I don’t understand why people do the things
they do, but then, I have to realize my brother did a lot of bad
things. I was just happy that my mom and my family didn’t do what
some people do when they get on the TV news and act like their kids
are innocent. My mom didn’t do any of that. I’m sad to say I lost a
brother, but it’s just so much more than that. I’m sure that if he
would have lived and been caught, he would have served time for
more than just the murder. I’m sure they would have found all these
guns somewhere, and probably drugs.
My cousin Andre was following in Lamont’s
footsteps, because he started gangbanging so early. And then, when
he was 17, the same thing happened to him as Lamont. Some boys came
up through the exact same lot, and they shot Andre at close
range.
I can’t forget that our other cousin Phillip
was killed the year before Andre. So it was every year, we lost
someone. It was emotional thing after emotional thing—a lot of
death—and my grandmother was still standing at the top of us all.
She raised them, she raised them all, and then to have to
constantly bury them year after year? Everybody would look at her
and say, “You are so strong.”
My cousin Shavontay and I went to an
all-girls Catholic high school through a residential scholarship
program that Marillac had set us up with. We moved to Evanston. We
didn’t come home much, and my grandmother cried, but she thanked
God for Marillac helping us get into the program. We had to get
used to not seeing our family. It was hard, but I wanted to go to a
good high school, get a real high-school education, because I
wanted to go to college eventually. In my neighborhood, some people
barely make it to high school, so you know how hard it is to go to
college.
I ended up running for class president senior
year and got it. So, by me having the top position in the school, I
was the first to come out on graduation day. Graduation hadn’t
started before I was crying. As I was preparing for our song to
play, I was looking at everybody in my family that was in the
audience. I will never forget it. When I got my diploma, I just
stood on stage like the graduation was all about me. I raised my
diploma, and my mother was the main one that I looked at. She had
been in jail for my eighth-grade graduation, and none of her
daughters had even gotten a diploma.
When I was younger, I was mad and I cried a
lot and wondered why my mother couldn’t be involved in my life. She
would stay at my grandmother’s some of the time, but she wasn’t
stable. She was doing hard drugs, like crack, heroin, cocaine,
stuff like that. I’d often see her, but she’d be hanging outside on
the corner with the other drug addicts. It was like she’d rather
spend time with them than me, and I always wondered if I did
something wrong.
When I became old enough, I started writing
her letters in jail—and as she started to better herself, she’d
write me cute little cards back. As I got older, I got more of an
understanding that this was just a problem she had. She had to take
time to deal with it, to better herself when she was ready, not
because everyone else wanted her to. I learned that it wasn’t my
fault, and everybody goes through problems. It just takes some
people a longer time than others.
Since my junior year of high school, my
mother’s been doing good and has stayed clean. I wasn’t always
proud to say, “That’s my mother,” because I’d see my friends with
clean mothers with the nice clothes and the nice shoes and the job
and everything. Today, I am proud. I say, “That’s my mother. Her
name is Raquel. That’s who brought me into this world. I love her
unconditionally.”
Her proudest moment was being at my
high-school graduation and being able to say, “I’m here. I’m clean.
I’m a mother. I’ve changed.”
Looking back, before high school, I would
have never thought I’d even make it to high school because of where
I lived and all the people I have lost. I thought that I would have
given up a long time ago, but I’m still pushing and fighting and I
plan on making it somewhere. I feel like, as long as you have faith
and you have some motivation, it will take you a long way, a way
that you would have never thought it would have taken you.
I’ve still never met anybody like my
grandmother. I was 17 when she passed away, and it was like Rosa
Parks died or something. I would give it all up if she could be
here now, but I know that she sees what I’m doing and I know she’s
proud. That’s why, when I’m done getting my bachelor’s degree, I’m
moving to get my master’s degree, so she can say, “Everything she’s
doing, I taught her that. And she hasn’t given up yet.”
