In Chicago: Raising Children in a Battle Zone

(2 of 3)

Those who can stay away from Cabrini-Green do so. Diana remembers calling an ambulance after Charles accidentally cut his head. It never came. She finally carried the frightened, bleeding child to the fire department, where someone took him to the hospital for stitches. The children's friends will not visit the project because they are too afraid. Sitting at her kitchen table, half watching All My Children on the TV, she answers her mobile phone. It's the Tupperware lady, pressing to come by and get $5 Diana owes her. Diana asks, "Do you know where I live?" She repeats the question to the caller and adds, finally, "Cabrini-Green." There is an obvious break in the conversation. "O.K.," says Diana, smiling a little, as if she had been through this a million times before, "I'll meet you at school." An alarmed policeman who spotted a rare white visitor walking in the project insisted that he drive her a block to her destination. "I'd rather do this now than take you out in a wagon later," the officer explained.

Since she moved into Cabrini-Green eight years ago, Diana has promised her sons that they will leave. "I keep saying to them, 'One more year.'" She vows, "My New Year's resolution is to get out." And it grows stronger every time she navigates the dangerous passage past the dope dealers and gang members in the graffiti-covered lobby, through the piles of garbage in the halls, to the sixth floor in a lurching elevator lighted by a single, dimly glowing bulb. Her son John is now at the age when many other boys in Cabrini-Green become "foot soldiers" in the gangs, which use them for killing missions because juvenile sentences are more lenient. She stays only because she cannot afford to go anywhere else.

Cabrini-Green was not always an urban version of hell. The project was originally intended as a way station for working-class families, both black and white, who were temporarily down on their luck. Since the first set of 55 row houses was built in 1943, however, the character of the urban poor has changed, and the 23 high-rises along Division Street have become permanent homes for generations of the black underclass. There are few intact families among the 15,000 residents of the project. Only about 150 husbands have their names on leases. Single mothers like Diana, whose three sons have two different fathers, shoulder the burden of bringing up their children alone, living on an annual income of about $5,000, mostly from welfare.

Any effort to recapture a sense of community seems futile amid such isolation and fear. Some mothers have determined that the safest course is to avoid their neighbors. "I don't want to know these people," Diana said. "I don't trust 'em." Six months ago, a handful of deter mined mothers in Cabrini overcame their fear of retaliation from the gangs and joined Mothers Against Gangs, a group assembled by Betty Majors, who lives near Cabrini-Green and lost her 17-year-old daughter to a stray gang bullet three years ago. She is leading the crusade to negotiate a Christmas truce, a single day without violence. So far the gangs have not agreed.