Authors: Ardella Garland
I was on it. Like radar, my eyes and mind focused in and read the person in front of me. The reporter in me knew that he was my man. It’s a tip-off to a reporter: Who is angry? Who is a leader? Who will open up for whatever the reason? That’s who a reporter has to find, a needle in a haystack, a good witness in the crowd. That was this dude in front of me. He was pissed off enough to give me the gutsy, for true interview that I needed.
“C’mon!” I told Zeke. We cautiously approached the man I wanted to interview. “I’m sorry to bother you during such a tough time… . Can you tell me what happened here?”
The teenager stopped crying for a second, then looked at me for a long moment before her tears began flowing once more. The man gritted his teeth again. “I’ll tell you what … these gangbangers are shooting up each other and anybody they see. They just missed my cousin Karen here but got her girlfriend Jackie in the chest. Shooting, that’s all they know. I’m so tired of it! You can’t walk the street, can’t have a damn block party for them trying to kill somebody over turf.”
“‘Them’ who?”
“The Bandits and the Rockies.”
I’m hip to the nicknames for the Gangster Bandits and the Rock Disciples, two of the most notorious street gangs in Chicago. “Did you get a good look at the car?”
He inhaled deeply, stared a second, then said, “I didn’t see
nobody
… . I just heard a lot of gunfire.”
“What about the direction the car came from?”
The girl wailed and he clutched her tightly, soothing, “It’s okay, it’ll be okay, sshhhh.”
“Sir? Which way did the car come from?”
He waved his free arm wildly. “This way, that way, some kinda way! It just don’t make no sense. I’m through.”
“I understand how frustrating this is for you. But if you could answer just a couple more questions—”
“Enough is enough.”
Now at this point my reporter instincts kicked in. What kind of body language was this man giving off? How much could I push him? Could I push him? I made a quick assessment of his eyes, his stance, then back to those eyes.
“Okay, thank you.” I decided to back off and not blow up the bridge. “Sir, I really appreciate you taking the time to talk to me. For editing purposes, say and spell your full name, please?”
“Calvin Hughes. C-a-l-v-i-n. H-u-g-h-e-s.”
I gave Mr. Hughes my card because he could be a good contact to have in the neighborhood. I could hear his cousin continuing to sob. I thought, I feel for you girl. It is so tough to watch people hurt. Even though I see so much of it, I have to stay focused, but that does not mean becoming numb. I don’t ever want to go there, because when it gets like that, then it’s time to bail. But you’ve got to do your job. I have to get the story.
I heard my pager go off. I knew it was
them
. The producer was worrying me about going live for the upcoming newsbreak. Zeke and I went back to the truck to set up a signal to air live pictures from the scene.
It works like this: An electronic signal is set up from equipment inside the truck. That signal is locked into a channel of a microwave dish on top of the Sears Tower or the Hancock Center. You can then transmit live pictures or play the tape that you’ve recorded back over those channels to the station where it’s recorded and viewed by a writer and tape editor. Then I write the story and read it back over that same signal, a process called tracking, and the writer and editor put together a long story called a package. Normally I would do all this later, but we were doing a live shot for the newsbreak.
I had about twenty minutes to the newsbreak, so I pulled out my makeup. My sister, Peaches, says I look like an overdone French fry—toasty brown, tall, and lean. I rushed to put on eyeliner because my large chestnut eyes are my pow feature. My hair? Simply put, it was wrecked, getting puffier and puffier by the second. Sorry to say but I was hopeless about the head this day and there wasn’t a darn thing I could do about it. I grabbed a clip and pulled my hair back. I didn’t look great but I did look presentable. There wasn’t a lot of time to fool with myself. Even though this is TV, the story comes first with me.
I put my cosmetics away and began to practice how I would lead into my big story. I was talking it through to myself out loud, “I’m Georgia Barnett, live on the South Side where a neighborhood block party turned into a frightening scene of violence… .”
