The ’Jects

♦♦♦♦ Honky, by Dalton Conley.
♦♦♦♦ There Are No Children Here, by Alex Kotlowitz.

I'm discussing these two books in conjuction because I read them within a few weeks of each other and they both deal with the same topic: growing up in the projects of a big city. Both are excellent, effective, and easy reads, though they treat the subject in slightly different ways.

Honky is Conley's memoir of growing up as part of the only white family in a project in Manhattan's Lower East Side during the 1970s. He discusses not only the problems and dangers that everyone in the projects faces, but the particular advantages and disadvantages he had being white. For instance, he had few friends in his neighborhood, and those he did disappeared for one reason and another; the silver lining was that he wasn't drawn into the communities of gangs. Conley acknowledges that if it were not for the color of his skin, and his parents' education and attentiveness (e.g., they worked the school system to get him into a school in a better neighborhood), he probably would not have broken out of poverty the way he did. (Most of his discussion of race is based on hindsight, as he, like most small children, didn't put much thought into skin color.) Honky illuminates the struggle of life in the projects, but more importantly it illuminates the injustice of who must stay and who escapes the cycle.

There Are No Children Here is a third-person, literary-journalistic account of a family, particularly two young boys, living in a project on Chicago's West Side in the 1980s. (Reading this struck closer to home when I realized how near this neighborhood is and began wondering whether any of the children I see while subbing come from places this abyssmal.) The outlook for Lafayette and Pharoah is much bleaker than for Conley. They are the third generation of their family to live in this project, a project ruled by drug lords and gangs, where friends and neighbors are caught in the cross-fire or caught up in the drug trade, where graduating from high school is something only 25% of the entering freshman class will accomplish. The book traces the boys' lives over a 2 or 3 year period, and we see their family's struggles with an unsafe and unkempt apartment, overcrowding, Welfare, job searches, drug use, gangs, and the Chicago court system. The bright side of the book is knowing from the afterword that the author (who never appears in earlier text) stepped in to help this family with financial and friendly support, even sending the boys to a private school away from their neighborhoods. But the lives of hundreds of families in that project alone remain untouched by outside support, and the picture is bleak.

I rode a bus through Cabrini Green last week and was shocked -- though not entirely surprised -- to see that the high rises look like prisons rather than housing, with metal grates shielding every staircase, balcony, and window. It made me feel privileged to live in a small but ordinary apartment, in a house, with big windows facing every direction. The disheartening thing is, living in safety and comfort shouldn't be a privilege. It should be a right.

Posted by Lisa on February 21, 2003 10:38 AM