An American Summer

by Alex Kotlowitz

  On this summer evening Ramaine pedals toward his apartment, invigorated by a late-night summer breeze, his body dancing to the lively beat of Lil Wayne. Ramaine lives with his aunt and older sister and younger brother. As he arrives at the row of townhomes with its manicured midway, a van screeches to a stop in front of him. The side door slides open and a man jumps out. He has a gun. He demands that Ramaine get into the van, but Ramaine, who is strong and agile, throws down the bike and sprints for his home, fifty feet away. As he pounds on the front door, pleading to be let in, he turns and sees the van pull a U-turn before taking off. He recognized the man who accosted him. He knows what he wanted. He knows they’ll try again. Standing in his apartment’s vestibule, trying to catch his breath, shaking, he tells his aunt, Joyce, They’re after me. They’re after me. Joyce doesn’t know what or who he is talking about.

  * * *

  —

  In Chicago, the vast majority of murders and shootings go unsolved. Murder someone, and chances are only one in four that you’ll get caught. Shoot someone and injure them, it’s only a one in ten possibility that you’ll get charged. That’s not a misprint. You have an awfully good chance of shooting someone in the city and getting away with it. The police will tell you that much of the reason for the low closure rates is that a street culture discourages cooperation with law enforcement. Which makes the story of Ramaine somewhat remarkable—and challenges the conventional wisdom that when people refuse to assist the police they’re acting out of defiance. It’s more often than not an act of self-preservation.

  Ramaine Hill and his two siblings lived with their aunt in a newly constructed townhome in a neighborhood called Old Town, just north of the city’s downtown. The family has been witness to and a part of an astonishing transformation in recent years. Until recently the neighborhood had been the site of the infamous Cabrini-Green public housing complex, a medley of drab-looking concrete high-rises and row houses, a place which served as a marker for the city’s brutal history—as well as the city’s legacy of gross neglect of those most in need.

  The litany of violence at Cabrini unnerved the city. It threw the city off-balance. In July of 1970, a sniper in a sixth-floor apartment shot and killed two police officers walking across a baseball field. In 1981, on the heels of a two-month period during which eleven people were murdered and another thirty-seven wounded by gunfire, Mayor Jane Byrne, angered by the shootings, moved into an apartment in Cabrini for three weeks. It was a move that highlighted the isolation of Cabrini; it sat barely eight blocks from Byrne’s posh Gold Coast apartment, and yet she required an around-the-clock full security detail. In October of 1992, seven-year-old Dantrell Davis, while holding his mother’s hand on the way to school, was shot and killed by a stray bullet from a sniper on the tenth floor of one building who was aiming for rival gang members. That same year, the horror film Candyman was released. It was set at Cabrini, and the film’s director, Bernard Rose, said he chose the location “because it was a place of such palpable fear.” Cabrini became a symbol of life run amok among the poor, but what few talked about or acknowledged was the abandonment—mistreatment, really—of the most vulnerable by the city and federal authorities. Conditions were appalling: frequent flooding, elevators that didn’t work, caged terraces. Cabrini, which sat just a mile from downtown, served as a demarcation between us and them. It almost felt like an internment camp for blacks set amid the white neighborhoods surrounding it.

  Ramaine spent his early years in a fifth-floor apartment in Cabrini with his aunt, who had already raised five children of her own. She had taken custody of her two nephews and niece when they were quite young because their mother had become addicted to heroin. Sometimes the children wondered if the violence had led to their mother’s dependence on drugs. When their mother was fourteen, she and a friend were walking across a vacant field when gunfire erupted. Their mom ran, got shot in the eye, and when she looked back realized her friend had been killed. Rakeisha, Ramaine’s sister, told me that sometimes her mother would say to her, I just want to be with my friend.

  In 1999 the city announced a plan to raze all of its eighty-two public housing high-rises. They housed 200,000 people, equivalent to a city the size of Des Moines, Iowa. One longtime housing advocate, referring to the scope of the plan, told me, “It takes your breath away.” Ever since I set foot in public housing thirty years ago, I believed these buildings should be torn down. They served as a bulwark to segregation; they were built on the edge of existing black ghettoes because white politicians didn’t want them built in their neighborhoods. They were constructed on the cheap and then ruled for nineteen years by Charlie Swibel, the head of the Chicago Housing Authority, who used them as a patronage fiefdom and whose neglect bordered on the criminal.

  The Plan for Transformation, as it came to be called, was a bold, if not flawed effort. Much of public housing, especially Cabrini-Green, sat on valuable real estate, so the idea was to invite private developers to build on these sites if they would set aside units for former public housing residents. The idea was that you’d have people from different economic strata mixing (though the city steered clear of using this moment to reverse decades of racial segregation). On the Cabrini site, you’d have the very rich living next to the very poor. At one point the Chicago Tribune reported that many former Cabrini families didn’t want to move back into these mixed-income developments because they feared that if anything happened, if anything went wrong, they’d get blamed. But Joyce relished the opportunity. In 2003 she and the three kids moved into a three-story, three-bedroom townhome, one in a row of eight. Three families in her section were former Cabrini residents. The rest were mostly professionals. Their neighbor, a single woman whom they became close to, was a social worker. The neighborhood felt so safe, Joyce and the kids didn’t even lock their front door. “I thought we had it made,” Joyce told me.

