“After they put coloreds out of the Mecca Flats, they knock it down. But before they built these projects all up and down State, we scattered past Bronzeville, going more east. Me and your grandma stayed here on State at 43rd Street, but next thing you know, we hearing about this here gang starting up. And this in the late fifties, getting real big in the sixties. Back then, seem like you could join if you wanted, wasn’t these beatings on boys who ain’t want nothing to do with it.

“Fee, you know what I think? The boys who done already made a plan for they lives, they do better than the ones who get invited into somebody else’s. I ain’t worried about you and no gangs, but if you ain’t thinking about what you want with this life, you might just fall into somebody else’s vision.

“When I moved into Robert Taylor in ’64, seem like the Rangers was already starting up. You’d see a few boys standing around. They wasn’t selling no drugs, but they was fighting a lot. I watched some of my girlfriends’ sons get all caught up with them.

“They was so busy trying to work to put some food out, that they forgot to ask they boys what they wanted to be, and how they was gone get what they wanted. So Felicia Ann Stevens, let us figure this out.”

I think for a minute, then I say, “I wanna do something like what Ms. Pierce do.”

Mama Pearl nodded her head. We sat there in quiet for a second. I liked what Ms. Pierce did for us in school. She knew what we were going through, because Farren wasn’t Ms. Pierce’s only teaching job. She’d taught between the bookends: early education, where kids were fresh and innocent, and in prisons, a season where people arrived scarred and mostly hopeless. She stopped to check on us before we started talking about US history or math. She got on our nerves sometimes with her speeches, but now I know that she did it to keep us out of jail.

I told Mama Pearl that I wanted a job that inspired young people, then I sat up a little straighter. I asked her to tell me more about the neighborhood.

She said, “Well, wasn’t no number twenty-nine bus. Chile, these electric trollies skeeted down the street! You could see the cords way up there in the sky where they was connected. Before the CTA it was the Chicago Surface Lines. What else?” She rubbed her cheek, like that would help her remember. “DuSable was here.”

I gave her a shocked face.

“Been here since 1935. Got to Chicago before me.”

I asked, “You think they gone get rid of it?”

“DuSable? Oughta have a landmark.”

“What’s that?”