An American Summer: Love and Death in Chicago by Alex Kotlowitz

Author:Alex Kotlowitz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Violence in Society, Discrimination & Race Relations, Political Science, Public Policy, General
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Published: 2019-03-05T05:00:00+00:00

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We met at the Greenline coffee shop on the South Side. Ashara and I drove together, and as we pulled into a parking space on the street, a car shot past us, honking. Ashara rolled her eyes. “It’s Aries,” she said. “He thinks he’s a hot shot.” Aries then pulled a U-turn, sped back, and pulled into a space, wheels screeching. “He’s showing off,” Ashara declared. She wasn’t happy. It was not an auspicious beginning for this gathering.

Inside the coffee shop, I offered to get Aries something to eat, but he declined. “You said you wanted breakfast,” Ashara chided. He replied that just a cup of coffee would do. Ashara didn’t let up. “But you told me we’d meet and you could have a good breakfast.” They went back and forth like this for a few minutes, and then I steered them to a table by the window. “This is the story of our lives,” Ashara told me. “We irritate each other.” She then turned toward Aries. “You’re irritating,” she told him. “You’re a bug.” He shot back, “She remind me of my little sister. And she’s only four.”

I both laughed and cringed. It was like they were kids again. I asked them about growing up together, and Ashara said, “We were like a cat and a dog in a cage together. But we love each other.” Aries wasn’t having any of that. “She talk too much,” he retorted. “She had a crush on me.”

“I had a crush on you?”

If I were making this all up, if I were writing fiction, I suppose this is where Ashara and Aries would fall in love, but that’s not where this goes. It’s messier than that. As real life often is. In the wake of Aries’s arrest, Ashara had come to realize that she was selling herself and others short. She came to realize that young men like Aries have so much going against them, not the least of which is feeling like they don’t fit in. Because of race. Because of class. Because of geography. She had by now experienced it firsthand herself. When Aries got out of prison, he couldn’t get his postal job back because of his felony record, and so he landed work at Eataly, an Italian food market and restaurant, where he buses tables for $6.95 an hour plus tips. He lives with his grandmother, since he can’t afford his own apartment. “I felt like Aries was the first black man in my life who really let his guard down,” Ashara told me. “Aries really shifted me.”

Aries doesn’t talk about that day much, but he has confided in Ashara that it haunts him, that he can’t get past the fact that he had a part in someone’s death, that he got himself into that situation in the first place. But today, at the Greenline coffee shop, he seemed, if not blustery, then chary and in a place that felt, well, too familiar to Ashara. It

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