We didn’t talk about Robert Taylor much after we’d moved, though it was impossible not to think about it. I saw more of Auntie Nora and her family around that time. She came over to help us get settled in, and sometimes, I spent weekends over at her house. It felt good seeing family again. TJ didn’t like the things that I used to do with my girlfriends, so I started to get into video games and baseball. And I made some new friends on his block in Roseland, which was nice.

I also stopped being mad at Uncle Tim because he wrote and visited Meechie, encouraging him to keep his head up.

By spring of 2000, all three of the buildings on my childhood block were demolished, their residents scattered across the South Side into neighborhoods like Chatham, South Shore, and even Auntie Nora’s neighborhood, which would soon be clumped into the area now referred to as the Wild Hundreds, dubbed one of the most dangerous parts of Chicago. She and her family would move to a quiet suburb called Lynwood, buying a home there.

Because humans are creatures of habit, Mama and I would still cross the city to shop at grocery stores that were familiar, even if it was truly inconvenient to do so. One day, we rode the State Street bus down to Jewel on Roosevelt Road to pick up groceries. While at the store, this girl walked by me, then swung back, and said, “Ain’t you Meechie lil sister?”

“Yeah,” I said, already knowing that she was someone from the buildings.

“I used to live in 4950. We was at DuSable together.”

Truthfully, it felt good to be called Meechie’s little sister, even though growing up, I used to hate it. I would tell people, “My name Fe Fe, not Meechie’s lil sister,” and throw them a bunch of attitude. Now it felt like a special title. I managed to give her a little smile while I tried to decide if I should tell her the whole story about him being in jail.

The girl looked like she had it rough. There was a toddler running up and down the aisle and a baby seated in the front of the cart. I asked her name, told her I’d let him know that I ran into her. Then I started doing the math: if she went to school with Meechie, she had to be about eighteen years old. Mama seemed to have the same calculations going and looked slightly concerned that this young girl had two babies to take care of.

I started thinking about landmark status again and was convinced that people had probably tried to tear her down for the decisions she made, but somehow, there she was, still standing. I watched her roll her baby away, collecting the other one by the hand before leaving the aisle.