I’m hoping that more youth will be involved
with education. I’m hoping that they’ll understand that you gotta
be educated to get out. I tell my gentlemen: Try nursing. I let
them know there’s something else you can do with your life. You
don’t have to sell drugs. You don’t have to run with a gang. It’s
like, “Aren’t you tired of your mother crying? Aren’t you tired of
that? You can do something that actually makes a difference,
helping people instead of hurting people.”
I just try to be a role model for them. When
they say, “Well, you don’t know my story, you don’t know my life,”
I’m like, “Yeah, I kinda do. I didn’t
live
your life, but I
do
know
what’s going on in your life.”
I grew up over here on the West Side. I
actually grew up in this neighborhood here at Congress and Central
Park. Now I think it’s called
East Garfield Park, but back then it was all just called the West
Side. I saw a lot of gang activity growing up, a lot of
hopelessness, helplessness, a lot of drug activity.
There was this one girl I knew—I will always
remember this one forever—she played Russian roulette and she lost.
I was like 13 when that happened. And it’s like, “A: Why are you
playing Russian roulette? B: Why are you drinking? C: How did you
get access to a gun?” There were just so many questions. And to see
so many of my peers—because we were all friends—going in a
different direction than I did, it was kind of depressing.
I went on to high school. Back when I went—I
graduated in 1982—they opened up a program where you could
basically go to any high school in the city.52 Before, you were
stuck to districts. So I went to Taft, which is up on the Northwest
Side. Oh! Going to Taft as part of the first big group of
African-American kids was like going back into the 1950s to civil
rights times. We were met with protests. We were met with rioting.
We were met with name-calling. People pulled their kids out of
school. It was insane. I stuck it out—I made it through my four
years and graduated—but I got to literally see what racism is all
about.
I went to college, and then, once I
graduated, I came back to the West Side to contribute back to the
population that produced me. I knew I always wanted to help people.
It was just a matter of
how
was I going to help people. My
mother was a big influence ‘cause her heart’s, like, huge. One of
the earliest things I can remember is, she allowed some of our
family members to come up from Mississippi, and they lived with us
for however long they wanted to before they moved on to other
houses here in the city. And after that, I saw how she would always
take care of homeless people or people in the neighborhood who just
needed help.
So I started my journey in nursing when doors
opened through the military. I became a nurse in the Army National
Guard, and I transitioned from the military to my civilian life.
That was back in 1988 or 1989. The military helps you to focus: You
work as a team player and you learn not to complain
at all
.
It’s like, “Look, this is a job, this is what you signed up for,
this is what you’re gonna do. Go do it.” And it gives you that
mentality: “I’m here to work and I’m going to work to the best of
my abilities. And, when it’s over, it’s over till tomorrow.” I’ve
been working at Cook County Hospital for almost 20 years and in
trauma since 2002.
I always tell patients, “I’m not here to
judge you; I’m just here to fix you. If you choose not to change,
you know that’s on you. If you know the things that can happen to
you—jail, death, permanent disability—then you have the
opportunities. If this is the life you’re choosing, then I’m just
here to try and put you back together again.”
We take care of some of the worst injuries,
some of the worst of the worst. But there are patients who you
would think would never survive who actually survive—and it’s just
amazing.
It’s amazing. I just told a patient the other day,
“I work in a land of miracles.”
We do have patients die, of course. When it’s
happening, if the patient can talk, they’ll let you know
something’s not right. Or they stop talking, which is a bad sign,
but a lot of people are like, “Oh great, they’re calm.” And it’s
like, “Mmm—they’re dying.” The next thing you’ll notice is the
monitor: The patient’s vital signs will start changing—and changing
drastically for the worse. Then you contact the doctor, you make
sure the patient’s airway is okay, make sure he’s breathing. And
then sometimes you have to explain to him, “We have to put you to
sleep. We have to put a tube in to help you breathe.” But sometimes
you don’t have time to explain—you just have to do it. And it can
be very scary for everyone involved, because we have to figure out
what’s wrong in a short period of time and then fix it. And
sometimes we can’t figure it out in time.
