Sudhir Venkatesh - Gang Leader for a Day

I heard Ms. Bailey coming. I’d never seen her move so fast before-she was practically galloping, trailed by Catrina and a few older women in blue Tenant Patrol jackets.

Ms. Bailey hurried past without looking at me. Catrina, however, gave me one of her signature looks that I now recognized as meaning this: Ms. Bailey’s got the situation under control, and all will soon be right with the world. Ms. Bailey unlocked her office door and went inside. Blue and Charlie, who’d returned from upstairs, picked up Bee-Bee and brought him into the office. Bee-Bee seemed cooperative. The three of them entered the back room in Ms. Bailey’s office, and then someone shut the front door. I stayed outside, along with the other squatters and the Tenant Patrol women. C-Note, his work done, took off.

Then Catrina poked her head out the door and waved me inside. Get in here! she mouthed silently. I did, and she pointed me to a chair.

It was hard to make out the full conversation behind Ms. Bailey’s closed door, but once in a while her voice was loud enough for me to hear: “You got some nerve, young man!… Beat her like that… Where do you live, huh, where do you live?!… She’s a good girl. She owe you money? She wouldn’t fuck you? Why did you do that?… Say something!”

Then came the beating. Charlie or Blue, or maybe both of them, started hitting Bee-Bee. I also heard Ms. Bailey cry out in a muffled tone. Maybe Ms. Bailey is hitting him as well, I thought. I heard chairs scuffing the floor. Then, for the first time, I heard Bee-Bee’s voice: “Oh, shit!… Get off me… Fuck that! She deserved it.”

Ms. Bailey started to yell louder. “Deserved it?… You’ll get worse if you come around here… Don’t ever, don’t ever touch her again, you hear me? You hear me? Don’t ever come in this building again.”

Ms. Bailey threw open the door. Blue dragged Bee-Bee out. His face was badly worked over; he was drooling and mumbling something unintelligible. Blue hustled him past Catrina and me and threw him to the floor on the gallery. Two other men grabbed him and led him toward the stairwell. Ms. Bailey followed them, with the members of the Tenant Patrol right behind.

I started to get up, but Catrina stopped me. “Sudhir! No, let them go! They’re just taking him in the car, and they’ll leave him on State Street. Come up with me and see how Taneesha’s doing.”

Taneesha’s aunt answered our knock. She and Taneesha’s mother told us that Taneesha was at the hospital; she had some bad bruises, but it seemed as if she’d be okay. “I don’t know what she’s going to look like, though,” said the aunt. “He beat her pretty good.” Taneesha’s mother promised to call Ms. Bailey later that night.

We went back downstairs to Ms. Bailey’s office. She hadn’t returned yet-she was apparently visiting Taneesha at the hospital- so Catrina told me what she knew. Bee-Bee had been managing Taneesha’s modeling career, booking her at lingerie shows and dances. For this, he received a 25 percent cut-and, according to Catrina, he made Taneesha sleep with him. When Bee-Bee heard that Taneesha was going to sign up with a legitimate modeling agency, he got mad and started beating her. Today wasn’t the first time this had happened. In fact, Ms. Bailey had repeatedly warned Bee-Bee to stop. But he kept harassing Taneesha, even stealing money from her apartment. It was only because Ms. Bailey felt there was no other recourse, Catrina explained, that today she had rounded up C-Note and the others to form a sort of militia. In the projects this was a long-standing practice. Militias were regularly put together to track down stolen property, mete out punishment, or simply obtain an apology for a victim.

In a neighborhood like this one, with poor police response and no shelter for abused women, the militias sometimes represented the best defense. “It’s hard when you can’t get nobody to come around,” Catrina said solemnly. She was sitting in Ms. Bailey’s chair, a soda in hand and her voice assured, seeming for all the world like the heiress to Ms. Bailey’s throne. “No police, nobody from the hospital. We can’t live like this! That’s why Ms. Bailey is so important. And especially for women. She makes sure we’re safe.”

“I suppose,” I said. “But it’s a horrible way to live. And wouldn’t you rather have the police come around?”

“I’d rather not live in the projects,” Catrina shot back. “But women are always getting beat on, getting sent to the hospital. I mean, you have to take care of yourself. Ms. Bailey makes these men take care of us. I don’t see what’s wrong with that. Unless you live here, you can’t judge us, Sudhir.”

For some reason I couldn’t restrain the judgmental voice of my middle-class self. “You all didn’t call the police, did you?” I blurted out.

For the first time since I knew Catrina, she couldn’t look me in the eye. “No, we didn’t.”

“Why?”

She took a deep breath and raised her head. “Because we’re scared of them.”

“You are scared? Women are scared? Everyone is scared?” I asked. “Who exactly is scared? I hear this all the time.”

“Everybody. But for women it’s different. You wouldn’t understand.” She paused. “At least we have C-Note and the rest of them when things go crazy.” It was clear that Catrina didn’t want to talk further. I decided to ask Ms. Bailey about this when things calmed down.

I’d seen some police around the neighborhood, and I’d seen them work with Autry at the Boys & Girls Club. But since most tenants were so distrustful of the cops, I kept my interactions with them to a minimum, since I didn’t want to be thought of as being “with” the cops.

Still, I had a hard time accepting the idea that tenants wouldn’t call the police for something as serious as an assault. I also found it tough to believe that the police wouldn’t show up-or, for that matter, that an ambulance wouldn’t respond either. But as Catrina sat now in total silence, staring at me expressionlessly, I realized I might well be wrong.

I told her that I’d better get back to my apartment. She didn’t acknowledge me. I wanted to do something to help her.

“Would you like to get something to eat?” I asked meekly.

She shook her head.

“Do you want to write me another essay?” I asked. “Do you want to write about what just happened?”

Catrina liked to write essays, which I read so that we could discuss them. This was a good way for her to talk through her aspirations as well as the shadows of her past: intense poverty and a bad family situation that I was just starting to learn about.

She shrugged. I couldn’t tell if that meant yes or no.

“Well, I’m happy to read it if you do write something. Whenever.”

“Thanks,” she said. The barest hint of a smile came to her face, and she pushed her thick, black-framed glasses up on her nose. She started sniffling and reaching for a tissue. She looked no more than twelve years old. “I’ll see you around,” she said. “I’m sure things will be okay.”

With Catrina having gone quiet and Ms. Bailey at the hospital and C-Note and the other squatters nowhere to be seen, there wasn’t anyone left for me to talk with. I thought about visiting J.T., but every time I asked him anything about Ms. Bailey, he’d shut me down. “You want to know what she’s like, you hang out with her,” he said. “I ain’t telling you shit.” J.T. didn’t care much for Ms. Bailey’s authority, as it occasionally challenged his own. It was well within her power, for instance, to close off the lobby to his sales crew. J.T. wanted me to experience Ms. Bailey for myself to see what he had to deal with.

I took the bus back to my apartment but decided to stop first at Jimmy’s, a local bar where a lot of U of C professors and students hung out. No one knew me there, and I could sit quietly and process what had just happened in my fieldwork. Sometimes I would go there to write up my notes, but more often I just sat and stared blankly into my glass. With increasing frequency, Jimmy’s was a ritual stop on my way home. At Jimmy’s, as at the best bars, no one cared what troubles I brought to the table. Most of the people were sitting alone, like me, and I figured they were dealing with their own problems.