I had a couple fights in my life, but I
didn’t do it for fun; I did it because I had to. I don’t like
fighting. I cry every time, every time I fight. I cry every time I
fight. Even if I do win, I still cry. I don’t know why. I get
sensitive when that goes on. Maybe ‘cause I’m scared because all
through your life you’re gonna have to fight people, no matter if
it’s over something major or something stupid, because people feel
like they gotta prove themselves all the time. That pride comes
before anything. I hate that. If you gotta prove yourself by
fighting, then there’s something wrong with you mentally. Really
there is.
Recently I broke up a fight at my school
between these two girls. I think they were juniors, and the problem
wasn’t between them. It was their two older sisters’ brawls, and
they brought the garbage to the school. They actually fought each
other just because their big sisters told them to. Like, one sister
probably said, “If you don’t beat her butt, I’m beating your butt.”
It’s crazy.
It was the quietest fight I ever seen. My
locker is there, and I walked right into the fight. I’m so serious.
I walked right into it. I didn’t even know they were gonna fight
‘cause I was switching classes, and people were just walking
through the halls. Then it got real quiet. You know how everybody
talks, and out of nowhere it just gets quiet for that two seconds?
That’s how it was. One girl was standing here, and the other one
was right here. They were just staring at each other. All you heard
was one girl say, “I’m finna zone-six this bitch”—basically beat
her up. Then she just ran up and started hitting the other girl.
They were fighting for like three minutes. People’s hair got pulled
out and everything. Everybody was shouting, “Beat that bitch ass!”
Just everybody saying little stuff. That’s all it takes to get loud
in our school. They pull out their cameras. They be so thirsty to
put it on Facebook and YouTube.
The thing is, they were fighting right in
front of the counselor’s office. That’s an automatic three-day
suspension. Why would you fight in front of the counselor’s office?
Crazy. And in the end, when one of the girls’ mothers came up to
the school, she didn’t even say nothing. All she asked the girl
was, “Did you win?” That’s all she asked her. Wow, your mother
condones you fighting, too?
I actually saw my mother fight once. I was
real
young, like 6 or 7. It was summertime, day, and my mama
was coming to pick me up from my dad’s house. My daddy’s girlfriend
was there with me. Truthfully, I loved my daddy’s girlfriend as
much as I loved my mother. I know it was wrong maybe because, I
don’t know, it seemed wrong to my mother. But I was young, and both
of them cared for me and showed me love or whatever. Actually,
there was one point where I thought both of them was my mama. I’m
so serious. When I was young, I used to call both of them mama. But
they didn’t get along at all. At all!
So when my mama got there, she and my daddy’s
girlfriend started arguing. I don’t know what the argument was
about, but I knew it was over something stupid. Out of nowhere they
just started fighting. Then glass was everywhere and I saw a lot of
blood. It was on my dad’s girlfriend’s face and it was on my
mother’s back. I was just sitting right there watching. I just
remember sitting on a little log, crying so hard. I was crying so
hard because two people I loved were actually trying to kill each
other—over what, though?
My dad came over and he started breaking it
up. And I remember my grandma, she was there, too. She wasn’t down
there; she was at the window. Then she came downstairs. I remember
little stuff. Little stuff. Maybe because I was crying. That’s the
stuff I remember. I remember my mom having glass in her back
because there was an ambulance. She went to the hospital. And when
she went home, some days after that, she had this scar on her back.
She still got this long scar on her back.
I brought it up a while ago to my mama, and
she was like, “I can’t believe you still remember that.” Whatever,
but I hate that day. If I was older, I know I would have tried to
jump in and stop it. I was so scared. I was so scared. But now,
they cool. They’re friends. It’s crazy, though, ‘cause you go
through all that and you could have just resolved it. If you knew
in the future that y’all was gonna be friends, then what happened
in the past was uncalled for. It really was.
