Nine-year-old Pharoah Rivers stumbled to his knees. “Give me your hand,” ordered his older brother Lafayette, who was almost twelve. “Give me your hand.” Pharoah reached upward and grabbed hold of his brother’s slender fingers, which guided him up a slippery, narrow trail of dirt and brush.
This opening paragraph is deceptive and seems very much more like something that might be found in a work of fiction; it would seem as equally at home in a story by Mark Twain as a novel by Stephen King. The portrait of two young boys obviously exploring the geography around them like so many kids their age seems in no way remarkable or out of the ordinary. And, of course, on one level it is not, but soon enough it will become achingly apparent that though this adventurous opening seems like it could be placed into any work of fiction, the reality is nothing of the sort.
On the city’s near west side, on the periphery of one of the city’s black ghettoes, was built the Henry Horner Homes. The complex of sixteen high-rises bore the name of an Illinois governor best known for his obsession with Abraham Lincoln and his penchant for bucking the Chicago Democratic machine.
In an example of how language shapes perception, a “housing development” named after a former Illinois Governor called Henry Horner Homes sounds like one of those nice planned subdivisions that pop up in small towns when they start growing larger. The people living there who are characters in the text variously refer to Henry Horner Homes as “the projects,” “Hornets” and, memorably, “the graveyard.” Perception plays a huge role in this book and the disconnect between what the projects are officially named and their less than glorious reality is a subtle foreshadowing of this divergence in perspective.
By season’s end, the police would record that one person every three days had been beaten, shot at or stabbed at Horner. In just one week, they confiscated twenty-two guns and 330 grams of cocaine. Most of the violence that summer was related to drugs.
And here is the crushing reality that completely destroys any illusions that the “Henry Horner Homes” is anything other than a crime-ridden, poverty-stricken, badly built and even more badly maintained example of what everybody who has never lived in one likely brings to mind immediately when they hear the words “the projects.” This paragraph also dispels any notion that the somewhat halcyon and Twain-esque opening scene of childhood adventure is anything like what it seems to be.
“Don’t you love this country?”
“NOOOOOOO!”
“...yes...”
A “truce” is called between rival gangs so that the community can all come together with a relative feeling of safety at the annual talent show put on by the Boys Club. The first line here is delivered by the emcee as a preface to the playing of the National Anthem. The second line is spoken collectively by much of the crowd and is so loud that it drowns out what may be the one lone voice of assent surrounded by the simmering anger of dissent representative of those living in “the graveyard.”
This excerpt does not appear in the actual text in quite the same way it has been presented here—descriptive prose fills in the blanks which have instead been provided in this analysis. When represented in this manner, however, what is already one of the most profoundly emotional moments in the text becomes even more so. That little expression of affirmation of love for his country spoken so softly that perhaps only the speaker and whoever was standing next to him actually heard it issues forth from the mouth of young Pharoah Rivers. He is the heart of the story and, ironically, the figure who most represents the dissenting opinion among those living in the Henry Horner Homes. Not coincidentally, it is also Pharoah who coined the moniker “graveyard’ to describe the projects. Pharoah is the symbol of hope as well as its symbolic representative of the collateral damage such living conditions inflict.
