Stateway's Garden Read online

  Mother stood, moved from the seat, past the woman and her flower earrings, and into the aisle. I looked behind us and saw people fighting for the space we once filled.

  “Coming off!” she hollered. “Coming off, please!”

  She had to squeeze and twist like the woman with the baby to get through everyone, saying “Excuse me, ma’am, excuse me, sir, excuse me, excuse me” the entire time. I waved goodbye to the driver as we descended the stairs. He nodded once. His head hadn’t gotten upright before I heard him yell with his voice-microphone, “Forty-seventh Street! Forty-seventh will be next!” Mother stood still on the corner, reached into her pocket, and pulled out her transfer ticket. It was a long and white piece of paper that you could almost see through. There were numbers printed in order across the top and center, some of which had holes punched through them. The date was along the side, in red.

  “Are we already home, Mother?”

  “Nah, we got one more bus to catch.” She folded the transfer ticket and placed it back inside her pocket.

  I must’ve fallen asleep on that next bus. Because I don’t remember anything about it nor another driver announcing express stops. What I do remember is Mother crossing the light and walking under the viaduct heading to our building. I think that’s my first true memory of our Stateway buildings and their differences from those that were west. I saw the many windows on each side. And how close together the big buildings were. All of them painted the same light brown color. And how they blocked out the sun.

  Mother clenched me with her left arm and used the right to pull out her keys. She crossed the parking lot surrounding our building and squinted when looking up. But there was no sun in her eyes. She then took a few breaths. She slowly looked down at the concrete, let out a sigh, then back at the building. Right then, I would’ve sworn she was looking directly into our apartment.

  WET PAPER GRASS

  Eventually, the journey grew to be worth everything to us, and we’d end up on 103rd and Woodlawn, at a college that spread across a set of eight to ten railroad tracks. Those tracks gave a cheap and fake rural energy to the community college that my cousin Jameel, my brother, Jacob, and me all dreamed of attending one day.

  The area by the community college was on the far South Side, and we’d turn the trip into a full day of pleasure. Being raised in Chicago’s Stateway Gardens projects exposed us to some things, quite a few different things, none of which involved peaceful car rides along the lake, A-list restaurants on Grand Avenue or Erie Street, or mile-long extensions of grass reminding us of Grant Park, which was waaaaaaay downtown. By then, we were probably too serious for that stuff anyway. Jacob and Jameel, who lived in the twelve-story building behind ours and had never met his birth mother, would assemble in either the thirteenth- or fourteenth-floor halls of our building, bright and early no matter what, mapping out a plan for our journey. We met there because those two floors actually did give the best and most predictable views of the weather, even though they weren’t the highest.

  “I’m glad we’re going somewhere that has real grass growing,” Jameel would say almost every single time we left the buildings. The reason he said that was because no matter how the rain may have flooded streets in spring, green grass was scarce in the projects. It was as invaluable to young black people as a paper bag stocked to the rim with penny candies, or better than that a seven-dollar book of food stamps, or even a Chicago Bears Starter jacket. Our buildings could be compared to a concrete-paved military zone, complete with elevated outposts. From each one, you could look from the ramp-porch and see the others. Truth is, the small samples of grass that littered the landscape we walked resembled patterns of zebra stripes. “Just look at that…it doesn’t even feel the same as real grass,” Jameel continued.

  Although his face was gentle for a thirteen-year-old—no hair anywhere—his mouth was large, teeth always hidden by dark lips protruding like he was practicing for cigars he planned to smoke one day.

  “What in the hell does real grass feel like?” Jacob asked him, speaking quickly.

  “It feels like wet paper,” Jameel replied. He then turned to me. “You ever felt wet paper?”

  I nodded and smirked at him, but was clueless about the entire thing.

  “Why would someone want to wet their paper? I mean, how stupid can one nigga be?” Jacob said with a laugh.

  “Nah, you don’t know what you talking about,” Jameel responded with a blank face. His words grew clearer. “If you get healthy soil, which is moist and bright with them li’l crystals, and twirl it around in your fingers with grass, it’ll feel like a handful of wet paper. Definitely nothing like this stuff.” He pointed to a patch.

