There Are No Children Here by Alex Kotlowitz Read Free Book Online

first opened.
    Across the street sat the baseball diamond, long since paved over, for reasons residents couldn’t recall. Nearby, a rusted orange basketball rim was shoved and twisted against the leaning metal backboard. The court’s opposite rim and backboard were gone entirely. Local management had stopped replacing the rims, so they got installed only when a resident could muster the energy and the money.
    On this early summer day six of Horner’s four thousand children vied to use one of the neighborhood’s few good courts. They arched jump shots into the opening created by the crossbars of a faded yellow-and-blue jungle gym. It, too, was over three decades old. Lafeyette could dunk on this makeshift rim; Pharoah, not quite yet.
    “Hey, Laf, let’s play,” James urged his friend. James loved basketball. Frequently, he sneaked into the Chicago Stadium toconvince players, from both the Bulls and visiting teams, to donate their sneakers to his collection. On his bedroom shelves sat an impressive array of boat-size basketball sneakers, including a pair from the Detroit Pistons’ Isiah Thomas and from Charles Oakley, then a Chicago Bull. James, who was short for his age, dreamed of playing professional basketball.
    “I don’t wanna play ball with them,” Lafeyette said, referring to the children by the jungle gym. “They might try to make me join a gang.”
    About a week earlier, members of one of the local gangs had asked Lafeyette to stand security, and it had made him skittish. His mother told the teenage members she would call the police if they kept after Lafeyette. “I’d die first before I let them take one of my sons,” she said.
    Gangs often recruit young children to do their dirty work. Recently, a fourteen-year-old friend of Lafeyette’s allegedly shot and killed an older man in an alley half a block north of Lafeyette’s building. Residents and police said the killing was drug-related. “I wish he hadn’t done it,” Lafeyette had told James.
    Lafeyette and James constantly worried that they might be pulled into the gangs. Lafeyette knew what might happen: “When you first join you think it’s good. They’ll buy you what you want. You have to do anything they tell you to do. If they tell you to kill somebody, you have to do that.” James figured the only way to make it out of Horner was “to try to make as little friends as possible.”
    So while a group of young boys shrieked in delight as the basketball ricocheted through the jungle gym’s opening, Lafeyette, James, and a few other boys perched idly on the metal benches in front of their building. Like the swing sets, the benches resembled an ancient archeological find. The entire back of one was gone; only two of four metal slats remained on another, thus making it impossible for anyone other than a small child to sit there. Nearby, Pharoah and Porkchop pitched pennies.
    “I’m gonna have my own condominium in Calumet Park,” James told the others, referring to a Chicago suburb. “It’s nice out there. You could sit outside all night and nothing would happen.”
    “They have flowers this tall,” said Lafeyette, holding his hand four feet off the ground.
    James laughed and hurled an empty bottle of Canadian Mist onto the playground’s concrete, where it shattered, adding to the hundreds of shards of glass already on the ground. “If I had one wish I’d wish to separate all the good from the bad and send them to another planet so they could battle it out and no innocent people would get hurt,” James mused.
    “That’s two wishes,” asserted Lafeyette. “I wish to go to heaven.”
    “I’d wish there be no gangbangers,” piped up Pharoah, wishing out of existence those who fought for the gangs.
    “Wherever you go there be gangbangers,” replied Lafeyette.
    “Not in Mississippi,” Pharoah assured him. An argument ensued as to whether there was, in fact, any state or city or neighborhood that didn’t have gangs. It was on