
She was cautious. For the first week, she selectively introduced me to a few women but refused to let me meet others. I’d suggest a name, and she’d mull it over. “Well,” she’d say, “let me think about whether I want you to meet with her.” Or, just as often, “No, she’s not good. But I got someone else for you.” Once, after Ms. Bailey introduced me to a psychic, I asked if many other psychics worked in the building. “Maybe, maybe,” she said, then changed the subject and left the room.
I eventually figured out why she was reluctant to let me explore the underground economy. As it turned out, tenant leaders like Ms. Bailey always got their cut from such activities. If you sold food out of your kitchen or took in other people’s children to baby-sit, you’d better give Ms. Bailey a few dollars, or you might find a CHA manager knocking on your door. If you occasionally cut hair in your apartment, it was probably a good idea to give Ms. Bailey a free styling once in a while. In these parts Ms. Bailey was like the local IRS-and probably a whole lot more successful at collecting her due.
So the people she let me talk to were the ones she probably trusted most not to speak out of line. But I didn’t have much choice: Without Ms. Bailey’s say-so, no one was going to speak with me about any illegal activities.
Truth be told, nearly everyone Ms. Bailey introduced me to had a fascinating story to tell. One of the most fascinating women I met was Cordella Levy, a close friend of Ms. Bailey. She was sixty-three years old and had lived in public housing her entire life, the past thirty years in Robert Taylor. (She had a Jewish surname, she said, because her grandmother had married a Jewish man; someone else in her family, however, told me that they were descended from black Hebrew Israelites.) Cordella had raised seven children, all but one of whom had moved out of Robert Taylor. Although she used a walkingcrutch to get around, Cordella had the fight of a bulldog inside her.
She now ran a small candy store inside her apartment. All day long she sat on a stool by the door and waited for children to stop by. Her living room was barren except for the candy: boxes and boxes of lollipops, gum, and candy bars stacked invitingly on a few tables. If you peeked around the corner, you could see into the back bedroom, where Cordella had a TV, couches, and so on. But she liked to keep her candy room sparse, she told me, because if customers saw her furniture, they might decide to come back and rob her.
“You know,” she told me, “I didn’t always sell candy.”
“You mean you didn’t go to school for this?” I joked.
“Sweetheart, I never made it past the fourth grade. Black folks weren’t really allowed to go to school in the South. What I meant was that I used to be somebody different. Ms. Bailey didn’t tell you?” I shook my head. “She told me you wanted to know how I used to hustle.”
“I’d love to hear,” I said. Cordella seemed itching to tell her story.
“Sweetheart, I’ve made money around here every which way you can. You know, I started out working for Ms. Bailey’s mother, Ella Bailey. Ella was a madam, used to have parties in the building. Oh, Lord! She could throw a party!”
“Ms. Bailey’s mother was a madam?” I laughed. “That explains a lot!”
“Yes, sir, and when she passed, I took over from her. Three apartments on the fourteenth floor. Cordella’s Place, they used to call it. Come in for a drink, play some cards, make a friend, have a nice time.”
“Make a friend? Is that what they used to call it?”
“Ain’t nothing wrong with friendship. And then I started making clothes, and then I sold some food, drove people around for a while to the store. My mother taught me how to sew wedding dresses, so I was doing a lot of-”
“Wait!” I said. “Slow down, please. Let’s get back to helping people make friends. I’m curious why you stopped running the parties. What happened? I ask because all the people doing that today are men: J.T. and the pimps. I haven’t heard about any women.”
“That’s because they took over. The men ruined everything for us. The first one was J.T.’s mama’s cousin, Miss Mae’s cousin. He just decided to start harassing all the women who were making money. I think it was around 1981. He would beat us up if we didn’t pay him money to work out of the building. I had to pay him a few dollars each week to manage my women and throw my parties. He nearly killed my friend because she wouldn’t give him money for doing hairstyling in her apartment. He was real awful. On heroin, used to carry around a big gun, like he was in the movies. And he was a very violent man.”
“So what happened, he took over your parties?”
“Well, all of a sudden, he told me I had to give him fifty percent of what I was making, and he’d protect me-keep the cops away. But I knew he couldn’t keep any cops away. The man was a thug and wasn’t even no good at that. I figured I had been doing it for a while, and so I just gave up and let him have the whole thing. But what I’m saying is that the women ran things around here, before the gangs and the rest of them took over. It was different, because we also helped people.”
“How?”
“See, people like me had a little power. I could get your apartment fixed or get you out of jail, because the cops were my best customers. These folks today, like J.T., they can’t do that.”
“What about Ms. Bailey?”
“Yeah, she can, but she’s just one person. Imagine if you had about fifty people like her doing their thing! Now, that was a sight. Fifty women, all powerful women with no shame. It was a different time. It was a time for women, a place for women.”
For several days after I interviewed Cordella, I kept thinking of what she said: “It was a time for women, a place for women.” Her nostalgia reminded me of how Catrina, Ms. Bailey’s assistant, spoke so reverently of women helping each other in the building.