But I’m sorry, a lot of people think you can
get used to watching a young person die. You don’t get used to it.
Young people have so much potential and, when you talk to them, you
realize, “You’ve got so many other gifts that you could use, that
you could contribute to the world.” And then to kinda see that just
ebb away, and you think about the people in their lives that it’s
going to affect because that person is gone. But for every 10 that
we lose, maybe there’s two that’ll turn around and actually succeed
and change their lives. And who knows? From that, maybe they could
change the world.
—
Interviewed by Michael Van
Kerckhove
Endnotes
52 Before Purnell and other blacks integrated
Taft under the city’s “Access to Excellence” desegregation program
in 1978, the Far Northwest Side school had only enrolled one
African-American student in its history. On the first day of class,
“some black students said whites threw rocks and crab apples at
them,” according to the Chicago Tribune. See Casey Banas, “Peaceful
Return to City Schools,” Chicago Tribune, Sep. 7, 1978.
YOU LIVE BY IT, YOU DIE BY
IT
LATOYA WINTERS
Latoya Winters studies sociology and Family
and Child Studies at Northern Illinois University. She hopes to
eventually earn a master’s degree and work with at-risk kids in a
neighborhood much like the one she grew up in: East Garfield Park,
an impoverished area that has seen its population decline from
about 70,000 people in 1950 to about 20,000 today. As a child,
Winters lost several family members and friends to violence and saw
her own mother spend time in prison. But she was nurtured and
inspired by her maternal grandmother and found refuge at the
Marillac Social Center, a Catholic outreach house that has served
poor families on the West Side of Chicago for almost a century.
In many respects, Winters shares
similarities with other college students on the verge of
graduating: She is neatly dressed, has big dreams and is a fast,
passionate speaker. But her childhood experiences are far different
from those of most classmates.
My grandmother, Carrie Winters, was born and
raised in Mississippi. After her parents passed on, she moved to
Chicago. She wanted to find work, and she wanted a better life for
her children. She worked all these odd jobs just to make a way for
her kids—two to three jobs at a time. She worked at Campbell’s Soup
forever, and that passed down to my aunt working there. My
grandmother bought her house in maybe the ’40s and lived there
until she died in 2006.
I always smelled a sense of soulful in her. I
could smell this perfume that she’d always wear, especially when
she went out or went to church. When I say she was churchgoing, I
mean
churchgoing. She was always cooking, everything from
the big dinners to macaroni to the chitlins. She had a kind of curl
to her hair, because she always wore rollers when she went to the
beauty salon. She was a hard-working, independent woman; I see that
in her from as early as I can remember. It is still deeply rooted
in her grandkids today. Oh my God, we are pieces of my
grandmother.
A lot of my grandmother’s kids strayed off—a
majority of her kids, honestly. Some of them were alcoholics; some
were drug addicts like my mother, Raquel. My grandmother raised me.
My mother had nine kids, and
my grandmother had custody of all of them, plus maybe 10 to 15 of
my cousins. My uncles’ kids, then my aunts’ kids—my grandmother
raised all of us. We had a two-flat building with a basement, a
first floor and a second floor. There was always room.
My grandmother reached out and took care of
kids that weren’t hers. At Thanksgiving dinner, if we had a friend
who didn’t have anywhere to go, my grandma had enough to go around.
She had her table set for everybody. If me and three cousins had to
sleep in the same bed, we always had somewhere to sleep. My
grandmother adopted all of us, because everyone had their different
problems, and she refused to let us be separated. She never closed
the door on anybody, including her own kids who didn’t, you know,
fulfill their parent responsibilities. I never even heard my
grandmother talk down about anybody, no matter what.
