I remember that, just like he said it
yesterday: “If God get ready for me, nothing nobody can do. It’s my
time to go.” And that’s what keeping me going. God was ready for
him. And he had to go; I couldn’t stop it.
No mother wants to lose a son by a stray
bullet, by any kind of bullet. Twenty-four years old—your life is
just beginning. That was the hardest thing for me to accept—his
life was gone at 24. But when you sit back to look at it, he lived
a life that a lot of young men didn’t live. We went to Denver,
Colorado, and he did a movie with John Ritter.34 He did commercials
with Gus, what’s his name, little white boy, Gus, what is his name?
Anyway, he did commercials with him. He did commercials for
macaroni and cheese. He was in a movie with Cicely Tyson.35 He did
a lot of things in his life that a lot of children didn’t get a
chance to do. And I said to myself, God blessed him. God blessed
him to do some of the things an average black kid couldn’t do.
It is just so sad to lose a child. You look
to your son or your daughter to bury you, not for you to bury your
child. When you bury your child, a part of your whole life is gone.
You cry; you’re gonna cry. It’s not going to ever go away. So you
have to wipe the tears and keep going to accomplish something.
That’s the way I think.
The day my son got killed, two mothers lost,
not one. I lost and the boy that killed my son, his mother lost.
Okay? I don’t have no hate in my heart. I just wanted that person
that killed my son to be taken off the street and punished because
he didn’t need to be on the street where he would kill somebody
else’s child. Now my husband feels differently than I do, okay? But
I’m my own person and I have to account to God.
That’s why I put the school here in Englewood
after he got killed. I decided to help stop some of the violence,
to give young men, ex-felons, ex-drug addicts and handicapped
people a trade. Take the guns out of their hands and put a trade
into their hands.
I reach out to help regardless of what kind
of crime you did. I have a young man who was in the penitentiary
for 25 years. And he’s working on a newspaper. I put my head out on
the block for him. You know why? Because he was sincere.
The person that called me said, “Miss Wright,
do you recommend him?”
I said, “Yes, I do recommend him. If he don’t
do what you say, give me a call.” He’s been there over two years
now. Those are things that I’m proud of because I’ve helped
somebody. They can come to me and ask for help. I’m their mother,
I’m their father, their brother and their sister because I leave my
door open for them to come in.
Everyone asks me, aren’t you afraid to be
around all them killers and rapists? No. They human just like I am.
They did something wrong, okay? They realized they done wrong. They
ready to change. How come I can’t give them the chance to change?
We have to give another human being a chance to change. And if you
don’t give them a chance to change, they back out there killing
again.
And I got backup behind me. It’s like a safe
haven here. I’ve never been broken into. I’ve never had big
problems. They know not to come down here and mess it up. Now who
put it out there I don’t know and don’t care, but I appreciate that
because they say that Miss Audrey is the only thing we got to help
us. Some of those same guys, I can call them up right now, and they
come to the rescue. You know why? Because I changed their life.
A lot of these young men, they keep me on my
knees, praying all the time. Right now, when they come through my
building, they say, “Miss Wright, I might not live to 25.” That’s
sad. We as parents, we don’t fight hard enough to keep our children
here. Do you think if you had a son he would come and tell you that
the gangs want him? Let me say this. Open up your eyes and listen
to what I’m saying. Open up your ears. The gangbangers on the
street tell a boy, “You gonna do what we say or we’re gonna do
something to you and your whole family.” That young man be scared
that something gonna happen to him and his whole family. It has
happened. We’re losing our babies now. The gangs don’t care who
they kill. They shooting up in the house, shooting up in the yard,
shooting everywhere, they don’t care.
I’ve seen so much, where they got empty
houses behind the buildings. Tricks go down there, and the
summertime I used to sit in my lot and I’d call the police because
the little kids coming though there, walking through the alley
going to school. They seeing this, they’ve been exposed to these
things when they 5 and 6 and 7 years old. Then the gangs drive by,
boom, boom, boom
. This is what needs to be stopped. And we
got to come together. If you got a strong group, you can stop them.