I spent the next three months focused on meeting the matriarchs of the high-rises. There were plenty to choose from: more than 90 percent of the four thousand households in Robert Taylor were headed by a female. Whenever Ms. Bailey introduced me to an elderly dressmaker or a grandmother who offered day care to working parents, I tried to solicit stories about the past as well as details of her current enterprise.
Many of these women had protested for civil rights in the 1960s and campaigned for black political candidates in the 1970s; they took the need to fight for their community very seriously. But during the 1980s and 1990s, as their plight was worsened by gangs, drugs, and even deeper poverty, they struggled just to keep their families together. By then the housing authority had grown corrupt and un-supportive, the police were largely unresponsive, and the tribe of strong women had been severely marginalized.
While the official statistics said that 96 percent of Robert Taylor’s adult population was unemployed, many tenants did have part-time legitimate jobs-as restaurant workers, cabdrivers, cleaning ladies in downtown corporate offices, and nannies to middle-class families. But nearly all of them tried to hide any legitimate income from the CHA, lest they lose their lease or other welfare benefits.
There were also working men living in Robert Taylor, perhaps a few dozen in each building. But they stayed largely out of sight, again because of the CHA limits on how much money a tenant family could earn. Sometimes a man would leave home for a few weeks just to keep the CHA inspectors off guard. So when I or someone else they didn’t recognize came into an apartment, the men might head for the back room. They didn’t attend many tenant meetings, and for the most part they let the women handle the battle for better living conditions. The absence of men in Robert Taylor had made it that much easier for the gang members and pimps to essentially have the run of the place.
As I began compiling statistics on the illicit earnings generated by women throughout Robert Taylor, it became obvious that all their illicit earnings combined hardly constituted a lucrative economy. Selling food or candy out of your apartment might net you about twenty dollars per week. (Cordella Levy managed to do better than that, having persuaded a local grocery store to sell her candy wholesale in return for steering her customers to that store for their groceries.) Day care brought in five or ten dollars per day per child, but business wasn’t steady. A woman could earn more selling sex, but that was risky in a few ways. One of the favored moneymaking options, therefore, was to take in a boarder, which could generate a hundred dollars a month. There was never any shortage of people who needed a place to stay.
But I also discovered something more interesting, and probably more important, than the money that changed hands in these various transactions. Many households participated in a vast web of exchange in which women borrowed, bartered, and pooled their resources to survive. One woman might offer day care for a large group of women, another might have a car and contribute by driving folks to buy groceries, and other women might take turns cookingfor various families. In some cases the members of a network maintained a fixed formula of exchange: If you cook my family five dinners, I’ll take care of your kids for two days.
Often a network of women would share their apartments as well. Let’s say there were five women on one floor whose apartments had maintenance problems (which, given the condition of the buildings, wasn’t uncommon). There was little chance that the CHA would respond to all their repair requests, and the women couldn’t afford to pay five different bribes to Ms. Bailey or the CHA building manager. These women would pool their money to make sure they could pay the necessary bribes so that at least one apartment in their network had hot water and at least two had working refrigerators and stoves; perhaps one of them would also pay for pirated cable TV. Everyone would shower in one apartment, cook in another apartment, keep their food elsewhere, sit in the one air-conditioned room to watch the one TV with cable, and so on. To have your own apartment with all utilities functioning was a luxury that few people expected in Robert Taylor.
I met most of the neighborhood’s male hustlers by hanging out in the local parking lot with C-Note. He let people know that it was safe to speak with me. There were always a lot of men milling around, talking and drinking, who represented the diversity of the neighborhood hustlers: carpenters who did inexpensive home repairs, freelance preachers, truck drivers who worked off the books for local factories, car thieves, rappers and musicians, cooks and cleaners. All of them made their money under the table.
Most of them had once held legitimate jobs that they lost out of either misfortune or misbehavior. Until a few years earlier, they could have gotten a few hundred dollars a month in welfare money, but by 1990, Illinois and many other states eliminated such aid for adult men. The conservative revolution launched by President Ronald Reagan would lead eventually to a complete welfare overhaul, culminating in the 1996 directive by President Bill Clinton that made welfare a temporary program by setting time limits on just about every form of public aid-for men, women, and children.
For men like the ones in Robert Taylor, the welfare changes only exacerbated their poverty. They all learned to keep track of which restaurants and churches offered free food and which abandoned buildings were available for sleeping. Like the women, the men also had a network: One would cook while another looked for work while yet another tried to find a place for all of them to sleep. If they heard of a vacant apartment, they’d pool their resources to bribe the CHA building manager, gang leader, tenant leader, or whoever else happened to have the key. These men also passed along information to cops in exchange for “get out of jail free” promises, and they could always make a few dollars from CHA janitors-who regularly paid off hustlers to clean the buildings when they felt like taking a day off.
