After all these years, I can still hear their voices screaming, “First!” “Second!” and “Zero no higher!” and arguing over who said “Zero no higher” first. The memories won’t go away; they’re proof that once upon a time, I lived in a brick skyscraper on State Street, in a place where stairwells filled with echoes of stampeding gym shoes and harmonizing winos. Those memories won’t let me believe that I dreamt up Precious, Stacia, and Tonya, but All in Together is over.

One
The Square

By the summer of 1999, me, Precious, and Stacia—all twelve years old—ran around in this tight formation, snapping through the block in neon colors like a school of tropical fish. Sometimes you’d catch us flowing through the masses of guys in white tees on a quick trip to buy candy from Ms. Rose, or at Food & Liquor. There were dudes draped around the building’s opening, standing guard in the parking lot, the tunnel inside the building leading to the stairway, everywhere, really. All the spaces around the building belonged to them, but we had our own spot, and for the longest time, no one bothered us there.

If you drove up the 90/94, a highway built to separate Blacks and whites without Jim Crow language, the Robert Taylor Homes loomed off to the side of your car. The buildings stared you down, their windows like eyes, watching. Off the highway, on State Street, the number 29 bus would take you on a ghetto tour, passing all those projects. You would see building after building and people just standing around.

Half the structures were off-white, the other ones, rust colored, and they’d alternate: red buildings, then a few white, then red, then white, then red, and it would go on like that for two miles.

From the exterior, these brick towers shot up sixteen stories in the air with neat rows of windows on one side and on the other, iron gates running the length of each floor, creating an opportunity for the residents to see out into the world and for people outside to catch a glimpse of project life.

The elevator moved up and down the middle of each building in an enclosed column of brick, and that’s where my friends and I gathered, on the third floor, in that covered square of space. Though it housed the elevators, it was also spacious enough for people to carry their trash and large items they needed to dispose of. We were grateful for its large, smooth, cement floor, wide enough for our crew to run around and, most importantly, to jump rope.