  Jacob, whitish skin, curly hair, fluffy lashes, smacked his lips and began walking ahead of us. He never was comfortable admitting when Jameel had a point.

  In the center of our project buildings were the block-long paths of crackled concrete that no roses were going to grow from. All trees had been subtracted and the small patches of grass Jameel criticized were everywhere. He would pull some of those patches and hold them to our skin—we both were quite dark—and compare colors, which didn’t match at all.

  He held the grass to me. “See how dark this is?”

  I nodded.

  “Nothing as dark as this can be healthy. And nothing healthy can live here. It’s just not possible.”

  I tilted my head in response, making certain not to nod so he’d continue.

  “Nothing,” he repeated.

  “We’re darker than the grass, though,” I said as Jameel continued twirling it like a coin around in his fingers. I snatched a big plot of my own from the ground, holding it against my arm. “See, Jameel? Our skin don’t match grass. This grass is light brown. We both are darker.”

  “That’s the point,” he replied without expression, and began following Jacob. Both of them eventually achieved a noticeable distance from me.

  By the time we passed under the viaduct on Thirty-fifth Street, the three of us hadn’t spoken for at least fifteen minutes. It was our routine. I followed behind them anxiously, wishing that either one of them would say something.

  The journey was all worth it the moment we arrived at the community college, a school packed with black people as dark-looking as Jameel and me, and some as light as Jacob. The school was set to the side of the road and surrounded with the most attractive scenery a botany channel could deliver. The soil there was a glittery color, seemed like there actually were small and glistening crystals inside it. The first time Jameel expressed some form of emotion during the day would be when we’d see the campus.

  “Come over here, Tracy,” he said. “Come now.”

  He would sit in the field that was surrounded by a lone road, legs folded one over the other like a hippie at Woodstock, and dig his hands into the soil assertively. He looked like a young Jack Russell terrier.

  I’d sit next to him, as close as I possibly could, attempting to make my short legs match his. “This is what real soil looks like.” He said the same things to me every time we went, all while using the word soil instead of dirt. He’d point out various flowers in the field—green ones, yellows, a few with purple tints—giving them all phony names made up on the spot. Each was singled out as some wonder woman we wanted: There was a Vanity Matthews and plenty of Jayne Kennedys or Apollonia Koteros, and even a few Jody Watleys.

  Jacob would be nowhere in sight. In fact, he made certain to be as far away from our two “ugly” faces as he could. It was to his advantage. Jacob didn’t really need to fantasize about girls. ’Cause even at twelve, Jacob could pass for nineteen, and his chin resembled the perfect petal of an orchid. Girls came out of the heavy school doors at the college and assumed someone as beautiful as him was there waiting to ride the CTA bus home with them, which he was. Each time he found a new one to do just that with, telling Jameel and me a
glorious story the next morning. We expected nothing less. So Jameel sat with me in that grass, pointing and naming every attractive flower we could. We stayed there long enough most times for the sun to begin setting. Jameel would eventually lie down in the grass, unconscious of the few aluminum soda-pop cans attracting armies of ants or the empty Newport cigarette cartons students had tossed after class. A few times, I believed I caught him playing with insects or digging deeper for worms. And I was his look-alike companion, patient, along for the serenity of the scene, admiring black students at the community college and realizing that if you simply surrounded the building with a barbed-wire fence and dressed its people in orange jumpsuits, the community college would resemble Cook County Jail on Twenty-sixth Street.

  “I wish I could just live here,” he’d say while smiling and smiling. “I just wish…”

  After I’d mention my comparisons of the college to an in-city prison was when Jameel snapped from his dream, and we’d head back home to the projects. It was mostly my fault that the vacation spot was eventually ruined for us anyway.

