With most of the Robert Taylor buildings gone, there are less than nine hundred kids at Du Sable High now, instead of four thousand. There are still fights at school, but fewer. The gangs are still trying to recruit on the school grounds. But Du Sable has one to two computers in every classroom, and it was one of the first high schools in the city of Chicago to get hooked up to the Internet. The library has more than twenty thousand books and a large collection of books about African Americans. If you go to Du Sable High School, you’ll see my name and picture posted in the Hall of Fame. I’m noted as a successful student, a parent, a scholar, the director of the Twirling Elainers Baton Company, a provider of social services to community youth and adults—a positive role model, living and working then on the Greater Grand Boulevard.
I often revisit the words of my sister Genice: “Mom has left behind a legacy to be carried on, and so it has been carried on.” I live my life serving people young and old. Nowadays, I am the Silhouette Rites of Passage facilitator at the Chicago Area Project. Our program is based on an African frame of reference but serves people without regard to race. We help female and male wards of the state—young people who have been taken from their families by the Department of Children and Family Services. Our goal is to teach them life skills that will prepare them for emancipation from the system and a life of independence.
TAMMIE CATHERY
A Mother’s Story
Tammie is a twenty-nine-year-old mother of six, a survivor of the Robert Taylor Homes. She told me that she would run things differently if she had the chance. “If I was in control, what I would do to change the life of our people in the ghetto is I wouldn’t give up on you. You see, that’s the problem. We give up too quick. First of all, I would have to think about it and map out what I would want to do. I would like to clean up our community . . . I would start with the ones that want to do for themselves. And ask questions, ask about them, what they like, what they wanna do, how they wanna raise their kids, what kind of environment they want to live in.”
When I was a kid, I lived on 61st and Marshfield with my mom and went to the grammar school over there, Earle Elementary. I was always doing sports and other activities. I was on the cheerleading team and was the cheerleader captain there.
We moved from over there into the Robert Taylor Homes in 1987, but I didn’t go right away with my mom ’cause I didn’t want to move into the Robert Taylors. My mom was always telling us that when we were growing up, we were saying, I ain’t moving into the ghetto. But eventually I did.
When I moved, I didn’t know no one. I knew people, but I was always a loner. I used to always hang by myself. When I graduated that year from Earle Elementary, I wanted to go to Du Sable High School. So I became involved in a lot of things at the high school, ’cause there was problems at home with the drugs and alcohol and it was like destroying a lot of our families over there.
Basically, it was like you were raising your own at the Robert Taylors. It was like there was one big family, everyone in one big home and in different bedrooms. That’s how the building was. But in reality there was different apartments, and some people had their head on their shoulders and some didn’t. Everybody knew everybody else, and a lot of the people were related to one another. Just like families, they argued sometimes.
Myself, I started off very good. Then I started getting peer pressure and arguing and fighting with my mom. I’d come home, and even if she hadn’t been high on drugs or anything, she’d still trip off on me or fuss at me. So it was very hard for me, and I started hanging in the streets. At this time, I was thirteen or fourteen years old. I always thought I was a superstar anyway.
I decided, I’m gonna go up to Du Sable High School and talk to some of the peoples there. So I started hanging out with the high school kids. They knew I had abilities even before I came there, ’cause they heard about them from the grammar school. So when I graduated from Earle and came to Du Sable, I was kind of like a bad kid but I had a lot of good things in me.
They got me hooked on the cheerleader team, and I was very, very good. I was on the volleyball team and the softball team. I was in a mixed choir, and I was volunteering. I used to work with some of the students, some of the basketball team and the football team. There was a lot of things that I started doing.
I grew up around my aunt Rochelle Catherine, who was a cheerleader at Du Sable High School. One of the girls was the cheerleader liner and she had to baby-sit me. I used to get tired of sitting all them hours watching the girls practice. I used to cry and get mad. My candy was gone and I was ready to go home. So I started playing with the batons. My aunt gave me a baton: here, girl, get this baton—we’re almost finished; we’ll see you later. So my auntie Rochelle, she was like, you should become a cheerleader instead of being always out there fighting, ’cause I was like a tomboy.
So things changed. I was dedicated to twirling. It was like I came home from school, and even going through the trouble I was going through at home, I was doing everything I could so I wouldn’t get no punishment, ’cause you can’t come to baton practice, the girls would say. Oh, it like breaks our heart. It breaks our heart ’cause we loved it, oh, we loved to twirl, loved to twirl, we did. We did a lot of shows back then. We had Coca-Cola sponsoring us. And we did a show for Mayor Harold Washington. More companies were promoting us, and it kept a lot of us out of trouble.
