There Are No Children Here: Chapter 2 Summary & Analysis

The buildings at the Henry Horner Homes public housing complex, which children call “the projects” and Pharoah nicknames “the graveyard,” are so poorly constructed and run-down that, in the absence of functioning light bulbs, residents are forced to carry flashlights to walk through the corridors during the day.

Danger, at Horner, might arise within one’s building, and is also most likely to arise in the summer. One June day, on Lafeyette’s twelfth birthday, the young boy and his nine-year-old cousin, Dede, are walking around their neighborhood to spend the eight dollars Lafeyette received for his birthday, when gunfire erupts suddenly. The two children fall to the ground, and Lafeyette covers Dede’s head with his jacket, thus keeping the young girl from running off in the open, which is dangerous when gangs are fighting. When the shooting subsides, the two of them walk home carefully, only to realize that Lafeyette has only fifty cents left, having lost the rest of the money in their hurried escape.

In such a violent neighborhood, Lafeyette and Pharoah depend on their mother, LaJoe, for comfort stability, and LaJoe, in turn, depends on them. Known for her warmhearted nature, LaJoe has welcomed so many children in her home over the years that many young people in the neighborhood still consider her their mother. However, even LaJoe has recently become overwhelmed by the stress of living at Horner. Like the many women who, by the age of forty, are grandmothers (and sometimes, great-grandmothers), LaJoe is worn out from caring for so many people—her husband, her children, and grandchildren. While she has maintained the beauty of her youth, her body has been affected by fatigue, and she looks both physically and spiritually exhausted.

LaJoe has witnessed the neighborhood’s decline over the decades, as white families left urban life for the suburbs, and middle-class blacks soon followed suit, seeking safer living conditions. Most businesses also left, and the decline in manufacturing jobs has left more than one in five people at Horner jobless. While other urban communities might be poorer, Horner has become famous because of how visible its decline has been, given that the neighborhood was once so wealthy, dynamic, and full of commercial activity. LaJoe laments everything that the neighborhood lacks, from public libraries and skating rinks to clinics, homeless shelters, and rehabilitation centers, despite widespread drug abuse. Despite their proximity to downtown Chicago, Horner residents feel that the city has completely abandoned them.

In addition to feeling abandoned by local institutions, residents also feel isolated from each other. Nearly half of families don’t have a phone, and some people find themselves without any friends who might allow them to borrow theirs. Worried about insecurity, some families refuse to let their children outside to play. What has disappointed LaJoe the most, however, is her own family, which she finds she cannot fully shield from the neighborhood’s decline. Her three oldest children, LaShawn (who sometimes work as a prostitute to support her drug addiction), Weasel (who was incarcerated for participating in a burglary), and Terence (who began selling drugs at an early age) have all dropped out of school, been incarcerated, and had problems with drugs. Terence, though, was LaJoe’s biggest disappointment, because he was a child she had felt particularly close to.

LaJoe’s family life now revolves around her younger children. Despite being married for seventeen years, LaJoe and her husband, Paul Rivers, have long been estranged, and LaJoe now depends on her son Lafeyette to take on a fatherly role. Although Lafeyette used to be a bubbly, energetic young boy, he has begun to change. Last year, for example, he was caught stealing candy in a store. More generally, though, the responsibility he feels toward his family leads him to behave in domineering, aggressive ways—his own attempts at trying to keep his younger siblings from harm.

Very different from Lafeyette, Pharoah is also unlike most other children. He has an imaginative, loving spirit and desperately clings to his childhood, although a stutter he has recently developed reveals his fears and vulnerability. While LaJoe has promised herself to protect her sons’ childhood and to keep them from the same fate that befell her other children, the violent summer of 1987 has made her so worried for their lives that she has begun to pay burial insurance for them.

To alleviate LaJoe’s worries, Lafeyette knows that he must actively protect his younger siblings. However, one day after school—barely three days after the violent events on his birthday—Lafeyette almost loses Pharoah, as gunfire erupts when children are exiting school. From the apartment, Lafeyette watches his brother walk out of school, which is just one block away, but then loses sight of him. He begins to fear that Pharoah, in panic, might run straight toward the gunfire instead of doing what his mother has taught him: walking slowly to figure out where the shooting is coming from, then running. Luckily, though, Pharoah soon notices Lafeyette’s friend James running toward their building and follows him, finding safety in their apartment. Despite the severity of the shooting and the police’s presence, reporters were never able to obtain a record of the incident from the police.