About book There Are No Children Here: The Story Of Two Boys Growing Up In The Other America (1992)
Technically speaking, there are a lot of children here. Here, being the Henry Horner Homes, the Chicago Housing Authority’s public housing project where the majority of Alex Kotlowitz’s non-fiction book “There Are No Children Here” takes place. In Henry Horner, there are babies, toddlers and teenagers. And there are also adolescents, such as Lafeyette and Pharaoh Rivers, the two young boys Kotlowitz profiles from the years 1987 to 1989. Children appear everywhere in the book — they’re inside the apartments with their families, they’re taking a few dollars down to the hot dog stand to get a snack with their friends, and they’re standing outside the United Center waiting to catch a glimpse of Chicago Bulls player Michael Jordan. Many kids under the age of 18, legal adulthood appear in this book. But the things they have seen, the experiences they have had, the conditions under which they live, don’t allow them to have an ordinary childhood. There are no children in Henry Horner because those who live there are forced to grow up too fast.Kotlowitz begins with this theme and is successful in weaving it throughout the narrative of his book. LaJoe Rivers, the children’s mother, gives the book its namesake on the second page when she says, “But you know, there are no children here. They’ve seen too much to be children.” The scenes Kotlowitz depicts of Layfeyette, Pharoah and their friends and family show how these people have been failed by many Chicago systems — public housing, penitentiary, education and the police."It is impossible to see this place without outrage — at blacks and liberals who refuse to face the reality of self-destructive black violence, who will neither inquire into its sources nor act to protect its victims, who are afraid even to acknowledge its existence,” wrote Adam Walinsky in a New York Times column about Henry Horner called “What It’s Like To Be In Hell.”Kotlowitz forces the reader to acknowledge Henry Horner’s plight in “There Are No Children Here.” The book shows that the city is full of politicians who do not stand up for their constituents’ basic human rights and gang leaders who have become the most powerful in the community because they threaten the lives of those around them. Ultimately, what it comes down to, is that these people live in poverty strikingly similar to that of a Third World country.LaJoe’s words are true. Kotlowitz’s imagery of the living conditions at Henry Horner — the dirty bathwater constantly running in the Rivers’ apartment, the decomposed rodents stinking up the basement of Henry Horner and roaches creeping their way through cracks — is jarring. But what’s even more palpable is that children in Henry Horner have had more emotionally devastating experiences than most middle- and upper-class Americans experience in their lifetimes. They’ve seen their friends murdered before their eyes, they’ve seen young girls drop out of school because of pregnancy, they’ve encountered blatant racism from outsiders, they’ve watched adults struggle with drug addiction and they’ve experienced physical abuse in their households.The main characters through which Kotlowitz chose to portray life in Henry Horner couldn’t have painted a better picture of how two children under the same roof react differently to the harsh environment around them. Though Lafeyette, 11 at the beginning of the book, and Pharoah, 9, are of the same family, have very different personalities and cope with the harsh environment at Henry Horner oppositely.Layfeyette isn’t a typical troublemaker, but he is a little rough around the edges and more likely to become involved with kids who break the rules. At two different points in the book, he is caught shoplifting at a video store and arrested for damaging a car — an incident he claims he had nothing to do with. He is his mother’s confidant and often bears the weight of the family’s financial and emotional woes. There are many points in the book in which Lafeyette mentions that he is tired. Kotlowitz seamlessly guides the reader to understanding the implication of this adjective. Lafeyette isn’t literally sleepy, but exhausted by the turmoil of his life. Kotlowitz perfectly describes how Layfeyette has become disillusioned about the reality of his family’s situation.“Lafeyette had grown increasingly cynical,” Kotlowitz writes. “And in a child who has not experienced enough to root his beliefs, such an attitude can create a vast emptiness. He had little to believe in. Everyone and everything was failing him.”As much as Lafeyette has grown up too fast by immersing himself in reality, Pharoah has done the opposite. He distracts himself with schoolwork in order to alleviate the emotional stress he feels at home. Some of the most inspiring scenes in the book were of Pharoah immersing himself in his schoolwork, particularly when he competes in the all-school spelling bee. He consciously tries to maintain his youth, attempting to ignore the setbacks his living situation presents. There are a couple times in the book where he mentions to his mother that his youth prevents him from understanding the impact of his situation. Kotlowitz implies that perhaps he does, but that he just doesn’t want to.“He continued to tell his mother he was too young to comprehend it all, as if he were trying to prolong his childhood, to keep it from passing him by as quickly as it had Lafeyette,” Kotlowitz writes.The juxtaposition that Kotlowitz shows between these two boys is poignant but certainly not forced. Although they cope differently with their environment, Kotlowitz brings back the theme of their adult-like childhood by speaking of their own mortality. He uses metaphors of two dreams the boys have — one in which Layfeyette is being chased by someone and can’t vocalize a cry for help and another in which Pharoah crawls on the ground in his sleep in order to escape gunshots in his dream — to show the emotional toll this life takes on the two young boys. Kotlowitz bravely delves in to the subject of mortality, causing the readers to feel the fear that these boys must come to grips with daily. These children aren’t just fighting to pass their classes, to reject joining a gang, to avoid getting caught up in drugs. They’re