The winds had blown over a half-constructed building at Eighty-seventh and Stony, three miles from my childhood home. A cop had been killed at the scene. I stared at photos of the rubble. Cinder blocks filled the streets, looking like Legos thrown on the living-room floor by a bad-tempered child. A VW bug was buried up to its windows in the debris. And then, the next day, twenty-six inches of snow fell, covering the debris, the mills, the roads, all of Chicago, burying the living as well as the dead.
My memory of the storm wasn’t the tornadoes, nor even the dead cop-although every cop’s death was an occasion of anxiety for my mother and me-but Gabriella waiting outside for me when school ended. My mother never walked me home from school, and I was scared when I saw her, scared that something had happened to my dad.
That she was worried about the snow seemed funny to me. A blizzard blowing five- and even ten-foot drifts was exhilarating, a game, not cause for alarm. But after a year of riots and protests, where she had sat up night after night waiting for Tony to come home, me sometimes watching from the top of the attic stairs, sometimes joining her at the kitchen table, whenever she did something out of the ordinary I thought first of my father.
“Tu e Bernardo, spericolati e testardi tutti e dui voi!” she said to me in Italian, seizing my mittened hand. “Both of you reckless and head-strong! If I don’t stop you, you will get lost in this blizzard. You will do something impossibly dangerous that will cost you your life and forever break my heart.”
“I’m not a baby! Don’t treat me like one in front of my friends.” I shouted at her in English, yanking my hand away.
It upset her when I didn’t answer in Italian. In my anger, I wanted to hurt her feelings. The truth was, I’d been planning on finding Boom-Boom-Bernardo-who went to Catholic school. We wanted to see if the Calumet River had frozen enough for skating. Being caught out made me sullen, even more so when Gabriella made me play the piano for an hour when we got home.
Sitting in the library this morning, I looked at my fingers, and regret twisted my intestines the way it uselessly does. I could be a decent pianist today-never gifted but competent-if I had acceded to my mother’s wishes that I study music more seriously. Why had I fought so against practicing? My mother adored me, and I had loved her fiercely back. Why would I not do this thing that was so important to her? Could it be that I’d been jealous of music? Who could possibly compete with Mozart, my rival for her affections? “Mi tradì quell’alma ingrata,” Donna Elvira’s aria about jealousy and betrayal in Don Giovanni, had been one of Gabriella’s favorites.
So lost was I in my memories that I sang the first line out loud and then blushed as everyone in the reading room turned to stare at me. I sank down in my chair and stared fixedly at the screen in front of me.
I looked at reports of homicides starting on January 26 and moving forward to the end of February-they got more play forty years ago when the numbers were smaller-but I didn’t see any unidentified bodies. I looked for car accidents and studied gang activity.
The Daily News had interviewed members of the Blackstone Rangers, who felt they were the legitimate voice of the black South Side. They were going to do all this good for the community, they told the paper: day care, schools, health care. I made a face in the dark reading room. The gang had started some of their grand projects, but, in the end, all they did was sell drugs and run protection and prostitution rackets.
I turned to the Herald-Star and read the same homicide reports there, saw the same pictures of the city up to its rail girders in snow. A week after the News talked to the Rangers, the Herald-Star played catch-up, running a feature on the Avalon Anacondas.
I sat up straighter, my fatigue forgotten, as I began reading about Johnny the Hammer. In the Herald-Star, he described some of the work the Anacondas had performed during the riot-filled summer of ’sixty-six.
I looked at the clock. Reading about Johnny Merton couldn’t be charged to Miss Ella’s account. I read all five articles in the Star’s series: a day inside the projects at Sixtieth and Racine, a day at a clinic that Merton said the Anacondas had started, pictures of the Hammer feeding his own eight-month-old daughter.
“The police are labeling the Anacondas as a criminal gang, and for what? For starting a school milk program for black children? For opening a health clinic at Fifty-ninth and Morgan when there’s been nothing in our neighborhood for fifty years? For organizing our people to vote, and getting us a real candidate for alderman in the Sixteenth Ward?”
This was a side of Merton I’d never known about. By the time I’d been facing him in that dreary bull pen at Twenty-sixth and California, he’d moved a long way from community organizer. The only organizing he did by then was where and how to separate small businesses from their money or his opponents from their body parts.
On the other hand, in 1967 he was already head of a powerful street gang. Maybe he’d just been spinning the reporter a line. A lot of white progressives had found street gangs glamorous or hip in the sixties. A lot of white reporters wanted the swagger that being on the inside with a black gangbanger would bring.
“The Man sees us as the threat to law and order on the streets of this city, but we weren’t the ones throwing bricks at Martin Luther King, were we? So how come it’s the brothers who are behind bars, not the white boys who turned cars over and such? You put Steve Sawyer up for murdering Harmony Newsome on no evidence whatever, no witness, no nothing. The sister went down in Marquette Park protecting Dr. King. And then they want to know why we aren’t grinning and tap-dancing for them. What if it was a white boy killed her in the middle of those riots? They were the ones with the weapons, but they are not the ones in jail!”
The Star inserted a picture of Harmony Newsome in her high school prom dress, her hair carefully straightened so that it hung to her bare shoulders in a slight bob.
It wasn’t the photograph that startled me into sloshing my contraband cappuccino all over my jeans. It was the caption: TRIAL BEGINS TODAY FOR STEVE SAWYER, ARRESTED IN THE MURDER OF HARMONY NEWSOME.
The sidebar explained that Sawyer’s trial was the culmination of months of protest by friends and family of the dead woman: they had held a prayer vigil outside the Area 1 police station since her murder the previous August. Sawyer had been arrested at New Year’s, which meant the trial was being rushed through like a bullet train.
I sat back in my chair, trying to figure it all out. Steve Sawyer. That must be, or at least might be, Lamont Gadsden’s missing boyhood friend. I read through all the papers and finally found a small paragraph in the Herald-Star. On January 30th, Steve Sawyer was convicted of Harmony Newsome’s murder. No other details were given. Nothing about weapon or motive and certainly no mention of Lamont Gadsden.
I did a cursory search for John Does. There’d been a good few deaths because of the snowstorm, but even though I skimmed all the papers through the end of April I didn’t find any reports of unaccounted bodies.
As I put the boxes back on their shelves, I kept wondering about Miss Ella. She must have known Steve Sawyer had been convicted of murder when she told Karen to give me his name yesterday. Why hadn’t she included that information? What was going on with her and her hostility to this search that she herself had initiated? But I had looked for Steve Sawyer along with Lamont in Department of Corrections databases around the country and hadn’t found either name. Did that mean that Lamont, too, was actually doing time somewhere?
I hurried past students whose faces were puffy from lack of sleep, pinched with anxiety over exams or jobs or love. In the sunken garden behind the library, I could see a gray-haired woman throwing a ball for her dog. They seemed to be the only happy creatures on the campus.