A Flower Can Bloom: How Women in Chicago are Overcoming the Restraints of Violence

A piece from “Chicago Retold” — A project on the violence in Chicago.

by Lindsey Ponder

“Sometimes I have to pretend that I’m not myself.”

Shaeday, who’s lived all 19 of her years in North Lawndale, blinked behind black-framed glasses.

“I’m cool with the gang members on the end of my block, but they hate my brother,” she said. “But they don’t know that’s my brother. They want him dead. So I have to leave myself at home, lose all ties with anyone gang-affiliated. I have to lose myself to stay safe. It’s nothing new to me. I don’t leave the house anymore. I go to school, go home, go to school, go home. So for me, I stay in the house because that’s where I can be me and know no one’s going to come after me.”

Shaeday, 19, shares her story at Feb. 25 Pearl event, Queens of the Westside.

While many American teens alter their appearances and personalities to fit in, Shaeday alters hers to blend in — stand out too much in North Lawndale, and you could get shot, said Sharona Drake. Drake, 28, is the founder of Pearl, a North Lawndale outreach to junior-high- to college-age women.

It’s Wednesday, and the scent of spring rolls and fried rice hangs heavy in the air. Shrieks and hollers reverberate off the gray and yellow and blue gymnasium walls, a backbeat to the syncopation of basketballs thumping the floor and backboard and the chatter of girls with their hands on their hips, shouting orders to middle school boys assaulting the dinner mess with wash cloths.

Drake is clapping and stomping and chanting a tune about cleaning up. High school boys that tower over her nonetheless respect her orders and hastily set to work collapsing the tables that currently occupy half the gym.

“At Pearl, we focus on building a network of lifelong relationships. So really that just means we’re there,” Drake said. “What we really provide is a family.”

Four-year-old Pearl is an offshoot of the Young Men’s Educational Network (YMEN), a similar ministry for men launched approximately 20 years ago in Lawndale.

Both organizations work to address the needs of young people living in North Lawndale, Chicago’s third most violent neighborhood, according to the Chicago Tribune.

Growing up in violent neighborhoods shapes young people in just about every way, Drake said, recalling her own childhood.

“Things would happen, and I would run because I thought it was a gunshot,” Drake said. “Like when we played football, they’d blow a cannon every time they’d score, and I was gone every time. I was in the band and played the bass drum, and I would run under the bleachers with the full bass drum. Even now there’s just a level of distrust I feel for people because growing up, it was like most people had a switch, and you had no warning that someone might be angry, you had no warning that someone might be a killer.”

Although Drake did not grow up in Chicago herself, she has lived in the ‘hood most of her life. Wherever she moved, she was affiliated with gang members.

“I was going to join,” she said, “but every time, God kind of blocked me.” Instead, Drake ended up in the role of counselor and confidante for gang members who had committed murders or other violent crimes. “I was the one gang bangers confessed to,” she said.

Drake sings at Queens of the Westside.

Drake has lived in Chicago for six years now, first on the Northside, then in West Garfield Park, and now at her current location in North Lawndale.

A graduate of Oakwood University’s psychology program, Drake said, “Because I am educated, since I [have been at Pearl] I’ve been offered jobs that would pay me twice as much as I earn now. But I stay because I realized I have privilege: I can leave. They can’t.”

“I stay because I realized I have privilege: I can leave. They can’t.”

- Sharona Drake

Drake intends Pearl to be a place where young women have people to turn to every day of the week. Monday to Thursday they meet together at Pearl, one Friday of the month is family game night, Saturdays are for tutoring and homework help, and on Sundays they go to church.

Kendra (center) performs a dance she and two friends from Pearl choreographed themselves at Queens of the Westside.

Sixteen-year-old Kendra, a student who has attended Pearl for the last year, said that being scared is something to which she has grown accustomed. At any moment, she said, she could be shot just for being somehow linked to a gang member.

“If a gang member’s in trouble, and the rival gang can’t get to them, they’ll get to you,” she said. “You can’t be really free. In a way you feel imprisoned in your own city.”

In order to survive, young women learn early in life to be vigilant, Drake said. For instance, she determines where to park her car based on how she can make the quickest escape if a fight breaks out. And in a community where, according to Drake, women are typically sexualized, staying alert to your surroundings could make the difference between getting followed on the street or just getting hollered at.

