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.

Over the course of three months, 172 people were killed, another 793 wounded by gunfire. By Chicago standards it was a tamer season than most.

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.

Virtually every teen and young man shot, the police tell us, belonged to a gang, as if that somehow suggests that what goes around comes around. But life in these communities is more tangled than that. It’s knottier and more lasting than readings of a daily newspaper or viewings of the evening news would suggest.

You have to fight—and fight hard—not to let the ugliness and inexplicability of the violence come to define you.

In Chicago, the wealthy and the well-heeled die headline deaths and the poor and the rambling die in silence. This is a book, I suppose, about that silence—and the screams and howling and prayers and longing that it hides.

Grief in places where the conflict is ongoing, Kathryn believes, is messy, without a straight line forward, without a map. “The way that people deal with that loss can vary dramatically,” Kathryn told me. “Some want vengeance, some want accountability. Others feel like even with that that won’t accomplish anything, so they become activists. And some want to pretend it never happened.” 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 closest bonds we will ever know are bonds of grief. The deepest community one of sorrow.”

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.

Violence has a way of catching up with you. Best not to stand still. Best to keep moving. Violence has a way of making you feel sullied. Best not to raise questions. Violence has a way of taking over your narrative. Best not to let it shape who you are. Violence has a way of exposing cracks in your universe. Best not to speak of those you love.