GO WHITE GIRL

Originally Written: Spring 1993*
Revisited with Post-Script: Dec. 26, 2020

Background: In 1991 during the spring of my freshman year at Northwestern University, I wrote a news story on Chicago’s Midnight Basketball League for one of my journalism classes. Writing about this league and the gang members who played in it piqued my interest in learning more about the urban landscape that was just opening up to me as a young woman who grew up in a village in upstate New York. By my second year at NU, I started my minor in urban studies, which included opportunities to research and write more papers on gangs and “social deviants” — the more intellectual and politically correct way to say criminals.

Around the same time, I’d been inspired by the characters and storylines in the classics such as How the Other Half Lives by Jacob Riis, A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry and A Foot in Each World by Leanita McClain as well as the modern works I was reading and watching — Alex Kotlowitz’s There are No Children Here, Rick Telander’s Heaven is a Playground, Boyz n the Hood by John Singleton, and the documentary Hoop Dreams by Steve James. These modern writers either grew up in or moved into the homes and regular habitats of their subjects for an extended period of time, which, to me, made their efforts and the storylines even more captivating. I was intrigued by the challenges of trust and access given that the writers and witnesses to these stories were white males. I also wondered where I, as a young, white, tall, Irish-looking American woman who often carried a basketball on her hip would end up if I’d made the same attempt. Throughout high school, I’d played hoops as the only white female usually at the Boys’ Club in Troy, NY, and at local community colleges and even once in Washington Park in Albany. Sure, I’d dipped my hightops in the water, yet as they say, the big city of Chicago isn’t Kansas.

After writing the story about how the Midnight Basketball League helped bring about truces and reduce crime during peak crime hours in Chicago during the late 80s and early 90s, I found myself lacing up my sneakers on the South Side of Chicago. I was with one of my college roommates, Stephanie Miller, who wouldn’t let me go alone. One of the guys from the league had invited me to a night of pick-up hoops. He and his friend were shocked when I showed up. Another player could tell that I was curious about writing the harsh truths of how hard life was in the Chicago Housing Authority. He started rating which CHA units were the least desirable, and as I listened, he asked if I was interested in seeing where he lived.

The Ida B. Wells Homes were constructed between 1939 and 1941 as a Public Works Administration project to house black families in the “ghetto,” in accordance with federal regulations requiring public housing projects to maintain the segregation of neighborhoods. What I remember was not seeing the high-rises as prominently as I thought I would thanks to the articles I’d read and photos I’d seen in the newspapers. It’s because this housing development had a mix of rowhouses, mid-rise and high-rise units. While standing in a path between brown rowhouses, I remember being quiet and polite as our new friend showed us around. My eyes saw a plague of neglect as I heard the stories of gangs, crime and violence and that it wasn’t as bad as other places, or at least at the moment it wasn’t. And while all of this talk of despair was happening, I watched residents act cordially to me and my college friend. A small minority of passersby either raised an eyebrow or looked slightly irritated at the suspicious sight of two young, white women being given a tour of the neighborhood. Yet no one called the cops.

I don’t know what moment or gut feeling caused me to look at my roommate, but I did, and when I did, I felt so far away from campus, from our car, from life as we knew it. It was as if we were standing on an island. I looked at her and thought we needed to go. I was the one who got us there, and I wasn’t sure if it was dangerous or a mistake or what good we could do as two young women who were in over our heads. We looked like poverty tourists — more specifically — black poverty tourists. As I stood in a housing unit named for African-American journalist and newspaper editor Ida B. Well, I wasn’t sure what to say, write or do. I had no point, no takeaway, just a sinking feeling that at that moment, I was doing more harm than good.

Moving forward I found it to be easier to simply continue my local volunteer work as a counselor when time permitted, and as a Big Sister of middle school girl in Evanston, IL. Then my thoughts changed in the fall of my third year at Northwestern when I read about the shooting of Dantrell Davis, a seven-year-old Cabrini-Green resident. During his walk to school, Dantrell was shot and killed in a crossfire between gangs while holding his mother’s hand. I told myself that I had to do something once our basketball season was over. And this time I’d have to go and interact as a human with something to offer, not as a basketball player or a poverty tourist.

