How Long Will I Cry? by Miles Harvey Read Free Book Online Page B

Gresham
neighborhood on the Far South Side.
    9 The 22nd District covers the Morgan Park
community on the Far South Side.
    10 Weis served as Chicago’s top cop from 2008
to early 2011.
    11 The 7th District covers the Englewood
neighborhood on the South Side.

FOUR BULLETS

    JOHN McCULLOUGH
    In 2012, Chicago’s homicide rate rose for
the first time in four years—an increase that experts attribute in
part to the breakdown of larger street gangs into feuding factions.
According to a Chicago Tribune investigation,12 roughly one in four
of the city’s 506 slaying victims in 2012 was affiliated with the
Gangster Disciples (GDs), a powerful South Side gang that, in
recent years, has splintered into at least 250 smaller, younger
groups—sometimes referred to as “cliques” or “sects”—which now
battle over turf older gang members once shared.
    One person who has experienced this bloody
infighting firsthand is John McCullough. Born and raised in the
Englewood neighborhood, he has been shot and incarcerated on
numerous occasions. At age 25, McCullough says he is no longer
involved in gang activity and is attempting to stay out
of trouble.
    In my neighborhood, it’s shootings
everywhere. There are a lot of vacant lots, abandoned cribs boarded
up. Some kids aren’t going to school or anything. Six guys got
killed between 2009 and the end of 2010. Terrible as usual.
    Ain’t no activities, I mean positive activities. They got playgrounds, but then in the playgrounds you
see the teenagers. The teenagers, they gangbang and all that, and
the kids in the park see this. They’re just gonna copy that. So
they need some recreational centers or something. In the ’70s and
’80s, they had game rooms. As times went by, everything that was
around our area got burned down or abandoned. The government could
put a little recreational center up for these kids so they could
see something different, besides being out there in the
streets.
    The key thing is, kids gotta have things to
do besides sitting around on the block. The kids that are growing
up right now, they’re paying attention to us. They’re following our
footsteps.
    See, I had a beautiful childhood in my eyes.
I stayed around my family and didn’t need for anything. I remember
playing with cousins, climbing trees, playing cops and robbers and
making guns out of wood, just doing what kids usually do.
    I went to Harper High School.13 Freshman,
sophomore, junior year, I was an A, B and C student. I stayed busy,
stayed working. I loved high school. I got kicked out my senior
year, acting a fool. The guys who I hung out with, man, we just
wanted to run the whole school. We was just having a ball in
school. We just got super reckless and started pulling fire alarms,
like eight times a day, just to get outside. They kicked us out.
They kicked us all out.
    My senior year, I think I had like 20 ½
credits when they kicked me out. I could have enrolled in another
school, but I wanted to have fun and hang around in the streets. I
could have put a stop to it. I could have just singled myself out
and did the right thing, but instead I wanted to be bad. I wanted
to have fun.
    I remember it was the summertime that my dad
got shot and killed. I don’t really know the reason. He was in
Michigan. I don’t know why he was out there. I think it was one of
them white girls he was messing with that stayed out there.
    My mama told me to come into the crib. I was,
like, 13. She told me and my sister that my dad had just got
killed. Everything went blank. I remember that day like yesterday.
Everything went blank and I couldn’t cry. I didn’t know what to do.
It was hard to take it all in. I just remember thinking, like,
“He’s gone.”
    I think my mama took it worse than me. Even
though they weren’t together for a while, she took it harder. While
she was telling me, she was crying. My grandma was crying. My
sister started crying and I’m just sitting there, the only one not
crying. Just