C-Note introduced me to Porter Harris, a bone-thin man, sixtyfive years old, who spent much of his time scouring the South Side for recyclable junk. When I met him, he was pushing a shopping cart filled with wire, cans, and metal scrap, trolling the tall grass between the high-rises and the railroad tracks. Years ago, Porter told me, he was the one who dictated where various hustlers in Robert Taylor could work, sell, and trade, much as C-Note did now. But he’d had to leave because of a battle with a gang leader.
“Booty Caldwell, real name was Carter,” he told me in a southern drawl. “That was the one who kicked me out of here for good.” Porter picked at his few remaining teeth with a blade of grass. He wore a floppy straw hat that made him look as if he’d stepped out of a faded photograph from the Old South. “There were about ten of us. I controlled Forty-seventh Street to Fifty-first. I had this whole area-you couldn’t sell your soul without letting me know about it, yessir.”
“Sounds like a good living,” I said, smiling. “You were the king of hustlers?”
“Lord, king, and chief. Call it what you want, I ran that area. And then one day it all was taken away. By Booty Caldwell. He was part of the El Rukn gang.” By the late 1960s, El Rukn had become the most powerful gang in Chicago. They were widely credited with uniting many independent gangs, making peace treaties and cooperative arrangements that resulted in a few El Rukn “supergangs.” But a federal indictment in the mid-1980s weakened El Rukn, allowing other gangs, including the Black Kings, to take over the burgeoning crack trade.
From Porter, C-Note, and others, I learned that the most profitable hustling jobs for men were in manual labor: you could earn five hundred dollars a month fixing cars in a parking lot or roughly three hundred dollars a month cleaning up at the local schools. The worst-paying jobs, meanwhile, often required the longest hours: gathering up scrap metal or aluminum (a hundred dollars a month) or selling stolen clothes or cigarettes (about seventy-five dollars a month). While just about every hustler I interviewed told me that he was hoping for a legit job and a better life, I rarely saw anyone get out of the hustling racket unless he died or went to jail.
One day, after I’d spent hours interviewing Porter and some of the other male hustlers, I was summoned to Ms. Bailey’s office. I’d been so busy that I hadn’t seen her in a while. It was probably a good idea, I thought, to have a catch-up session.
I said hello to Catrina on my way in, and she gave me a smile. She was assuming more and more duties and seemed to be acting nearly as a junior officer to Ms. Bailey. Inside, J.T. and Ms. Bailey were laughing together and greeted me heartily.
“Mr. Professor!” J.T. said. “My mother says you haven’t been by in a month! What, you don’t like us anymore? You found somebody who cooks better?”
“You better not piss off Ms. Mae,” Ms. Bailey said. “You’ll never be able to come back in the building again.”
“Sorry, all this interviewing has kept me really busy,” I said, exasperated. “I just haven’t had time to do much of anything else.”
“Well, then, sit down, baby,” Ms. Bailey said. “We won’t keep you long. We just wanted to know who you’ve been meeting. We’re curious about what you’ve learned.”
“Hey, you know what, I could actually use the chance to tell you what I’ve been finding,” I said, taking out my notebooks. “I’ve been meeting so many people, and I can’t be sure whether they’re telling me the truth about how much they earn. I suppose I want to know whether I’m really understanding what it’s like to hustle around here.”
“Sure,” J.T. said. “We were just talking about that. You used to ask us to find you people. Now you do it yourself. We feel like you don’t need us no more.” He started laughing, and so did Ms. Bailey.
“Yeah,” Ms. Bailey said. “Don’t leave us behind, Mr. Professor, when you start to be successful! Go ahead, tell me who you’ve been talking to. If you tell us who you met and what they’re doing, maybe we can check for you and see if folks are being straight.”
For the next three hours, I went through my notebooks and told them what I’d learned about dozens of hustlers, male and female. There was Bird, the guy who sold license plates, Social Security cards, and small appliances out of his van. Doritha the tax preparer.
Candy, one of the only female carpenters in the neighborhood. Prince, the man who could pirate gas and electricity for your apartment. J.T. and Ms. Bailey rarely seemed surprised, although every now and then one of them perked up when I mentioned a particularly enterprising hustler or a woman who had recently started taking in boarders.
I finally left, riding the bus home to my apartment. I was grateful for having had the opportunity to discuss my findings with two of the neighborhood’s most formidable power brokers. As I looked out the bus windows, I realized just how much I owed Ms. Bailey and J.T. If it weren’t for the two of them, and a few other people like C-Note and Autry, I wouldn’t ever have made any progress in learning how things really worked around Robert Taylor.
Ispent the next few weeks turning the information in my note-books into statistical tables and graphs that showed how much different hustlers made. I figured that J.T. would appreciate this data at least as much as my professors would, since he was always talking about the importance of data analysis within his managerial technique. So I headed over to Robert Taylor to show him my research.
In the parking lot, I ran into C-Note, who was in his usual spot with a few other squatters, fixing flat tires and washing cars.
“Hey, what’s up, guys?” I shouted out. “Long time-how you been?”
