My Midnight Years: Surviving Jon Burge's Police Torture Ring and Death Row
My Midnight Years: Surviving Jon Burge's Police Torture Ring and Death Row
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781538526781 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Blackstone Publishing |
| Publication date: | 08/01/2018 |
| Edition description: | Unabridged |
| Product dimensions: | 5.20(w) x 5.70(h) x (d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
BORN IN THE PROJECTS
I TOOK A LOT of chances on stuff when I was a kid. I did. Ever since I can remember, I took risks. But they were calculated risks.
In the late 1970s, for example, when we were living on the South Side of Chicago, my uncle Earl owned two Doberman pinschers named Bonnie and Clyde. He had kept attack dogs for as long as I could recall, and I knew he had the skills to train them to a T. Bonnie and Clyde were new, and he was going through the delicate process of transforming them into deadly weapons. "Don't touch my dogs," he told everyone. "Don't go 'round them."
I was twelve or thirteen years old at the time. What did I do? I snuck over there and started feeding them. I didn't exactly have a set purpose in mind. I just knew there wasn't any way in the world I was going to spend time in a house that had two attack dogs in it — and not try to get on good terms with them. Every night, after Earl left for work, I headed over to his place. Chicken bones, leftovers, I grabbed whatever was in the fridge. At first I just threw it to them from the window. Then I came down the stairs, right up to their cages, and let them sniff me. For a month or more I did this, until I felt I had a deal with these dogs. I was pretty sure they wouldn't bite the hand that fed them.
One day a bunch of us were hanging out on the sidewalk near Earl's yard. He was feeling good or cocky, or something, because he suddenly boasted, "I bet none of you will walk to the fence and try to rub my dogs." At first I was kind of leery. Maybe he had caught an inkling about what I had been up to. But I barely hesitated.
"Man," I said, "I'll do it."
He looked at me with disbelief. "You gonna try to rub them?"
"Yeah."
"If you rub both of them," he said, "I'll give you a hundred dollars apiece."
Now this was interesting.
"Show me the money," I replied.
"I got it."
"No, show me the money," I insisted, knowing better. "Give the money to Tommie. Give the money to him. I'm going to do it." I watched as Earl handed over the cash.
"Hold it out," I said to my other uncle. "I'm gonna get my money."
Now Earl was a little worried. Not over his money — he figured I had no chance of collecting — but he was probably thinking about what he'd tell his big sister, my mother, if his dogs tore me up. "You gonna do it for real?" he asked anxiously.
"Yeah," I replied. "But what are you gonna say? You're not going to tell them to attack me, right?"
"I'm just going to tell them to watch you."
I took a step toward the fence. Bonnie and Clyde stood up, their keen dark eyes staring daggers at me. Another step. They raised their front paws, suddenly on full alert. Oh shit, I thought.
"Watch him!" Earl commanded. Their canine focus sharpened even tighter.
I got a little closer and I could see that even though they were watching me, they were not growling. A tiny bit more relaxed now, I walked over to the deadly attack dogs. They sniffed and licked my hands playfully, like puppies, as I laughed and rubbed them all up and down their backs.
"What did you do to my dogs?" shouted Earl.
That memory says volumes about me as a youngster. I was always a little different, even from my brothers, cousins, and friends. I hadn't started out to win that cash, just with a general feeling that it would be a smart idea to be on good terms with those dogs. But when the moment came to earn a buck — or sneak a kiss — I was ready to act. I got a reputation for thinking ahead, for reading angles and sensing possibilities that others maybe didn't see. So when I took a chance, I was generally pretty sure it would pay off.
Things seemed to come my way — the good and the bad. Money. Girls. Trouble. I put it down to my smarts and to protecting what was mine. Others had a different interpretation: they said, "This boy's got issues." In either view, it related to my general attitude. Part of it was just who I was. Me. But it was also all about my upbringing, the people who raised me up: my grandmother, my mother, and my uncles.
* * *
My people had always lived in the South. My grandmother, Geraldine Howard, was born in the town of Baxley, Georgia, about a hundred miles west of Savannah, in 1929. Her father — Roy Bell — had lived in the area all his life, earning a meager living as a pulp wooder, cutting timber for the local paper mills. For all that backbreaking work he was only able to afford a little old country house — a shack, really — to shelter his family. It had no lights and no plumbing. The kitchen featured a coal stove, but the family was too poor to buy fuel, so instead they used wood shavings for all the cooking and heating.
Geraldine was basically still a kid herself — she had only just celebrated her own sixteenth birthday — when she gave birth to her first child, my mother, Louva Grace Bell. They were still in Georgia then. The year was 1945. Nine other children followed after. There were so many of them that my mother sometimes lost count of who was who. To remember their ages she had to work her way down the whole list of names to figure out which one came when. Regardless, my mother was big sister to them all. She and my grandmother were so close in age that they basically raised up the entire family together as a team. They were remarkable women, fighters who had big dreams for their kin. And it didn't take long for them to outgrow the family shack. They had eight or nine people crammed into a couple rooms. It was time to move. First they went to Jacksonville, Florida. Then, in 1960, the whole clan up and moved to Chicago.
