Free There Are No Children Here by Alex Kotlowitz Page A

Lafeyette and James and the others in the church nodded in assent.
    “Tomorrow is not promised for us. So let’s take advantage of today,” she urged them. “Sometimes we take tomorrow for granted. Oh, I’ll do this tomorrow or tomorrow this will happen.And we forget that tomorrow’s not promised to us and we never get a chance to tell those people that we love them or how we feel about them and then, when they’re gone, there’s so much pain that you feel because you didn’t get to do that.” Carla caught her breath; her audience remained silent and attentive.
    “Bird Leg wasn’t a perfect person, but he wasn’t a terrible person, and people are going to say that he was a great person or some people are going to say he deserved it, that he was a terrible person. We can’t pass judgment on him, because whatever he’s doing, there’s somebody who’s doing more or somebody who’s doing less. He cared about his family and I don’t think he was deep into it as much as people thought. All of you are here to pay your tribute to him as Bird Leg or as a gang member and maybe you’re here for both or either one of them, but it could be you. You take tomorrow for granted and it could be you tomorrow. We just never know what’s going to happen. You all need to get your lives together before it’s too late.”
    Jimmie Lee hugged her as she stepped down. “You did a good job,” he told her. “I appreciate what you said. I heard you.” Meanwhile, another family friend led the congregation in a spirited rendition of the pop song “Lean on Me,” a song that always stirred Pharoah’s emotions. Here, in the company of other sobbing children and adults, large tears slid down his plump cheeks. He clutched his rolled-up sweatshirt to his chest for security, and, as often happened to him in tense situations, he found himself battling a piercing headache.
    James cried too. It looked to some as if he might be doubled over in pain, but he hid his teary face in his black felt hat, which he held between his legs so that others wouldn’t see him cry. Lafeyette stared hard at the whirling blades of the long-stemmed electric fan behind the lectern, his eyes sad and vacant, his right arm slung over the pew in front of him so that he could hold the hand of his two-year-old nephew, Terence’s child, Snuggles. “Look,” Snuggles said to his young uncle, “Bird Leg’s asleep.” Lafeyette shushed him, his chin buried in his free hand. “I cried on the inside,” he said later. “I didn’t have enough in me to cry.”
    As the service closed and the mourners moved forward to pass the casket for one last look at the body, Pharoah, still grippinghis balled-up sweatshirt, asked of Lafeyette, “What’s up in heaven? Do they have stores?”
    “Shut up,” Lafeyette said. “You don’t know what you talking ’bout.”
    As the boys waited to file out of their aisle, they heard a mother, two rows back, scold her son: “That could have been you if I’d let you go over there. They would have killed you, too.” When gang members passed the casket for the last time, they flashed the hand signal of the Conservative Vice Lords at Bird Leg’s stiff body, their thumbs and index fingers forming the letter C. The boys didn’t speak until they were outside the church.
    “We’re gonna die one way or the other by killing or plain out,” James said to Lafeyette. “I just wanna die plain out.”
    Lafeyette nodded. “Me too.”

Six
        LAFEYETTE FROZE, then stabbed at a fly resting on the stove. “Got it.” He shook his fist a couple of times and threw the startled insect into the hot, stagnant air. “C-c-c-c’mon, Lafie, let’s … let’s … let’s go,” Pharoah pleaded. Lafeyette reached out again, this time swatting the back of his brother’s head. “Shut up, punk. I ain’t going.”
    Pharoah begged his brother to take him back to the railroad tracks. He wanted to get away from his suffocating home, from