Nobody replied. They looked at me, then turned away. I walked closer and stood a few feet from them. “What’s up?” I said. “Everything all right?”
One of the men, Pootie, picked up a tool and started to loosen a tire from the rim. “Man, sometimes you just learn the hard way,” he said to no one in particular. “That’s life, isn’t it? Sometimes you realize you can’t trust nobody. They could be a cop, a snitch- who knows?”
C-Note simply shrugged. “Mm-hmm,” he said.
“Yup, you just learn you can’t trust nobody,” Pootie continued. “You tell them something, and then they turn on you. Just like that! You can’t predict it. Especially if they’re not from around here.”
Once again C-Note shrugged. “Mm-hmm,” he muttered. “You got that right.”
They kept ignoring me, so I walked over to J.T.’s building. A young woman I knew named Keisha was standing on the grass with her kids. They looked like they were waiting for a ride.
“Hey, Keisha,” I said. “How are you doing?”
“How am I doing?” she asked, shaking her head. “I was doing a lot better before I started talking to you.” She picked up her things and walked her kids a few yards away.
In the lobby some of J.T.’s gang members were hanging out. We shook hands and said hello. I went upstairs to see Ms. Bailey and J.T., but neither of them was home.
Down in the lobby again, I could feel people staring at me, but I couldn’t figure out why. I felt myself growing paranoid. Did people suddenly think I was a cop? What was up with Pootie, C-Note, and Keisha? I decided to go back home.
Ispent a few days trying to track down J.T., but nobody knew where he was. I couldn’t wait any longer, so I went back to Robert Taylor and found C-Note in the parking lot. He and two other men were working on a car.
“C-Note, please,” I begged, “what did I do? Tell me.”
C-Note stood up and wiped the oil off a wrench. He motioned for the two other men to leave us alone. One of them gave me a nasty look and muttered something that sounded equally nasty, but I couldn’t quite make it out.
“You need to learn to shut your mouth,” C-Note finally said.
“Shut my mouth? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Don’t play with me. All that shit I told you. All them niggers I introduced you to. If you told me you were going to tell J.T. they were making that money, I wouldn’t have told you nothing.”
My heart sank. I thought of my long debriefing with J.T. and Ms. Bailey. I had given them breakdowns on each hustler’s earnings: how much every one of them made, when and where they worked, what they planned for the future. I didn’t hand over my written data, but I’d done the next-best thing.
“J.T. is all over these niggers,” C-Note said. He looked disgusted and spit on the ground. I could tell he was angry but that he wasn’t comfortable expressing it to me. Until now our relationship had been based on trust; I rarely, if ever, spoke to anyone about what I learned from C-Note.
“He’s taxing every one of them now,” he said. “And he beat the shit out of Parnell and his brother because he thought they were hiding what they were doing. They weren’t, but you can’t convince J.T. of nothing. When he gets his mind to something, that’s it. And then he tells Jo-Jo and his guys that they can’t come around no more because they were hiding things from him. Jo-Jo’s daughter lives up in here. So now he can’t see her.” C-Note kept talking, getting angrier and angrier as he listed all the people that J.T. was cracking down on. “There’s no way he could’ve found out if you didn’t say nothing.”
There was an awkward silence. I thought about lying, and I began to drum up an excuse. But something came over me. During the years I’d been in this community, people were always telling me that I was different from all the journalists and other outsiders who came by, hunting up stories. They didn’t eat dinner with families or hang around at night to share a beer; they typically asked a lot of questions and then left with their story, never to return. I prided myself on this difference.
But now it was time to accept my fate. “I was sitting in Ms. Bailey’s office,” I told C-Note. “She and J.T. always help me, just like you. And I fucked up. I told them things, and I had no idea that they would use that information. Man, I had no idea that it would even be useful to them.”
“That has to be one of the stupidest things I ever heard you say.” C-Note began putting away his tools.
“Honestly, C-Note, I had no idea when I was talking to them-”
“No!” C-Note’s voice grew sharp. “You knew. Yes you did. But you were too busy thinking about your own self. That’s what happened. You got some shit for your professors, and you were getting high on that. I know you ain’t that naïve, man.”
“I’m sorry, C-Note. I don’t know what else to say. I fucked up.”
“Yeah, you fucked up. You need to think about why you’re doing your work. You always tell me you want to help us. Well, we ain’t never asked for your help, and we sure don’t need it now.”
C-Note walked away toward the other men. They stood quietly drinking beer and watching me. I headed toward the building. I wanted to see if Ms. Bailey was in her office.
Then an obvious thought hit me: If J.T. had acted on my information to tax the male street hustlers, Ms. Bailey might have started taxing the women I told her about. Worse yet, she might have had some of them evicted for hiding their income. How could I find out what had happened because of my stupidity? As I stood in the grassy expanse, staring up at the high-rise, I tried to think of someone who might possibly help me. I needed a tenant who was relatively independentof Ms. Bailey, someone who might still trust me enough to talk. I thought of Clarisse.
