Up in Here: Jailing Kids on Chicago's Other Side

Chapter 3

26 ​3 “Line up!” Attendant Walton hollers from the console. Breakfast is over, and the boys have done the four-­ by-­ four again scraping and then bathroom area visits. Twenty-­ two androids stand up from their TV area seats, plod past the glass partition, and arrange themselves in two lines at the door. Attendant Walton will escort them to morning class— the 6–2 shift’s main duty. The 8–4 did it yesterday while Walton waited for me with the cellblock paperwork lesson. No hustling me through the logbook and roll board again. Old enough to be any inmate’s grandfather and shorter than at least a third of them, Attendant Walton’s control impresses me.The boys obey him with the demeanor of boot camp recruits waking up, remaking their beds, brushing their teeth, and dressing —not loving it, not hating it, just doing it. If Walton wields such influence, I should too, once trained. I’m younger, taller, stronger. My stomach is much flatter. I’ve lifted weights since my last year of high school. Skin color can’t make that vast a difference . I was right not to quit after one day of orientation. The logbook, cell searches, and steel doors potentially heaved at my face will prove only minor distractions from my real mission— befriending Calvin and Monty. Standing aside the back of Walton’s line, something catches my eye from the right. It’s Calvin, still confined and still a Close Watch, awake today and propped on his elbows again, tracking us from his cell floor. I turn fully around. Lodged across from the console so we can watch him, Calvin is sitting up on his green mattress, smirking like Confinement is a party, and he relishes missing school. I feel stupid about yesterday’s pity. Being “played” is any children’s attendant’s Achilles’ heel, I will learn. Attendant Walton hasn’t batted an eye at Calvin. 27 c h a p t e r t h r e e “Step out,” he commands, monotone. Walton can’t say it any other way. Jailed boys can’t walk themselves to school. Nothing here to be happy about. The inmates copy his solemnity. But I wish to be their remedy, to cheer them up and rebuild their humanity, like when I modeled the cake serving for Monty, and he grinned. No chance right now though to help anyone beam. An inmate up front pushes the door open. It is fashioned like the cell doors—a vertical glass rectangle framed with steel painted Mississippi mud brown, as if the cellblock is its own cell. The boys live in cells within a cell. I trail Walton and the two-­line formation to the elevator shaft. The boys halt in place while he waves a black electronic key against a dark panel embedded in the brick wall. A red light, small as an eraser head, illuminates. With punch buttons, juveniles could slip off their cellblocks, activate elevators, and bolt east along Roosevelt Road toward the ABLA housing projects before we detect them absent. Without incident, everyone steps into the carriage. Like suited corporate workers from different firms, the inmates say nothing during the ten-­second ride downstairs. Some study their sneaker tops or stare straight ahead. I catch Attendant Walton’s plain expression in an awkward exchange, like we’re supposed to be ignoring each other too. I look away, and without intending to, meet eyes with an inmate. The kid frowns, and I’m embarrassed . I focus down or up, anywhere but someone’s face. One floor below and off the elevator, Walton points the boys into the Chicago Public Schools’ Nancy B. Jefferson Alternative School. Revered as the “Joan of Arc of the West Side,” Ms. Jefferson ’s nursing career propelled her to threedecades of involvement in numerous social institutions, which included the school system , the police department, and the Mayor’s Council onWomen’s Affairs. I see no sign with her name, much less an embossed shoulders-­ up profile, like the plaque for Arthur Audy mounted on a wall out by the front desk. The public never sees the school section of the jail. Instead of cellblocks, classrooms line both sides of this hallway. Every school area wall is complete brick—no glass here. Metal doors coated in the same brown paint barricade each 28 c h a p t e r...