Six months after their move north, Grandma got engaged to my grandfather, Percival Stevens. After the wedding, she and Mama Pearl lost touch. But Mama Pearl wasn’t bitter or discouraged. Grandma left Curtiss Candy to be a homemaker, and Mama Pearl kept working. Eventually, she’d rent a room from a woman who owned a dry cleaner’s at 43rd and State Street, just blocks away from where Grandma lived in the newly built Robert Taylor Homes. One day, she boarded the State Street bus, the same bus that Grandma was on, and they began chirping updates at one another. When Grandma told Mama Pearl about the Robert Taylor Homes, urging her to come to dinner that night, Mama Pearl agreed, and she fell in love with the community the complex provided.

Though the brick structures cast shadows on the block, the gardens and playground were lovely, and the neighbors helped keep an eye on one another’s children. Mama Pearl left the dry cleaner’s and moved onto the same floor as Grandma. She babysat Mama and my auntie Nora and became part of our family.

Over the years, she’d watched cute little kids grow up to become fiends or drink themselves to death, dying in their forties. She’d seen descendants of her friends ruin their family names, one generation at a time. For Mama Pearl, it wasn’t just about the demolition of iron gates and bricks; what had already broken her heart was the destruction of so many families over the years.

We all looked up at the ball swinging from a metal cord, breaking apart the building’s sharp angles. Some people watched and let their minds wander. Other folks stepped right up to the mic. Earl, who everybody dismissed as just a drunk, and his boy from back in the day, Woody, who got his name because his legs looked like wobbly mop sticks in a bucket of gym shoes, came to the front of the crowd and started a tag team elegy, spreading the odor of soured liquor across the crowd.

“Didn’t I tell you?” Woody said, tapping Earl on the chest with the back of his hand. “I told you they was gone knock ’em down. Goddamned Mayor Daley.”

Earl responded and said, almost to himself, “Papa put ’em up.” He took a swig from their shared crunched-up paper bag, then finished his thought: “Junior knocked ’em down.”

“This don’t make no damned sense! They just gone put us out?” a lady asked, cutting in.

Then this dude told her, “Tootie, yo’ ass going right down the street to another building. You know you ain’t Lease Compliant.”

She kissed her teeth, put a hand on her hip, and rolled her eyes at him. Just the mention of this term, Lease Compliant, agitated the crowd—it had the same effect on Mama when I asked her about it—and they all started talking at the same time.