—
Interviewed by Danielle Turney
TOMORROW IS NOT PROMISED
CHARLIE BROWN
Charlie Brown—an alias—is an 18-year-old who
lives in the West Humboldt Park community on the West Side of
Chicago. Residents of the area face high crime and poverty rates,
struggling schools and “one of America’s biggest open-air drug
markets,” in the words of a recent Chicago Reader article.53
Charlie describes his neighborhood as a place where you need to
watch your back.
Charlie is a tall, charismatic young man who
loves to write poetry. He describes himself as artistic, cocky and
intelligent. Charlie was adopted by a woman who is raising six
children, five of whom are adopted. His biological father dropped
contact with Charlie suddenly when he was 10 years old.
Charlie spent his first two years of high
school at King College Prep on the South Side. For his junior year,
he transferred to Urban Prep Academy, an all-male charter school on
the West Side that regularly helps get 100 percent of its
graduating seniors accepted to college. Despite the academic
excellence of the school, Charlie doesn’t like it. “The days are
too long,” he says. “I also don’t like Urban Prep because of the
uniform, which is a blazer, red tie and khaki pants. And I don’t
like it because it’s all boys.”
But an even bigger problem for Charlie Brown
is trying to imagine a future anywhere outside of his own violent
community.
I know basically everybody in the
neighborhood, so if I see unfamiliar people, I get cautious. “Who
is that? Watch out!” I turn around every few steps. I watch my
surroundings. If I see cars drive slowly down the street, I get
paranoid. If I am sitting on the porch, I go in the house. Everyone
operates like this, even the drug dealers. No matter how many dudes
you have with you or how many guns you have on your waist, you have
to watch your back.
I’m also cautious of the dudes who hang on
the corner. When you pass them, they often say, “Hey, you wanna
work?” And I always think, “No, nigga, you need to work. You need
to get a job.” But I can’t snap on them like that because I don’t
know what they got. Plus, I get kind of scared when I tell them no
because I don’t want them to start looking for me. Sometimes they
follow you and wait for you to fall just so they can say, “Yeah,
you should have come and worked for me.”
I’m cool with a lot of the people around
here, but my friends know that I’m not like them. You won’t catch
me sagging my jeans or saying to every chick, “Hey, shorty!” I am
not like that. So if they wear their pants down, if they are about
to go smoke, or if they be like, “We are about to go to this party
and do this or that,” they know I am not going to join them. So
they just say, “All right, we will talk to you later.” But I do
like to have fun, get my laughs and jokes in. I make sure I live
life for today and not tomorrow. Tomorrow is not promised.
I have been writing poetry ever since I
learned to write. I realized that poetry was my thing when I
started reciting it in front of the class in fourth grade. We were
told to recite memory pieces. That’s when you take somebody else’s
poem, memorize and recite it. But I would write my own and recite
it. People started saying “You’re real good,” and I loved the
attention.
Art makes me happy. I can express myself and
let me be seen. When you express yourself, you don’t want to be
judged. You want somebody to listen and just hear what you have to
say. You want them to see you for
you
, not how stereotypes
see you or the media sees you.
At a poetry performance I had to write on the
topic: What have my parents given me? The other kids said life,
breath, lungs, beautiful eyelashes. I know my parents gave me those
things, but I took it as, “What have they given me—given
me
?” My response was: nothing.
I never knew my real mother but my adopted
mother has a picture of her in our house. I know how she looks, but
I don’t know her. I just know what I see on that picture. I did
know my dad. I can’t say I resemble him, but I’m tall like him; he
wears glasses, I wear glasses; he always looks mean like I do. He
stopped coming around when I was 10 so I only have a couple
memories of him. What I do remember was he was my daddy until
then.
My dad was a construction worker and had his
own restaurant. One day, he took me and my granny there and we had
spaghetti. When he picked me up he said, “You’re my little guy” and
my granny was right there. When I say my granny, I’m talking about
my adopted mother’s mom. I don’t know what happened, but I never
saw or heard from him after that day. Even though I don’t talk to
my dad anymore, that moment makes me smile because that was the
last moment I remember having with him.