Geraldine brought her children north for a chance at wider opportunities and a better life. She wanted the same thing my mother wanted for us — the same thing I want for my kids, the same thing everybody wants for their children — to allow her children to grow up in a better environment and to be better than their parents ever were, to be a better provider and a better spouse. Upon arriving in the city, the family lived for a while in some of the South Side's dilapidated, falling-down tenements. Seventeen years old and eager for a place of her own, my mother became one of the first tenants to move into the city's newest and most famous housing development — the Robert Taylor Homes.
In later years the Taylor Homes, like many of Chicago's other huge projects, would come to have a notorious reputation. But when they first opened in the early 1960s their construction was greeted with joy. Carefully selected families — with good jobs and steady incomes — felt lucky to be chosen to move into their pristine apartments. To my family, who had only known grinding poverty, the Taylor Homes were like a dream: running water, elevators, massive apartments with bedrooms for all — or nearly all — the children. For us, these weren't the "projects" — they were the "high rises."
But the dream didn't last long. The Taylor Homes were too large and isolated to thrive. Stretching for two miles down South State Street, the complex consisted of more than two dozen dreary, identical towers. It was the largest public housing project in the country. Thirty thousand people lived there — nearly every last one of them black. The Dan Ryan Expressway ran alongside the development, serving as a barrier between the residents and the rest of the city. The apartment towers had been built on the cheap. Before long, the elevators and heating systems started breaking down. As working families increasingly moved out — replaced by the underemployed and single mothers on welfare — the project became known as a place of crime and delinquency. Within a year of its opening, tenants were staging protests demanding more police protection and better conditions. During Martin Luther King Jr.'s visit to the city in 1965, civil rights leaders dubbed the Taylor Homes Chicago's "high-rise ghetto."
And this is where I came into this world. I was literally born in these projects. My mother was twenty years old when she gave birth to me in unit number 1101 of 4444 S. State Street, right in the middle of the Robert Taylor Homes. It was January 13, 1966. My great-aunt served as midwife. My brother Pat had been born a few years earlier — in a more theatrical fashion — right on the dining room table, but for me the experience was not quite so dramatic. I first drew breath in the back bedroom of our apartment.
I had a child's eye view of the Homes. Big things like crime and politics escaped my notice, but I sure felt the little things. What I remember best was the day care center down on the first story of the building. In my bones I can feel the way the wind would blast in through the cheaply constructed walls. For a young baby down on hands and knees, the floors were always gusty and freezing. And I can almost still smell the hot dogs, nachos, hamburgers, and sweets that the older kids bought with extra pocket money from the "Candy Lady," who had turned her apartment into a makeshift food stand.
In those early years, the Homes retained some of their original shine. The walls were being painted semi-regularly by the Chicago Housing Authority. Pleasant patches of lawn had been planted between the buildings. Playground equipment, the Laundromat, and other services still functioned — at least part of the time. But on the whole, living conditions on the South Side were desperate enough to draw the attention of national civil rights leaders. Two weeks after I was born, Martin Luther King Jr. returned to Chicago to take a public and courageous stand against northern slum conditions. That summer, while I was still too young to sit up on my own, he and hundreds of his followers participated in a series of demonstrations in all-white neighborhoods to demand better jobs and integrated housing.
I recall listening to my grandmother's stories, years later, about these events. We were sitting on our front porch late at night — approaching midnight, if I am remembering this correctly — when one of my cousins asked her about King and the summer of 1966. These confrontations were still fresh in her memory. She had been there, on the front lines. Organizers had hoped these demonstrations would be nonviolent, but the rage and fear of local residents had ensured the shedding of blood. Mobs of angry white Chicagoans waved Confederate flags and chanted "Niggers, go home!" During one march in Marquette Park, they threw stones, eggs, bottles, whatever they could get their hands on. King was hit and knocked to the ground by a brick. He told reporters, "I've been in many demonstrations all across the South, but I can say that I have never seen — even in Mississippi and Alabama — mobs as hostile and as hate-filled as I've seen here in Chicago."
My grandma had other stories about the time two years later — in April 1968 — when King was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee. In Chicago, days of open rebellion and violence followed the tragic news. As African Americans demonstrated their frustrations, thousands of soldiers were deployed to the city's South and West Sides to try to restore order. Mayor Richard Daley issued a "shoot to kill" order that was basically a declaration of war against black residents. Over the course of several hellish days, more than two hundred buildings were destroyed. The human cost was great, too. Hundreds were injured, and many were killed — all of them black. Although black folks' anger was focused on whites, the devastation of April 1968 was confined almost entirely to our own neighborhoods, mostly on the West Side. Some of Chicago's public housing high-rises had turned into furious battlegrounds during the uprising. Entire business districts were leveled.
