America Behind the Color Line

by Henry Louis Gates

  We used to have regular meetings of the Gangster Disciples and talk about what was going on in the streets. Guys used to say they heard that the cops could get extra vacation time or bonuses if they picked up a gun from a gang member. I guess it was true, because sometimes when the cops arrested us, they would try pretty hard to get a gun from us. They’d say, if you turn in a gun, we won’t press charges for drugs.

  One time I was charged with battery when the mother of a young man I was fighting with slipped and fell while she was trying to pull me off him. There were other charges for battery, and I was charged with damaging property and defacing a firearm—scratching off the serial number.

  Lots of the guys smoked weed and drank when they got through for the day. I only smoked weed two or three times. I didn’t want to have my mind affected that way. I needed to have my mind right and know my surroundings and know what was going on all the time. I didn’t drink vodka or beer or gin. I saw people who were smoking and drinking, and I didn’t want to be like them. I figured if I was addicted to alcohol and intoxicated and doing silly things, I’d be no different from the person I was selling to.

  I became somewhat of a man roughly around my fifteenth birthday. I was given a set of my own down the street from the set where I’d been working. My brothers and I had guys working for us now. Instead of my brothers and me collecting $50, the guys were taking the $50 and bringing us $200. It was good money.

  About a month down the line, we got into a confrontation with our own gang members. We started getting shot at a lot within the Gangster Disciples. I guess it was all the jealousy. A lot of the guys didn’t want to see my brothers and me make that type of money. A lot of them wanted to take over the whole area, so they started calling us renegades because we would not participate in some of the meetings or pay our dues. If you were on a set, you had to pay $200 a week dues, sometimes more. Sometimes it was $1,000 a week, for commission and for owning the set in the Gangster Disciples—sort of like rent.

  One of my brothers and I were still living with my mom at home, but my oldest brother moved out and got his own place. During this time, a member of the Gangster Disciples gave me some bad stuff. He fronted me some cocaine, and we were supposed to sell it and give him the money back off the sale. It was real cocaine, but they’d mixed embalming fluid or roach spray or something with it to destroy the business we had so the customers wouldn’t come back to us.

  As a result, we had a set but no customers. We went to Evanston because my cousin had a drug house up there. There were about ten of us, my brother and me and about eight of my cousins. When you keep the drugs within the house, it’s called a drug house. The customers came to the crack house and paid for the drugs. You could say I was commuting to work. I was taking the train with the drugs from Chicago to my cousin’s house in Evanston. I figured I wasn’t going to get caught on the train because there were not going to be any police officers on the train; but if I took the car, they might stop me because of the profile I already had.

  There’s a big difference between the guys who sell drugs to people on the street and the people who provide the drugs to sell. The guy who sells the drugs to the customer on the street is the one who is constantly out there working. The guy who is supplying the drugs to the guys on the street is the middleman between them and the big-time drug dealers. He’s the guy who has the set. The drug dealers are the ones who are moving weight—a kilo of cocaine, a half ounce of cocaine, quarter ounces of cocaine.

  If the guy who had the set bought a half ounce of cocaine for $500 or $600, he would divvy up the cocaine into smaller pieces to give to his workers. So he’d probably double his money. I knew the guys who were moving weight. There was always a third party who would help you get to that person, because that person wanted to make sure that the people contacting him weren’t police. You didn’t want to buy bad stuff either, so that drug dealer had to have a good reputation. If he was in the neighborhood, he was very low key. He didn’t want competition from you. If you had good stuff too, you’d be competition for his customers. Nobody ever trusted anyone else. In the beginning I was one of the guys selling drugs on the street, and then I moved up to owning a spot. I wasn’t thinking about the dangers much—I was very young, and the money outweighed the fear. I never reached the position of big-time drug dealer.

  My cousin in Evanston did. By the time I was sixteen years old, we were making about $10,000 a week from the crack house in Evanston, between the ten of us. Sometimes I’d go home with $1,000 a day. I started buying clothes and spending money on girls and more expensive cars. I helped my family with the rent and continued buying drugs to sell. I had a savings account I had started when I was in the eighth grade. I figured if I put some money in the savings account, it would be safe. But I couldn’t put lots of money in the account because if it grew too much, the bank would begin to notice, since I had no job. So I kept some of my money under the carpet in my room at home, but that turned out to be a bad decision. Someone broke into the house and took all the money.

  The house in Evanston got raided, and three of my cousins went to jail. My brother and I happened not to be there that day. The police shut down the house, which belonged to my aunt.

  I was still living in Chicago. I guess I wasn’t looking for a way to sell more drugs during this time, because I started thinking I was going to wind up getting shot or going to jail. I had bought a couple of guns, and I put them in my house. We had to move over to the hill, to the West Side. I was going to Dunbar High School. At some point, my brother who was still in the Gangster Disciples went to work for another guy, who had a different set where my brother thought he could make more money.