If we start weaving ourselves together like a basket, you can’t get
through it. You can stop them. You
can
stop them. We can
help our own communities.
Where I live—the Beverly neighborhood—they
say I’m crazy.36 But let me say this to you: Not only my son, it
could have been your son, anybody’s son. I grieve every day. Some
days I cry, some days I don’t. But I grieve every day. I was
married 10 years before I got pregnant with my son. Then boom, he
gone. I don’t hate. I can’t hate. I can’t hate the young man that
killed my son because that person has to give an account to God for
all his wrongdoings. I don’t feel that I have to give up on nobody.
I don’t ever give up. I don’t
ever
give up.
—
Interviewed by Mariah Chitouras
Endnotes
34 The 1987 made-for-TV film Prison for
Children. Interestingly, the film is
about how incarceration and detention can actually breed more crime
than
they prevent.
35 The 1981 made-for-TV movie The Marva
Collins Story portrays one Chicago woman’s successful attempt to
start her own school for inner-city youth.
36 Beverly, on the Far South Side, is an
integrated, middle-class neighborhood.
DEATH IS CONTAGIOUS
MAX CERDA
The Jan. 10, 1984, edition of the Chicago
Tribune37 contained a special full-page display of mug shots—the
faces of gang members from all over the city who had recently been
sentenced to prison for murder and other brutal crimes. One of the
most menacing mug shots on that page belonged to a teenager with a
childlike face, a muscular neck and a fiercely defiant scowl. His
name was Max Cerda—and a few years earlier, he had been convicted
of two murders and an attempted murder.
Nearly three decades after that story
appeared in the paper, Max Cerda stares at his old mug shot with a
look of wonder and sadness. Sentenced to prison at age 16, he spent
18 years behind bars. Now he sits in the Humboldt Park office of
the Latino Cultural Exchange Coalition, a group he co-founded in
prison with Jose Pizarro, who was another one of the murderers
pictured in that 1984
Tribune
story. In those days, the two
men were members of enemy gangs. Today, they work together to help
ex-offenders re-integrate into society and to encourage teens to
stay out of gangs.
On the day we visit, Cerda is holding an
anger-management class for ex-offenders and at-risk youth. Although
the young men tease him with greetings such as “Wassup, Old
School?”, he clearly has their respect. At 50 years old, Cerda
still has the thick black hair of his youth, which he pulls back in
a ponytail. His world-weary face is calm and gentle-looking—but
when he talks about the past, his dark eyes can go
dead.
When I look at the face in the newspaper, I
see anger, hurt, fear—just a lost kid chasing an urban illusion. I
thought that life was about killing and dying. Nothing else.
You know, there’s a myth that kids who join
gangs come from broken homes and stuff like that, and I’m sure
that’s true in a lot of cases. But in my case, it was not true. I
came from a good family. My mother came from Mexico, and my father,
he was a Tejano; he was from Texas, from Brownsville. A lot of my
uncles and my grandfather—I was named after him, Don Maximo—moved
up to Aurora, Illinois. Then they just eventually moved into the
city, perhaps just like most Mexicans and immigrants at that time,
just trying to find opportunity.38
Where I lived in Little Italy—Taylor Street
and Loomis—it was a beautiful neighborhood. I’ll never forget it. I
still go there today when I have problems in my mind and I gotta
clear it out. There’s a park there, and I can still see me and my
father having a race on the sidewalk.
My father was a foreman for Acme Supply. He
always had his shirt pocket full of pens. And it’s funny, because
today I’ve always got my own shirt pocket full of pens, and every
time I reach for them, I’m always thinking about my old man. He
used to come from work to take me to the park. We’d get some ice
cream or buy some peanuts from the Sicilians who used to push the
peanut carts on our streets. It was nice, man. It was my father. He
passed away while I was in the joint at Menard.39
I was an altar boy when I was young. But one
day, a friend and me got kicked out of there because we saw the
Communion wine and we drunk that wine up, and we was eating the
holy bread like potato chips, man. I was just restless back then. I
didn’t want to pay attention. I was a smart-ass. Every elementary
school that I ever went to, I got kicked out of. I mean every one:
Notre Dame, McLaren, every one, even Montefiore, which was a
reformatory school.
