Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, March 10, 1992 TAG: 9203100080
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: E-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARY BISHOP STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Such an obvious thing, and yet it had been so long since anyone had tried.
Chicago journalist Alex Kotlowitz drove across his city a few years ago to one of its most fearsome housing projects, a place where well-educated white-collar guys like him fear to tread.
Instead of asking the experts and the city officials, Kotlowitz asked the people: What's it like to live here?
He made friends, mainly with a woman named LaJoe and her eight kids in the high-rise, crime-encircled Henry Horner Homes. He wrote stories about them for the Chicago bureau of the Wall Street Journal.
He returned and hung out with them for two years. He shot basketball with two of LaJoe's sons, Lafeyette, then 11, and Pharoah, 8. He took them to movies, out for burgers.
Kotlowitz saw up-close - felt himself - how the family members' survival, their sanity and their health were tested every moment of every day. He inhaled it all:
Murders the boys saw on the streets. Bullets whizzing through their first-floor windows, hurling them to the hall floor. Maggots by the overflowing incinerator. Stench at the kitchen drain from the basement's backed-up sewage, its pile of dead dogs and cats. Years of neglect that left LaJoe, a determined housekeeper, with rusting cabinets, no working oven, a bathtub that gushed scalding water day and night and a furnace baking them all at an uncontrollable 85 degrees.
Kotlowitz watched Pharoah develop a stutter as the gang and drug warfare raged outside. He watched the boys struggle to hang on to a little childish innocence, even as they doubted they would live long enough to become men. Pharoah would mumble quietly during ugly incidents: "I'm too little to understand what's happening." Their mother bought burial insurance so her children would be treated with dignity in death, if not in life.
"You know," she told Kotlowitz with words that would resonate for him later, "there are no children here. They've seen too much to be children."
When one of her older sons was arrested, Kotlowitz bailed him out with $2,000 from prize money he'd won from newspaper stories about the family.
At night, Kotlowitz, 36, drove five miles back to his home. He cried about what he saw. He worried about the kids.
The horrific violence and isolation weren't news. But what had not been widely reported was the tenderness of mothers like LaJoe and the determination of her children to hope, against all odds, for a better life. Amid the gunfire, they chased rainbows, hunted garter snakes, played marbles, won spelling bees and decorated for birthdays. These were lovable people doing the best they could; sometimes stumbling, often bitter. They were just like the rest of us.
So Kotlowitz wrote a book. Old-fashioned journalism, it was: A writer just listening to people and watching them live their lives. It came out a year ago.
He did what an archive's worth of poverty studies had not. The prize-winning, best-selling book "There Are No Children Here" (Doubleday/Anchor Books) - named with LaJoe's words - hit home with national policymakers.
Democratic presidential candidate Bill Clinton read it. So did Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Jack Kemp, who called Kotlowitz a new Charles Dickens, a humanizer of the poor.
For after reading this book, you know that under the same circumstances - no money, no jump type job, no car, no friends in high places - anybody could get that poor and stay that way.
"These people are our neighbors," Kotlowitz said in an interview last week. He wanted "to break down the walls of silence we have built" around housing projects.
Kotlowitz isn't sure he has. "Sometimes I feel very encouraged," he said. "Sometimes I feel very distraught."
He sees more policy debate going on about poverty, from both the political right and the left. But, he said, "Sometimes I feel I want to shout louder."
For LaJoe and the boys, things are better.
They are out of the projects. Soon, they will move into their own town home. Some of the book's royalties are going into a trust fund for the boys.
Kotlowitz paid for Pharoah, now an eighth-grader, to attend private school. He's doing well. Kotlowitz would divulge less about Lafeyette, 16 and having troubles. "But I won't speak on that," Kotlowitz said.
"I feel some propriety about my friendship with the family." He has guarded their real last name, using a fictitious one in the book.
The script of an Oprah Winfrey ABC movie based on Kotlowitz's book is in its second draft. LaJoe has been on the "Oprah Winfrey Show." She's met Kemp and many other famous people. She is famous herself. Her character in the movie is a heroine. "I think it's been a very empowering experience," Kotlowitz said.
But she is somewhat uncomfortable with all the attention. Kotlowitz told the Chicago Tribune that when a TV reporter wanted to do a documentary on her family, she asked, "Why do you want to talk to us? There are millions of us out there."
"She's absolutely right," Kotlowitz said.
He's back at the Wall Street Journal, still writing about urban poverty. A couple of weeks ago, he wrote about a corporate executive who's trying to save inner-city schools.
Weekends and many weeknights, Kotlowitz often is with the boys. They go to parks, museums, bookstores. He takes them fishing in northern Michigan in the summers.
And every now and then, he drives them over to Henry Horner Homes.
Pharoah, particularly, despairs at what he sees. "I think Pharoah had a very strong sense of what the book would do."
He sees the housing project getting worse, and he frets when they drive by. "He worries," Kotlowitz said, "about his friends he left behind."
Before Kotlowitz came up with a title for his book, he asked Pharoah for his ideas. He said to call it, "No Place To Be."
Speech: Alex Kotlowitz, journalist and author of "There Are No Children Here," speaks at 7:30 Thursday night in the Hall Campus Center at Lynchburg College. His topic: "Breaking the Silence: Growing up in Today's Inner-City."
by CNB