I knew that when Stacia asked me to return with her, that I ought to invite Meechie. Stacia had asked Ed if he wanted to come. So eventually we told the rest of our families. We didn’t know who would show up, but we gave them the time, and asked them to meet us on the steps of DuSable. Mama Pearl at ninety-three years old decided not to make the trip, saying she’d “made her peace with thangs.” Mama said she might come.

It’s odd that DuSable High School, built in the 1930s, remains a solid, stone structure. It’s in pristine condition, and still a high school. Only a select group of people know that it was once the site of many gang shootings and violent fights.

I sat on the steps with Stacia, Ed, and Meechie and looked over at the empty land where we all once lived. “Let’s go over there,” Stacia said, already rising.

It was the middle of the day, in spring, but we didn’t hear any birds. No trees rustling in the breeze. We stood in a wide-open field; nothing new had been erected since the final demolition of the three buildings that once blocked the sun, lording over us. It was eerie that it looked like the place down south where my grandmother was once a girl, in a country area in Mississippi she only referred to as Jenkins Quarters.

The land had returned to its humble beginnings, back before someone decided to overcrowd it with bricks and gates and too many people. Mama Pearl delivered this prophecy to me that summer before everything fell apart. She said, “State Street gone look like the country again.” Then under her breath, with a faded voice, she said, “Probably be the healthiest this land been in a hundred years.” I couldn’t imagine what that would look like, with two schools just sitting there, and no kids to go in them, but we stood there, two decades later, and saw it with our own eyes.

We made a diamond without even trying, the way that me, Precious, Stacia, and Tonya used to stand while playing Rockin’ Robin. “Let’s bow our heads and ask God to forgive our sins, to give us the strength to forgive ourselves,” I said.

I glanced up at Stacia, and she looked miserable, so I placed my hand on her back.

When we finished the prayer, I continued, “We all stand here, alive and living, despite all we’ve been through, because just like that school over there”—I point back at DuSable—“we were made special, intentional—”

Meechie cut in: “We Chicago Landmarks.”

The Buchanans were new to this idea, but they liked it, nodded proudly.

My brother, who had read this exact phrase in a letter that I sent him back when he was seventeen, had held on to this inspiration all these years, believed it.