Zeke gave me an internal feedback device or IFB, a little earplug that lets me hear Nancy and the director back at the station. Through the IFB I heard them ask me for a mike check. I counted down for them. My audio was good. I saw that the little children who were on the corner were now crowding around me. They were anywhere between the ages of six and ten.
“We wanna be on! Hip hop hurray-hey, ho-hey!” one of them shouted and the others joined in waving back and forth at the camera.
“Hold it,” I said. “I’m working and I can’t put you on television doing that. This is not a music video. So there’ll be no ‘hip hop hurray-hey, ho-hey!’” I sang it and did the little wave part, too. They got a kick out of that. Even Zeke laughed. “You can stand behind me and be on air but no waving and yelling, okay?”
They agreed, then lined up with starburst smiles in a curbside class picture.
“Coming to you in ten,” the director said in my ear through my IFB. I got focused, looking straight into the camera.
“In five, Georgia!” He counted me down. I relaxed my face a little bit. Then the director cued me: “Go!”
“I’m Georgia Barnett, live on the South Side where a neighborhood block party turned into a frightening scene of gang violence. Five people have been shot—”
Suddenly I heard somebody yelling in my ear from the control room back at the station. The director? No. The producer? No.
It was Bing!
He wolfed, “Ask the kids something! Use the fuckin’ kids!”
How could I think and talk live in front of thousands of people with Bing yelling in my ear?
“Get a bite from the kids, Georgia!”
I struggled to finish my thought without stuttering live on-air. “There were only a few people outside cleaning up when the drive-by occurred—”
“Use the kids! Now!!!”
I turned to the kids behind me. “Did you see anything?”
A cute little girl with fuzzy-plaited hair was standing in front. She was wearing a faded pink and white sleeveless cotton dress. Large eyes brimming with excitement focused on me. The little girl grabbed the mike and said, “I seent a car. This real dark black boy with a scar, he was dressed all in yellow, and just shooting his gun!”
An ashy hand belonging to a little boy with a jealous heart grabbed the mike away from her. He shouted, “Let me talk some! They were shooting, I was running! Bang! Bang!”
Now the rest of the kids went off the deep end, too: “Bang! Bang!”
Bing was in my ear again, yelling, “Wrap! Wrap!”
“Again, there’s been a drive-by shooting on the South Side. Five people shot. We’ll have a report from the scene and from the hospital. Channel 8 News will have all the latest details at ten.”
I stood very still until I knew I was no longer live on the air, then I threw down my mike and cursed, “Dap-gum-it!”
All the kids scattered, mocking me: “Dap-gum-it!”
“Zeke, Bing was yelling in my ear the entire live shot. I could barely think. He totally messed me up. Now all the viewers think I don’t know what I’m doing. But how can I do my job with a domineering boss yelling in my ear?”
Zeke just shrugged.
Then the phone rang in the truck. I didn’t need to dial 1-800-Psychic to know that it was Bing. I wasn’t about to take any more mess off Mr. News-it-all. I moved toward the phone inside the truck.
Zeke stopped me. “Don’t bother, Georgia. Bing will only piss you off. Let’s hustle up.”
Zeke was right. I needed to finish up what I had to do, and quickly, because the other stations had started to arrive at the scene. Zeke popped in a new tape and we got ready to flag down one of the cops handling this shooting. I was trying my darndest to swallow my anger and get focused when I caught sight of a newcomer to the scene, a calming force in the chaos.
I slowly approached this stunning man. He was an ab- and backplus masterpiece, his mountainous shoulders tapering down to a just-right waist. Obviously he believed in caring for his body. An overall rugged look was softened perfectly by his creamy reddish-brown skin. Mister-man squared his shoulders, spoke firmly, and gave orders as naturally as exhaling. His figure and his confidence cut a magnificent presence among the madness.
Who was he? I hadn’t seen him on any of the other murder stories I’d covered. Clearly he was
somebody,
or he would be soon. Could he help me with this story? I went straight over and introduced myself. “Georgia Barnett, 8 News. I’d like to talk to you about the investigation.”