“As a female, I’m never rude to dudes if they try to holler at me, never ever. In some areas, they’ll beat you up, or they’ll say something nasty to you and follow you. And then you can’t go home because then they know where you live,” Drake said. “You just have to learn to navigate. And as a female, it can change you, can make you a lot harder, or you just stop liking men at all. And you either become one of the dudes, or you want nothing to do with guys.”

Although girls typically earn better grades in school (81 percent of Chicago girls graduate high school versus 66 percent of Chicago boys, according to the Tribune), Drake said they are confused as to how to interact with men.

“A lot of them growing up in those single parent homes are still looking for love and attention that they never got from a father, and so they’re attention-hungry,” she said.

Kendra added, “Women allow themselves to be mistreated. People just start turning to whatever will help them feel better because they don’t have anyone to turn to at home.”

“Women allow themselves to be mistreated. People just start turning to whatever will help them feel better because they don’t have anyone to turn to at home.”

- Kendra

In North Lawndale, 72 percent of households are run by single moms. Many issues perpetuate the prevalence of single parent households and complicate matters for couples that do desire to raise their kids together.

For one, because many a young mother is dependent upon Section 8 housing, if the father of her children is charged with a felony, he either has to move out, or his family loses government assistance. Because they need the assistance, parents often choose to stay split up. It’s extremely painful for a woman to witness, Drake said.

Shaeday’s older brothers were kicked out of the house because they had felonies and her mother relies on Section 8 housing. “I think it was hard for her, but she’s so numb to it now,” Shaeday said. “She just had to do what she had to do. She saw my grandpa put my uncle out ’cause he went to jail. So you just get numb to it because that’s just how it goes. You have to act like you’re not as hurt as you are.”

Consequently, said Drake, boys and girls are raised under the authority of mothers, aunts, or grandmothers. Most school teachers are female. And “if Grandma forces you to go to church,” Drake added, “then, the leaders there are typically female. So when you start trying to step up as a male, you get criticized really hard, and the only place they feel they are leaders is in the bedroom. Young men have no place where they belong, and YMEN’s great for that.”

Having a safe place to be angry, as well as having a sense of family, helps with the violence, Drake said. “And I think that speaks to something deeper — it’s not a program they need or a system. Maybe they just need a family.”

The way Kendra sees it, this longing for family is the primary reason young men join gangs in the first place. They long for father figures or a place to fit in, or they need quick money.

Many girls, while not gang members themselves, “claim” a gang to attract its male members. And gangs do end up utilizing girls to carry out drug deals because cops typically do not investigate women, especially those with strollers and babies.

More youth programs like Pearl and YMEN would help alleviate the violence in neighborhoods like Lawndale, Kendra said, as well as help young women to be convinced of their own self-worth.

It’s recognizing her own self worth that has given Kendra the confidence to pursue higher education. She plans to attend college — which is unusual, she said, because typically, women’s self-perceptions are too low to make college even seem like an option, the result of generational trickle-down.

Shaeday has already completed her associate degree at Malcolm X and is working toward her bachelor’s degree in elementary education at Eastern Illinois University.

“My family thinks I’m an oddball,” she said. “They call me ‘the white girl’ because I want to sit around and talk about life, and I’m 19 and don’t have a baby yet. And I’m in college. People think I act like I’m better than them. I just don’t want to be another statistic.”

“They call me ‘the white girl’ because I want to sit around and talk about life, and I’m 19 and don’t have a baby yet. And I’m in college. People think I act like I’m better than them. I just don’t want to be another statistic.”

-Shaeday

Leaders at Pearl attempt to convince young women of their own value, but they also teach them other much-needed practical life skills. During Pearl meetings, students learn everything from Bible verses and catechisms to reading comprehension and spelling, and basic skills like cooking and cleaning.

“Once I had a girl living with me — it took me a week to teach her to make scrambled eggs. She didn’t know anything, even how to hold a fork,” Drake said. “We practiced every day. The next time I picked her up from her shelter, she said she had cooked for her boyfriend — eggs, of course.”

However, not all progress is as instantaneous as learning to scramble eggs. Wounds that have accumulated for years take years to heal, Drake said. For leaders at Pearl, the slowness of the progress can be disheartening at times.

“I cry a lot,” Drake confessed. “I hurt a whole lot. And I have to be careful not to grow desensitized. To survive, I have to make sure I’m living in community, and I had to learn to mourn well. But you learn to celebrate really well too. I had a girl that was a cutter and suicidal, so I learned to celebrate when she had fewer marks on her arms. You can’t get upset every time they cut after being there just two years.”