I hustled over to the liquor store and bought a few bottles of Boone’s Farm wine. Clarisse wasn’t going to talk for free.
I walked quickly through the building lobby and took the stairs up. I didn’t want to get trapped in the elevator with women who might be angry with me for selling them out to Ms. Bailey. Clarisse opened her door and greeted me with a loud burst of laughter.
“Oooh! Boy, you fucked up this time, you surely did.”
“So it’s all over the building? Everyone knows?”
“Sweetheart, ain’t no secrets in this place. What did Clarisse tell you when we first met? Shut the fuck up. Don’t tell them nothing about who you are and what you do. Clarisse should have been there with you. You were spying for Ms. Bailey?”
“Spying! No way. I wasn’t spying, I was just doing my research, asking questions and-”
“Sweetheart, it don’t matter what you call it. Ms. Bailey got pissed off and went running up in people’s houses, claiming they owed her money. I mean, you probably doubled her income, just like that. And you’re really not getting any kickbacks? Just a little something from her?”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “How do they know I was the one who gave Ms. Bailey the information?”
“Because, you fool, she told everyone! Even if she didn’t tell them, she was running around saying, ‘You made twenty-five dollars last month,’ ‘You made fifty dollars last week,’ ‘You made ten dollars this week, and you owe me ten percent plus a penalty for not telling me.’ I mean, the only folks we told all this information to was you!”
“But did she charge you, too?”
“No, no! She don’t charge the hos, remember? J.T. already charges us.”
I sat and listened with my head down as Clarisse listed all the women who’d been confronted by Ms. Bailey. I had a sinking feeling that I’d have a hard time coming back to this building to continue my research. I also had to face the small matter of managing to leave here today still in one piece.
Clarisse sensed my anxiety. As she talked-laughing heartily all the while, at my expense-she started massaging my shoulder. “Don’t worry, little baby! You probably never had an ass whuppin’, have you? Well, sometimes that helps clear the air. Just don’t take the stairs when you leave, ’cause if you get caught there, they may never find your body.”
I must have looked truly frightened, for Clarisse stopped laughing and took a sincere tone.
“Folks forgive around here,” she said gently. “We’re all religious people, sweetheart. We have to put up with a lot of shit from our own families, so nothing you did to us will make things much worse.”
At that moment, sitting with Clarisse, I didn’t think that even the Good Lord himself could, or would, help me. It was embarrassing to think that I had been so wrapped up in my desire to obtain good data that I couldn’t anticipate the consequences of my actions. After several years in the projects, I had become attuned to each and every opportunity to get information from the tenants. This obsession was primarily fueled by a desire to make my dissertation stand out and increase my stature in the eyes of my advisers. After I’d talked with C-Note and Clarisse, it was clear to me that other people were paying a price for my success.
I began to feel deeply ambivalent about my own reasons for being in the projects. Would I really advance society with my research, as Bill Wilson had promised I could do if I worked hard?
Could I change our stereotypes of the poor by getting so deep inside the lives of the families? I suddenly felt deluged by these kinds of questions.
Looking back, I was probably being a little melodramatic. I had been so naïve up to this point about how others perceived my presence that any sort of shake-up at all was bound to send me reeling.
I couldn’t think of a way to rectify the situation other than to stop coming to Robert Taylor entirely. But I was close to finishing my fieldwork, and I didn’t want to quit prematurely. In the coming weeks, I spoke to Clarisse and Autry a few times for advice. Both suggested that the tenants I had angered would eventually stop being so angry, but they couldn’t promise much more than that. When I asked Autry whether I’d be able to get back to collecting data, he just shrugged and walked off.
I eventually came back to the building to face the tenants. No one declined to speak with me outright, but I didn’t exactly receive a hero’s welcome either. Everyone knew I had J.T.’s support, so it was unlikely that anyone would confront me in a hostile manner. When I went to visit C-Note in the parking lot, he simply nodded at me and then went about his work, talking with customers and singing along with the radio. It felt like people in the building looked at me strangely when I passed by, but I wondered if I was just being paranoid. Perhaps the best indicator of my change in status was that I wasn’t doing much of anything casual-hearing jokes, sharing a beer, loaning someone a dollar.
One sultry summer day not long after my fiasco with the hustlers, I attended the funeral of Catrina, Ms. Bailey’s dutiful assistant. On the printed announcement, her full name was rendered as Catrina Eugenia Washington. But I knew this was not her real name.
Catrina had once told me that her father had sexually abused her when she was a teenager, so she ran away from home. She wound up living in Robert Taylor with a distant relative. She changed her name so her father wouldn’t find her and enrolled in a GED program at DuSable High School. She took a few part-time jobs to help pay for rent and groceries. She was also saving money to go to community college; she was trying to start over. I never did find out her real name.
As a kid she had wanted to study math. But her father, she told me, said that higher education was inappropriate for a young black woman. He advised her instead just to get married and have children.