Gangs always existed in my neighborhood. The
majority of the guys in my family are affiliated with the Gangster
Disciples; so are the majority of people in my neighborhood,
actually. I never understood what it was about gangs, but then, as
I grew older, I learned more. I’ve had these sociology classes
about it, and I see the way gangs have destroyed people. I’ve
talked to people like my uncles and cousins and brothers who say,
“I got put into the gang when I was younger,” and, “If I could have
gotten out, I would have.” But some of them wouldn’t have. Like I
always say, “You live by it, you die by it.”
Growing up, it was terrible. It was all I
saw, all I knew. I think that I was scared that I might end up in a
gang or something. I look back now, and all I can say is, “I am
thankful.” I hate the lives that were taken, but I just thank God
for the lives that were changed because they were given a chance to
look at the positive and the negative and decided not to get
involved.
I grew up not even a whole block away from
Marillac House, where they have different social service agencies
inside the building. Their main purpose is to make a safe
environment for kids, so they don’t have to be out on the streets.
My big cousins and my big sister actually went there first, but I
was too young to go. They always had their jump-rope teams going,
they had their cheerleading, and they had their dance groups, and
it was like the spark of a movement or something. They would come
home bragging, “We did this and we did that,” and I was just moping
around, sad, because I wanted to do it.
That’s how I became involved, with my cousin
Shavontay and my two sisters. We were the four young ones who
begged and cried and whined, and they opened up the age range for
us. I came in through Hope Junior, an after-school program. It went
from just the basics of getting help with my homework to being
involved in everything you can name, just to have something
positive to do. I played basketball, I played volleyball, I did
poetry, I did choir—you name it, I did it. As soon as I walked into
Marillac, it felt like home, and you don’t get that everywhere you
go. My Marillac family is like my second family, and the different
things I’ve learned there, the many friendships I’ve gained there,
are remarkable. I give them credit for me sitting here today. It’s
made some of the violence in the neighborhood invisible, like it
doesn’t exist.
My brother, my mother’s firstborn child, his
name was Lamont. Lamont started out in a gang when he was about 13.
He was heavily involved. Heavily. He did a lot of negative things,
lived a very dangerous life, and it caught up with him. I was 10
years younger than him, and young when all this happened, but I did
have a relationship with my brother. I knew that he would only be
going out one way: through the jail or, you know, dead.
It makes me curious, every time I think about
him. I think about the day when me and my aunt and my cousins had
just come from eating out, and he walked up to the car and said,
“When I die, I want to be buried right here in front of this
house.” He lived to see about two or three more days, and then he
was dead.
People said that he had killed somebody a
week before that, and somebody was coming back for him. My family
was telling him to leave town and just go lay low. He had been
wearing a bulletproof vest for a week, but then to just take it
off... Why was he wearing that bulletproof vest all the time and he
all of a sudden took it off?
I was in sixth grade when it happened. It was
a normal day, and I was in the house. Me and Shavontay were hanging
out and watching TV, and I had fallen asleep. Then, she was shaking
me: “Wake up, wake up. I just heard gunshots.”
Gunshots in our neighborhood was like hearing
the ice-cream truck, as sad as that is to say. I guess, when she
told me, I kinda was asleep. Before I could fully get up, I heard
people upstairs running out the door. I got outside and my mom’s
all broke down and fell out, and the mother of Lamont’s kids is out
there lying down on the street and she’s crying, and my sister’s
crying, and my cousin—so I knew something happened to someone
close.
Lamont had been standing with my mom and
sister and all these chicks, so obviously, none of them were
holding any guns. These two boys came up through the empty lot next
to our house and shot Lamont at close range, about 15 times. My
uncle had gotten his pickup truck and put my brother in the back of
it. There was a hospital up the street from us, and my uncle was
just speeding. The police got behind him but he didn’t stop until
he got to the hospital. The boys shot Lamont so many times, so I’m
guessing my uncle already knew he was dead, but he still wanted to
try and revive him.