An American Summer: Love and Death in Chicago

by Alex Kotlowitz

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.