My mother is not my role model. I don’t think
of her as that. I don’t look up to my mother because she has her
hand out way too much. It’s to the point where she wants other
people to do stuff for her, but she knows she wouldn’t do it for
herself. I don’t understand that at all. If you want something, you
gotta get it yourself. Don’t depend on others. And that’s all she
does. I hate asking people for money. What’s the point of that? You
had your whole life to make your
own
money, start a career,
do anything you wanted, and instead you just wasted it.
I don’t really talk to nobody in my
household. My mother turned into nothing, and my one older sister
is slowly turning into nothing. I see my sister as a failure. For
some reason she just can’t get her life on track. She has so many
opportunities, but she just don’t take them. She just don’t take
them. She was a straight-A student, like she had good grades,
everything, the whole ten. As she got older, she got more
interested in boys and less in school, so in high school she
continued to get F’s. I still remember her coming home with F’s on
her progress report. I was still in grammar school, so she had me
thinking, “When I get in high school, I’m gonna get F’s too. The
work is gonna be so hard.” So, when I first went to high school, I
thought the work was gonna be hard, but I saw it was easy. I just
don’t understand how she got F’s. Whatever, she wasn’t paying
attention. She wasn’t doing the work.
She didn’t graduate on time, but actually, it
wasn’t too late for her. This school accepted her. They had a
scholarship for her; she even won a laptop. And instead of taking
the opportunity, she got pregnant by this dude I really don’t like
who sells drugs. I was mad. Even though that’s my big sister, I was
disappointed in her because she had her whole life back on track,
and then she failed again. It’s like every time she gets back on
track, she finds something to distract her from what she doing. I
noticed that. Every once in a while, she sees other people’s lives,
and she be like, “Oh, that’s how I could have been,” so she starts
back with the little educational route. And then when she gets on
it, she gets bored, so she goes back to her regular life. When she
was little, all she would talk about was being a lawyer. And now
she don’t talk about being nothing.
It fascinates me, though, because when people
are young, they have a lot of dreams. All I hear is people saying,
“I wanna be this. I wanna be that,” but they never break it down
and say, “Okay, how am I gonna get there to become this?” Maybe
‘cause they’re young, and they think, “Well, I won’t take this
opportunity. I’m gonna get another opportunity later in life for
the same thing.” You gotta start off when you’re young. I don’t
know, maybe it’s the way I think.
People my age, their mind-set is way
different from mine. I heard so many little girls and dudes my age
who say they don’t care about college. So they don’t care what they
do in school or outside of school. They know it’s not going to
affect them because they don’t have a life after they leave high
school. I feel sorry for them, actually. I feel sorry for them,
because you’re failing in high school and you don’t wanna go to
college? You messing your life up. Then, half of the girls at my
school have kids. So, what’s really your point? You gonna be living
with yo’ mama all your life? But when people first get into high
school, or when they in grammar school, they don’t think, “Yeah,
when I get into high school, I’m gonna drop out.” I mean who
actually does that? Wait to graduate and then fail? They don’t
think like that. They just probably stop thinking.
For example, there’s this girl at my school.
She’s the same age; she’s 17 years old. And she recently had a baby
by this dude.
He
looks like he could be my father. No lie.
It’s terrible. There’s girls that actually talk to older dudes,
saying, “He buy me stuff.” You stupid! You would actually talk to
an older dude because he buys you stuff and treats you like he
cares about you? These girls don’t
think
first.
And there’s so many teenagers my age that’s
out there selling drugs, robbing people, and their siblings do the
same thing. There’s this 13-year-old boy. He goes to school with my
little sister, and he’s out there selling drugs. He steals from his
mama, and he tried to steal his sister’s Xbox game, that she got
for Christmas, and pawn it for some money. Yeah, that little boy
got his nerve. His big brother, Darryl,27 sells drugs, and I guess
that what got him turned on to it.
Darryl and I have been friends since fifth
grade. Through grammar school, it’s like I already knew how his
life was gonna be by the way he acted. But he’s easy to talk to.