Sometimes I get mad and my granny will say,
“Think about your dad.” She tells me this because she knows that
last time together was a happy moment in life. I don’t know how to
take it when she reminds me of my dad, because I’m like, “I don’t
see him anymore.” But she says, “Don’t judge him. You’re still his
little guy.” I don’t know what went on, so I don’t judge him, but I
do feel like he could at least call or something.
My mother adopted me at the age of 3. I don’t
even know where I lived before that. It’s not a lot that I remember
from my childhood, but it was all right. I wasn’t getting beat up
or nothing like that. She wasn’t a drunk or had me with stepdads.
She took care of me like I was her own. As I got older and started
thinking about it and seeing everyone else with their mothers and
daddies, all being so happy, we did get into a lot of arguments. I
would sometimes tell my mother, “I wish you didn’t adopt me. I
don’t want to stay with you.” And I would walk out the house. I
didn’t mean those things because she did take care of me like I was
her own. But sometimes little things get to you. My mother was
single when she adopted me and still is, so I don’t have a man
around to say, “Don’t get in trouble with the law, don’t drink,
strap up when you have sex” and things like that. But she raised me
to the best of her ability and I’m not doing bad. I’ve never done
drugs, been to jail or anything like that.
Sometimes I think about asking my mom and
dad, “What happened?” But at the moment I just write a lot of
poetry or I draw about it. If I’m in a real bad mood, where I can’t
stay still, I turn on some music and just dance. Now that I am
aware of my talents and what I can do, I go draw, paint, dance or
whatever. This is my way to get my feelings out. I don’t go hit or
yell at somebody, or smoke or sell drugs. Plus, if I do those
things, that will just make me less of a person. I am going to be
me. Peer pressure doesn’t get to me. I won’t let it.
There is not much I would change about me,
with the exception of my social skills. I’m a good speaker. I
perform poetry, but when certain people are talking to me, like if
a white man or woman were talking to me right now, I wouldn’t be
looking them in the face. I would be looking down or something.
When a person of authority talks to me, a police officer or white
person, I don’t look them in the face. Well, not just a white
person. It depends on the type of authority and power. Like police
officers, when I watch the news I see them get away with everything
they do. They beat people for no reason, they can be crooked
sometimes and then it is just like they get away with it. And then
judges, they can send you to jail for X amount of years if you did
the crime or if you didn’t do the crime. And I don’t want to spend
my life behind bars.
I don’t know what would happen if I looked
them in the eyes. That’s the part that scares me. I’m already
placed in a box to be lower than them. If I go to school or if I
don’t go to school, they still see me as a statistic. It doesn’t
matter how many degrees I get, I would still be the minority to
them, the black person, slave or whatever you want to call it. I
can go to school and graduate and be at the top of my class, but it
will always be that white man who has to hire me. Or, that college
tuition that I would owe, how would I get it? There will always be
that white man who has to put my life in order. Or, it doesn’t
necessarily have to be that white man who has to hire me. It can be
a black man, but what’s to say that he won’t hire the white man
over me?
I started feeling this way when so many of my
friends were being judged and sentenced before they even did a
crime. No one gave them the chance to speak up or speak out. No one
listened to them and what they had to say. It starts in school.
When something happens in a lot of the schools in my area, they
don’t suspend the kids or call their parents. They just throw them
on the streets. Who’s to say, when they are thrown on the street,
that a drug dealer won’t be standing there and say, “Do you want to
make some quick money?” Before you know it, they are in gangs, they
take this into the schools, it escalates, they get failing grades,
are kicked out of school and are on the corner 24/7, and then jail
time.
Trevon—like if someone was to ask, “Who is
that?” I would say, “That is my brother.” We were that type of
close.