How Long Will I Cry? Read Online Free Page A

ground. And someone—I think it
was the man that got out of the black SUV—I think he had his feet,
but I’m not sure. I took him inside.
    We laid him on the floor of our receptionist
area. I immediately got on my knee to check to see if he had a
pulse, which he still did at the time. He had a lot of swelling in
his face. There was blood coming from his nostrils, from his mouth.
I could definitely tell that there was head trauma. He looked like
he wasn’t sure about where he was. He looked to me like he felt he
was still outside, still vulnerable, about to get hit again. He
looked very intense.
    There was so many people around me at the
time and I’m pretty sure someone said his name, but he also had on
a school name tag. So, I looked at his name tag and immediately
called Fenger High School and told them that I had a student named
Derrion Albert. I said, “He’s badly injured and we need to get in
touch with his family, immediately.”
    One of the other staff members at our
facility had already called an ambulance. I reached back down to
check his pulse again. When I called his name, he did what I
thought was him trying to answer me. But he took a deep breath and
nothing. And so I called his name again and he took another deep
breath, but then I called his name again—and after that, no
more.
    We waited for the ambulance. It took them a
while to get there, which I was very angry about. And when they
came, they were not prepared. They came in with a stethoscope.
There was no defibrillator. I didn’t see any type of equipment that
would address what looked like a pretty traumatized kid, you know,
in terms of injury. One ambulance guy did say, “We need to call for
backup.” And the other guy said, “No, we’ll just put him up on the
board.” So he came in with the board, and they put him up on the
board and took him out.
    Roseland’s always been kind of notorious for
deaths associated with violence, but it has increased within that
last five years or so, after they began to tear down the big
housing projects of Robert Taylor Homes and Cabrini-Green.3 The
Roseland area got an influx of families that moved from those
particular projects and, while there were some really beautiful
families that moved to the area and wanted a chance to make it and
do okay, there were some other families that brought on a lot of
conflict to our community. Gang activity increased, territorial
wars began to take place, and we began to start losing a lot of our
kids to gang violence. It’s because of money, to be honest. People
want money from the drug trafficking and with that comes a cost, so
they fight over it.
    In the last five years or so, it also became
more evident that our kids were coming from families that were in
distress. There’s a different kind of poor taking place right now.
And what do I mean by that? I’ll give an example. Though my mother
put me at a high risk in terms of her lifestyle, there was still
the expectation that I would do better than she did. My mom would
always say, “Don’t end up like me.” And my grandmother had a
sixth-grade education, but she expected me to not come home with
less than a B on my report card. The expectation was that I would
not back-talk to teachers; the expectation was that I would respect
adults.
    But with the new poor, it feels like the
family is in such distress that the expectation to do well in
school, to have respect for adults, has gone down tremendously. Not
even grandparents are stepping up the way they did when I was
growing up. We have a lot of grandparents my age—and I’m only 39—so
for multi-generational households, things have really gone down in
terms of people feeling responsible for the young people in our
community. I’m not against public aid, but in some ways it has
handicapped some of our family dynamics, because it’s taken away
the ownership that poor families once had with their children.
Don’t get me wrong, I support Section 8 home vouchers,