Catrina had a love of knowledge and would participate in a discussion about nearly anything. I enjoyed talking with her about science, African-American history, and Chicago politics. She always wore a studious look, intense and focused. Working as Ms. Bailey’s assistant, she received just a few dollars a week. But, far more significant, she was receiving an apprenticeship in Chicago politics. “I will do something important one day,” she liked to tell me, in her most serious voice. “Like Ms. Bailey, I will make a difference for black people. Especially black women.”
By this time Catrina had been living in Robert Taylor for a few years. But over the July Fourth holiday, she decided to visit her siblings in Chicago’s south suburbs, an area increasingly populated with African-American families who’d made it out of the ghetto. From what I was told, her father heard that she was visiting and tracked her down. A skirmish followed. Catrina got caught between her brother, who was protecting her, and her angry father. A gun went off, and the bullet hit Catrina, killing her instantly. No one around Robert Taylor knew if either the brother or the father had been arrested.
The funeral was held in the back room of a large African Methodist Episcopal church on the grounds of Robert Taylor. The hot air was stifling, the sun streaming in shafts through dusty windows. There were perhaps fifty people in attendance, mostly women from Ms. Bailey’s building. A few members of Catrina’s family were also there, but they came surreptitiously because they didn’t want her father to hear about the funeral. Ms. Bailey stationed herself at the room’s entrance, welcoming the mourners. She looked as if she were presiding over a tenant meeting: upright, authoritarian, refusing to cry while consoling those who were. She had the air of someone who did this regularly, who mourned for someone every week.
Sitting in a corner up front was T-Bone, his head down, still as stone. He and Catrina had been seeing each other for a few months. Although T-Bone had a steady girlfriend-it wasn’t uncommon for gang members, or practically any other young man in the projects, to have multiple girlfriends-he and Catrina had struck up a friendship and, over time, become lovers. I sometimes came upon the two of them studying together at a local diner. T-Bone was about to leave his girlfriend for Catrina when she was killed.
Any loss of life is mourned in the projects, but there are degrees. Young men and women who choose a life of drugs and street gangs may, understandably, not be long for this world. When one of them dies, he or she is certainly mourned, but without any great sense of shock; there is a general feeling that death was always a good possibility. But for someone like Catrina, who had refused to follow such a path, death came with a deep sense of shock and disbelief. She was one of thousands of young people who had escaped the attention of social workers, the police, and just about everyone else. Adults in the projects pile up their hopes on people like Catrina, young men and women who take a sincere interest in education, work, and self-betterment. And I guess I did, too. Her death left me with a sting that would never fade.
The essays that Catrina used to write covered the difficulties of family life in the projects, the need for women to be independent, the stereotypes about poor people. Writing seemed to provide Catrina a sense of relief, as though she were finally acknowledging the hurdles of her own past; it also helped her develop a strong, assertive voice, not unlike that of her hero, Ms. Bailey.
In tribute to Catrina, I thought I’d try to broaden this idea by starting a writing workshop for young women in the building who were interested in going back to school. I brought up the possibility with Ms. Bailey. “Good idea,” she said, “but take it slow, especially when you’re dealing with these young women.”
I was nervous about teaching the workshop, but I was also eager. My relationship with tenants up to this point had largely been a one-way street; after all this time in Robert Taylor, I felt as though I should give something back. On a few occasions, I had managed to solicit donations from my professors, fifty or a hundred dollars, for some kind of program in the neighborhood. This money might do a great deal of good, but it seemed to me a fairly impersonal way of helping. I was hoping to do something more direct.
In the past I hadn’t been drawn to standard charitable activities like coaching basketball or volunteering at a school, because I wanted to differentiate myself from the people who helped families and ran programs in the community. I had heard many tenants criticize the patronizing attitudes of such volunteers. The writing workshop, however, seemed like a good fit. Having hung out in the community for several years, I believed I could avoid the kind of fate- exclusion, cold stares, condescending responses-that often greeted the people who rode into town to do good.
I was also still reeling from the fact that I had alienated so many people around J.T.’s territory. I was feeling guilty, and I needed to get people back on my side again.
Of all the people in the projects, I had the least experience spending time with young women, particularly single mothers. I was a bit nervous, particularly because Ms. Bailey, Ms. Mae, and other older women warned me not to get too close to the young women. They felt that the women would begin looking to me as a source of support.
In the beginning the group convened wherever we could-in someone’s apartment, at a diner, outside under a tree. At first there were five women in the group, and then we grew to roughly a dozen as more people heard about it. The meetings were pretty casual, and attendance could be spotty, since the women had family and work obligations.
From the outset it was an emotional experience. The women wrote and spoke openly about their struggles. Each of them had at least a couple of children, which generally meant at least one “baby daddy” who wasn’t in the picture. Each of them had a man in her life who’d been either jailed or killed. They spoke of in-laws who demanded that the women give up their children to the father’s family, some of whom were willing to use physical force to claim the children.
Their material hardships were overwhelming. Most of them earned no more than ten thousand dollars a year, a combination of welfare payments and food stamps. Some worked part-time, and others took in boarders who paid cash or, nearly as valuable, provided day care so the young women could work, run errands, or just have a little time for themselves.
