Close Quarters

Josie lived with her mother—and her older sister and her sister’s baby, and her two young brothers—in an old building on Escanaba. As we drove over, Josie implored me not to tell her mother she’d been punished. “Ma, she thinks I should go to college and all, and if she knows I been in trouble over basketball maybe she’ll say I can’t play no more.”

“Do you want to go to college, Josie?”

I pulled up behind a late-model pickup parked outside her building. Four speakers stood in the bed, with the volume cranked so high that the truck itself was vibrating. I had to lean over to hear Josie’s response.

“I guess I want to go. Like, I don’t want to spend my life working as hard as Ma does, and if I go to college maybe I can be a teacher or coach or something.” She picked at a loose cuticle, staring at her knees, then burst out, “I don’t know what college is, what it’s like, I mean. Like, would they be all stuck up, not liking me because I’m Latina, you know, and growing up down here. I met some rich kids at church, and it’s, like, their families don’t want them to know me, on account of where I live. So I’m worrying college would be like that.”

I remembered the church exchange program that Billy the Kid had mentioned. His choir had been singing with Josie’s Pentecostal church choir. I could well imagine families as rich as the Bysens not wanting their children getting too friendly with girls from South Chicago.

“I grew up down here, Josie,” I said. “My mother was a poor immigrant, but I still went to college up at the University of Chicago. Of course, there were morons there who thought they were better than me because they grew up with a lot of money and I didn’t. But most of the people I met, students and professors, all they cared about was what I was like as a person. If you want to go to college, though, you’re going to have to work hard on your studies as well as your basketball. You know that, right?”

She hunched a shoulder and nodded, but the confidence was over; she undid her seat belt and got out of the car. As I followed her up the walk to the front door, I saw five youths lounging around the truck, smoking reefer. One of them was the guy who sat morosely in the bleachers with his and Sancia’s children during practice. The other four I hadn’t seen before, but Josie clearly knew them. They called out to her, something taunting that I couldn’t hear over the booming speakers.