Like Walking Through Baghdad
Deshon McKnight
In 2011 and 2012, while more than 900 people were being murdered on the streets of Chicago, creative-writing students from DePaul University fanned out all over the city to interview people whose lives have been changed by the bloodshed. The result is How Long Will I Cry?: Voices of Youth Violence, an extraordinary and eye-opening work of oral history.
Told by real people in their own words, the book contains the extraordinary stories of 34 Chicagoans. This is one of them.
Marillac House—a social outreach center for the poor and the working poor—is located in East Garfield Park on an inconspicuous side street right off the Eisenhower Expressway. Established in 1947 by the Daughters of Charity, Marillac originally served a mostly white clientele. By 1960, however, the neighborhood had become mostly African-American. In the 1970s and 1980s, poverty and unemployment consumed the area, triggering a surge of drug and gang activity.
Nineteen-year-old Deshon McKnight, who grew up in the nearby neigh- borhood of Austin, sits on a sofa within the Marillac House waiting room. His mannerisms are polite and reserved; his tattooed arms seem at odds with his clean-cut style of dress. His face is young, but his expression is intently serious, his gaze straight and unwavering. Born into a gang-affiliated family, Deshon speaks about the dangers of his neighborhood with deep and mature insight. His words are unpolished, honest and poetic. Every syllable and inflection feels deliberate.
What I remember from being little is gunshots every night. Being in the house before the streetlights come on ‘cause that’s when all the action happens. Don’t stray too far from the block. It was like my childhood was contained. The only time I would go out, the only time I would get a chance to go out—our parents had to take us out. Because, like, it wasn’t that safe to go outside or ride the bikes, or go outside and play basketball, or play hide-and-go-seek. I never really got a chance to, like, hang out at the park, play at the park, with all the other kids. I couldn’t do that. That’s in the enemy’s territory, and my mom didn’t want anything happening to me. So basically, my life was playing video games.
When you hear gunshots, the first thing they tell you is get on the floor. And they cut all the lights off. I don’t know why they cut all the lights off; I never got that point. But I understood why to get on the floor, in case a bullet came through the window. But, like, one day, when I was about 9 or 10, me and my mom was watching TV in the front room, and we heard gunshots. So she instantly pushes me on the floor and she runs to the back to make sure all the other kids on the floor. But while she was doing that, I creep to the window, and I peek out. And I just see, like, a guy on this side of the street, and a guy on the other side of the street, I just see them, like, shooting at each other. Shooting at each other.
Then I see more guys run out shooting, more guys from the other side, coming out shooting. Then the police came on the block—and I just see my older cousin, running. He running upstairs, and then he get in the hallway, and he fall—because he got shot in his leg, and he got shot in his ear, and there’s just blood everywhere. So I’m like, I don’t know what’s going on, but that shocked me. You see all the blood, you see how much pain he in, and you like, “This a grown man. He’s right here. He sounds like he’s crying.” So you don’t want that. You scared. You don’t know what’ll happen to you if you go outside.
After that, I was just more cautious. I was suspicious of everybody. I was basically paranoid. I’m still like that now, but when I was little it was even worse. Because there’s people that knew my name, that I didn’t know. They know me because of my parents, so I don’t know if… Is this the enemy talking or one of my dad’s friends speaking to me? So I would just turn my head down and act like I don’t hear them.
I got a gun when I was 13. The chiefs of the block, the upper generals of the block, they buy the guns. And as soon as you walk up there on the street, they gonna tell you that you going to need one. They say “You protected?” And you be like, “No” and they be like, “Hold up” and they give you their gun, and they’ll go get another one. It’s that simple.
I don’t have a gun anymore, but I used to keep it in a shoebox. Or, then I had got me a tackle-box, like fish tackle-box, and I put a lock on it because I know my little brothers come in my room to play. And I would slide it under the far end of my bed, and I’d throw some dirty clothes on it or something, to make it look just like my room’s junky.
I was basically dragged into gangbanging. Because if you related to this person, and they in a gang, their enemies are going to assume that you’re in a gang, too. Like, so, you get forced into it. You have no choice. You got to protect yourself somehow. You gotta…if you out there by yourself, if you not claimed by a gang…basically, that gang is not going to help you. If this other gang attacks you, because they think you in a gang, you out there by yourself. You’re out there alone.
The area I live in has always been rough. That violence—everything just got out of hand. The streets aren’t really safe no more, like there’s more gun violence, more gang violence, drug violence. People getting beaten half to death—or beaten to death. This side of the street don’t like that side of the street. I don’t know why, it’s just been like that all this time.
When I walk at night, it’s like walking through Baghdad or something. You don’t know when somebody might pop out or shoot at you. I was standing, and the streetlights all got cut off for some reason—every now and then they get cut off. When that happens, that’s when everybody starts shooting.
One time, somebody shot in my grandma’s house and a bullet missed two inches from my head. Hit the couch pillow. Another time, when I was 19 years old, I was at my house, and my mom was around the corner at my grandmother’s house. I was in the house playing a game. I heard the gunshots, but they sound far away, so I can’t really tell where they coming from. So I’m thinking, they could probably be coming from over there by my grandma’s block. So I’m like, “Nobody’s really getting to it, so what could have happened?” As I’m walking up the street, I see one of my friends and I ask him, “Did you hear some gunshots coming from this direction?” He was like, “Yeah, they was shooting on your grandma’s block.” So as I was walking down there, I was thinking in my head, “Please, nobody hurt. Nobody shot.”