The most forceful stories were the tales of abuse. Every single woman had been beaten up by a boyfriend (who was usually drunk at the time), some almost fatally. Every one of them had lived in fear for days or weeks, waiting for the same man to return.
One cold autumn evening, we congregated at a local diner. We found a large table in the back, where it was quiet. The owner was by now accustomed to our presence, and he didn’t mind that we stayed for hours. If business was particularly good, he’d feed us all night long and then waive the tab. He and I had struck up a friendship-I often came to the diner to write up my field notes- and he liked the fact that I was trying to help tenants.
The theme of this week’s essay was “How I Survive.” Tanya was the first to read from her journal. She was twenty years old, a high-school dropout with two children. She’d stayed with her mother after the first child was born but eventually got her own apartment in the same building, then had a second baby. She didn’t know the whereabouts of the first father; the second had died in a gang shooting. In her essay she bragged about how she earned twice her welfare income by taking in boarders.
“But sometimes it doesn’t go so well, Sudhir,” said one of the other women, Sarina, who liked to be the voice of reason. She stared down Tanya as she spoke. Sarina had three children, the fathers of whom were, respectively, in jail, dead, and unwilling to pay child support. So she, too, had taken in boarders. “I remember when my brother came into the house, he started dealing dope and they caught him. Almost took my lease away.”
“Yeah, but that’s just because you didn’t pay the building manager enough money,” Tanya said. “Or I think that it was because you didn’t sleep with him!”
“Well, I’m not doing either one of those things,” Sarina said in a moralistic tone, shaking her head.
“You got some nerve,” interrupted Keisha. “Sarina, you put your ass out there for any man who comes looking.” At twenty-six, Keisha was one of the oldest women in the group. Even though she had grown angry with me for sharing information about hustlers with Ms. Bailey, she hadn’t held the grudge for long. She had two daughters and was the best writer in the group, a high-school graduate now planning to apply to Roosevelt College. “Hell, there ain’t no difference between some ho selling her shit and you taking some man in your house for money.”
“Hey, that’s survival!” Tanya said. “I mean, that’s what we’re here to talk about, right?”
“Okay,” I jumped in, trying to establish some order. “What’s the best way for you to take care of whatever you need to? Give me the top ten ways you survive.”
Sarina began. “Always make sure you know someone at the CHA you can turn to when you can’t make rent. It helps, because you could get evicted.”
“Yeah, and if you have to sleep with a nigger downtown, then you got to do it,” said Keisha. “Because if you don’t, they will put your kids on the street.”
Sarina went on, ignoring Keisha. “You got to make sure you can get clothes and food and diapers for your kids,” she said. “Even if you don’t have money. So you need to have good relations with stores.”
“Make sure Ms. Bailey’s always getting some dick!” Keisha shouted, laughing hard.
“You know, one time I had to let her sleep with my man so I wouldn’t get kicked out of the building,” Chantelle said.
“That’s awful,” I said.
“Yeah,” Chantelle said. “And he almost left me, too, when he found out that Ms. Bailey could get him a job and would let him stay up there and eat all her food.” Chantelle was twenty-one. Her son had learning disabilities, so she was struggling to find a school that could help him. She worked part-time at a fast-food restaurant and depended on her mother and grandmother for day care and cash.
Chantelle’s hardships weren’t uncommon in the projects. Unfortunately, neither was her need to appease Ms. Bailey. The thought that a tenant had to let the building president sleep with her partner was alarming to me. But among these women such indignities weren’t rare. To keep your own household intact, they said, you had to keep Ms. Bailey happy and well paid. As I heard more stories similar to Chantelle’s, I found myself growing angry at Ms. Bailey and the other LAC officials. I asked Chantelle and the other women why they didn’t challenge Ms. Bailey. Their answer made perfect sense: When it became obvious that the housing authority supported a management system based on extortion and corruption, the women decided their best option was to shrug their shoulders and accept their fate.
I found it unconscionable that such a regime existed, but I wasn’t going to confront Ms. Bailey either. She was too powerful. And so while the women’s anger turned into despair, my disgust began to morph into bitterness.
The women’s list of survival techniques went well beyond ten. Keep cigarettes in your apartment so you can pay off a squatter to fix things when they break. Let your child pee in the stairwell to keep prostitutes from congregating there at night. Let the gangs pay you to store drugs and cash in your apartment. (The risk of apprehension, the women concurred, was slim.)
Then there were all the resources to be procured in exchange for sex: groceries from the bodega owner, rent forgiveness from the CHA, assistance from a welfare bureaucrat, preferential treatment from a police officer for a jailed relative. The women’s explanation for using sex as currency was consistent and pragmatic: If your child was in danger of going hungry, then you did whatever it took to fix the problem. The women looked pained when they discussed using their bodies to obtain these necessities; it was clear that this wasn’t their first-or even their hundredth-preference.
