In honor of the 10th anniversary of the Chicago Review of Books, The New Chicago Renaissance series revisits exemplary works of literature about Chicago from the last 10 years and explores their continued relevance. Join us all year long as 12 leading writers and artists explore books that they love and why they’re meaningful to our understanding of modern Chicago.
During the recent attacks on our city, the demonizing, the raids, the deportations, I found myself returning to Carl Sandburg’s Chicago. The poem is more than a century old, and its best-known parts have been fossilized into a manly civic anthem (“City of the Big Shoulders,” “husky, brawling”), the sort of copy that’s intoned, Bill Kurtis–style, before a nationally televised Bears game or stenciled on a tourist shop coffee mug. But with people here stepping up to protect one another, helping door-to-door and across neighborhoods in ways, let’s be honest, we don’t often see, I wanted to revel in that chest-out, chin-up pride. “Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning.”
The poem, as a model of how to write about Chicago, also feels contemporary. “Hellhole” and “killing field,” Donald Trump has cast us in his amorality play, “the most dangerous city in the world.” Sandburg, too, was reacting to the insults from outsiders, the maledictions. “They tell me you are crooked and I answer: Yes, it is true I have seen the gunman kill and go free to kill again.” The poem’s narrator has witnessed here the hunger, desperation and cruelty. Sandburg’s response to the haters, “those who sneer at this my city,” is not to ignore or hide Chicago’s endemic woes; it’s to show that they aren’t our totality. Not even close. A caricature is false not because it lacks a basis in fact but because the facts are distorted, the most shocking or foreign made gigantic and grotesque. The dangers here are real, but they don’t eclipse all else.
That brings me to Alex Kotlowitz’s extraordinary An American Summer, a book so focused on the personal toll of gun violence in Chicago, its root causes and untold reverberations, that reading it can feel like staring defiantly into the sun. The book is also a love letter to the city. Similar to Sandburg’s poem, or the work of our city’s many great chroniclers, An American Summer fleshes out Chicago’s profusion of suffering and beauty, of injustice and resilience. “You can’t talk about death without celebrating life,” Alex writes. (Full disclosure, Alex is a friend—the city’s shoulders may be broad, but the number of writers doing deep-dive narrative nonfiction remains relatively narrow.) Alex writes at one point, “Violence has a way of taking over your narrative.” He’s talking about individuals overwhelmed by trauma. But the same skewing effect applies to the city as a whole, and to any effort to portray it in its complexities. Alex writes, “You have to fight—and fight hard—not to let the ugliness and inexplicability of the violence come to define you.”
Like all of Alex’s nonfiction and documentary work, An American Summer is told on the human level. It consists of a dozen or so intimate portraits of people whose lives have been stamped by their experiences as victims, shooters, survivors, helpers, witnesses. “Sketches of those left standing, of those emerging from the rubble, of those trying to make sense of what they’ve left behind,” he writes. They are people whose stories are too often summed up in a headline or lost in the tallies of grisly statistics. There’s Marcelo Sanchez, a gawky teenager from the Southwest Side, a mostly A-student, skittish with deadpan jokes, who’s also been stabbed and shot, and with friends one weekend morning goes on a crime spree. And Ramaine Hill, whose son is just learning to walk, who survives a bullet to the back but finds he’s even more endangered by his decision to testify against the shooter, a boy he knows from his community. There’s also Eddie Bocanegra, from Little Village, who after serving his time in prison and fashioning an upstanding career in violence prevention, is still seeking atonement for the life he took as a teenager. Many of the perpetrators of crimes portrayed in these pages have been victims themselves—hurt people, hurt people. And while the violence is a Chicago problem, it wreaks havoc in a handful of neighborhoods, predominantly Black and Latino, while largely missing others, “like a thunderstorm barreling through the city,” Alex writes.
Reported over many years and published in 2019, An American Summer explores events from 2013. The chapters progress chronologically, from May to September of that summer, but each profile leaps backward and forward in time, exploring context and ramifications, building suspense, teasing out meaning. The book’s structure is as complex as a Rube Goldberg machine, and, masterfully, doesn’t appear that way. It’s nonfiction that reads like loosely braided short stories, like Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio or Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried. What links the chapters together is the way Alex deploys himself in the text. A longtime writer about crime and its effect on people here, he’s befuddled, outraged and sometimes left speechless by the glut of violence. He’s both the reader’s stand-in, trying to make sense of it all, and the trusted guide. “What you need to know here is this,” he interjects. Or he adds, “I want to be careful here,” when there’s danger of oversimplifying or idealizing a response to the violence. “A little backstory is necessary,” he advises. Another person’s experience, he says, “requires a somewhat full windup.”
Inside of a chapter about a woman named Lisa Daniels, who is struggling to come to terms with the murder of her adult son, Alex interrupts the narrative to explain that he’s spent time with dozens of other mothers who were also waging harrowing battles with grief. “I could tell story after story like this, of mothers who drift on a sea of heartache, without oars and without destination.” He’s making clear the depth of both the violence and his own reporting on it. He can give voice—let alone a full chapter—to only a tiny fraction of all he’s seen. But suddenly Alex delivers an extended aside, a panorama, of these other women whose stories demand to be heard. The young mourning mother who cuts herself—the intensity of the wounds giving her momentary reprieve from thoughts of her 6-year-old killed by stray crossfire. The mom who holds on to her 7-year-old’s bloodied clothes, or the one who tattooed her son’s last heartbeats, his EKG, on her forearm. There are the ones who have become activists and organizers—Mothers of Murdered Sons, Parents for Peace and Justice. And the ones who turn into amateur sleuths, obsessed with trying to solve the homicides that the police can’t or won’t. (Over the past decade the Chicago Police Department has arrested someone in fewer than a third of its murder cases.) “I didn’t know there were so many different ways to grieve,” a mother tells Alex. One forlorn mother, looking for any way to mask the unending bitterness of her misery, begins to eat sand. She buys it by the bagful, from Home Depot, eating so much she develops an iron deficiency. “I’m trying to save what is left of me,” she explains.