In the aftermath of the Dantrell Davis shooting, gang leaders had declared a truce, the first ever in Cabrini-Green, and locals were hoping it would last. (It did — for three years.) That spring after the shooting I called around and offered to do a small writing workshop for kids at a local youth center. One director answered, and he said he had a small group of boys who would benefit. We picked a regular day of the week and time — Mondays, after school. The director gave me the address to the building, which was on the perimeter of Cabrini-Green.

Here is the story as I wrote it in May 1993. It made it no further than as a completed journalism assignment and journal entry. Whether I liked my style, word choice and voice of a 21-year-old or not, I left it as I wrote it. I knew in reading it many years later that I remained truthful to the end of the anecdote, and it was best to stay within that anecdote. Yet there was more to the story of how my experience ended. It is something that I am sure I didn’t want to tell in writing or in person to anyone because back then I think it was easier to quietly blame myself, or to just let it go without questions, which is something a writer would never do to her subjects. This time through, I will tell the story of how my experience came to a close, and what happened to one of the most notorious housing units in the country following the death of Dantrell Davis.

Go White Girl
By Maureen Holohan
Spring 1993

It was a humid Monday afternoon in May. As I dribbled toward the sizzling, blacktopped basketball courts, I looked down at my pink, freckled skin and saw that it was already glazed with sweat. After a deep breath, I stood up straight and still felt the pressure of the infamous red and white stacks of buildings in front of me.

The buildings of Cabrini-Green.

“Don’t you dare flinch,” I told myself in my head.

Confused and calculating stares struck me from near and far. I forced my eyes to grab every glance I could, and retaliated with my own undaunted expression. But deep inside, my soul implored, “Don’t hate me. Please don’t hate me.”

As the rest of the indifferent outside world buzzed by with their car doors locked, I penetrated an isolated world riddled by poverty and tormented by violence and oppression. No longer could I confine myself to my volunteer time spent as a writing teacher for a group of boys at Demicco Youth Service next door. I took to the playground. To interact. To get along. To witness the feedings of this emotionally remote, yet physically close world that I’d only read about in the Chicago-Sun Times and Chicago Tribune.

“You wanna run the hole?” a boy about 13 years old asked me as I stepped inside the caged fence surrounding the courts.

“Yeah,” I said. “I’ll run.”

I was a nearly six-foot giant running among sixth through eighth-grade children who didn’t seem to mind my skin color or gender. Within 15 minutes, my squad turned into a trash talking, high-fiving team bragging about how well we played together.

After a sweet give-and-go, Cornelius pointed to me and boasted, “Man, it’s like we’ve been playing together all of our lives.”

As fatigue began to weed out the younger players, older teenagers replaced them. It was time to play with the big boys. The posse of my new young acquaintances, now on the sideline, supported me with a little, “Go White Girl, Go White Girl, Go!” tune. After sinking some jumpers, Donnie and Fruit Loop nicknamed me “Rifle woman” and “Shotgun.”

The games grew as intense as the fierce sun. A film of dirt covered my arms and legs, and I could taste the sweat in my mouth. Out of nowhere, a visitor from the Chicago Police Department rolled in. From outside the wire fence, I felt like the lights and front bumper of the squad car were pointed right at me. It felt like they were babysitting me.

Please don’t step out of that car and ask me why I’m here.

Minutes later I was grounded while converting on a hard drive to the basket. When I jumped up into a huddle of high fives, the squad car slithered off.

In my last game, I guarded a tall, wiry guy others called Bones. Bones told me when he was going to score. He was even so courteous to point to the exact spot where he was going to school me. He shot. He scored. I matched him on an up-and-under into a lefty jump hook that sent the crowd in an ooohhhing frenzy.

“She can ball,” someone shouted. “And she’s balling on all y’all.”

In between possessions, I felt someone’s eyes on me, and I turned into his gripping glare. The teen, who wore all blue and black with his cap turned to the right, stood outside the cage. A Gangster Disciple. His unrelenting stare permitted an elusive nod of his head.

I bid my farewell to my new friends and gimped to my car. Three younger women sat outside the row of low rises and watched me pass. I caught myself still wearing my game face.

Drop your guard, I told myself.

I let my guard go.

And then I smiled.

Three new friends smiled back at me.

I thought of Andre telling me earlier about how a Bulls star, protected by security guards, signed autographs for an hour yesterday, and how a Chicago TV cameraman and reporter were in the neighborhood a week ago for a clip. I thought of how people just come and go. Take and don’t give much more than a signature in return.

