Word: dianas
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Every school day at precisely 2:40 p.m., Diana Brooks turns to the window of her apartment in Chicago's Cabrini-Green housing project. She stares at the bleak concrete landscape between the red brick high-rises until she spots John, 12, Charles, 7, and Jermaine, 5, picking their way past the broken glass, rusty cars and trash. Only when the boys are safely inside the apartment can the 28-year-old mother relax...
...window where Diana keeps her vigil has been pierced by a bullet, and there is another bullet hole in the wall, which she covered with a cabinet and a neat display of picture postcards showing Chicago's tourist attractions. Diana and her sons and the other families of Cabrini-Green live in a cross fire between rival gangs, who have turned the project into an American version of Belfast or Beirut. Constant warfare between gangs like the Disciples, Vice-Lords or King Cobras across such notorious between-building battlefields as "the Blacktop" or "Wild End" have made Cabrini-Green...
Hunkered down in their apartments decorated like shrines, cinder-block walls adorned with pictures of children, Martin Luther King Jr. and Jesus, the mothers of Cabrini-Green feel fear every time their children go out. The other night, Diana's son Charles ran home crying in terror after missing his ride from class. When he arrived, Diana had already phoned the police. "I was crying my heart out. A child has to be home at a certain time," Diana recalled. Even before nightfall, when radio rhythms are punctuated by gunshots, children cannot play outside. A neighbor child, Angela Grant...
Those who can stay away from Cabrini-Green do so. Diana remembers calling an ambulance after Charles accidentally cut his head. It never came. She finally carried the frightened, bleeding child to the fire department, where someone took him to the hospital for stitches. The children's friends will not visit the project because they are too afraid. Sitting at her kitchen table, half watching All My Children on the TV, she answers her mobile phone. It's the Tupperware lady, pressing to come by and get $5 Diana owes her. Diana asks, "Do you know where I live...
Since she moved into Cabrini-Green eight years ago, Diana has promised her sons that they will leave. "I keep saying to them, 'One more year.'" She vows, "My New Year's resolution is to get out." And it grows stronger every time she navigates the dangerous passage past the dope dealers and gang members in the graffiti-covered lobby, through the piles of garbage in the halls, to the sixth floor in a lurching elevator lighted by a single, dimly glowing bulb. Her son John is now at the age when many other boys in Cabrini-Green become "foot...