Free There Are No Children Here by Alex Kotlowitz

gold friendship pin bearing his initials were reminders that Bird Leg had been only fifteen.
    Lafeyette, Pharoah, and James were the first to file up to the open casket, where Lafeyette ran his fingers along Bird Leg’s jogging suit. At first hesitantly and then with great affection, he caressed the boy’s puffy face. James also gently touched the body, pulling back before his fingers reached his friend’s rounded cheeks. Pharoah, barely tall enough to see into the casket, stood on tiptoe but kept his hands to his side. He had hardly known Bird Leg; he was here to be with his big brother.
    “It looks like he’s breathing,” James whispered to Lafeyette, desperately wanting to be told he was wrong.
    “He ain’t breathing,” Lafeyette assured him.
    James glanced at Bird Leg again and, to no one in particular, muttered, “I’m figuring to cry.” He wiped the tears from his face with the back of his hand.
    Except for its plush red-cushioned pews, the one-story Zion Grove Baptist church, formerly a barbershop and before that a grocery store, seemed tired and worn. It adjoined an abandoned hamburger stand and faced a vacant lot. Inside, the church was sparsely decorated. A nearly lifesize rendering of
The Last Supper
covered the back wall; an American flag, wrapped around its pole, was draped in clear plastic.
    The low ceiling and cinder-block walls did little to discourage the late August heat. The two bright floral arrangements, one at each end of the casket, struggled to retain their beauty through the hour-long service. Friends and relatives and fellow gang members, about 150 in all, shifted uncomfortably in the pews, fanning themselves with the mimeographed programs in a futile attempt to keep from perspiring.
    The humidity put everyone on edge. Bird Leg’s sister, in her grief, wailed in a pained, high-pitched voice that echoedthrough the small church like a stiff wind through a canyon. “I wanna kiss him. He ain’t dead, HE AIN’T DEAD ,” she cried. Months later, her protestations would echo in Pharoah’s head; it was the one moment he would vividly recall from the funeral.
    The three boys found seats off to the side, positioned so that one of the numerous thin pillars wouldn’t obstruct their view of the lectern. Lafeyette wore faded gray corduroy pants and a shimmery silver-colored nylon jacket; Pharoah wore matching navy blue corduroy pants and sweatshirt. Both outfits were in sharp contrast to the tight suits and carefully cocked fedoras of most of the men. James himself looked like a young man, in his own purple high-waisted suit and black fedora. Three of Bird Leg’s relatives, including a brother, wore T-shirts that read I BIRD LEG . Jimmie Lee, dressed in a charcoal-black sport coat, sat unobtrusively in the crowd. He had been asked to be a pallbearer.
    To the deep, sorrowful spirituals played on the church’s organ, the Reverend C. H. Stimage, an elderly minister who had been preaching here for over thirty years, climbed to the lectern. “God needs some young soldiers among the old soldiers,” he consoled the gathered mourners. His message in funerals for the young was usually the same: he warned of the evils of drinking and drugs, and sometimes, when he felt comfortable about it, cautioned them against the lure of the gangs. When young gang members die, other youngsters attend church; it was, reasoned the minister, the only time he could preach to them about the love of God.
    Carla Palmore, a sturdy, self-assured seventeen-year-old who had been a friend of Bird Leg’s, followed the minister to the lectern. Carla wanted to be upbeat, to be hopeful, and, as if to proclaim her intent, sported a matching pink skirt and blouse that, amid the mourners’ somber suits and dark dresses, seemed all the more cheerful. Despite her efforts, though, her speech underlined the general feeling among her peers that many of them, like Bird Leg, might not make it to adulthood. During her impromptu sermon,