Just before I stepped into my car, I heard my name from across the courts. I looked back to see little Andre hustling across the blacktop.

“Are you coming back?” Andre shouted in between breaths.

I nodded.

“Yes, I’ll be back.”

— END

27 Years Later

My memory of the Mondays I spent teaching writing and playing basketball in Cabrini Green during the spring of 1993 holds the details of the most revealing vignettes of the past like the rich colors of stained glass. My dates and names often don’t fare so well unless I wrote them down, and in this case, I had the names of the kids in my writing workshop and on the courts thanks to a hard copy of this story. I am also not sure of what I knew and when I knew it with regard to the places I was entering and exiting as a basketball player or writer or both. What helped was knowing my Big Ten basketball season calendar and deadlines for my rigorous and competitive journalism classes, which always had me chasing down my next story.

What has been troubling in my efforts to dig up the details and chronology of public housing in Chicago is what it says about the places I had visited. The summaries, descriptions and snippets always depict in detail the worst of the area or neighborhood. And worse, the bleak summaries and statistics on violence and inhumanity seem to gloss over how these places came to be. It reads like so with my use of brackets: It was a really bad [black] neighborhood. It was filled with bad [black] people. There is nothing good to ever come from this [black] neighborhood except for the short list of maybe 10 famous people who made it out of these housing projects — out of tens to hundreds of thousands who lived there. Even the use of the name “project” has always rubbed me wrong. Like it was an experiment or sociological project that had so little thought and effort put into it because it was designed as a short-term fix that would lead to a long-term disaster.

As an outsider who was inside the lines of Cabrini-Green only on Monday afternoons for a few hours max — and fortunately, I was there during a truce — the most stressful part of playing during my first trip to Cabrini was when I could tell by the apparel of a group of boys who were all wearing blue that they were part of a gang, and I was not sure what that meant. Initially one was suspicious of my presence, one was happy-go-lucky and the other was something in between. In the original story, I wrote that the boys were Gangster Disciplines based on their colors, and thought I’d guessed, which is unacceptable in journalism. Yet I just googled the colors of the GDs and well, it looks like I may have been correct. I just remember seeing this group of boys wearing matching attire. Maybe they were pre-teens to teenagers. Behind them, a police car slowly crept up and watched me play. I remember thinking that I could keep glancing at them, to take notes and hope for approval. Or I could ignore both factions. I chose the latter because it was the only way to function on the court.

The second moment where I had major hesitation as to what to feel, think or do occurred at the end of a great series of games with the kids. The director had told me to make sure I was out of the area well before dark — by 5:30–6pm latest — and he’d been firm with me on this point. He knew that I’d dangled pick-up hoops as a carrot to the boys if they’d finished their writing assignments. It worked as I expected it would.

After our games on the courts, I realized that I was behind my hard out time, and said goodbye to everyone on the courts. I hustled over to my tan 1990 Honda Civic hatchback, a used car that my mother had given me. As I pulled out of the parking lot, a male wearing a blue cap, blue jeans and white T-shirt stepped right in front of my car and stared me down intensely. The only way I could move forward was if I was willing to bump him. My foot hit the breaks. With both of us at a standstill, he stared hard at me through my windshield, maybe six feet between us.

I froze, not sure what to do next or how this would end.

He raised his right arm up slowly, stared up at the sky and mimicked a jump shot.

Then he smiled at me and got out of the way.

Now that moment was as rich, positive and surprising as any I’d experienced, which is why I still remember it 27 years later. I have no idea looking back why I didn’t make it my ending.

The third and final test came out of nowhere, and this one went unanswered.

I can’t remember if it was a phone call, a voice mail or in-person exchange. Either way, it was a one way convo, brief and door was slammed firmly. I think that it was in person. I think that I went down for my regular meeting on Mondays, and the director met me at the door and said, “You’re no longer needed here.” I think I remember it as such because he always had a hard time with eye contact or maybe eye contact with me, and I just feel like he looked down while saying it to me. And that was it. My time there with the boys was over, and there was no offer by the director for me to have an opportunity to say goodbye.

I know for sure that I didn’t even fight it or ask why. I guessed that it was too much of a risk from a safety standpoint — to have me on the premises was one level of risk, and maybe my being on the basketball courts in such an open and public space elevated that risk for him. The last thing he needed was something happening to a white girl in Cabrini-Green on his watch. Or maybe the risk was my having too much fun with the kids, or it was a combination of everything — my whiteness, my presence, my having a basketball game that appealed to the kids.