For my grandmother, surveying the damage from the window of our eleventh floor apartment, the scenes of rebellion were heartbreaking and filled with frustration. Geraldine hated to see these self-destructive acts. Everything she did was to bring stuff back to the community, and she could not understand why people — even in the depths of frustration — would choose to tear it down. Rioting and looting and stuff, she wasn't for that. She knew that when black people tore things down like this, it would be hard to ever get these areas rebuilt. And she was right. Many of the damaged areas have never been mended.
Seeing that the projects were on a downward slide, and that black neighborhoods would take decades to recover, she and my mother made a difficult and courageous choice. It was time to leave the Taylor Homes. The family would work its way into a better area, a place with nice houses, good schools, and pleasant parks — in other words, a white neighborhood. They knew this would mean a long, hard fight. But they wanted the kinds of opportunities that any parent wants for their kids, and they refused to be intimidated.
I was about four years old, in 1970, when we left the Taylor Homes and moved into our own house on Emerald Avenue at Fifty-First Street, on the city's Southwest Side. My family had put away enough money to purchase an older home divided into twin units. We would live on one side, my grandmother on the other. The main thing I remember is how fun it was to live next door to Geraldine. Whenever she called me over — or if I wanted to visit — I could go into the bathroom, unhook the grate, and crawl through the heating vent across to her side. To me, the houses seemed huge, especially after the cinderblock walls and dark corridors of apartment living. We had upstairs, downstairs, a basement, and a porch. In our backyard there were apple trees, cherry trees, and even grapes growing. My older brothers, Pat and Darnell, shared one room; I shared another with my little brother, Charlie. My sister, Leslie, had one to herself. By other people's standards it might have been rather modest, but for us at the time it was a little bit of the American Dream.
My favorite memories from these years all take place in my grandmother's kitchen. It was white and beige, with all new appliances and curtains decorated with flowers. The living room was off limits to us children; the furniture in there was covered in plastic sheeting. The formal dining room was also for adult guests. She didn't want anything broken or messed with in either of those areas. The kitchen, though, was the place for us. It was large enough for a full-size table, two chairs to a side, and we spent hours sitting there playing cards, doing homework, and just hanging out.
During the afternoons or on weekends we'd play out front, remembering always to keep within sight of the door. In the evening, when the streetlights switched on, we knew it was time to head inside. My mother would step onto the porch and call us all in. Anyone who was even a little bit late could expect to be greeted by anxious looks, or a quick smack. We were one of the first African American families in the area, and our parents understood the reality of our situation. Anyone who could remember those demonstrations that King had led knew how fiercely white Chicagoans were going to fight even the first hint at integration. Our elders shielded us from it all. We didn't think about it or question anything. It was just a simple fact of life: when the lights came on everybody who was black had to be in the house.
The area we had moved into was very much a working-class white enclave. Filled with Irish and Polish immigrants, or the children of immigrants, it was a flourishing area of small bungalows with lawns and yards, set back from the tree-lined streets. Our specific area of Chicago — east of Racine and north of Fifty-Fifth Street — was at the meeting point of several neighborhoods. It had character but not a lot of renown. Our part of town didn't even have an agreed-upon name. Depending on who you asked, this small pocket was Back of the Yards, Englewood, New City, or Moe Town. For generations, the nearby stockyards and packinghouses had served as the main local employers. Men went off to work at the factories, or to city jobs, while their children played with friends in the nearby parks after school and their wives kept house, running errands at the many local shops and stores. The row on row of neat single-family houses and two-story brick flats were clean and spacious, with all the modern conveniences. These thriving stores — these nice homes — they had all been built for the white working-class families, at a time when the city's bright future had seemed certain.
None of these nice things had been intended for us. And as we, and a few other black families — including the Loves, Gilberts, Carrs, and some others — started to move into the neighborhood, white homeowners saw us as a threat to everything they'd worked to build. They cared more about keeping us out than about working to provide good times for all — even if it meant the destruction of their own community. We were greeted with ruthless terror and violence.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "My Midnight Years"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Ronald Kitchen with Thai Jones and Logan M. McBride.
Excerpted by permission of Chicago Review Press Incoporated.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Prologue: The Midnight Crew 1
1 Born in the Projects 19
2 Penitentiary or Death 41
3 The Crying Years 65
4 The People vs. Ronald Kitchen 85
5 A Killing Spree 107
6 The Death Row Ten 129
7 Clearing the Row 151
8 General Population 171
9 It's Good to Be Out 193
10 Life 213
Epilogue 239