fighting for their survival.At one point, Layfeyette says to LaJoe, “Anytime I go outside, I ain’t guaranteed to come back.” Kotlowitz then writes: “LaJoe felt Lafeyette had begun to recognize his own mortality, to begin to come to terms with death.”After Henry Horner was torn down in 2001 to 2008 and the city revamped its public housing strategy, violence didn’t necessarily end; it just dispersed. A 2012 study about the transformation of public housing in Chicago and Atlanta showed that Chicago’s “Plan For Transformation” reduced citywide violent crime 1 percent. However, when a neighborhood welcomed a lot of former public housing residents, crime in that area didn’t decrease as much as it might have. In fact, the rate of violent crimes in these neighborhoods was 21 percent higher than neighborhood with no relocated households.Much of Kotlowitz’s book is heartbreaking, depressing and dark. I appreciate that Kotlowitz did not shy away from telling the tough stories. He even provides glimmers of hope at some points, like when the boys’ cousin Dawn graduates from high school, when LaJoe takes the kids on a trip downtown at Christmastime and when Pharoah gets second-place in the spelling bee. However, he didn’t include many stories about adult residents of Henry Horner trying to empower themselves. Most of the narrative was of systems failing these people, and rightly so. book. But it seems that something is missing in the narrative — those who were working for positive change in the community. Surely, someone who lived there, aside from gang leaders, was mobilizing others to create better lives for those in the community. In researching the Henry Horner homes, I found a group that did.The Henry Horner Mothers Guild began in 1986. With $88,000 they received from Chicago charities, the group initiated projects with neighborhood gangs to prevent violence. They launched cleanup campaigns, they pushed for structural improvements, they made efforts to tighten security, and they asked the city to tow away abandoned cars and tear down abandoned buildings. After Kotlowitz wrote his book, they sued the city for building code violations and for breaking tenant contracts.“If I have to live here and my kids are here, then I’m going to fight too,” said Annette Hunt, a board member of the Mothers Guild. “Because I have to fight with the gang every day, I have to fight with the drug addicts. The lice, the trash, the elevator, the stairway, the rats, the roaches. … This is the clear picture of CHA.”It seems like this group was fairly prominent in the community, and I wonder why Kotlowitz chose to leave them out of the book. Adding them would have showed that there were people who weren’t apathetic to the housing crisis at Horner. Rather, there were groups trying to pick the community up from its bootstraps and revitalize it, even temporarily. I wish Kotlowitz had included miniature profiles of people like Hunt who were attempting to be productive.Its clear that Kotlowitz’s reporting in the community was nothing short of respectful, compassionate and honorable. However, during the late 80s and early 90s, Henry Horner gained media attention as it embodied example of poorly executed public housing throughout the nation’s largest cities. A Chicago Tribune article in 1996 pointed out that the residents of Horner both felt exploited by the stories, but also were able to use their voices as a cry for help from the government."I had a reporter call me who said he wanted to see some bad stuff," said Earnest Gates, a Near West Side neighborhood leader and businessman who has fielded a dozen interview requests in a week. "I said we have good and bad. Let me show you the good."Kotlowitz’s advantage of spending time at Henry Horner like it was his full-time job showed in his body of work. He didn’t just implant himself into a community for one day and try to create a short yet comprehensive roundup of all the problems that Henry Horner residents face. He spent enough time there that he knew there was a lot more complexity in these people’s lives than what first met the eye of an outsider.Perhaps the biggest critique of Kotlowitz’s book is that he placed himself in the middle of the boys’ lives. He bailed their brother out of jail once, he took the boys out for pizza or bought them clothes on a few occasions, and he paid for their tuition to parochial school after the book was written. While he certainly crossed some ethical lines journalistically, he was very upfront with his actions in the epilogue of his book. In reporting for this book, Kotlowitz showed a lot of courage and respect for his subjects’ privacy. His involvement with these children’s lives only shows his humanity. He was in the position to help, and he did. How could he not? His actions only affirm how much he cares about the subject. As a writer, it makes him more authentic.However, if I were his editor, I would have suggested that he put this information at the front of the book. Sometimes, when reading, I wondered how he knew about specific things that happened to the boys. His scenes were so vivid that I almost found them unbelievable at times. How could Kotlowitz know that much detail? Surely he wasn’t always there. It would have been helpful to understand his intentions and process from the beginning of the book. I would have had even more of an appreciation for his storytelling process from the get-go.This world is filled with bubbles — everyone lives in their own compartment. They have a routine family life, housing situation, work routine, etc. No matter how much one is exposed to other parts of the world, it is hard to truly understand how people’s environment shapes who they are and determines the outcome of their success. Kotlowitz’s story is important because it breaks that barrier, exposing those who do not live in the projects to the dangers and the devastations that are associated with growing up in such a harsh environment. Kotlowitz didn’t need to be evangelical in his storytelling to display the overarching issues associated with this community’s problems. All he needed to do was articulate the truth of what he saw. And he does so beautifully, giving the reader no choice but to empathize with Lafeyette and Pharoah. Because they are still children, even if their home doesn’t allow them to be.
