How Long Will I Cry? (2 page)

I normally don’t pay much attention to the
platitudes of politicians, but by that time I was beginning to
realize that Derrion Albert’s death had left an indelible mark on
my psyche, too. Chicago is the most racially segregated city in the
country,1 and it’s easy for those of us who live here to think of
other neighborhoods as distant planets. Before that video, I had
pretty much viewed youth violence as someone else’s problem. But
now I could no longer turn away. I wondered how such carnage could
happen in my own city, and then I began to wonder how I could stand
around and
let
it happen. But what was one white,
middle-aged creative-writing professor supposed to do about it?
What was
anybody
supposed to do, for that matter? The
problem just seemed too big and scary and complex.

Then one day I happened to have coffee with
Hallie Gordon, an old friend. As the artistic and educational
director of Steppenwolf for Young Adults, Hallie produces plays
aimed at teenage audiences. She spends a lot of time with young
people, and she’s passionate about their problems. Like me, she was
frustrated and angry about Derrion Albert’s death; unlike me, she
had a plan. Her dream, she explained, was to produce a documentary
theater piece about youth violence in Chicago, a production that
would weave together the real stories of real people, told in their
own words. The trouble, she said, was that she didn’t have anyone
to go out and do the interviews. For me, it was one of those
aha!
moments. “What would you think,” I asked her, “about
the possibility of my students doing those interviews?”

Our plans were modest at first, but things
quickly snowballed. Before long, Hallie had not only received the
enthusiastic backing of Steppenwolf Artistic Director Martha Lavey,
but she had also enlisted the support of other arts and cultural
organizations in Chicago. The result was Now Is The Time, a
citywide initiative aimed at inspiring young people to make
positive change in their communities and stop youth violence and
intolerance. Partner organizations eventually included the Chicago
Public Library, Facing History and Ourselves, and more than 15 of
Chicago’s finest theater companies.

The administration at DePaul, meanwhile,
proved equally enthusiastic, allowing me to set up special courses
for both graduates and undergraduates and providing the project
with financial and logistical support through the Irwin W. Steans
Center for Community-based Service Learning, the Egan Urban Center,
the Beck Research Initiative, the Vincentian Endowment Fund and
other programs.

Soon my students started coming back with
stories—amazing, heartbreaking, brutal, beautiful stories, far more
stories than we could fit into a single play. Long before
How
Long Will I Cry?: Voices of Youth Violence
premiered at Steppenwolf Theatre on Feb. 26, 2013, we knew we
needed to collect as many of those stories as possible in a
book.

The interviews for this volume were conducted
over the course of two years. While more than 900 Chicagoans were
being murdered in 2011 and 2012, creative-writing students from
DePaul fanned out all over the city to speak with people whose
lives were directly affected by the bloodshed.

Most of the interviews lasted one or two
hours, after which students took their audio recorders home and
transcribed the entire session word-for-word, a hugely
time-consuming task. Whenever possible, the student then went back
for a second interview, attempting not just to firm up facts but to
pin down whatever it was that made the participant tick, even if it
was hard for that person to articulate.

Often, these second interviews produced
remarkable results. Young people who had denied gang involvement in
the first interview, for example, opened up about their lives on
the streets—and about their anxieties. Parents of victims began to
talk more frankly about their murdered children. Community
activists and public officials set aside their well-rehearsed
talking points and spoke from their hearts.

Once the interviews were complete, students
began shaping the raw transcripts into narratives for this book—a
process that the legendary oral historian Studs Terkel once likened
to “the way a sculptor looks at a block of stone: inside there’s a
shape which he’ll find, and he’ll reveal it by chipping away with a
mallet and a chisel.”

In our case, it wasn’t just one sculptor at
work, but a team of artisans. All the narratives in this book have
gone through several rounds of careful revision and editing by
graduate students—a gifted group that included Lisa Applegate,
Bethany Brownholtz, Rachel Hauben Combs, Stephanie Gladney Queen,
Molly Pim and the members of Professor Chris Green’s editing
course. Our goal was always the same—to make every piece as
coherent and compact as possible, without losing the poetry of the
speaker’s voice.

