anymore doesn’t mean she won’t be around. Thomas is disappearing into his sweatshirt. He looks either deeply sad or lost, or both.
“How come they didn’t have me testify when Nugget got killed?” he asks by way of wondering why he needs to testify in the trial of Shakaki’s assailant. “What if I tell ’em I don’t remember anything?”
“You afraid?” Anita asks.
“No. I don’t want to sit on the stand and tell them everything. It’s snitching. You can get killed for that. I ain’t scared. It’s just like that.”
Anita can feel him slipping away, not necessarily in this moment, but she sees it coming. She tells him how he owes it to Shakaki to appear at the trial. It seems only right. She was his best friend. Justice of any kind feels so ephemeral in Englewood, and this feels like a moment that you can actually grab on to it, a moment when things can be made right, that Thomas can be made right. But Anita knows. And Thomas knows. As Anita later told me, “You need to be honest—Thomas is afraid. I understand that.”
Afterward, in her car, she starts to cry. She tells me that she can tell it’s hard on Thomas, knowing she won’t be around this coming year. “If I had known this was going to happen, I would’ve never gone to Harper,” she tells me. “It’s like I’m giving up on them. It’s so unfair to him.” She pauses to wipe her cheeks and drives down the narrow one-way street: past the two-story home where Shakaki was shot, the downstairs windows covered by sheets of warping plywood; past the sidewalk along a waist-high fence where Dwayne “Duck” Duckworth had been shot so many times—thirteen—it took hours for neighbors to scrub the blood from the pavement; past the home where Nugget was killed at her birthday party by a bullet piercing the large front window, shot by a young man who at the age of thirteen had himself been caught in crossfire and shot in his leg; and past a shuttered home on which someone has scrawled “Fuck 7-0.” Some, Anita tells me, call this “the block of death.”
* * *
—
Ur child is in jail. Anita received this text from Thomas’s sister, Stella.
As the trial of Monkey Man—his real name is Antuan Joiner—approached, Thomas became more and more skittish. At one point, the prosecutor on the case asked Shakaki’s mother if she felt she might need protection or if she wanted to move. Thomas was in the room at the time, and after he returned from the courthouse, he told Anita, Miss Stewart, they was asking the wrong person. He worried that he might be the one targeted, not Shakaki’s family. Thomas received a subpoena to appear in court, but he refused to comply, and as a result the judge ruled him in contempt, sending him to the county jail, a place he’d never been. He was miserable. He kept to himself. He would’ve called Anita, but he hadn’t memorized her phone number. After a week locked up, he promised he’d appear at the trial, and so he was released on house arrest. When he arrived home, he learned that a few days earlier someone had driven by and shot up his house, a bullet piercing his grandmother’s bedroom window. The bullet hole was still in the wall. He called Anita, who told him, You need to be in protective custody.
The case dragged on; the trial was postponed several times. In June 2014, Thomas graduated from high school in a ceremony at Trinity Church, and Anita and Crystal cheered and yelled, “Hey, Big Baby!” as he received his diploma. The school also awarded an honorary diploma to Shakaki and one other slain student, a not uncommon occurrence at Chicago public school graduations. The next day Anita texted Thomas: I am so proud of you! You are really growing into a responsible young man. I love you very much and I am still in charge. ? ☺ Anita also celebrated the graduation of her oldest daughter, who was awarded a full scholarship to Carleton College. (Her two youngest, twins, would end up at the University of Wisconsin Madison and at the University of Michigan.)
Anita called me one day, noticeably upset, trying to keep from crying. She told me that the week before, as Thomas was walking home from Harper after picking up his transcript, he had noticed a figure furtively moving alongside his house. Thomas was crossing