One day that fall, Mama Pearl asked me, for the second time that year, what I wanted to do with my life. I had an idea, but I didn’t have a sure answer. I looked at her, then raised and dropped my shoulders.

“Black kids ain’t got the luxury of not knowing what they want to do,” she said, and I felt stupid. She kept talking, because Mama Pearl was never in the business of making you feel good when she thought you needed a lesson.

“Let me tell you something about these here gangs.”

I sat up straighter, because I never thought Mama Pearl knew anything about gang life.

“You think these GDs the first gang round here? First ones to come for these boys?”

The answer was yes, I did think that they were the first ones. If not, then the BDs.

“When me and your grandma get here, we settle in. We meets peoples. We goes out with some gentlemen callers sometimes. We meets other ladies at Curtis Candies who live down in them Mecca Flats, these apartments down on 34th and State and Dearborn. So big, sits on two streets. Fancy architect built the place as a hotel for whites visiting for that World’s Fair back in 1893. Fair come and go, then they tries to rent this fancy place out to Chicago whites. Know what they say?”

I shake my head from side to side.

“They say, too close to coloreds. You can have it. So coloreds move in. And make it they own. Open businesses: cleaners, jazz clubs, pool halls. Make a whole community. Then, the Illinois Institute of Technology say, I want this land for a school building. You coloreds gots to go. So in 1952, they close it and tear ’em down.”

I looked at her. My eyes grew wider, because I realized that Mama Pearl was telling me that years ago, the same thing happening to us, happened already; that a whole neighborhood of Black people had to get up and leave because people with wealth and power wanted the land they’d settled on.

“Peoples got upset. They marched and protested, but they still put ’em out.”

“Where they move to?”

“Other parts of Bronzeville.”

“They make new places to fit everybody?”

She just looked at me like I was a big fool. Head all tilted, lips pushed out. “Child, Bible say, no new thing under the sun. This here migrating, it’s all we been doing: them ships from Africa, them trains from the South, then this here moving from neighborhood to neighborhood. It’s sheeping. Folks gathering up coloreds and sheeping them this way and that. They done sheeped your brother into prison. Trying to sheep us on further into the South Side. But I wants to tell you about these here gangs.