  One day as I was on my way home from school, I saw some people and didn’t know they were detectives. I was standing under the El, and the under-cover grabbed me. He said they’d been watching me. I asked how they had been watching me, since I had just left school. He said they knew four guys were under the El selling drugs and that someone had called and said I fit the profile. The guy they grabbed with me had a gun on him. He was twenty-seven or twenty-eight years old. The police wanted to pin the gun on me, so they said it was my gun. I was charged with possession of a loaded .40-caliber Glock blue steel semiautomatic handgun with nine live rounds.

  I don’t know what happened to the guy with the gun, because I was in juvenile court and they didn’t mention anything about him in my court papers. Maybe it was a setup of some type, but I ended up being charged with another UUW. So I went to court and met Judge Kelly, who placed me on a year’s probation and home confinement.

  Judge Kelly is a wonderful woman who happens to be Caucasian. She could have sent me up to the detention center and held me until my court date, but she gave me a chance. She said I was going to Pretrial Service, a program designed to prevent youth from picking up new cases. It’s a round-the-clock service run by WACA—the Westside Association for Community Action. If I had any problem, I could contact my counselor, James. This guy was also wonderful. He came to my home. He didn’t demand anything from me. He valued my ideas. He took me places—Colorado, Boston, Pennsylvania, Niagara Falls—just showing me a different way of life. He happened to be African American.

  At first, I was rebellious. I did not like someone coming into my house and telling me what to do. I’d been doing everything on my own. I was the man. But I respected James. In school and on the streets, people talk at you and don’t listen to what you have to say. James was willing to listen to me and help me out in any way possible. He helped me get back in school and get my GED. He helped me enroll in college. I went to Malcolm X College, and then I transferred to Richard J. Daley College and completed my two-year degree before moving on to Governors State.

  It was hard to change my way of life and turn away from selling drugs. It was hard cutting off friends I had grown up with and known for years. But I didn’t travel back to the South Side and visit them. They’re the ones who came from the South Side to the West
Side to visit me. They tried to apply peer pressure and persuade me to sell drugs and hang out. But somehow my mind was made up. I didn’t want to die. I wanted to be able to take care of my family. These are the types of issues we started talking about at the Pretrial Service Program—counselors like James, Vern, Jimmy Alexander, and Ernie, who founded WACA and is now its CEO, and the program’s clients, like me. I had never had a positive environment to grow in before, or positive role models like these guys. I was mostly around guys who drank, smoked, and stood on the corner doing nothing all day. I saw something different in the guys at Pretrial Service that made me say, well, maybe I can change. Maybe I can become a normal human being and get a job. All because Judge Kelly sentenced me to the program and gave me a second chance.

  It didn’t take right away. The counselors had to work on me because, like most young men, I wouldn’t accept what they had to say. I thought I knew it all. I thought I had the world at my feet. But they were willing to assist me— to educate me on what was going on in the neighborhood and in society in general. They talked to me about the things that went along with a life selling drugs. People who sell drugs on the street think they’re going to retire on the drug money. But most of them don’t. They get killed or go to jail or the police take the money away. The government can come in and confiscate your car and your home. You’re always looking over your shoulder. You’re always exposed to the dangers that go with a life of drugs, drinking, sex, and violence.

  It took almost a year and a half for the program to work—for me to turn my life around. I didn’t backslide even once. Something buried within me had helped me survive and kept me going. Once I arrived at the Pretrial Service Program, over time I found a meaning to my life. I had proven I had leadership skills and the drive to be successful when I was selling drugs. In the program, I could apply my strengths to something that would make a difference.

  Ernie gave me a job. He had me working as a peer counselor for the Evening Reporting Center from four o’clock to eight. I went there directly from school, which kept me out of trouble. I knew I had to be there if I wanted to keep the job. And I had decided I wanted to keep the job. It was a legal way of making money, and I thought the police would stop harassing me. But they still harassed me because of my background as a juvenile. Some of the police knew me. I still hung out in the streets and on the corner. I wasn’t doing anything wrong, but they seemed to think I was doing the things I used to do. They would put me up against the wall and have me get out of my shoes, and then they would take out the soles of my shoes, empty my pockets, pull down my pants, and check whether I was carrying drugs in my pants. It was degrading.

  I wasn’t making much money as a peer counselor, but I figured, how was I going to spend the money anyway if I was dead or in jail from selling drugs? If I’m not here, I thought, how am I going to take care of my mother and my sister? Working as a peer counselor was a different way that I could provide for my family. It took some time for me to grasp that.

  In 1996, Ernie told me I could take his daughter to the Thirty-sixth Annual Debutante Cotillion in May, sponsored by the Chicago chapter of Links. There were months of preparation, learning the dance steps, learning where to put the forks and knives on the table at a black-tie ball. The guys I met in the practice sessions were nothing like me. I had just gotten my GED. They were more prestigious. Some were graduating from high school and entering college; others were already attending big-name schools. They had it all. I didn’t feel nervous when I met them. I figured that I had been on the street and didn’t need their approval. I figured I probably wouldn’t be socializing with them anyway.