But it was my mom. She was just sitting on the porch. They just came right through, shooting. At first we thought she was shot in her stomach— though later we realized she got shot in the hand. So everybody’s mad and angry and upset. Then everybody just went looking for guns.
It escalated to a big, all-out war. They would come by and shoot inside my grandma’s house. All the windows were shot out, with bullet holes in the walls. None of the kids could stay there because of what happened, so we had to get them out. But my grandma—they still stayed, I don’t know why, but luckily nothing ever happened to them. They come, they shoot, and then we’ll go back and shoot at them.
Nobody knows what the original argument is. It’s been like that for years. Since my parents, it’s been like that. Since my mom lived there, nobody on that side of the street likes this side. And my mom told everybody to leave it alone, let the police handle it. We were just leaving it alone because she said it. But they kept shooting at us.
It’s basically all about territory. In this neighborhood, all the gangs be on the same block. There’s Vice Lords on this block, Latin Kings on the other block—each block got their own gang. Whether you gangbang or not, if they see you on that block, they gonna assume you a Vice Lord or something, especially if you a male. They’re just going to assume.
Because you can’t really tell who’s affiliated by looks alone. You can’t do it. There’s a lot of drug dealers that wear baggy clothes, like baggy jeans. Then you see these guys who are wearing skinny jeans. Some of the dudes in skinny jeans don’t like the baggy clothes, and some of those guys wearing the baggy clothes styles don’t like skinny jeans. Clothes don’t matter. You gonna try to have something with your gang color in it. You could have on a whole green outfit and you gonna put on some red shoes because your gang color is red. That’s how it goes. So it’s like a fashion thing.
Police don’t understand that. Just because you have your hat cocked a certain way, that don’t necessarily mean that you’re in a gang now—that’s more of the style. Everybody cock their hat now, just to be doing it. Justin Bieber be cocking his hat, but the police aren’t calling him a Vice Lord.
The police can only help so much, though. They can’t catch every bad guy, every person with a gun, every person committing a crime—they can’t catch everybody. It got to be an internal thing. There’s got to be a person saying that they want to make a change. People know what they’re doing is not right. They know deep inside it’s not right. But still, that’s the path they choose. It’s got to be an internal thing for you to have your own change. Because if you don’t change, who’s going to change? You got to set an example for somebody.
I didn’t have a lot of examples of my own. All the dads in my family are either dead, in jail or hang with gangs. It’s like no real fathers around, just mostly stepfathers. We don’t have a dad. All my cousins, brothers, friends— all of them, same thing. My dad’s a deadbeat. My brother, his dad got killed. That was my stepfather—that was who I called my dad. He got killed. My little brother—my youngest brother—his dad is engaged to my mom, so he’s around. My little sisters—one of my little sisters’ dad, he’s around. But my other little sister—we share the same dad—he’s not around. One of my cousins, his daddy’s in jail. His brother’s dad lives in Atlanta. He’s a dead-beat. His older brother, his dad’s in jail. And my cousin, his dad’s in jail. His dad’s a deadbeat, just like mine. That’s something all of us have in common. We joke about it, but it hurt us, you know what I mean? We joke, “Ah, our daddies ain’t nothing.” We laugh about it, but we not really laughing, we’re just expressing ourselves to each other. We don’t want to seem like a bunch of wimps. We’re telling each other “You’re not alone in this.”
I don’t want my daughter to feel like she’s alone in the world. I want to be there when she needs me. I know how it felt to not have a father and my biggest fear is that I fail her. I don’t want to become like my dad.
I made high school rough for myself because I stopped going and started getting in with a tough crowd. I’d be on my way to school, uniform on, everything, And I’d get a phone call, like, “Oh, you wanna go play ball?” Or, “Do you want to hang out?” And I’d just ditch school and go with them. That was their life, the streets. It was all they knew.
But I just decided to start over. I missed out on the last semester, so I had to do my senior year over. I told myself, “No matter what, I’m going to keep going.” I got my diploma in 2010. I’m the older child, and I didn’t want my little brothers to see me not graduating. I felt like I was letting them down by not going to school. And I didn’t want them to go the same route I was heading.
I hate when you see someone fighting for their goals, for what they want to be and then they die or something happens to them. Broken dreams. Like, their dreams was broken and other people see that, and they’ll be like, “Don’t let that happen to me.” And I’m like, “What should I fight for? What goals should I set for myself, besides staying alive?”
Like, my cousin Danta. His goal wasn’t to be someone big or whatever— he was a drug dealer, he always been a drug dealer, since he was like 10. His goal was to go back to school. He told me he wanted to go back to school. He was supposed to start on a Monday. But he was killed that Sunday.
I feel like I just got to take life day by day. How many days can I get out of it? Nowadays, people my age, they’re not going to live that long. Every night, I just felt like I don’t know when it’s going to be my time to go. I hear about it on the news: A guy my age that lived down the street from me was killed. That could have been me.
People who aren’t from here don’t have no clue about how intense it is. They gonna go by what they see on TV or what they read on the paper. But to really understand how intense the violence is you got to be living in it. You got to be part of the danger.
—Interviewed by Colleen Wick
