Entry 2:

I awoke at 5:30 a.m., without an alarm clock, to the sound of bird song. Most days I am up before dawn. This is my writing time: two hours of quiet and solitude before I immerse myself in the turbulence and clamor of Stateway Gardens.

When the weather allows, I write on the balcony of our third-floor apartment. We live in Kenwood, an integrated, middle-class neighborhood at the edge of the black South Side. Our apartment is half a block from the house where I grew up. From the balcony, I look out on the tops of trees that shaded and dropped their leaves on me when I was a child. I am deeply a native of this place. It holds strata upon strata of memory and association through which I know myself. Every day I look with deepening puzzlement at sights I have seen all my life and wonder what it is like as their world is dismantled around them.

When I was younger, I traveled widely on several continents. I was drawn to wild places and was, for a time, a passionate mountaineer. A friend and I once drove a motorcycle, laden with climbing gear, from Paris to New Delhi. But I have become, as Polish poet Milosz somewhere describes himself, "a man of a few streets." Not provincial. Certainly not agoraphobic. But intensely local. The adventures these days are close at hand.

Kenwood has achieved a rare degree of comfortable, unself-conscious racial integration. It is a place to which mixed-race couples move in order to raise their children in a setting in harmony with their households. Yet the relationship of this neighborhood to the public housing development where I work, five minutes away by car, can only be described in the language of apartheid. Passing back and forth daily between these worlds, I permanently live in the state of heightened lucidity travelers experience when they return home after a long period abroad and see the strange in the familiar.

Today Stateway seemed a world in transition. When I arrived at the office, there were two moving vans outside the House of Pain. And at the center of the development a city crew had excavated a deep channel and was laying a new water main. I asked the foreman why they were doing the work. "For the future," he replied.

Up under the building, a barber cut the hair of customers who sat on a tree stump. A story circulated that the night before a gangbanger had tried to stick up a drug customer who had disarmed him and taken his gun. It was also rumored that the drug dealers who operate on one side of the building were going to pack up shop and relocate.

Around the clock, a never-ending parade of customers passes through the drug marketplace. Black and white, well-heeled and down-and-out, they step into the dark interior corridors off the lobby to be served by the young men laboring in the drug trade.

The office where I work is at the end of one of these corridors. A five-bedroom apartment that we have converted into office space, it houses several collaborating organizations: 32 Degrees (a public health initiative); the CARA Program (a job training organization with which we collaborate in an initiative directed at non-leaseholders); and the Stateway Civil Rights Project (a police accountability project in collaboration with the Mandel Legal Clinic of the University of Chicago Law School). Also, a lawyer from the Legal Assistance Foundation of Metropolitan Chicago and a social worker from the Family Institute of Northwestern University have office hours there in the course of the week.

Today two groups of students from Northwestern University made their way down that corridor. They came to talk with me as part of their (unusually adventurous) freshman orientation program. I enjoyed the encounters. The students were appealing—attentive, intelligent, full of questions.

We ended up talking about the way in which, as Albert Murray once put it, the social sciences can become a sort of folklore when social scientific categories are treated as essences. I recalled a phone call that WBEZ, the Chicago public radio station, received recently when it aired an interview I had done with a former Stateway drug dealer and addict named Fred Hale. A remarkable witness to his own experience, Fred took us inside the drug culture up under the building and compellingly described his own struggles to stay clean. The program was generally well received, but the station got one call from a man in Wilmette, a northern suburb, who was incensed that WBEZ was giving air time to a former drug dealer and heroin addict. What fascinated me about this call was that it came within the first five minutes of the first airing of the 25-minute program. Without listening to Fred, the caller knew enough about him—public housing resident, felon, heroin addict—to know that he didn't need to know more.

After saying goodbye to the second group of Northwestern students on State Street, I encountered E, a 38-year-old man who used to be a lookout for the drug dealers in the building. "If you've got nowhere to go," he said bitterly, "come to the House of Pain." Two months ago he had emerged from prison clean and full of hopes for the future. Now he was in agony from a combination of being "dope sick" and ashamed that he had fallen back into heroin use. "I'm not going down with the building," he told me. "I'm not going to let that happen."



See a slide show of photos taken at the Stateway Gardens housing development.