“Always know somebody at the hospital,” Tanya blurted out. “Always have somebody you can call, because that ambulance never comes. And when you get there, you need to pay somebody, or else you’ll be waiting in line forever!”
“Yes, that’s true, and the people at the hospital can give you free baby food,” Sarina said. “Usually you need to meet them in the back alley. And I’d say you should keep a gun or a knife hidden, in case your man starts beating you. Because sometimes you have to do something to get him to stop.”
“You’ve had to use a knife before?” I asked. No one had spoken or written about this yet. “How often?”
“Many times!” Sarina looked at me as if I’d grown up on Mars. “When these men start drinking, you can’t talk to them. You just need to protect yourself-and don’t forget, they’ll beat up the kids, too.”
Keisha started to cry. She dropped her head into her lap and covered up so no one could see. Sarina leaned over and hugged her.
“The easiest time is when they’re asleep,” Tanya said. “They’re lying there, mostly because they’ve passed out drunk. That’s when it runs through your mind. You start thinking, ‘I could end it right here. I could kill the motherfucker, right now. Then he can’t beat me no more.’ I think about it a lot.”
Keisha wiped her eyes. “I stabbed that nigger because I couldn’t take it no more. Wasn’t anybody helping me. Ms. Bailey said she couldn’t do nothing, the police said they couldn’t do nothing. And this man was coming around beating me and beating my baby for no reason. I couldn’t think of any other way, couldn’t think of nothing else to do…”
She began to sob again. Sarina escorted her to the bathroom.
“She sent her man to the hospital,” Tanya quietly explained. “Almost killed him. One night he was asleep on the couch-he had already sent her to the hospital a few times, broke her ribs, she got stitches and bruises all over her body. She grabbed that knife and kept putting it in his stomach. He got up and ran out the apartment. I think one of J.T.’s boys took him to the hospital. He’s a BK.”
Because the boyfriend was a senior gang member, Tanya said, J.T. refused to pressure him to stop beating Keisha. She still lived in fear that the man would return.
One day Ms. Bailey called and asked that I come to a building-wide meeting with her tenants. She hadn’t invited me to such a meeting in more than a year, so I figured something important was afoot.
I hadn’t been keeping up with Ms. Bailey’s tenant meetings in part because I’d already amassed sufficient information on these gatherings and also because, in all honesty, I’d grown uncomfortable watching the horse-trading schemes that she and other tenant leaders used to manage the community.
My own life was also starting to evolve. I had moved in with my girlfriend, Katchen, and we were thinking about getting married. Visiting our relatives-mine in California and hers in Montana- took time away from my fieldwork, including much of our summers and vacations. My parents were thrilled, and they pushed me to think seriously about starting a family along with a career. Katchen was applying to law school; neither of us was ready for children just yet.
And then there was the matter of my dissertation, which I still had to write. I began to meet more regularly with Bill Wilson and other advisers to see whether I could plausibly move toward wrapping up my graduate study.
Ms. Bailey’s office was packed for the meeting when I arrived, with a few dozen people in attendance, all talking excitedly. As usual, most of them were older women, but there were also several men standing in the back. I recognized a couple of them as the partners of women in the building; it was unusual to see these men at a public meeting. Ms. Bailey waved me up front, pointing me to the chair next to hers.
“Okay,” she said, “Sudhir has agreed to come here today so we can clear this up.”
I was taken aback. Clear what up? Everyone was suddenly staring at me, and they didn’t look happy.
“Why are you sleeping with my daughter?” shouted a woman I didn’t recognize. “Tell me, goddamn it! Why are you fucking my baby?”
“Answer the woman!” someone else hollered. I couldn’t tell who was talking, but it didn’t matter: I was in a state of shock.
One man, addressing me as “Arab,” told me I should get out of the neighborhood for good and especially leave alone their young women. Other people joined in:
“Nigger, get out of here!”
“Arab, go home!”
“Get the fuck out, Julio!”
Ms. Bailey tried to restore order. Amid the shouting she yelled out that I would explain myself.
I was still confused. “Let Sudhir tell you why he’s meeting them!”
Ms. Bailey said, and then I understood: It was the writing workshop. People had seen me picking up the young women and driving away with them. Apparently they thought I was sleeping with them, or maybe pimping them out.
As I tried to explain the writing workshop, I kept getting drowned out. I began to feel scared. I had seen how a mob of tenants nearly tore apart the Middle Eastern shopkeeper who’d slept with Boo-Boo’s daughter.
Ms. Bailey finally made herself heard above the riot. “He’s trying to tell you that he’s just helping them with homework!”
That quieted everyone down a little bit. But still, I was stung: Why weren’t any of the women from the workshop in attendance? Why hadn’t anyone come to defend me, to tell the truth?
After a few more minutes, things having calmed down a bit, Ms. Bailey told me to leave. There was other business to take care of, she said, laughing-at me-and clearly enjoying herself at my expense.
Leaving the building that night, I wondered how much more time I could afford to spend in J.T.’s territory. It was hard to think of any tenants who weren’t angry with me.