Sudhir Venkatesh - Gang Leader for a Day

There was an awkward silence. I thought about lying, and I began to drum up an excuse. But something came over me. During the years I’d been in this community, people were always telling me that I was different from all the journalists and other outsiders who came by, hunting up stories. They didn’t eat dinner with families or hang around at night to share a beer; they typically asked a lot of questions and then left with their story, never to return. I prided myself on this difference.

But now it was time to accept my fate. “I was sitting in Ms. Bailey’s office,” I told C-Note. “She and J.T. always help me, just like you. And I fucked up. I told them things, and I had no idea that they would use that information. Man, I had no idea that it would even be useful to them.”

“That has to be one of the stupidest things I ever heard you say.” C-Note began putting away his tools.

“Honestly, C-Note, I had no idea when I was talking to them-”

“No!” C-Note’s voice grew sharp. “You knew. Yes you did. But you were too busy thinking about your own self. That’s what happened. You got some shit for your professors, and you were getting high on that. I know you ain’t that naïve, man.”

“I’m sorry, C-Note. I don’t know what else to say. I fucked up.”

“Yeah, you fucked up. You need to think about why you’re doing your work. You always tell me you want to help us. Well, we ain’t never asked for your help, and we sure don’t need it now.”

C-Note walked away toward the other men. They stood quietly drinking beer and watching me. I headed toward the building. I wanted to see if Ms. Bailey was in her office.

Then an obvious thought hit me: If J.T. had acted on my information to tax the male street hustlers, Ms. Bailey might have started taxing the women I told her about. Worse yet, she might have had some of them evicted for hiding their income. How could I find out what had happened because of my stupidity? As I stood in the grassy expanse, staring up at the high-rise, I tried to think of someone who might possibly help me. I needed a tenant who was relatively independentof Ms. Bailey, someone who might still trust me enough to talk. I thought of Clarisse.

I hustled over to the liquor store and bought a few bottles of Boone’s Farm wine. Clarisse wasn’t going to talk for free.

I walked quickly through the building lobby and took the stairs up. I didn’t want to get trapped in the elevator with women who might be angry with me for selling them out to Ms. Bailey. Clarisse opened her door and greeted me with a loud burst of laughter.

“Oooh! Boy, you fucked up this time, you surely did.”

“So it’s all over the building? Everyone knows?”

“Sweetheart, ain’t no secrets in this place. What did Clarisse tell you when we first met? Shut the fuck up. Don’t tell them nothing about who you are and what you do. Clarisse should have been there with you. You were spying for Ms. Bailey?”

“Spying! No way. I wasn’t spying, I was just doing my research, asking questions and-”

“Sweetheart, it don’t matter what you call it. Ms. Bailey got pissed off and went running up in people’s houses, claiming they owed her money. I mean, you probably doubled her income, just like that. And you’re really not getting any kickbacks? Just a little something from her?”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “How do they know I was the one who gave Ms. Bailey the information?”

“Because, you fool, she told everyone! Even if she didn’t tell them, she was running around saying, ‘You made twenty-five dollars last month,’ ‘You made fifty dollars last week,’ ‘You made ten dollars this week, and you owe me ten percent plus a penalty for not telling me.’ I mean, the only folks we told all this information to was you!”

“But did she charge you, too?”

“No, no! She don’t charge the hos, remember? J.T. already charges us.”

I sat and listened with my head down as Clarisse listed all the women who’d been confronted by Ms. Bailey. I had a sinking feeling that I’d have a hard time coming back to this building to continue my research. I also had to face the small matter of managing to leave here today still in one piece.

Clarisse sensed my anxiety. As she talked-laughing heartily all the while, at my expense-she started massaging my shoulder. “Don’t worry, little baby! You probably never had an ass whuppin’, have you? Well, sometimes that helps clear the air. Just don’t take the stairs when you leave, ’cause if you get caught there, they may never find your body.”

I must have looked truly frightened, for Clarisse stopped laughing and took a sincere tone.

“Folks forgive around here,” she said gently. “We’re all religious people, sweetheart. We have to put up with a lot of shit from our own families, so nothing you did to us will make things much worse.”

At that moment, sitting with Clarisse, I didn’t think that even the Good Lord himself could, or would, help me. It was embarrassing to think that I had been so wrapped up in my desire to obtain good data that I couldn’t anticipate the consequences of my actions. After several years in the projects, I had become attuned to each and every opportunity to get information from the tenants. This obsession was primarily fueled by a desire to make my dissertation stand out and increase my stature in the eyes of my advisers. After I’d talked with C-Note and Clarisse, it was clear to me that other people were paying a price for my success.

I began to feel deeply ambivalent about my own reasons for being in the projects. Would I really advance society with my research, as Bill Wilson had promised I could do if I worked hard?

Could I change our stereotypes of the poor by getting so deep inside the lives of the families? I suddenly felt deluged by these kinds of questions.

Looking back, I was probably being a little melodramatic. I had been so naïve up to this point about how others perceived my presence that any sort of shake-up at all was bound to send me reeling.

I couldn’t think of a way to rectify the situation other than to stop coming to Robert Taylor entirely. But I was close to finishing my fieldwork, and I didn’t want to quit prematurely. In the coming weeks, I spoke to Clarisse and Autry a few times for advice. Both suggested that the tenants I had angered would eventually stop being so angry, but they couldn’t promise much more than that. When I asked Autry whether I’d be able to get back to collecting data, he just shrugged and walked off.

I eventually came back to the building to face the tenants. No one declined to speak with me outright, but I didn’t exactly receive a hero’s welcome either. Everyone knew I had J.T.’s support, so it was unlikely that anyone would confront me in a hostile manner. When I went to visit C-Note in the parking lot, he simply nodded at me and then went about his work, talking with customers and singing along with the radio. It felt like people in the building looked at me strangely when I passed by, but I wondered if I was just being paranoid. Perhaps the best indicator of my change in status was that I wasn’t doing much of anything casual-hearing jokes, sharing a beer, loaning someone a dollar.

One sultry summer day not long after my fiasco with the hustlers, I attended the funeral of Catrina, Ms. Bailey’s dutiful assistant. On the printed announcement, her full name was rendered as Catrina Eugenia Washington. But I knew this was not her real name.

Catrina had once told me that her father had sexually abused her when she was a teenager, so she ran away from home. She wound up living in Robert Taylor with a distant relative. She changed her name so her father wouldn’t find her and enrolled in a GED program at DuSable High School. She took a few part-time jobs to help pay for rent and groceries. She was also saving money to go to community college; she was trying to start over. I never did find out her real name.