One of the trickiest issues we struggled with
was dialect. It was true, for example, that some of the
African-Americans we interviewed said “ax” instead of “ask.” But it
was equally true that white interviewees, with their nasal Chicago
accents, often pronounced the same word “ee-yask.” And if we used a
phonetic spelling of one ethnic group’s pronunciation of a word,
shouldn’t we do the same for all groups? Linguists, after all,
insist that
everyone
speaks with a dialect. Keeping this in
mind, I urged my students to steer clear of nonstandard spelling
and try instead to capture the cadences, speech patterns,
inflections and slang of their subjects. Nonetheless, we found that
some words and phrases sounded too formal in standard English,
while others simply got lost in translation. The terms “finna” and
“fitta,” for example, no doubt derive from “fixing to,” but they
now have taken on linguistic lives of their own. In the end, we
decided to use dialect on a case-by-case basis, but only sparingly
and always with the dignity of the speaker in mind.

Once the narratives were close to completion,
we sent them to the respective interviewees for fact-checking and
review. I confess that this part of our plan did not sit well with
me in the beginning. Years of training and experience as a
journalist had taught me that allowing a source to see a story in
advance was questionable on an ethical level and often unwise on a
practical one. But the students convinced me that we had a special
obligation to the people who had opened their lives and hearts to
us. If we were planning to present these narratives as
their
stories, told in
their
words, didn’t they deserve to have
creative control over the material?

It took weeks—and in some cases, months—to
track down all the people whose stories appear on these pages.
Nonetheless, this book is deeper and richer as a result of that
final round of give-and-take with participants, many of whom
supplied vivid new details that helped make the material come alive
on the page. And it’s a tribute to their courage and honesty that
relatively few of them ended up asking to remove, alter or
otherwise sanitize things they had said, no matter how sensitive or
controversial.

This book contains crude language and graphic
descriptions of violence—the result of our decision not to censor
the narratives. There was only one exception to this rule:
protecting the safety of our subjects. Toward that end, we have
changed the names of several people who risk retaliation under “no
snitch” codes or might otherwise be endangered by identifying
themselves. In a couple of cases, other minor details have also
been fudged to protect the security of certain participants. As
with all of the narratives in
How Long Will I Cry?
, however,
their stories remain faithful to the speakers’ words and have been
verified to the best of our abilities.

The title of this book (and the theater
piece) comes from a conversation I had with the Rev. Corey Brooks,
a South Side pastor who, in the winter of 2011 and 2012, spent 94
days camped out on the roof of an abandoned motel to draw attention
to gun violence. When I asked Brooks what Bible story had been his
biggest inspiration during the vigil, he pointed to the Book of
Habakkuk from the Old Testament. Set in an age of bloodshed and
injustice, Habakkuk tells the story of a prophet who goes up to a
watchtower. There, the prophet speaks to God:

O Lord, how long will I cry, and you will
not hear? I cry out to you
“Violence!” and will you not save?2

Those words were written about events that
transpired in 600 B.C.—but when I read them in 2012, I was struck
by how they spoke to the frustration and rage that so many
Chicagoans feel about the slaughter on our streets today—the same
frustration and rage that had prompted Hallie Gordon and me to
undertake this effort in the first place. I was also struck by how
that passage touched upon the two goals Hallie and I had envisioned
for this project from the start.

This book embodies both definitions of the
word
cry
. On the one hand, it is intended as an expression
of grief, a means of mourning the hundreds of young Chicagoans
whose lives are lost every year. On the other, it is meant to be a
howl of protest, a call to action, a cry for peace. But more than
anything else, it is an effort to
hear
. When we began this
project, I told my students that we live in a world where
everybody’s talking—blogging, texting, tweeting, Friending,
shouting each other down—but nobody’s really listening. So that was
their assignment: just go out and listen.

