In Chicago: Raising Children in a Battle Zone

By Elizabeth Taylor

Every school day at precisely 2:40 p.m., Diana Brooks turns to the window of her apartment in Chicago's Cabrini-Green housing project. She stares at the bleak concrete landscape between the red brick high-rises until she spots John, 12, Charles, 7, and Jermaine, 5, picking their way past the broken glass, rusty cars and trash. Only when the boys are safely inside the apartment can the 28-year-old mother relax.

The window where Diana keeps her vigil has been pierced by a bullet, and there is another bullet hole in the wall, which she covered with a cabinet and a neat display of picture postcards showing Chicago's tourist attractions. Diana and her sons and the other families of Cabrini-Green live in a cross fire between rival gangs, who have turned the project into an American version of Belfast or Beirut. Constant warfare between gangs like the Disciples, Vice-Lords or King Cobras across such notorious between-building battlefields as "the Blacktop" or "Wild End" have made Cabrini-Green one of the most dangerous places in America. Too often, the innocent bystander is gunned down in a murderous fusillade. This year alone, there have been eleven killings. During the summer, someone gets shot on the average of every other day. As one young mother puts it, "There are days when you feel it. Death is in the air."

Hunkered down in their apartments decorated like shrines, cinder-block walls adorned with pictures of children, Martin Luther King Jr. and Jesus, the mothers of Cabrini-Green feel fear every time their children go out. The other night, Diana's son Charles ran home crying in terror after missing his ride from class. When he arrived, Diana had already phoned the police. "I was crying my heart out. A child has to be home at a certain time," Diana recalled. Even before nightfall, when radio rhythms are punctuated by gunshots, children cannot play outside. A neighbor child, Angela Grant, 6, has never once frolicked in the play area by her apartment building because fighting frequently breaks out there. "She knows," says her mother, Sonja Grant, 26, "that she's never going across that battlefield."

"When it's bad out," said Kathy Ford, pregnant and holding Tramaine, 2, on her lap, "I don't go out to the store for milk. Or sometimes I grab his hand and say, 'Come on, Tramaine, walk fast.'" The regular sounds of shooting used to upset the little boy. "It was 'What those shots, Mommy?' and 'Him was killed? Who dead?'" said Kathy, a fashionably dressed 19-year-old, imitating her son. These days, though, little Tramaine has grown accustomed to the gunfire; when it begins, he ignores it. Sonja, who has childhood friends now in the gangs, cannot remember how many funerals she has attended. Still, she sighs, "when I hear shots and they're close by, I panic. But if they be far away, it's like, 'I'm tired, it's fine.' "

Those who can stay away from Cabrini-Green do so. Diana remembers calling an ambulance after Charles accidentally cut his head. It never came. She finally carried the frightened, bleeding child to the fire department, where someone took him to the hospital for stitches. The children's friends will not visit the project because they are too afraid. Sitting at her kitchen table, half watching All My Children on the TV, she answers her mobile phone. It's the Tupperware lady, pressing to come by and get $5 Diana owes her. Diana asks, "Do you know where I live?" She repeats the question to the caller and adds, finally, "Cabrini-Green." There is an obvious break in the conversation. "O.K.," says Diana, smiling a little, as if she had been through this a million times before, "I'll meet you at school." An alarmed policeman who spotted a rare white visitor walking in the project insisted that he drive her a block to her destination. "I'd rather do this now than take you out in a wagon later," the officer explained.

Since she moved into Cabrini-Green eight years ago, Diana has promised her sons that they will leave. "I keep saying to them, 'One more year.'" She vows, "My New Year's resolution is to get out." And it grows stronger every time she navigates the dangerous passage past the dope dealers and gang members in the graffiti-covered lobby, through the piles of garbage in the halls, to the sixth floor in a lurching elevator lighted by a single, dimly glowing bulb. Her son John is now at the age when many other boys in Cabrini-Green become "foot soldiers" in the gangs, which use them for killing missions because juvenile sentences are more lenient. She stays only because she cannot afford to go anywhere else.

Cabrini-Green was not always an urban version of hell. The project was originally intended as a way station for working-class families, both black and white, who were temporarily down on their luck. Since the first set of 55 row houses was built in 1943, however, the character of the urban poor has changed, and the 23 high-rises along Division Street have become permanent homes for generations of the black underclass. There are few intact families among the 15,000 residents of the project. Only about 150 husbands have their names on leases. Single mothers like Diana, whose three sons have two different fathers, shoulder the burden of bringing up their children alone, living on an annual income of about $5,000, mostly from welfare.

Any effort to recapture a sense of community seems futile amid such isolation and fear. Some mothers have determined that the safest course is to avoid their neighbors. "I don't want to know these people," Diana said. "I don't trust 'em." Six months ago, a handful of deter mined mothers in Cabrini overcame their fear of retaliation from the gangs and joined Mothers Against Gangs, a group assembled by Betty Majors, who lives near Cabrini-Green and lost her 17-year-old daughter to a stray gang bullet three years ago. She is leading the crusade to negotiate a Christmas truce, a single day without violence. So far the gangs have not agreed.

Every day the mothers of Cabrini-Green encounter silent reminders of how urgently they need this truce. At Cycle, a community center and haven for Cabrini mothers and children, a crayon drawing hangs in the hallway. It depicts a bright yellow sun shining down on two big brightly colored figures. The messages I LOVE GOD and WE ARE SPECIAL are written in a child's neat block letters. At the bottom of the picture, a little girl named Laketa wrote her name. On a hot July night last year, Laketa awaited her turn in a double-Dutch jump-rope game on the walkway of her building. Suddenly, the taunting chants of warring gangs filled the air, and gunfire broke out. A bullet pierced Laketa's chest, and she fell to the pavement. She died on the hospital operating table. Laketa was nine years old.