He barely glanced in my direction. Mister-man was cool as the underside of a pillow. He said in a voice aged in a wine cellar, “I’m Detective Doug Eckart. And I’m busy.” Then he ignored me good old fashion. Detective Eckart turned and began talking to a beat cop who was now standing next to him.
“Excuse me, Detective,” I said louder, more forcefully. “I’d like to do a quick interview with you.”
“Nope.”
He didn’t even look at me. “Too busy. I can’t be bothered right now.”
Well, in the words of Chaka Khan, Please pardon me! Sometimes these detectives are super-helpful because they know we can assist them by asking the public for information. But sometimes old-school detectives don’t like to cooperate with us. They think we’re too glitzy or that we’re nothing but a pain in the behind. But this guy wasn’t old enough to have that kind of Jurassic ’tude! What was his problem? He had a job to do and so did I—and I only wanted to help and that’s all my news report would do.
“Detective Eckart,” I said firmly but politely, “I’m not asking for an extensive sit-down. I just want you to spot me up on what’s happening in a quick one-on-one. In return, any info I may get I’ll pass along to you. You know how it works.”
“In a few minutes I’ll do an interview with everybody. I’ll just get it over with then. Okay?”
Not okay! An interview with everyone? With all the other TV stations, radio, and newspaper reporters, too? Excuse the pun, but a gangbang was what we called it in the business. What made him think I’d settle for something as common as all that? I don’t think so, Detective Eckart. I wanted an exclusive interview, a shot of us walking together to show that I was here first, that I had the best stuff—I wanted to strut that stuff.
“Excuse me, Detective Eckart?”
He looked at me, annoyed. “Detective, I hustled to get here and I’ve got a lot of great stuff. I just want to cap it all off with a quick interview with you. Five minutes. My cameraman is right here, you can walk the block with me and tell me about this turf war. Otherwise, we’ll just hang around on your heels.”
“That’s all you reporters tend to do—hang around on our heels getting in the way.” Detective Eckart snorted.
“It seems to me that because we’re in the way, most of your cases get solved because we make people aware of what’s going on. We’re really not in the way, we’re helping
make
a way.”
To outsiders it would appear that we were now engaged in a stare-down. But it wasn’t. It was a momentary mesh of understandings, the art of give and get. He realized that he must give to get me out of his way.
Detective Eckart suppressed a cough in the low end of his throat, then showed me his bad-cop scowl. “Five minutes and that’s it, understood?”
“Understood.”
We let Zeke swing around in front. That way he would have a walking shot of us together. I started by asking a question I knew the answer to. I wanted to get a read on this man’s body language. That way I would be able to pick up on habits that would distinguish truths from lies.
“Detective Eckart, could this drive-by be retaliation for the two murders that happened in the park last week?”
“That’s exactly what we think it is. It’s a tit-for-tat deal that the gangs love to play with one another.”
Truthful: straight gaze, no eye or eyebrow movement, no change in walking stride.
“Do you have any suspects?”
“No, we don’t have any suspects and no one in custody to be questioned.”
Truthful: straight gaze, no eye or eyebrow movement, no change in walking stride.
“What about leads? Any clues to point you guys in a specific direction?”
“No, we do not have any leads at this time. But our investigation is moving forward.”
Lying: eyes dart quickly, slight hitch in the walk before resuming stride.
“If we get any big developments in the case, we’ll hold a news conference to brief reporters. Right now I have no hard details.”
Lying: eyes dart quickly, slight hitch in the walk before resuming stride.
Obviously that was about all I was gonna get out of him and that wasn’t much. So I decided to get an extra sound bite on the history of the gangs for my story.
“How quickly is the gang problem growing in Chicago?”
“There are 125 gangs with more than 100,000 members. It’s not a mom-and-pop thing either. They’re all organized. Each gang has hand signs, colors, and graffiti symbols.”