Drake (second from left) poses with the young women of Pearl.

It is important to Drake that her students feel the necessity of giving back, taking time to serve others in ways similar to the ways in which they have been served. Pearl students flew last year to South Dakota to work with Native Americans, and to do missions work in Nicaragua.

Drake also makes it a priority to take students to places (like Five Guys) they may never have encountered before.

“None of them had ever gone to Five Guys before, but then they liked it so much they brought their families [the] next time,” Drake said. Because so many girls walk just two places every day (school and home) in order to stay safe, she wants to make sure her students get to have fun, too.

For Shaeday, who started attending Pearl as a student when it was first founded and now volunteers as a youth leader, Pearl started off more challenging for her than it was fun.

“The hardest part of growing up in North Lawndale and then going to Pearl is they were all so open,” she said. “I was always taught, ‘What happens in the house stays in the house.’ But I feel like YMEN and Pearl are trying to teach us to break those chains. And so that’s the mindset I have with students now. It’s teaching me to have an open heart because I hated people when I came in to Pearl.”

Drake and her students live in constant danger, but to her there’s something beautiful about this neighborhood known to many only by police reports and a general sense of fear. There’s a side of Lawndale outsiders don’t get to see — or don’t try to, Drake said.

“In the suburbs, people just close their garage doors and don’t come out. In the ‘hood, people know you and look out for you,” Drake said. “There’s a sense of community. When you have your block parties in the summer, and there’s barbeque and dominoes or spades, and you just chill out with everything for a day, and people watch out for their ‘sisters’ and ‘brothers,’ it’s beautiful. I hope people would see the beautiful part of having someone hide out in your house, even though you could get in trouble. That’s big love; that’s big sacrifice. I always learn from that. I think we’re all called to sacrifice for love at times. There are certain things I learn about God in the ‘hood.”

In her interactions with young women at Pearl, as well as with gang members she meets, Drake is committed to discerning and pursuing the beauty in people.

When she lived in Garfield Park, a certain gang would stake out the corner in front of her house 24/7, taking it in shifts to wait there, even in the bitter winter. One especially cold night, Drake approached the drug dealer on her corner with an offering of tea and cheese toast (the snack her mom always made when the weather turned chilly).

“You know we selling drugs?” he asked.

“Yeah, but it’s cold,” she replied.

Within moments, grown men on little kid bikes surrounded her — they had all come for tea and toast, and several asked if she would do their daughters’ hair. Members of that gang looked out for Drake for as long as she lived in that house, even waking her up in the middle of the night to move her car out of the way of a street cleaner so it wouldn’t get towed.

Drake said, “The important part in these relationships is being real with what you see that is wrong. Sometimes, people talk about love being blind; I think what makes God’s love so beautiful is that he sees everything and still loves. Like, ‘I see you out here on the corner, you know you’re wrong, but I still love you.’”

“The important part in these relationships is being real with what you see that is wrong. Sometimes, people talk about love being blind; I think what makes God’s love so beautiful is that he sees everything and still loves.”

- Sharona Drake

For Shaeday too, the gang members on the end of her block are like family. They drive her grandma to the hospital and the grocery store, accompany her and her siblings to the pool, and take her to school.

According to Shaeday, this makes for complicated relationships — on the one hand, she loves the young men who have become her “brothers” and “cousins.” On the other, associating with them puts her in danger. However, she makes it a priority to love them however she can, because that’s what leaders at Pearl did for her.

“Many drug dealers feel so poorly about themselves they don’t feel worthy of relationship with you,” she said. “You have to show them love or they’ll never have the confidence to push forward, just like I would never have gone to college if Sharona hadn’t loved me and believed in me. I mean, I wasn’t planning on it. But I had to believe in myself because she saw something I didn’t.”

We’re really not that different from those drug dealers and just as desperately in need of help, said Drake. “I think you realize more about yourself when you deal with broken people because you see how broken you are too, and then you work on it together. Like, they demonstrate lack of trust in God by selling drugs; I do it by over-working.”

And so it’s a complex community that resides in North Lawndale. For as prevalent as violence is, hope and beauty flourish too, Drake said. Her hope takes shape in the form of young women like Shaeday, who are growing beyond the boundaries of what people expect of them.

“We’re supposed to teach our kids what our parents taught us. But I can’t do it,” Shaeday said. “I am making the conscious decision to change my story and not just be what my mom told me I was gonna be, and I can’t do that with my kids either. A flower can bloom in this place you guys call the murder capital.”