A lot can happen to a person in ten years–especially someone who’s poor.
The cadets are by and large in their 20s and 30s, and about three-quarters of them are men. At least 80 percent are black, and most if not all of the rest appear to be Hispanic. They are a raucous crowd: they pound palms and bellow as classmates step forward and receive their diplomas.
In subsequent years, Wilson’s son would periodically terrorize his sisters, threatening them with knives, cutting them with pieces of glass. He knocked out two of his youngest sister’s teeth. He set small fires in the family’s apartments. In ’88 he was diagnosed as emotionally disturbed. Even before he was abandoned those three days, Wilson had wondered whether something was wrong with him: he rarely smiled or cried. But she still blames his emotional problems largely on the February ’80 incident.
She volunteered at Mount Sinai Hospital, and after a few weeks they hired her as a typist. She worked there until ’77, when she had her first baby. She got pregnant out of ignorance about birth control, she said. The baby’s father split soon after. With no child care, Wilson couldn’t return to work. She started receiving AFDC.
She saw another man from ’85 through ’87, but broke up with him when he wanted to get married. “If I was to ever get married again, my kids would have to be grown, or almost grown, because I don’t want a man over my kids. Those kids are mine, and I want to do for them and chastise them myself.”
The building at 1119 N. Cleveland sits behind Cabrini-Green’s notorious blacktop. The blacktop was designed as a playground, but for years now the only thing getting much play on it has been the gunfire of rival gangs. Wilson followed the advice of veteran tenants: she got her kids away from Cabrini as often as possible, and kept them inside when they were there. So while they heard the “pop pop pop” of the gangbangers’ guns almost daily, Wilson witnessed just one shooting and had only one close call, a bullet whizzing past her head one afternoon when she was departing for a store. There were other problems, though. Her bathroom sink regularly backed up and would flood the apartment while she was gone. The kids downstairs set fires in the incinerator to try to kill the building’s rats; the smoke that drifted up into Wilson’s second-floor apartment would start her son wheezing, and off Wilson had to go with him to the hospital. In September ’88, when another two-room apartment became available in the building on Morse, Wilson moved the family back there.
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It felt great to be earning that money, she said. But what she looked forward to most was “telling [Public] Aid to kiss my ass.
