Here is an excerpt from my final piece from the Academy of Alternative Journalism. To read more go to: http://aan.org/aaj2009/campers/user/maryandom/
On a mild summer July day, Jermaine walks me through his CeaseFire beat of West Garfield Park— a place dotted with foreclosed homes and scraggly fenced lots. Less than a decade ago West Garfield was dubbed one of the deadliest neighborhoods to be a kid, where Chicago children were twice as likely to die from accidents, abuse or shootings.
Jermaine watches everything, he knows everyone and his phone serves as a hotline for residents who tip him off to simmering conflicts.
“What’s good, lil homie?” he says to a towering guy with furry cornrow braids who doesn’t crack a smile. He strolls past an overgrown weed lot littered with trash, and past his former elementary school.
Walking with Jermaine through the neighborhood, it’s clear that he’s something of a local celebrity, partly due to a cameo appearance he made on the History Channel’s “Gangland” documentary, which chronicled some of America’s most notorious street gangs, but also because of his former occupation as a drug dealer.
He waves to the grandmothers of the neighborhood who smile sweetly from their porches. One chubby kid pounces on his back and he wrestles him to the ground.
“Illy, Illy. I saw you on TV yesterday,” one kid clamors. The others chime in: “Me too!. Me too!”
“Everybody knows me,” Jermaine says, showing flashes of his old drug dealer bravado.. “My senior year Googie [a fellow dealer] and I brought a bundle of $1,000 bills, tied it with a rubber band and threw it around like a football.
It is the sort of over-the-top exploit that drug dealing heroes are made of, especially in a part of town where few people hold regular 9-to-5 jobs.
“I used to love selling drugs,” Jermaine confesses. .“If that’s what all your friends are doing, you’re gonna do it too,” he says. “In like one hour I made $90. I was happy.”
He rolls up his shirt sleeve revealing a tattoo mapped out on his biceps, with a BH.
“It stands for Bogus Hustlers or BraveHarts,” he says of the loosely-formed gang in his neighborhood that gained him notoriety.
At the age of 16, or 17 Jermaine was a well-known drug dealer and a BraveHart. He dropped out of Marshall High School in his senior year to focus on making money. He says he owned three cars: a Lumina, a LeSabre and a ’93 Grand Prix. The rides and his flashy wardrobe earned him the street name “Illy Mac” because he says the girls would swoon over him.
He is frank about the entrepreneurial attitude of the local hustler. “It’s not a 9-5 regular job; you can’t get fired, it doesn’t matter if you’re late,” he says. “You wake up, sell some drugs, get some liquor, get a girl, and go to the club. And the next day you do it all over again.”
But the life had its perils. Early in 2005 his friend Tron was shot to death. A couple months later another friend, Tron Bone, was killed, a couple blocks of where Jermaine and I walk today. Like many murders in Chicago, they appeared as a two sentence mentiosn in the local papers. “To this day I don’t know what happened,” he says.
Yet he maintains that there was no life-changing epiphany that made him turn his back on the hustler’s life. He simply says he saw a way out when an older, ex-felon named Reginald “Akeem” Berry gave him a job handing out flyers for CeaseFire.
“It feels crazy because a couple years back I was into this violence,” he says. “Sometimes I feel like shoot’em, fuck’em I don’t know them, but I gotta think that ain’t me no more.”
***
A white Oldsmobile makes a slow turn into the courtyard of the elementary school. It circles around twice. Ten minutes later a familiar fixture: a blue and white squad car follows the same route. Jermaine fixes his eyes on the car.
“We don’t mess with the cops. PERIOD,” he says. “People don’t want to talk to the cops.”
Once the Chicago police are called on the scene of a shooting, Jermaine and other violence interrupters wait in the background. Distancing themselves from the police, gives them a certain level of credibility they wouldn’t have otherwise.
It’s something of a high wire act, being a violence interrupter. “I’m not a police officer,” Jermaine says. “I don’t have a vest. I’m putting my life on the line.”
A day in Ceasefire for Jermaine could be a “good day or a fucked up day” he says. “Sometimes there is a war going on and you have to jump in the middle. It’s hard to tell a man- not to shoot at someone after he was shot at.”
On a traffic light post, a red CeaseFire sticker reads: Stop. Killing. People- East Garfield with a hotline number to call.
A scrawny older black man and a heavyset black woman wearing a gray miniskirt are screaming at the top of their lungs. With his face two inches from hers, the man calls the woman a bitch. At this point, three young kids crowd around the commotion.
“See this is what I’m talking about,” Jermaine says. He stands around waiting, hoping he doesn’t have to step in. Luckily nothing happens. The woman storms off. “Old stupid son of a bitch,” she hollers. Jermaine steps back.
“If a man is fighting his woman,” he says. “He don’t want anybody in his business.”
Despite his work with CeaseFire, Jermaine admits that it’s difficult staying on the straight and narrow path. Since CeaseFire went through its funding issues with the state, he has been scraping by financially, but resisting the temptation to sell drugs. Instead he works a part-time job at a printing press on the West Side specializing in R.I.P memorialized T-shirts, obituaries and flyers. He thinks about his meager paycheck, mentally calculating how much it will be: $8 an hour, 25 hours a week, he admits it isn’t much to live on.
“I’m ashamed,” he says. “But don’t put that in the story.” He mumbles something under his breath about “making more on the block.”
He still hangs out on the block with his unreformed friends and still manages to dress fashionably (Coogi brand jeans and polo with matching rainbow Jordans) except he doesn’t gang bang or sell drugs, even if he understands why many people do.
“Some people can’t wait two weeks to get paid,” he says adamantly. “They wanna get paid now.”
Although, Jermaine has long given up his hustling he still speaks with a gang-banger’s machismo about growing up on the tough West Side. When comparing other urban areas gripped by violence such as: South East D.C. or East Baltimore, he brags, “Chicago is a fucked up place,” he says. “They ain’t got nothing on us. If I were there and I gang-banged I’d take over that city.”
But in more reflective moments, he thinks about how far he’s come. CeaseFire may not provide the creature comfort or the status that gang-banging and drug dealing once afforded him, but it has given him perspective on the futility of his former life. “Being out in the street you think you know everything,” he chuckles. “But you really don’t know shit.”