  * * *

  THE THREE OF us went through a lot to travel that far south to the community college, and for good reason: It was our summer resort after the spring school semester; we imagined ourselves as those rich North Side white kids being sent to European cities we’d never manage to spell. For our trip we weren’t afforded first-class planes, nor were we chauffeured in fabulous carriages boasting darkened windows. We merely did what we had to for the trip, probably would’ve done much more. And our ways of traveling were unorthodox. There were those days when Jameel and Jacob stole bikes from middle-class kids parked on Martin Luther King Drive, and I’d have to hop on the handlebars, riding dangerously fast through traffic for some seventy blocks. Other mornings we stood on an eastern avenue that was close to our project buildings—Cottage Grove, Michigan, or Indiana specifically—doing our best to hitchhike as far south as possible. If we were feeling really lucky, we would wait until those afternoons when the Chicago White Sox were playing games at Comiskey. Hopefully, they were winning. The score of the game was rather important.

  Comiskey Park was ironically only a block and a half from Stateway Gardens, and when a player from the Sox hit a home run—Harold Baines, Carlton Fisk, and later Frank Thomas—they’d launch fireworks that rivaled those at Navy Pier on the Fourth of July. The noise of fireworks from the stadium was so loud that it drowned the sounds of most anything: gunshots from one gang aimed at another, babies that may have been crying, bottles breaking, or anything else. This was perfect because Jameel looked quite mature for thirteen, looked old enough to drive, and was slicker than baby-oiled worms in community-college soil. He would use the opportunity to break the closest car window in the parking lot, peel the steering wheel column’s skin to get it started, and seconds later the three of us were on our way. Those escapades were only once in a while, though. More often than not we’d simply have to do the thing that was normal to us, something probably more dangerous than all those others combined, and that was jump onto the “L.”

  Without fail, when we headed to the train platform, Jacob and Jameel began bickering like a divorced couple.

  “Come on!” Jacob said.

  “We need to go this way,” Jameel said. When he’d talk, it was hard not to notice the terrible puffiness underneath his eyes—full night of sleep or not—that made his pupils seem nonexistent. The only way you knew where he was looking was the direction he may have been facing at the time. “It’s not like we’re paying, anyway,” he continued while glaring at Jacob. “Just need to make sure we hop on at the right time.”

  Jacob replied with a simple “Whatever.”

  “We can’t just go from any side,” Jameel said. “We just can’t.” He then looked to me, probably nervous about the fact that I was only eight.

  Jacob reluctantly glanced my way as well. “He’ll be fine.”

  The “L” we used to travel south was on the lower level of Thirty-fifth Street and shoved right in the middle of the Dan Ryan Expressway. It was a divider cutting traffic in half. On each side of the train platform was a three-lane highway, with cars heading in both directions at roughly seventy to eighty miles an hour. There was a grassless knoll near the curb, with dirt matching that of Stateway’s Garden, and it was protected by a ten-foot fence. This headed down to the platform where the train arrived. None of us had any money—most times, there was probably no more than three dollars between us, ninety-five percent of which was owned by Jacob. He wasn’t about sharing.

  Jameel would head to the fence first, which began on the south end of La Salle Street. He was the oldest, tallest, and most athletic, and definitely capable of setting the best example. He climbed the fence with ease, jumping the ten or so feet to the ground without as much as a grunt. Jacob urged me to follow, but the nervousness I felt each and every time we went stiffened my legs. Jacob then followed Jameel, who by that time was at the landing of the knoll, staring back at us and taking glances every so often at the passing traffic on the highway.

  Each time we did this I hoped that the holes of the fence had widened, spreading spaciously enough that my mouselike body could easily pass through. When I climbed the fence, I’d grip it as though I feared being shot by a military sniper from the projects’ outposts. I slowly gripped each link and tightly attached them to the inside of my hand. It always left marks. Jacob and Jameel, opposites in everything except height, stood there waiting impatiently. Jacob would even be tapping his leg to some rhythm. I’d eventually use the middle area of my crotch for balance along the fence. Obviously this was painful, but I wouldn’t allow my hands to release. After so much time, Jacob would begin huffing loudly; he’d beg me to go another route or, better yet, to not come at all. He grew so annoyed that he’d even offer to use his money to pay my fare. That was when I’d drop down toward them like a brick from an eleventh-floor window, breathing uncontrollably and staring at speeding cars along the highway.