After that it was like everyone started getting older, becoming teenagers, and we started breaking loose. Some of us kept on. We always kept in contact with someone. We’d jump on a bus and see each other, or we’d visit somewhere; we’d bump into each other. That’s when my life went from good to worse. I lived with my grandmother before I had my first child ’cause I couldn’t take it no more with me and my mother. I was an A student. I stayed on the honor roll in high school. I didn’t finish, ’cause I had so much other stuff going on in my head. I didn’t have no one really to back me up, to keep me focused, keep me going. It was like I actually just gave up, so I hung with a street gang.
Once I stopped going to school, started hanging out, it became like a lot of tragedies are happening. A lot of classmates started going to jail, dying; there was so many killings over there at the Robert Taylor Homes. It was a lot like Harlem. One building is one thing, the next building is another. Two different gangs. You step on someone’s toe, bump into each other, or one gang member liked the other gang member’s girl, or it was just ’cause of something stupid. Someone says something. You have a pair of Jordans, then they take your Jordans. Next thing you know, they coming back with the next building and they all get to fighting. But then it’s like always one person come here with a gun, then the next person.
Then that’s what became like a big war. So tenant patrol, they come to each building, holler up in the buildings, say, you kids come on down. They pick them up out of each building and walk them to school ’cause some parents are probably hung over or couldn’t get it together for some other reason. You get them ready, then you pick them up from each building and walk them to school. The different buildings was doing things together, just to make sure the kids weren’t hurt by violence.
It was so bad down there that the U.S. Marshals had to come and escort the kids back and forth to school. We couldn’t come outside. If you did, you took a chance. Over there it’s like life is based on a chance. You might win, you might lose; you might live and you might not live. It was so bad. They had them close the buildings down, and you had to sign on the first floor to come up. We had to buzz you in, like normal high-rise buildings, but we had police officers. There was a police for each project location—each project had a station in it. They were the CHA Police—Chicago Housing Authority. They called them Chicago Rental Cops, or Robocops, as a joke. They were tough cops.
The Fifty-first Police Station also sent a lot of people to the Robert Taylors, people who knew the area and the residents. Some of the officers they sent were part of the regular force and some were private security officers. So it was very dangerous. You couldn’t have a birthday party for the kids downstairs in the playground; that’s how terrible it was.
The street gang didn’t get me. I gave it up and started hanging out with friends. I never did drugs. I got pregnant, and I had my first child when I was seventeen. And it was like, okay, what am I gonna do now? Public aid. They ain’t giving no money to no kids, so you have to go on your mother’s grant. I wasn’t living with my mom, but she was still in the Robert Taylors and I was still coming over there.
A year passed after I had my baby, and then I got my own apartment. Only if you had a child and you were a certain age could you get an apartment. So most people was like, well, sure, I’m having me a baby to get my own apartment. That’s how I was thinking, and I wanted someone to love me and to have for my own. Them years I was thinking that way, but now I know more. I wish I would’ve took my time and settled down instead of doing a lot of things that I did. I wish I had thought things out before I reacted. It was just so terrible.
You see the guys, the drug dealers, have things that you would like to have, and you get with them. The car, the fashion; it was all about the fashion, really. Selling drugs for fashion. A lot of people did a lot of things for the fashion and appearance and the talk of the town. Selling drugs for the cars, the money, and now you’re more important to us in the projects. You have all this money, so we’re gonna try to get with you and hang around with you and be your friend. You don’t know that wasn’t the right way until after you have thought to yourself if that’s what you really wanted.
Now I’m twenty-nine, and I have six children. If I could do it over again, I probably would’ve had them six, but I probably would’ve been on number one now. If I would’ve stayed with the YMCA that we had to practice in, and the activities that we had at the time, I would have had more options. The communities would’ve had more options for the teenagers, which they don’t really have now, because everyone is going their way. It’s more kids that’s out of grammar school now than it was back then, and more kids pregnant by sixteen too, and have more than two children now.