The director had always come across as tight, strict, and a touch irked to borderline angry most of the time. Yet I thought he’d given me a pass. I had caught a few brief smiles that led me to believe he was just carrying too much on his mind. The mistake I know for sure that I’d made was during a session on descriptive writing, an enthusiastic boy said the word “Ethiopian” to describe a body type, and the other boys laughed, and honestly, I did a little, too. I remember being reprimanded by the director who snapped, saying, “There’s nothing funny about people who are starving to death.” We all sat there silently. He was hurt that we’d laughed, and hurt more by the fact that he had to say this to us. To me. And he was right. I tried not to repeat the same insensitive behavior and I do think the boys did, too.

What I will never know is why he told me I was longer needed.

What I do know for sure is the circumstances in which he had to work, and maybe even live, assuming that he lived in Cabrini or grew up there or in a similar situation. The descriptions of public housing in Chicago always include the horrors — crime, poverty, hopelessness — and rarely include the stories of those who grow up there and do not leave their homes because they know the kids need to see role models and leaders. I’d be a fool to try to build a case that the crime isn’t that bad in these areas, but the bigger problem, to me, is that idle, frustrated and even angry hands are too quick to grab what they can — drugs, money, goods, and most of all, guns. The first three you can recover from — addiction, greed, lust for power — but only a doctor and luck can save you from the last.

Any google search on public housing will be rife with adjectives like “notorious” and “drug and crime infested” and “violent.” These words express the worst in people and society. Entries that I read on The Robert Taylor Homes and The Ida B. Wells units included citations on kids and people being shot or thrown out of windows, and police officers being shot at or simply afraid to go into dark, unknown places where gangs ran too much of everyday life. After years of people being shot at by gangs who perched themselves on higher floors above the most contested turfs, it has been said that the shooting of Dantrell Davis is the act that brought down the public housing high rises in Chicago. The powers that be in Chicago started planning the demolition of all of the public units by the early 2000s with a belief that it would help reduce crime, and shootings in particular. Follow-up reporting is that the demolition of public housing and displacement of its residents left the community members who were able to support each other far more disconnected. Gang members spread out to other areas of the city as well. This dispersion along with the increased proliferation of guns — older weapons that never die or expire combined with more sophisticated weapons — resulted in new technological shooting trackers to light up everywhere. According to The Chicago Tribune, 4,049 people have been shot this year in Chicago (as of Dec. 20, 2020), which is 1,414 more than what was reported in 2019. The pandemic is certainly creating more frustrated and idle hands, as is the case in several major cities that are struggling with an increase in shootings and stabbings.

I don’t have solutions, and after reading Alex Kotlowitz’s book An American Summer and watching the documentary The Interrupters, it is clear that those who study and dedicate their lives to the plight in Chicago are struggling to come up with answers, too. What I do know is that due to my brief experiences in these areas, I read these stories and watch them on the news and see the loss of humanity in terms of the lives lost and in how it’s just all part of an average day in America. I think of the young kids who I’ve played ball with over the years, and can’t put my head around the scars left from actual violence or living under the constant threat of when it will happen again. I think of the older brothers in the neighborhood, those who were there with me way back in May of 1993 and how we all just wanted to play ball. They didn’t care who I was, where I came from and none of them told me to go home. All of them were human. All of them were trying to find a place and time to laugh and sweat and have fun each day. So much of this truth is lost in summaries of the worst cities and areas you can live in based on statistics that only drive people away from the areas that need the most support. And the proliferation of guns in our country since the crack epidemic started the obliteration of many black neighborhoods has caused many inside and out of these areas to give up on hope.

But along the way, there are moments when I think anyone who has covered these stories sees the personification of hope. My experience going to Cabrini gave me enough guts to go up to three plain-clothed police officers who were rapping at The Prairie State Games two summers later. I explained that I had a lengthy magazine-style story due my junior year and I wanted to write a profile on the three rappers who happened to work in Cabrini-Green. The three officers agreed. I wrote a story called “Hip Hop Cops.” It ended up being published in The Chicago Reader in the fall of 1994, and it won the Randolph Hearst Journalism Award for Feature Writing.

