An American Summer: Love and Death in Chicago

by Alex Kotlowitz

And for the longest time I thought Pharoah was without heart, that he’d become hardened, if not numb, to the violence around him. This of course is the mistake we all make, thinking that somehow one can get accustomed to it.

The numbers are staggering. In Chicago, in the twenty years between 1990 and 2010, 14,033 people were killed, another roughly 60,000 wounded by gunfire.

And here’s the thing: Chicago is by no means the most dangerous city, not even close. Its homicide rate doesn’t even put it in the top ten. But the city has become a symbol for the personal and collective wreckage—a kind of protracted cry of distress—in the streets of the nation’s most impoverished and segregated neighborhoods. Citizens killing citizens, children killing children, police killing young black men. A carnage so long-lasting, so stubborn, so persistent, that it’s made it virtually impossible to have a reasonable conversation about poverty in the country and has certainly clouded any conversation about race. One friend who worked for a local antiviolence organization—the fact that such groups even exist speaks volumes to the profound depth of the problem—calls it “a madness.”

Consider that in Chicago the police have tried community policing, SWAT teams, data to predict shooters, full saturation of troubled neighborhoods, efforts to win over gang members. And the shootings continue.

Indeed, this is a book about death—but you can’t talk about death without celebrating life.

the national grieving and questioning don’t extend to corners of this country where such carnage has become almost routine. It’s in these, the most ravaged of our communities, among the most desperate and forlorn, that we can come to understand the makings of who we are as a nation, a country marked by the paradox of holding such generosity beside such neglect.

You hit zero to rage within thirty seconds, and you act out.” In other words, these are young men and women who are burdened by fractured families, by lack of money, by a closing window of opportunity, by a sense that they don’t belong, by a feeling of low self-worth. And so when they feel disrespected or violated, they explode, often out of proportion to the moment, because so much other hurt has built up and then the dam bursts. They become flooded with anger.

if you’re black or Hispanic in our cities, it’s virtually impossible not to have been touched by the smell and sight of sudden, violent death.

You have to fight—and fight hard—not to let the ugliness and inexplicability of the violence come to define you. With just one act of violence the ground shifts beneath you, your knees buckle, and sometimes all you can do is try as best you can to maintain your balance.

In Chicago, the wealthy and the well-heeled die headline deaths and the poor and the rambling die in silence.

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross wrote that grief takes place in five stages: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Come to Chicago. I dare you to find those stages. I dare you to chart grief. Someone dies a sudden, violent death and the natural order of things breaks apart.

“The only thing you can do is love, because it is the only thing that leaves light inside you, instead of the total, obliterating darkness.”

“When you start changing for the better and your perspective changes,” he told me, “you start wrestling with good and evil. Ain’t no murder got no credibility to it. Any murder is madness.”

“You can’t make no sense of it,” Napoleon said. “It’s like trying to understand God. When we’re dead and gone there’s gonna be violence. It is what it is. It’s the order of the day.”

A former big-time drug dealer, James Highsmith, once shook his head in wonderment at one clique’s name. “What the hell you gonna call yourself Brain Dead for?” he asked.

I ask them what they think can be done. “That I wish I knew,” Jimmie said. “Only thing I can do is, a lot of it start at home. You got to get into the families. If people at home aren’t trying to change them, nothing will change them.”

“They want that respect,” Napoleon explained. I hear this a lot, and while it may seem like an oversimplification, it makes sense. You grow up in a community with abandoned homes, a jobless rate of over 25 percent, underfunded schools, and you stand outside your home, look at the city’s gleaming downtown skyline, at its prosperity, and you know your place in the world. And so you look for ways to feel like you’re someone, ways to feel like people look up to you, ways to feel like you have some standing in your city.

Hey, Jimmie, I loved carrying your guns. I loved that power. I couldn’t get it anywhere else.”

9:22 p.m. So this shooting out on Artesian tonight—mutual combatants. Working on updating the story now. #chicago

The violence, he tells me, also pushes people together. He gets a tattoo on his left forearm, a quote from Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses: “The closest bonds we will ever know are bonds of grief. The deepest community one of sorrow.”

I love this city but it can be tiring.

In Chicago, the vast majority of murders and shootings go unsolved. Murder someone, and chances are only one in four that you’ll get caught. Shoot someone and injure them, it’s only a one in ten possibility that you’ll get charged. That’s not a misprint.

I think what so bothered him is that it’s only human nature to have hope. Without it, you have nothing. It’s about as close to death as one can get without actually dying.

“A part of me has been taken away. Stolen,” George told the reporter. “For what? Because you thought he was someone else.” The you referred to the shooter, but in some ways, though George didn’t say this—he didn’t have to—you could be referencing all of us. My son, he was trying to say, wasn’t who you think he was.

When I was writing this story, I went back through the notes which I had accumulated over the course of four years. I feel sheepish admitting this, but I wasn’t fully paying attention to all that Thomas was telling me. I started to make a list. Shakaki’s cousin, Kywante Shumake, shot two times on Thomas’s block. Thomas’s friend Tim, who held two jobs, invited Thomas to come by to celebrate his birthday; Thomas went to the corner liquor store to buy Tim a bottle of Hennessy, and when he returned found Tim lying beside his house in a pool of blood, a fatal bullet wound in the back of his head. While Thomas was in jail on the contempt charge, Antonio Clark, a friend and fellow Harper High graduate, died, an apparent victim of the accidental discharge of a pistol. His friend who’s a rap artist and goes by the moniker Skully TV was shot six times, including in both eyes; he lost his sight. Thomas’s friend’s older brother, Vido: killed. Thomas’s friend Nukey: shot and killed by a fourteen-year-old boy. Thomas had indeed mentioned each of these incidents to me, but the casualness of his remarks belied what he was telling me. The shootings, the killings, accrue like so many teardrops. Nobody’s keeping count. Not even Thomas. He just tells me he’s tired, that he’s stopped going to funerals.

“You can’t cry about it,” he tells Anita and me one day over lunch at Ms. Biscuit, a soul-food restaurant a few miles east of Thomas’s home. “I’ve seen people go crazy because of all the violence they seen. People lose their mind. They don’t care ’bout nothing. But I’m stronger than that. I ain’t gonna let it break me down. I don’t let that stuff get to me. I think about it, but I don’t let it get to me.” He pauses. “I be thinking about a lot of crazy stuff, about revenge.” He’s talking more than usual, and neither Anita or I want to interrupt. And then, as an afterthought, almost to convince himself, he assures us, “It’s not gonna happen overnight, but it’s gonna get better.”

“The violence, it’s like a virus,” Rush said. “It’s part of this rage and anger, and the need to express power. It’s about absolutely nothing except for seeking a sense of validation.”

Work is the thread that holds the social fabric together, and without jobs that fabric begins to unravel. “You’re jobless, living in the land of plenty,” Rush later told me. “You’re constantly reminded that others have and you don’t.”

“Yeah, you love to drop the f-bomb.” “It gives texture to the conversation,” Marcelo says with a glint in his eyes.

The shooting doesn’t end. Nor does the grinding poverty. Or the deeply rooted segregation. Or the easy availability of guns. Or the shuttered schools and boarded-up homes. Or the tensions between police and residents. And yet each shooting is unlike the last, every exposed and bruised life exposed and bruised in its own way. Everything and nothing remains the same.

People have a capacity to keep going even when their world has been shattered. We all long for connection, for affirmation that our lives matter.