  Three years ago, on the evening of August 13, 2010, a Friday night, Ramaine, who was nineteen at the time, met Kaprice in front of Wayman AME Church, a 124-year-old red-brick structure which resembles an apartment building more than it does a place of worship. Ramaine and Kaprice had met in third grade. “He was quiet,” Kaprice told me. “He was to himself. In order to see the real him, you had to get to know him. He was quiet as a church mouse.” On this particular night they met a friend of theirs by the church and helped him clean up the mess in his car, a four-door white Buick Regal, so there would be room for all of them. They were planning to drive to a party nearby. Ramaine was leaning into the backseat, clearing it out, when a boy rode by on a bicycle, pedaling so fast his hoodie flew off. The boy had a pistol and started shooting, his apparent intended target the young man who owned the car, Ramaine and Kaprice’s friend. The boy shot six times and then sped away. Ramaine felt a burning sensation in his back, so he stood, and then hobbled into the driver’s seat. “I’m shot,” he told Kaprice. He could be a prankster, and so Kaprice thought he was joking until he leaned forward and she lifted his bloodstained white T-shirt. She saw the bullet lodged in his back, inches from his spine. Ramaine insisted on getting out of the car, tried to stand, and then leaned against the hood, bending over for support. There, Kaprice and her mother, who had arrived on the scene after hearing the shots, told him not to move. Ramaine could hear people talking, saying that the bullet was in a dangerous location, and he started to shake from fright. Kaprice’s mom tried to calm him, rubbing his shoulders. She asked if he knew who had shot him. Ramaine replied, “Pinkie.” When the police arrived, Ramaine gave them the same name, as well as a physical description. The police knew right away who he was talking about, a fifteen-year-old boy named Deantonio Agee who belonged to a local gang, a remnant from the projects.

  It’s one thing to identify someone who shoots you. It’s another thing to then be willing to press charges and to testify. It doesn’t happen often. The state’s attorney charged Agee with attempted murder, and because of the seve
rity of the offense, Agee’s case was transferred to adult court. Before the trial Agee’s defense attorney, Nathaniel Niesen, stopped by Ramaine’s home, hoping to talk with him, to find out what he knew, to discover what kind of witness he would be. Niesen knew it was a long shot. Most of the time witnesses would turn him away, angry and scared. And he knew Ramaine still had the bullet lodged in his back, a daily reminder of his encounter. But Ramaine invited Niesen in, and along with his aunt, Joyce, they sat down at the kitchen table, where Ramaine, unflustered and undeterred, recounted the shooting while Niesen took notes. His aunt was surprised, mostly because Ramaine so assiduously avoided talking with strangers. “I was struck by the fact that he was so forthcoming,” Niesen recalled. “He seemed just very calm and Zen about the whole thing.” Ramaine appeared so certain about what had transpired that night and so straightforward that Niesen thought his client, Agee, would never survive a trial with Ramaine as the key witness. A judge or a jury, he had no doubt, would completely trust Ramaine—and convict Agee, who faced a minimum of thirty years. At that point, sitting at the kitchen table, listening to Ramaine recount the evening, Niesen knew that he would urge Agee to seek a plea deal. It was, he thought, really the only option.

  On July 6, 2012, Agee entered a plea of guilty in exchange for lesser charges: aggravated battery with a firearm. The judge sentenced him to fifteen years. That’s when everything changed. For Ramaine. First there were the phone calls, a voice on the other end telling Ramaine he needed to tell the court that he had been wrong, that he couldn’t in fact identify his shooter. As time went on, the calls got more heated. You snitchin’, Ramaine was told. On another occasion, We’re gonna get you. One afternoon, walking to Jewel, a local grocery store, where he worked in the meat department, two men stopped him and offered him $5,000 to recant. Then, a few weeks later, when he was strolling with Kaprice, a man approached them and told Kaprice he needed to speak with Ramaine by himself. She didn’t stand down. Whatever you got to say to Ramaine, you can say to the both of us, she told him. So the man told Ramaine, Pinkie’s my nephew. I heard about what happened to you. So how much money you want? He wanted Ramaine to agree to tell the police he couldn’t in fact identify the boy who had shot him. Ramaine looked away. I don’t want no money, he muttered. I ain’t going to court. I just want you to leave me alone.

  Ramaine never told his aunt about the threats, only his brother and sister. One time two young men jumped out of a passing car, one with a gun. Pop his ass, the other instructed as Ramaine ran, taking cover in the shadow of a local elementary school. Kaprice tried to get him to stop listening to music as he walked through the neighborhood. She worried that he wouldn’t hear anyone approaching. But he insisted, and she said that after the kidnapping attempt he walked with his head dropped, like he didn’t care anymore. “It messed with his mind,” she told me. But Ramaine, who could be stubborn, went about his life, walking to and from his job. He continued to don his earbuds, drowning out everything around him. He refused to go to the police. Nijujuan, his younger brother (by a year), said he felt too humiliated, too embarrassed. Plus he worried that going to the police would only escalate things. Maybe, too, he also felt reasonably safe, because with each week the neighborhood seemed to grow whiter and more prosperous, a more and more unlikely place for a street assault. Also, it had now been a year since Agee got sentenced. At some point, Ramaine figured, Agee’s friends would move on.