No book, of course, will stop the violence.
But I believe in the transformative power of telling stories. I
believe that stories connect us with other people and open us to
new worlds, that they help us discover ourselves and show us ways
to change, that they have the power to heal. And I believe this,
too—that stories can save lives.

The people in this book regularly find
themselves in difficult and dangerous situations, the kind where
one choice seems worse than the next. What’s amazing is how often
they respond with grace, resourcefulness and bravery. My hope is
that
How Long Will I Cry?
might inspire readers to act with
similar courage. For young people in violent neighborhoods, that
may mean the courage not to give in to the perverse logic of gangs,
not to reach for a gun, not to lose sight of your own humanity and
potential. For the rest of us, those lucky enough to live in places
where our children don’t have to risk their lives every time they
step out the door, it means the courage not to turn away. These
stories belong to us all.

ENDNOTES

1 These results are from a January 2012
census data study conducted by the Manhattan Institute. See Edward
Glaeser and Jacob Vigdor, “The End of the Segregated Century,”
Civic Report, No. 66.
http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/cr_66.htm

2 This version of Habakkuk 1:2 is from the
World Bible translation, with one
minor change. I have substituted “O Lord” for “Yahweh,” as is often
done in other translations.

Foreword

By Alex Kotlowitz

The numbers are unimaginable. During this
century’s first decade in Chicago, 5,352 people were killed and,
according to the University of Chicago Crime Lab, another 24,392
shot. So many that the violence has necessitated its own language:
“To change” someone is to kill them; “a black cat” refers to a
woman who has children fathered by at least two men who have been
murdered. So many that funeral homes have rules about burying the
murdered: Only during the day. No hats. Police present. So many
that during the spring and summer, makeshift street side
memorials—consisting of balloons and flowers and liquor bottles—pop
up like perennials in full bloom. So many that people arm
themselves in self-defense, and so the police pull anywhere from
7,000 to 8,000 guns off the street each year. So many that “R.I.P.”
has become so commonplace it’s scrawled on walls, embroidered on
shirts and hats, and tattooed on bodies. So many that should you
walk into a classroom in any of these communities virtually every
child will tell you they’ve seen someone shot. Indeed, the vast
majority of murders—82 percent of them in 2011—occur in public
places such as parks and streets and alleyways.

I recently met one high school student,
Thomas, who rattled off for his social worker the people he’s seen
shot. The first was at a birthday party for a friend who was
turning 11. She was shot and killed when a stray bullet struck her
in the head. Then Thomas saw his brother shot, on two occasions,
the second time paralyzing him. He saw a friend shot while waiting
at the bus stop. And then in the summer of 2012, as Thomas chatted
on a porch with a fellow student, a boy with a gun approached.
Thomas begged him not to shoot, but he ignored those pleas, and
shot the 16-year-old friend three times in her torso. She died on
the porch. After this last incident (“incident” seems completely
inadequate in referring to such bloodshed) Thomas retreated into
himself, unwilling, unable to acknowledge his grief. He could only
manage to tell his social worker, “I want to hurt someone. I want
to hurt someone.” It was the only way he could articulate the
pain.

We think that somehow people get hardened to
the violence, that they get accustomed to the shootings. I’ve made
that mistake myself. When I first met Lafeyette, one of the two
boys whose lives I chronicled in
There Are No Children Here,
he recounted the time a teenaged neighbor had been shot in a gang
war and stumbled into the stairwell outside his apartment. There,
the boy died. I remember that as Lafeyette recounted this moment,
he showed virtually no emotion, and I thought to myself, he didn’t
care. Over time I came to realize that the problem wasn’t that
Lafeyette didn’t have feelings, it’s that he felt too much, and the
one thing he could do to protect himself was to try to
compartmentalize his life, to push the dark stuff into a corner
where he hoped it wouldn’t haunt him.