In that moment out there with everyone fussing about whether the CHA would deem them Lease Compliant, I started to wonder what would happen to my family if we weren’t given the approval to move. I didn’t know what it meant, but I saw the change in people after those words entered the atmosphere. Moving meant leaving our block, where we knew the rules. I worried about my brother switching neighborhoods as a sixteen-year-old. In the nineties, dudes got shot all the time if someone threw up a gang sign and it didn’t get returned, proving that they were in the same gang.

I looked up at our window and saw him there, Meechie, his blackish-brown skin striped by white child-safety bars. Mama wouldn’t let him go anywhere, just down the porch to see one of his classmates or to Mama Pearl’s apartment to help her around the house.

Some kid snapped me back to the crowd when he asked, “Why come they tearing up that building?”

Quan, Stacia’s oldest brother, the leader of the gang on our block, squatted down to his level, put a big, strong paw on his tiny shoulder, and said, “Because white people want to be closer to their jobs, Lil Man.” He held his position, and more questions lit up the kid’s face, but Tootie came back.

“And we don’t get no damn say?”

“What you gone say?” that same guy asked her. The crowd, busy laughing at how he treated her, didn’t see her snatch Earl’s paper bag. It had a bottle of Crown Royal in it. She cracked it over the guy’s forehead, spraying glass everywhere. People cursed and moaned, and as everyone rushed forward, trying to get at Tootie, I started moving back toward the building.

Mama Pearl swept me out of the fray, her arms like the wide wings of an eagle, dragging me and Precious away from the mess. I scanned faces, trying to locate Stacia. When I found her, what I saw was disturbing: she stomped and kicked at the ground, her face twisted up ugly, Buchanan wrinkles matching her brother and sisters who huddled near her, attacking that lady for what she did.

In the elevator, we checked ourselves. Precious wasn’t cut, just shook, her skin hot pink, breath puffing out in short gusts. I had blood running down the side of my face. I could feel a trickle. Mama Pearl dug around her bag, but by the time she found some crumpled-up tissues, stained with cocoa flecks of powdered foundation, the scent of a tiny alcohol pad filled the metal square. Precious handed me the wet, stiff wipe, then a Band-Aid strip. Mama Pearl stuffed her tissues back into her purse. You could hear the eerie groaning of elevator cords until the doors opened on the third floor. We rushed off, but I froze when Mama Pearl called my name.