Post 8 - One Night In Chiraq
The red line train was speeding to its next stop, bringing me closer to my destination. Wiggling the toes of my left foot which was already soaked and freezing from the rains that rinsed the city combining with the hole in my Chuck Taylor shoe. Back to the city lights from underground to approach Cermak-Chinatown. 2 more stops.
It is around 1 in the morning, December 27th but it is still the day after Christmas to me. The Garfield Boulevard stop came and I step back in to the cold and windy city with a few other people and head out to the street. The desolation is already apparent here, and I met with looks and faces that read both “Why the fuck are you here?” and total absence or lack of care.
I cannot explain why, but these are the only types of places that I find peace. It is a dark irony because I know that in a split second I could get robbed, fucked up, or killed by a stray bullet. On this night I find myself in Chicago’s Englewood neighborhood, which is by most accounts, including numerically, the deadliest place in Chicago. This is Chiraq. In these few city blocks that make up this neighborhood, in this year alone there have been 38 homicides and another 296 people wounded by gunshots. That is a staggering total of 334 people affected by gun violence in a few square mile radius.
I know about Chiraq and I know the rap songs do not lie. I have experienced it a bit in some of my other adventures. Even still, I find a type of peace, a clarity in these types of places. My mind, heart, emotions, and being are just as wartorn and desolate as the landscape.
I exit the station among a lot of people rushing to get to the bus that waits right outside. I turn left with the crowd and I keep going passed the bus. Garfield Blvd. is a main street, full of gas stations, fast food joints and the like. Even still, it only took about 50 yards before walking passed some type of domestic squabble involving a woman and a man. One of them standing outside of the van in the rain, the other inside screaming.
Keep walking under a bridge where the Metra rail rests and I decide to cut up and off of Garfield. It is too busy. My senses go in to full alert as I wander up S. Perry Street. Not a threatened feeling but just knowing exactly where I am, and that now there are no witnesses, there is not even an illusion of safety.
Houses are either boarded up, or have been leveled all together, leaving empty lots, looking even more menacing with the barren trees reaching up and in to the crimson sky. The buzz of the high voltage wires is crisp and apparent. Walk a very long block and get to 57th Street. In the middle of all the despair, the abandonment and desolation, in the middle of all of the violence that rips this hood to pieces, leaving blood on street corners, is a huge community garden. This is beyond a garden, and more like a small farm. It is huge, and it bing there warmed my heart to the point I no longer felt the cold in my soaked left foot. It stands defiant, like so many of the people in this area, and others like it, refusing to leave, refusing to give in to whats happening around it. This is their home and they will fight for it and try to contribute to ending the turmoil, rather than abandon it. I am reminded of the motto “If not you, who? If not now, when?”
I try to get a picture of it but there is no way to get a decent one since it is dark and I have nothing to rest the camera on.
Keep walking up Perry Street, another very long block that ends at 59th, which is a somewhat busy street. Turn right and work my way, along with 2 other people slightly ahead of me, through a bunch of construction that has the sidewalk closed underneath the Metra bridge.
My hands are stiff and cold, they feel the sting of the wind and cold rain but I refuse to keep them in my pockets. Every few feet is another alley, another place for somebody to get the jump on you, and this place is full of predators. I keep my vision wandering, scanning, refusing to look down at the ground, refusing to get tunnel vision.
I am nearing the overpass to cross back over the freeways, my intent is to cross and work up to the 63rd street station. An alleyway on my right giving access to the back of many boarded up houses, an abandoned garage or gas station, a few active house ones, and some garbage filled lots. Across the street is an abandoned lot with a raised train track dissecting it. There are cars parked there, there are some people, and there is an alleyway. Traffic is stopped at the red light, including a cop.
It is 2:15 in the morning when the sound rings out. It is like a lot of those whipper snappers that we all used as kids…..Its so fast but time slows down, and I see one of the bodies in the lot across the street drop to the ground fast and hard. Another person ducks for cover behind the wheel well of a car. Taking cue I run down the alley to a nearby tree and take cover.
Gunshots. There were at least five, and by the rate of fire it was from an automatic or semi-automatic. The smell of firearm discharge catches on the wind as car horns start blaring. I have no idea where the shots came or are coming from, but I see a car with lights in the alley across the street.
The light must have turned green because traffic starts to move. The horns continue and I see a few people looking toward the cop, trying to get their attention, screaming, and the cop drives away.
This is the reality of Chiraq. It hits full force, harder than it ever did. Harder than it can ever hit just by seeing the abandoned areas, hearing the stories, and seeing the statistics. This was a crowded intersection, people around, zero warning. There was no heated exchange, no screaming, just somebody driving up and opening fire and leaving.
I cut up the alleyway, constantly looking over my shoulder to see if anything is coming up that alley, ready to cut through the houses in full sprint if I must. I make my way back to 57th street and am able to cross over the freeway. By this time flashing blue lights are seen where it went down, at least 3 cars at this point. I start cutting up another street that parallels the I-90, and get back on track trying to get to 63rd street station.
Police start showing up on the streets, cars weaving up and down the streets and alleys, looking for somebody involved, looking for the possible reciprocity killing because all too often one shooting here leads to another only minutes later and blocks away. I snap a quick picture from across the bridge of the scene that now has 2 ambulances, and 5 police cars.
Cutting up another alleyway, trying to avoid being seen by police, on top of trying to avoid anything else. I take note that my hands or feet are no longer cold even though they are completely soaked. Alleyway leads to empty streets, empty park, boarded up houses, and a corner boy on the next block. Headlights turn on to the street and I cut left at an abandoned house and up on to some train tracks. I notice one of the side doors has its plywood kicked in, no doubt somebody has been in there, or IS in there right now. The headlights turn out to be police and they have not seen me.
I snap a picture of the train tracks, and try to get one of the neighborhood before I climb back down to the street. The corner boy is gone and I continue up the street, passed the park, and turn left on 63rd street. The ambulance comes through, seemingly on its way to the hospital that can be seen the opposite way on 63rd.
This is just another night for the people that live here. The gas station has people coming in and out, there is somebody standing in the concrete island, and 200 yards away somebody lies dead on cold wet ground. It is trained reaction that when the pop is heard you hit the ground, run, or find cover.
Death can come for anybody and we have no idea when or where or how it will happen to us. Life can end in a second and witnessing this in the South side of Chicago makes that staggeringly clear. Hardened faces, a beggar, are what I fnd in the 63rd street station as I begin to process everything. The cold begins to make itself known to me again, aching my left foot.
Within 40 minutes I go from being the only white face, to a place where people really do not worry about the type of shit I just saw. Walking around this neighborhood, most people get sketched by the homeless under the bridge. I go and get a rootbeer and some snacks and begin walking back to where I am staying, stopping for a couple of minutes to talk with one of the homeless men under the bridge.
Different worlds…a world that exists that a lot of people never know. I can’t help but think about the end of the film “Boyz N Tha Hood” when Doughboy talks at the end about how he was watching TV right after his brother was killed. He mentions how the TV talks about all these foreign wars, but there was no mention of his brother, or what was happening in the hood.
It is still the same. I found out when I got back that the shooting I saw left a 29 year old male dead, and a 28 year old female wounded. 15 minutes later a 68 year old man and 34 year old woman were wounded in another hood. At 4:20am another 25 year old male was dropped in the same Englewood neighborhood where I saw what I saw.