  And so Ramaine, who kept to himself anyway, went about his life, mostly staying inside except when he walked to and from work or visited Kaprice, with whom he had started bickering a lot. It was, all in all, a reasonably good summer. Ramaine especially took pleasure in hanging out with his son. He so wanted him to start walking, and one afternoon Nijujuan had an idea. He got two oversized remote-control cars their aunt had given them years ago, and in Ramaine’s downstairs bedroom he placed RJ against one of the cars, letting him use it as kind of a crutch. He tottered and then let go. Nijujuan burst out laughing, boasting to Ramaine that he, not his dad, had taught RJ to walk. Nijujuan spent much of the summer with Ramaine, and since Nijujuan was at school, at Trinity Christian College, Ramaine, who was working, would treat him to meals at Subway or Mr. Gyro’s. Ramaine slowly began to seem like his old self, but Nijujuan and his sister worried about him. Ramaine wouldn’t talk about it, but Nijujuan says, “He may not have showed it, but he was scared. I could see it in his eyes.”

  Chapter 8

  The (Annotated) Eulogy

  JULY 4…JULY 5…JULY 6…

  The funeral was held on the far South Side at Shiloh Missionary Baptist Church, but it was arranged by Leak and Sons Funeral Home, one of the oldest and busiest African-American-owned funeral homes in the city. Mr. Leak estimated that already this year he had performed over forty services for victims of violence.

  At the service, the women wore white dresses, the men white suits or white T-shirts with a photo of the deceased, Robert Douglas, who was thirty-one and had been shot and killed in his car nine days earlier. Robert, too, lying in the powder-blue casket, was dressed in a white suit and a white Kangol cap.

  My name is Erin, for those of you who don’t know me.

  Erin Wells is dressed in a sleeveless, form-fitting white dress, and because she is short, a deacon of the church comes to lower the microphone at the lectern. Erin, the daughter of a white man and a black woman, is light-skinned, with high cheekbones and knowing eyes. She and Robert have five children together, three girls and two boys. They first met in grade school; Robert was on a tumbling team with Erin’s older brother. When Robert was a freshman in high school and Erin in eighth grade, they ran into each other at a dance. There, Robert declared, You’re going to be my girlfriend. They started dating a few months later.

  The church is packed, standing room only, so many that a gaggle of men stand outside the sanctuary, peering in through the doorway. A police officer in a Kevlar vest stands in the rear as well. Erin looks around and realizes she doesn’t know everyone. Not even close. Robert had a life separate from hers, and that was part of what came between them. With one hand on her hip and the other on the podium, she seems remarkably composed. This is her goodbye, and she is brutally honest about her battle for Robert—which she ultimately lost.

  I’ve known Robert for almost twenty years now—fifteen of which we were together, back and forth, like a roller-coaster ride. And we weren’t together at the moment because the streets had come between me and Robert. But that did not stop Robert from seeing me constantly and seeing his kids constantly. And they say that if you love something you should let it go and if it comes back then it’s yours. And I truly know what people mean by that because even though Robert and I were not together, we were with each other every day.

  Robert and Erin were very much a couple through high school and in the years after. Erin went to college, briefly, before taking a job at JPMorgan Chase, working her way up to her position as a personal banker. Robert, according to Erin, aspired to be a rap artist, though to make money he apparently sold cocaine. He went by the name Rob Dob, and some of his music still lives on YouTube. During one period when the two were apart, Erin had a set of twins by another man. Then she had five children, all with Robert. He could be a very attentive father. He’d come by Erin’s apartment and play Monopoly or Uno with the children, or watch television with them snuggled on the couch, or take them out for a meal. “He truly had a big heart,” she told me, “but then he had to be all tough outside. I’d say to him, Why do you feel like everyone got to be afraid of you? She knew she was in a tug-of-war with the streets when one late night Robert showed up at her apartment with his arm bleeding, a hole in his sleeve. What the hell is going on? Erin demanded. We got into a shootout, Robert explained. She looked out the window and couldn’t find their van. Where the hell is your car?

  The police got it, Robert replied sheepishly.

  Who were you in a shootout with?


  Robert paused.

  Robert!

  The police.

  And you brought your dumb ass to my house, with your kids here. If the police kick in my door, I swear, you get the fuck out, ’cause I’m gonna tell them everything.

  Robert told Erin that after he’d been shot he ditched the van and had a relative call the police to tell them that she’d just been robbed and that the van had been stolen. A short while later, Robert left to visit his cousin, who was a medical assistant and who sewed up his wound so he could avoid going to the emergency room, where his injury would undoubtedly be reported to the police.

  Erin was under no illusions. Their relationship seemed to be as unpredictable as the weather, sun mixed with clouds. She told stories with a playfulness, marveling at Robert’s persistence and mischievousness.