  “Stand here,” Jameel would say while directing. His lips barely moved when he talked. “I mean it, Tracy. Stand here.” His hand pressed into my chest with enough force to move me back to the other side of the fence. Jameel then faced the other direction, looking at oncoming traffic. He could calculate like a Macintosh computer, and would use his brain to analyze traffic far down the expressway, figuring the map and a path we’d travel to get closer to the “L” platform. “Guys, pay attention.” Each moment Jameel spoke I begged to see his teeth, or to maybe witness his mouth truly moving, some form of human expression along that face that resembled mine. He manually adjusted his eyesight, using his first finger and thumb to squeeze his eyelids together. He was focused on nothing but estimating the angles and timing of cars on the highway. “We’re gonna dodge this black Toyota with coffee stains on its carpet first. Then there’ll be a gap. We’ll wait there on the second highway line for nine seconds, then cross after the blue Chevy missing three lug nuts on the back tire. Four more seconds. Once we get to the last highway line, a maroon Ford pickup with a refrigerator tied in its cab will pass. Three seconds between. Right from there we’ll break out to the wall where the tracks are. We gotta run because I think I see this grayish sports car farther down. He’s coming fast.”

  Jacob readied himself after Jameel spoke, rolling his eyes and tightening his shoelaces. Knowing him, he wished there was something to add that would make Jameel’s strategy appear flawed. But he pulled up his pants, tucked the bottom cuffs into his socks, and began kneeling.

  “Come on, Tracy,” Jameel stated firmly. He grabbed my hand as tight as I’d held the fence, probably stopping quite a bit of blood circulation from fingers to forearm. “You gotta move right with me,” he said. “We can’t make mistakes.”

  “Okay,” I replied with a nod. But when I looked to the right, where Jacob had been a few moments previous, he was gone. He’d already left us, forming his own an
ti-Jameel route to the other side, and was standing next to the train track’s wall, laughing and pointing at us.

  Jameel pulled me through those cars like a Thoroughbred horse bound to a plow wagon. We executed his plan with precision: the black Toyota, then the blue Chevy, the maroon pickup with the falling fridge, and I couldn’t help but appreciate the glow of that grayish sports car we missed, seeing its abnormal white stripes bright in the sun. We finally made it to the wall, where only a chalk-resembling line separated us from cars that honked wildly.

  “You okay?” Jameel asked.

  “Yeah,” I replied. I doubt he could hear me over Jacob’s laughter and definitely not over the sounds of Dan Ryan Expressway traffic.

  The space from the thick white highway line and the traffic was no more than twelve inches, not nearly enough for teenaged feet to fit, but we had to stand there and flatten ourselves against it. It was all concrete, probably five feet in height. This was what shielded us from the most dangerous portion of the journey. Because honestly, we never thought much about the ten-foot fence on La Salle, or its subsequent grassless knoll that could have tumbled you into traffic like an avalanche; there was little concern for the eighty-mile-an-hour cars and trucks with fridges that may fall off and gray sports cars with white stripes passing one another on the Ryan. It sure enough would have been worth a million points in a video game for one of those drivers to hit three black youngsters from the projects crossing illegally.

  What we dreaded most was the third rail, located on the other side of the short wall. “L” tracks are set up in parallel couples, with the outer railing being a bit higher. However, the third rail of four was what conducted the electrical power for the train. Had to be avoided. We needed to climb the five-foot wall and land directly in the middle of the tracks.

  Jacob and Jameel achieved things like this effortlessly. Jameel was the best, scaling the wall like a caterpillar on a leaf, hands harboring a hidden suction. He would jump to the gravel and rocks in the middle of the tracks, landing and standing with arms outstretched like a gymnast finishing a routine. He was nothing less than the Secret Service during a presidential emergency. I barely saw him on the other side. But I heard his voice clearly across the wall as he urged me to make my move.