That’s probably why I was friends with him. As he got older, he
still acted the same, but it’s like he matured just a
little
bit, maybe just a drop. His mother is not his real mother. His real
mother is on drugs, and his sister got killed three or four years
ago in a car crash right outside their house. He was real messed up
by that. He still be talking about her to this day every now and
then. He always has this certain look on his face when he talks
about his sister ‘cause his sister was like a mother figure to him.
Probably adds to why he act like that. But I feel he could change
for his little brother.
The people around you—family, friends—if all
of them bad, and you’re around them 24/7, most likely you’re going
to engage in what they’re doing. ‘Cause “your chance of success
depends on the five people you hang with,” my counselor said to all
the seniors in the school. So I don’t hang with a lot of people.
Instead, I just watch people a lot to learn stuff from them. You
don’t know—seems like I’m listening or watching? I am. ‘Cause it’s
just the little things that people do that tell you a lot about
themselves.
I don’t do this in school, ‘cause people
would think I’m crazy, but when I’m in my room alone, I just sit
and talk to myself about stuff, like, all the stuff I
know
I
could
be, and then start brainstorming. I always connect it
back to school. Right now, I graduate in June, and all I’m really
thinking about is leaving. I wanna do all the work I have to do in
order to graduate. I
owe
it to myself. I deserve to graduate
on time. Not with the rest of them kids. That can’t be me. I’m
trying to get up outta here.
—
Interviewed by Bethany Brownholtz
Endnotes
25 In the fall of 2012, we contacted Ora to
see how things were going at Illinois College. She reported that
small-town life in Southern Illinois had proven to be something of
a culture shock. “It’s just cows and farms everywhere,” she said
with a laugh. “To be truthful, I thought I wasn’t gonna like it.
But I was so wrong. It’s like a variety of different ethnicities
there. It’s like so many Africans, it’s a lot of Latinos, whites,
blacks. It’s just like a mix of everybody and, at that school,
everybody’s so nice.
“The crazy part is that, as soon as I got out
of Chicago, I stopped carrying that knife. I put it all inside this
little red box where I keep my change. I don’t carry it with me on
campus at all, even when it’s nighttime. My sister, she’s a
freshman at North Lawndale Prep and has to walk to school. She can
have my knife. I’m serious.”
Ora noted that although she received a large
scholarship to attend college, her mother has never said she was
proud of her daughter. “I don’t like talking about her,” she said.
“She’s the reason why I just want to go so far away from home.
She’s the main reason.”
26 A hype is an addict.
27 Ora asked that we change her friend’s name
to protect his safety.
MEET THE JUJU-MAN
JULIAN
When we visit 9-year-old Julian at his house
on the Northwest Side, he seems like any other kid with a passion
for skateboarding. “I was going up the ramp, and I was like,
‘Ahhh,’” he says, motioning with his hands to illustrate his
adventures at a skate park. “I would be like this high in the
air!”
But Julian’s childhood has been anything but
normal since Halloween night of 2009. That’s when his brother
Manuel “Manny” Roman was shot in Humboldt Park while driving with
another brother, Damian. Twenty-three-year-old Manny was on life
support for several weeks, until his parents decided to allow him
to die. He left behind a wife, an unborn daughter and twin sons.
Police—who say that the attack was unprovoked and that Manny and
Damian were innocent victims—filed charges against Andrew Ruiz, a
paraplegic gang member with a lengthy criminal record. As this book
went to press, the case was still awaiting trial.
When Julian’s mother, Myrna Roman, tells the
story of the murder and its aftermath, tears fill her eyes as
Julian jumps in to console her. Afterward, the energetic and
articulate boy settles in the kitchen. Occasionally breaking his
story to hum or draw or play with a tiny toy skateboard, Julian
begins to discuss life without Manny.
Can I show you something? It’s in my
backpack. You’ll probably think it is just a binder, but I will
tell you the story. I know I kind of doodled on it, but I will
always, always, always treasure this binder. This is the last thing
Manny gave me on the day he died.
Manny was like “Hey Juj!”—he called me Juj
that time—“Come here! Come here!” I said, “What’s up?” And he was
like, “Here.”