Growing up in the 80’s and 90’s in the Chicago suburbs, we thought we knew about the ghettos and the projects. We were mindful not to wear our Starter jackets if we were going into the city. We knew not to wear hats, and if we did, to make sure we wore them straight. We heard about the dangers of gangs and the threats they presented. At the same time though, it seemed like a fantasy. It seemed like part of a whole other world.They never really seemed real, and were something we joked about, like how some kids in our suburban neighborhood jokingly called Carol Stream, Cabrini Stream.We were oh so wrong, and insanely fortunate that we could afford to be ignorant and wrong.About 6 or 7 years ago, I had a chance to meet Kotlowitz and hear him speak about his book, and children growing up in inner-city Chicago. I was part of a summer residency program which let me teach summer school to inner-city kids as well as learn about education and opportunities in the city of Chicago. I wish I remembered more of what he said.These days, I’m living in Cincinnati, teaching in an inner-city school. I do my best of focusing on teaching good lessons, helping my students understand what they need to know in middle school, so they can get a strong start in high school. I know they don’t live the easiest of lives, and I know that they don’t contend with the same exact problems as the Chicago projects, but children are a product of their environment.This book is fantastically well written. In a way few other people have done, “There Are No Children Here” really takes you inside what it meant to live in the Chicago projects. It was literally hell in a million different ways. The stories of poverty, of violence, of unfairness and injustice are monumentally depressing. When you consider the implications of this book it gets worse.We get the story of two boys, out of a large number of kids. Yet every family living in the projects could tell the same story, or something rather similar. Then, think beyond the city of Chicago, and the results are mind boggling.This book doesn’t really attempt to get at the root cause of these things, it doesn’t place the blame. Since then, different people in Chicago have made attempts to clean things up and change things around. The projects have been torn down, and the city has worked a lot trying to turn things around, attempts have been made to gentrify neighborhoods as a way to turn things around, though it seems like the same types of issues in Chicago have started to resurface again.This book is an amazing read, and the scariest thing is that it will remain relevant, more books like this will be create, more stories like this lived until people find a way to stop the conditions that create these types of lives.
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There are no Children Here: the Story of Two Boys Growing Up in the Other America, by Alex Kotlowitz, narrated by Dion Graham, produced by Blackstone Audio, downloaded from audible.com.This is the true life portrait of two boys, Lafeyette and Pharoah Rivers, ages 11 and 9 when the story begins in 1987. The author, a famous journalist, kept track of the family for four years. This included the two boys, their mother, and the six other children she had, plus a father who lived there sometimes, and various and sundry relatives who lived with them from time to time. They all lived in the Henry Horner Project in Chicago under conditions worse than I could ever imagine. During this four years, the author watched the boys go through many tragedies, such as friends shot and killed, their older brother going off to jail, trying to steer clear of gangs, the indifference of the welfare system and the juvenile court system to children, and the constant danger of erupting gunfire which forced the family to run for cover at any time, not unlike the war in places like Sarajevo. The New York Public Library, list this book as one of the 150 most important books of the 20th century.
—Kathleen Hagen
It came as a huge surprise to me that I loved this book as much as I did. It was assigned to me at school, and I was less than enthusiastic about reading it. It took me a little while to get into the writing style - it's not exactly prose, more like a work of journalism or reporting.I would describe this shocking and moving glimpse into the lives of Lafayette and Pharoah Rivers as disturbing, in a good way. Eye-opening and tragic, something that people perhaps need to read more than they want to read.Stunning. I will keep it on my shelf from here on out.
—Tori
This book ended abruptly for me. I think it's because I wanted to keep hearing about Lafayette and Pharoah's days...make sure they were okay. I've felt a void not reading about them since I finished it. That is one sign of an exceptional book. There is so much chaos in the Lafayette and Pharoah's lives. The book affirmed the importance of school with all its rules and rituals. The Spelling Bee! The biggest idea I take from this story is, as a teacher, school can offer some order, structure, some connection between cause and effect for kids who don't have it in their homes and families. I'm also really interested in all the descriptions of space in the book. The lack of a common space or formal entry way in the Henry Horner Homes, the putrid, wasteful mess in the basement, doors falling off hinges in apartments, how hallways provide safety from stray bullets, the lack of grocery stores, restaurants, or businesses near the projects, and the looming money-filled United Center just a few blocks away. There is no respect for boundaries or the separation between public and private space. It's part of what makes life so tiring and dangerous. I know there's more to say. I'm grateful for what this story has made me think about.
—Anne Tommaso