I need to be clear here: Chicago is nowhere near the most dangerous city in the country, let alone the world. More than twenty other U.S. cities have higher murder rates. In 2013, the year of the book’s “summer,” the number of people killed in Chicago actually fell to a fifty-year low of 425. A couple of years after that, homicides spiked, reaching nearly 800, then they dipped, spiked and then fell again. Last year, despite all the shit talked out of Washington, Chicago saw its fewest murders since 1965. Yet none of that ebbing and flowing, or vilifying or defending, should obscure the fact that there’s too much violent death here. More than 14,000 human beings have been killed in Chicago over roughly the past two decades; some 60,000 wounded by gunfire. How do you write about that and not add to the funhouse distortions of Chicago? Or for that matter, how do you make it feel new? There can be a stultifying sameness to the abundance of crimes, the accumulation of horrors. The harder thing might be making others continue to pay attention and care.
I was a fan of Alex’s work well before I met him. I looked to his writing about Chicago to try to better my own. In There Are No Children Here, how he tackles the immensity of public housing, along with all it contained and represented, by zooming in on the experiences of two boys living there. In Never a City So Real, the mosaic of Chicago he forms through multiple profiles. His incredible This American Life audio feature on Englewood’s Harper High School, his documentary The Interrupters (with Steve James), works that are simultaneously enraging, stunning, heartbreaking. Alex doesn’t call himself a journalist; he likes to self-identify as a storyteller. And he often talks about empathy as being central to that kind of true storytelling. That process of understanding and sharing is two-part. As a reporter, and one generally operating from a position of privilege, you have to be open and diligent enough to put in the months and years getting to know those willing to share their experiences. Then as a writer, you have to be skilled and artful enough to turn around and make an audience experience those feelings too. An American Summer doesn’t get into the weeds of policy or solutions on how to treat the epidemic of gun violence. Alex is firmly of the “show not tell” faith. But through empathy, its transference, the hope is that we as readers might overcome our indifference and self-interest, see beyond the abstractions or racial bogeymen, and be moved enough to demand a civil society that is fairer and more just.
There’s a storyline in An American Summer that probably haunts me the most. It revolves around the relationship between Anita Thomas, a social worker at Harper High, and one of her charges, a senior at the South Side school named Thomas, who hides behind a curtain a long locks, his hoodie cinched tight. The Englewood neighborhood has become synonymous with the city’s gun violence, a metonym, but its problems run systemically deep—a legacy of redlining, entrenched segregation, joblessness, population loss, blocks still gap-toothed with vacant homes from the 2008 foreclosure crisis. Thomas suffers from “complex loss,” someone in the book calls it; there’s nothing “post” about his trauma in a place where the trials are repeated and ongoing. “Thomas was like the Zelig of Englewood’s violence,” Alex writes. At ten, he was at a neighbor’s surprise eleventh birthday party when shots fired from the street pierced the house’s outer wall and killed the birthday girl. Thomas’s brother is wheelchair-bound from a shooting. He’s seen other boys from his neighborhood killed. Then his best friend, a girl at his school named Shakaki, is murdered in front of him.
Thomas and other students at his high school need Anita and other caring counselors like they need oxygen. Indeed, Anita sometimes takes Thomas and another student (a boy who accidentally shot and killed his own little brother) to a room on the fourth floor of the school, with a rocking chair, that functions as a sort of a chill room. It’s for students to cope with their rage and despair. Other adults in the school think Thomas is a leader of a clique, the gang on his block, and write him off as a thug. But Anita had come to understand the enormity of the weight he’s carrying, a weight that she also bears. “We weren’t trained for this. We weren’t taught how to bury a child,” the school’s only other social worker confides in Anita.
Then, Alex relates, the school district relocates Anita. She has to leave Harper High. It’s a testament to the storytelling, how much I was made to care, that after I read this passage I threw the book against a wall. Actually heaved it and shouted, “Fuck this city!” (They tell me you are wicked and I believe them, Sandburg writes.) Another person Alex profiles in his book, an overnight violence reporter named Pete Nickeas, articulates the feeling that overcame me another way: “I love this city but it can be tiring.”
Thomas’s story in the book doesn’t end there, though. He and Anita stay in touch. She takes him out to lunch one day, Alex tagging along, to a spot on the South Side called Ms. Biscuit, which I think has since closed. “I’ve seen people go crazy because of all the violence they seen,” Thomas tells them over their meals. He feels trapped in the undertow of the violence, the inexorable pull to give in to the nihilism, the desire to meet murder with murder, death with death. It’s what most people think he’s doing anyway. Even Shakaki’s relatives goad him to avenge her death. But Thomas, miraculously, also seems to have a purchase on solid land. He seems to be making progress. He’s become more talkative. Less cynical.
“I think about it but I don’t let it get to me,” he explains to the two adults, who, like most of us, especially now, are looking for signs of hope. “It’s not gonna happen overnight,” Thomas assures them, “but it’s gonna get better.”
NONFICTION
An American Summer: Love and Death in Chicago
By Alex Kotlowitz
Vintage
Published March 31, 2020