I didn’t take nothing seriously. Didn’t care.
The only time I cared
was when they said they was gonna tell my father, ‘cause my father
played no games, man. He put it on me. I used to get whooped hard.
I used
to get welts on my back that’d be there for days, man. I couldn’t
lay on
that side.
Fifth, sixth grade—that’s when things took a
turn. This was by McLaren Elementary School, in Little Italy. This
was outside on the playground. I remember this one kid, I don’t
know if he was Italian or not, but he was white. And he said
something to me, something racial, and I don’t know why it bothered
me because I never thought about, you know, being Mexican or
nothing like that. But I was seeing people fight all the time, and
I guess I was just waiting for somebody to say something to me. And
this kid did. And I beat him down. I stomped him like he was on
fire. I just couldn’t stop. I felt empowered, man. I felt like,
“Damn, I’m not taking shit from nobody. I’ve been whooped so much
at home, I ain’t taking shit from nobody on the streets.” I didn’t
know it then, but I know it now. I know it now. It was exciting. It
was contagious. It was like finding a gun.
When I was about 11 years old, my father
bought a house up here on the North Side, by Avers and Iowa. I
didn’t wanna leave Little Italy. I kept taking the bus back to the
old neighborhood to see my friends, but like a year or so later, I
got to know young kids, Mexican kids in Humboldt Park. They was in
gangs, so I fell into a Mexican gang called the Latin Diablos, and
we were fighting the Puerto Ricans. But eventually, I ended up
becoming part of that same Puerto Rican gang40 we used to
fight.
See, back in the day when I was gangbanging,
we had what we would call our yo-yos, our peewees, our juniors, our
seniors. I was a peewee, and we did something wrong. So one day,
the juniors and the seniors called a meeting in the garage and we
all got whooped bad by these older guys. That made us mad, so we
made peace with the Puerto Ricans. We became one gang. We kicked
the older guys out of the neighborhood and that’s where it began.
When we were able to overcome these older guys, I realized, “Damn,
we really do got power.” It was an illusion, but I believed it.
It wasn’t about the girls; for me, at least,
it wasn’t about the girls. It wasn’t about money or fancy cars. We
didn’t have none of that. Hell, we all had bikes. Regular bikes.
Schwinns. It was about the camaraderie, man. We looked out for each
other. And we protected the neighborhood. There was no burglaries
in our neighborhood. There was no purses being snatched.
But when the gunplay got involved, that
changed everything, man. Everything changed. People started getting
shot. You know, nothing serious at first. The leg or the back or
something like that, but then this one guy got killed, and we
realized that this is life and death. It just escalated from there.
It just didn’t stop.
Raymond, Raymond Cruz, was the brother who
died in my arms. The first time I ever saw him was when I was still
a Latin Diablo. You know, Raymond’s Puerto Rican, and I remember
they sneaked up on us, and he threw a brick at me. I said, “Man,
I’m gonna get this punk, whoever he is.” But then, after my gang
and his gang united, we became real cool, man. He got me into
salsa—the Fania All-Stars, Willie Colón, Héctor Lavoe, all of those
guys. He turned me on to a new world of music.
His mother used to live right behind our
house, and that’s how we got close to him. My ma loved him. He used
to come to the house beat up, cut up. My mother would sew him up,
take care of him. My mother was like his personal doctor. So yeah,
we got close like that, man. We just ended up getting real
close.
He was two years older than me. He was 18,
going on 19. He decided to leave the neighborhood and move to
Maywood and get a job at Zenith.41 He was so happy he had just got
that job.
I was always telling him, “Man, come back to
the ’hood. We need you, man. You know, shit is happening over here.
We need you.”
And he kept saying, “Man, you need to give
that shit up. There’s too much stuff going on right now. A lot of
people getting shot at, people getting killed.42 Why don’t you come
hang out a couple weeks by me in Maywood, man? Let this shit blow
over.”
Finally, after like a month or two, I was
able to talk him into coming back to pick me up, just to spend some
time with me—and we ended up getting ambushed. We got ambushed.
This happened April 18th of 1979.