I have three girls and three boys. I kept having babies; they kept coming out. I couldn’t stop them; no, I could not stop them. I thought about abortions, but I never had no abortion. My mother she did prefer abortions. She said, well, you get pregnant, you should have taken more of a responsibility, ’cause I’m not gonna keep them. That’s what she told me. So why did I go six times? I don’t know. I haven’t asked myself that. It’s just I got pregnant and I had them. With help or not. I had one actually born in the Robert Taylor Homes. I was having it so fast it just came. The baby came on down on my auntie’s bed. The birth certificate has it.
I’m a good mama, though. I went through a lot of changes to be the good mom that I am today. I had to learn from my mistakes and experiences to know what to look for.
I went through a lot of things dealing with DCFS—the Department of Children and Family Services. They come to your home, and if there’s something wrong, you get reported. They take your children and you have to go through parenting classes, or whatever they ask you to go through; you have to go through it. They took my children away. So much was happening in the Robert Taylors, I mean living the fast life.
There is things that you do have to think about if you have children first of all, if you love them and want them to be with you and grow up with you, and not just with you, but with each other. So it was good they went to my mom. They were in the system but they weren’t spread out all over town somewhere and don’t know each other.
Oh, but I have them back now. I have certificates and everything. My eldest daughter is thirteen. I keep her in the house a lot. I cannot always do that, but I try to talk to her. She’s not more mature like I was when I was thirteen. I was more experienced back then than how the kids are now. I try to talk to them and get them to understand life, what life is all about, and what I’ve been through—my mistakes, my wrongdoing. I try to tell them my wrong-doing. I don’t hide nothing from my kids. I tell them everything I think they won’t know. I don’t hide nothing.
Some things I tell them straight out. I know how to talk to my children. I know how they will understand me the way I talk to them. Sometimes I come straight out with it, and sometimes you have to not beat around the bush, but put it in a different level for them to understand what you’re talking about, trying to explain to them.
My son he been suspended from school before I got them back home with me. I don’t have a male in my home right now; none of the kids’ fathers are around. I don’t see them; I don’t have no contact with them. It don’t bother me at all. I really don’t worry about it. I really don’t care, ’cause I’ve been making it all this time without their help. So I can stay alone.
From my experience at the Robert Taylor Homes, I’d say the trouble was from drugs and meanness. Both. But then sometimes you get some good things going on. Like they had Triple-H. They had summer programs where the children could eat breakfast and lunch. They took the children on trips. There was a lot of good over there too. But it didn’t last long, ’cause some of the workers, when they get shown around, didn’t want to come over there. So they gave up on our community over that. They gave up, so we had more people to get together, to make a solution, and everyone joined in. See, everyone talks the talk, but a lot of people just don’t do the walk. A lot of people they say, well, they should’ve did this and should’ve did that, but we don’t have peoples, my peoples, black peoples, we don’t get together to make a statement and make it last and stick together. We say one thing to the next person, but we don’t make no action towards our world, see.
I see a lot of mothers my age now. A lot of them are doing real good. Like one of the twirlers, she’s trying to open up her own day-care center for the children. It’s things like that we need to be doing, getting together to help other black people. There’s some of us out there can be saved if we have the right hand to hold on to, to help us save the communities, the children. Our own children first; we have to start at home. We have to teach our kids not to run down the street twenty years later, be in jail for robbing the lady next door. We need to get them back into these schools and onto these basketball teams and into cheerleading. I don’t see a lot of competitions going on anymore. They used to have the Pizza Hut, the small pan pizzas given to them free to read so many books. I don’t see that no more in schools. I don’t see a lot of trips no more. Not just going to the park, to the zoo, but going to these libraries to pick out books and read. Have them do a report on them as we did. A lot of the kids nowadays, we put them with so much material things that whatever they do they have to get paid for. That’s the big problem.
Most of the adults in my neighborhood, a lot of them have jobs. Also they had jobs in the Robert Taylors. The Robert Taylors had a lot of programs for tenants. Janitor, the lunchroom, building presidents, tenant patrols, all of them had a part in the community. You had the porch captains; you had to make sure you kept your own porch swept and mopped. No clothes hanging on the galleries or the gates. It was basically helping us to develop ourselves as a clean environment, helping us keep it clean and be lovely neighbors. Everyone got into it some of the time, but if your children aren’t home, you can’t teach them about respect and honor, and about honoring other people’s things and property. If you could, the neighborhoods wouldn’t be so trashy. Over my way, where I live at now, they have garbage cans on each corner. Over at the Robert Taylors you probably would’ve had but one trash can. You’d probably only see one out of the whole community. Of course people are gonna throw trash on the ground and things and on people’s grass.