An American Summer: Love and Death in Chicago

by Alex Kotlowitz

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.

the violence occurs in communities for which a sense of future feels as distant and arbitrary as a meteor shower, communities that in fact have been shunted aside precisely because they are black and Hispanic.

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

There are those who right themselves and move on, but for most, their very essence has been rattled.

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross wrote that grief takes place in five stages: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.

“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.”

She found comfort in this passage, and thought the only way she would get through the hurt was to focus on God’s love for her and not on her own feelings.

It’s just another day, she thought to herself. I refuse to give it power over me.

We’re all more than the sum total of our worst experience. I won’t allow myself to be reduced to that single day. There’s so much more to me. There’s so much more to my life. So I need to pick up the pieces and keep moving.”

from that day to this I awake every day with the mission and purpose that his legacy will not be defined by his worst mistake. No one’s should. Not even the defendant.

‘My humanity is bound up in yours, for we can only be human together.’

forgiveness is easier when the line between victim and killer is blurred, where the victim is someone who just as easily could’ve been on the other side of the equation.

“The violence damages cops just like it damages anyone else who has to watch it day in, day out.” He comes to see how the violence has dented everyone it touches.

In the Austin neighborhood: “All these people wanna grab guns and nobody got target practice,” she said.

The violence, the trauma, he realizes, has this paradoxical narrative. It isolates people.

But he found comfort in talking to people in the streets, people who had seen what he’s seen, people who had a lot more at stake than he does. 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.”

For both, holding on to those secrets have left them floating, alone, with only each other to hold to. They are each enshrouded in silence, silence about what really matters.

Mike saw something of himself in Victor—hotheaded and stubborn, someone who had a storm raging inside, a storm no one could see.

they didn’t take kindly to perceived injustices—and they both often reacted out of proportion to the offense in question.

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.

And they say that if you love something you should let it go and if it comes back then it’s yours.

us as people when we have difficulty on our journey of life we tend to focus on what we need at the moment that we forget what we already have…Hey

we both in our own ways have been on journeys that we would not have chose but have shaped us into much better people.”

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.

What happened next has been etched into Gerald’s memory like an ancient cliff painting, the scene still recognizable but the drawing faded in places and in some cases simply erased by years of erosion.

He had failed his cousins and his aunt. Something—he couldn’t fully describe it—bore in on him, like a jackhammer on cement, pounding cracks in his soul.