  I had gotten a haircut the night before the cotillion, and the guy who designed my hair didn’t make a gang design; it was just a nice design. Still, the coordinator of the cotillion said I couldn’t wear that haircut. I guess she thought it was too street—too ghetto. Well, I was going to refuse to dance. I wasn’t going to participate. The coordinator was saying I could participate only if I hid my hair or got the design cut out of it. So I was like, all right, I’m not going to participate. What happened was the guys I had practiced with for months before the cotillion came together and said, if Jason’s not going to dance, we’re not going to dance either. I went and shaved the design into my hair so it wouldn’t be as visible, and I participated in the dance.

  At the Evening Reporting Center, I moved from peer counselor to a position as counselor and then became the program director. Counselors at the center work hard to keep the kids busy with educational and recreational activities and with life and skills development workshops. They take the kids out to museums and to bowling and basketball games—activities they probably wouldn’t do if they were still in the community selling drugs, because they’d be too busy trying to make that money. They probably wouldn’t do these things at home either, because most of their parents are busy working or hanging out, not spending quality time with their kids. We enjoyed sitting down like family with the kids and discussing what was going on in their lives and in the world.

  We had about twenty-five youths at the center daily when I was program director there. Sometimes it went to thirty. I can remember one winter we had thirty-five kids in the program in one day. Kids enter the program between the ages of ten and eighteen. The counselors try to get the kids to see that the behavior they’re displaying is not working; it’s not going to get them far. They try to put it out there so the kids can see for themselves where it might lead if they continue down that path.

  The kids want to come back. They come back on their own. They go in front of the judge and say they like the program, and after they leave it, some of them stop in and say hi. They feel that the staff members and the kids at the program are their family, their gang. Out there on the streets, they feel they have to take care of their family. In the program, they can be themselves— young people—and not take on that burden. The program has a 91 percent success rate. About 9 percent of the kids don’t finish the program. Some of them just drop out; some of them pick up a case.

  When I was at the center, we were spending roughly four hours a day with these young people. We got to know them on a personal level. The kids are there every day, four o’clock to eight, Monday through Friday. During the weekend they’re on home confinement, with no band around their leg. On some weekends, we picked them up on our own time and took them to the mall, just to see how they were doing. The home confinement officers go out and check up on them. If we could have operated a seven-day-a-week, round-the-clock program, we probably would have.

  I try to use myself as an example in any job I have working with kids in trouble. I compare myself with some of those that kept on that path. I explain that when I was a little younger, I looked up to the guys who had all the fancy cars and all the jewelry and all the women, and now I look at them and they’re on the corner drinking at age forty and broke and on drugs. Or they’re in jail or the grave. I try to explain what really goes on out there. I explain that if Judge Kelly hadn’t sentenced me to the Pretrial Service Program, I probably wouldn’t have lasted another ten years.

  Maybe the biggest reason why kids need the Pretrial Service Program is they don’t have that family structure. When I was a kid, I was willing to risk my life because I was told by many people in the neighborhood that I would not survive. I was told by teachers that I would not become anything in life. I had my mom, but she wasn’t always there. I probably would have been proud to have her spend more quality time with me. I wanted to have nice clothes and the jewelry and cars, but I think I missed that quality time more. It’s that family structure, it’s love, that’s missing out there now, in our neighborhoods and in society in general.

  The hardest thing for the kids in the Pretrial Service Program to believe is that they could get a great education. They feel that a lot of the teachers in the school are not educating them right. They feel like some of the teachers don’t care. I tell them that sometimes you have to pick up a book yours
elf and educate yourself. Many of these kids are functionally illiterate. The counselors hold educational sessions on Tuesday. They try to help tutor the kids. They set aside an hour each day for the kids to do their homework. Sometimes the counselors travel to the schools and make sure the kids bring their homework with them to the program.

  When the kids leave Pretrial Service at twenty-one or thirty days, they move on to a different program. Those who are committed to the process can have a rewarding life. We’ve had some young people come back and say, I’ve graduated from high school and now I’m going to college. Without this program, we couldn’t have made it, they say. We couldn’t wait any longer; we had no more time.

  I left my job as program director of the Evening Reporting Center to take care of my mother when she got sick. When she recovered, I applied for the position of probation officer with the Cook County Juvenile Justice and Child Protection Division and got the job. Being a probation officer means the world to me. It allows me, as a professional, to demonstrate to others the importance of believing in our children. It allows me to help others better understand the potential of the minors who become involved in the juvenile justice system. I’m in a position to demonstrate what these youth can do when they receive support to develop their talents and succeed.