With the money I’d been paid for my story, I bought my first Apple computer. On it, I wrote a story about two basketball players who were balling on the west side at Farragut High School during the 1994–95 season. One was a leaper named Ronnie Fields, who jumped with such pop that he pulled people in the stands up off their feet as he elevated to dunk or block a shot — including me. The other subject was a near seven-foot skinny kid who recited lines from the Godfather. His name was Kevin Garnett. Kevin, Ronnie, their teammates and coaches always made sure that I got out of their school or gym with one eye on me or a car behind me as I spent days covering their games and practices for my published story entitled “Fleet Admirals.”

Considering how many positive experiences going to areas where some felt I didn’t belong, I never became upset with the director who told me I was no longer needed as a writing instructor in Cabrini-Green. If he was the only one who pushed back, and it wasn’t really a hard time, it would be wrong to paint a picture where I was somehow the victim or casualty of discrimination. I was only 21 years old at the time, but I knew why he would be hesitant to trust me. It wasn’t a “good” reason, but it certainly was a fair one. And maybe I was just wise enough to simply accept that I had gained far more than I lost on that experience. It was simply time to move on to a different place.

And I wasn’t the only person who stood to benefit from such experiences. Stephanie Miller, my college roommate, went to law school after completing her undergraduate degree at Northwestern. Stephanie’s mother told me once that our trips to me to the South Side are what opened her mind to the work of representing mostly impoverished children and women who were the victims of child abuse, sex abuse, rape and violence. Stephanie not only represented the most vulnerable in our society and those treated the most unfairly. She was in the uncomfortable and heartbreaking spot of how to help children and women find a way out, even if it meant taking them away from family. Stephanie went on to be what she’d always aspired to be — a judge in Chicago. When it comes down to making life-altering decisions in what feels like a no-win scenario, she’s the compassionate person who should be on the bench.

I still remember the dingy gym we were in on the South Side. Aqua-colored pads were up on the walls under the hoop. When my college roommate and I walked in, heads turned. More guys hung out to watch the scene unfold. My roommate found her spot against the wall, content to fade into the background and watch what only she knew was about to happen.

There are moments in my career and in my life that I have realized that I was in over my head. Socially on that day, knowing I was with the guys in that gym who were living lives that were much harder than mine, I was a few feet under the surface.

But as far as where I fit on on the court, I was above water, going with the current.

How did I know? Because of the jumpy guy guarding me. I know types and he was that hyper, trying-to-hard guy, an over-reactor who was nervous about guarding a female in front of the boys. Of course he was athletically superior, but I knew him better than he knew himself. As someone who made it to Big Ten play due to her work ethic and love for practicing solo, I knew if I could get past him, I’d be able to finish based on the marks on the floor.

My teammate passed the ball to me, and my defender lunged too late on an overplay. He’d been too hungry for the steal and his feet were now in the wrong spot. I respected him for the respect he had given me, yet I also knew he’d set himself up for his own demise.

I caught the ball and rolled off his side, knowing he was on my back, chasing me and hoping for the block. His poor position prevented him from effectively re-entering the scene of the crime that I was about to commit. On him. I blew past him and crushed him with a righty reverse on the left side.

As another sign of respect, he fouled me.

Yet it didn’t matter.

When the ball went in the hoop, every guy in the gym howled.

I looked up at my roommate.

She beamed with delight.

For that moment, we — we as in all of us — escaped our lives, our genders, our skin colors, our neighborhoods, our backgrounds. This euphoria is what always kept me going back to the courts. Armed with my basketball and pen, it was my entry into the lives and stories of others.

Decades ago, the kids of Cabrini-Green told this white girl to go, and I did, on the court and off. I went to places from Chicago to Venice Beach in LA, to Greece, Hungary and Israel where I limped my way through the bottom of my bank account, and the end of my basketball career. It was along these paths where I discovered the common threads between me and others whose stories I did my best to capture.

And in trying to tell their stories, I began to discover and collect many of my own.

Writer and author Maureen Holohan was a three-time All Big-Ten basketball player and journalism award winner at Northwestern University. After playing pro ball overseas briefly in Greece, Hungary and Israel, she served in various roles as a teacher, director, entrepreneur, volunteer and activist. For more info on Mo, go to her To the Rim — Storytelling, Truth & Leadership blog and website (totherim.com)