Ada Smith, born and reared in Sardis, Miss., arrived in Chicago on an Illinois Central train on New Year’s Day in 1945, looking for work.
What she saw was a “dirty old city,” cold and snowy and full of jobs. What she could not see was that the city would draw her family north, as it drew so many Southern blacks, and then suck it into a saga of poverty and welfare, jail and mental illness, jobless parents and fatherless babies, leading to a murder so appalling that it would dominate the city’s headlines.
Over the years, two of Ada Smith’s nephews would be murdered in the city’s streets. Another would go to jail for murder. Her niece and three great-nieces would have 18 children by 12 men. Arson would kill one great-nephew and leave two great-nieces scarred, mentally and physically.
Finally, one of those great-nieces, drowned in schizophrenia, would allegedly throw an electrical cord over a transom, stand her 3-year-old son on a chair, wrap the cord around his neck, kick the chair away and hang him.
The alleged murder of little Joseph Wallace by his mother, Amanda, in April has become the most celebrated of the deaths of children in Chicago this year. This is mostly because he was returned repeatedly to his mentally ill mother by a system of judges, lawyers, social workers and doctors that all but conspired to kill him.
But Amanda and Joseph were no isolated failures of a good society. Of the 59 children chronicled so far this year in the Tribune’s Killing Our Children series, more than 70 percent were black; most were poor; many lived with single mothers, amid family histories of violent death, jail and illness.
Ada Smith is a blameless woman, hard-working, widowed and living in a spotless bungalow on the South Side. But she also is the matriarch of a family, the Wallace family, that could stand as an urban parable.
The pattern of the Wallace family’s history is repeated in thousands of families in the ghettos of Chicago and other American cities where economics and prejudice have combined to create a social black hole so powerful that it can destroy the life of anyone who lives in it.
Historians and sociologists argue whether this breakdown is rooted in slavery, or sharecropping, or the mass migration to the North during and after World War II, or the postwar collapse of urban economies, or even the civil rights movement that freed the majority of working, educated blacks from ghetto life, leaving behind those who already had failed.
Some blame society for creating the ghettos, others the ghetto-dwellers themselves for their failure, through generations, to cope with their own lives.
But the lesson remains: The causes of the epidemic of child-killing are nothing recent and lie far beyond any quick fix. If inept judges or social workers helped speed Joseph Wallace to an early death, the seeds of his murder were planted years before.
In Chicago, those seeds are economic.
If the parents came north to find work, their children and grandchildren seldom work at all; welfare is the norm. Jobs, so plentiful in the 1950s, are scarce now, especially the heavy factory work that supported earlier generations because the factories themselves have gone.
The intact families of the 1950s also no longer exist. Ada Smith stayed married to her husband until he died. But the later men in this story are mostly feckless figures who stopped off only long enough to father children.
Ada’s niece, Bonnie Wallace, had eight children by five men. Her three surviving daughters, including Amanda, had 10 more children by seven different men. Usually, the fathers were not husbands. All the men are gone now-some dead, some in jail.
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These dismal facts are linked. When the factories that employed the men moved on, so did the men, into drink and crime and early death. Useless as breadwinners, they vanished from the lives of the women, who went on welfare and raised their children alone.
All this did something terrible to the family.
“When people left Mississippi and came here, when they got jobs, they forget where they come from, they forget their morals and standards,” says Evelyn Walker, Bonnie’s oldest daughter and the most reflective member of the family. “When there were jobs, that’s where the forgottenness came in. Now there aren’t many jobs, and there aren’t any standards either. The only thing is children, desperate for money.”
Statistically, the Wallace family mirrors its society.
In 1950, women headed only 8 percent of all black families; by 1992, it was 46 percent. In 1990, 66.7 percent of all black births were to unmarried mothers. The unemployment rate for white men is 7 percent: for black men it’s 12.9 percent. A white male born today can expect to live 73 years, a black female even longer, 74.3 years: but a black male has a life expectancy of 65.6 years, about the same as a man in Iraq.
Behind these statistics are people, funneled with a horrid inevitability from the hopeful New Year’s Day when Ada Smith arrived in Chicago to the moment, 48 years later, when Amanda Wallace killed her son.
Ada Smith and her husband “came here for the work,” and they soon found it, he in a felt factory, she cleaning cars for the railroad.
Willie Brown, Ada’s brother and Joseph Wallace’s great-grandfather, arrived in Chicago in 1951 and found a job with what became the U.S. Postal Service; he worked there for 35 years. Willie’s two sons and a daughter came north in 1953. Willie’s ex-wife, her husband and their daughter, came later. Willie had three more sons who were born after he settled in Chicago.
Among those sons are Freeman, who got life in jail for stabbing a girl to death in 1973, when he was 17: James, who was shot to death in 1971 after a life in and out of jail; and Walter, who was shot to death in 1980 in a dispute after a pool game.
Willie also fathered Ernest, who is said to be working as a grocery stock clerk in Chicago, and Timothy, a cheerful but defeated man. His defeat, at the hands of a collapsing economy, is all too typical of the men who, robbed of the chance to be breadwinners, have simply drifted out of their women’s lives.
Timothy Brown worked for 11 years as a stoker at the Interlake steel mill in East Chicago, making $14 an hour. He commuted 35 miles each way from the two-flat that he owned in suburban Maywood. He had two cars. He was married and had eight children.
The mill closed in 1982. Timothy found a job as a short-order cook at $8 an hour in a South Side soul food restaurant, then as a gravedigger for six years, at $10 an hour. In 1990, the graveyard laid off 20 black laborers and hired Mexicans in their place, paying them $5 an hour. Timothy filed suit, charging racism; the suit is pending. He hasn’t worked since.
Along the way, he says, “I lost everything, my home and God knows what.” The bank foreclosed on the home. The cars went. His wife left him. He is 57 now, grandfather of 11 children, and he lives with his father. But the central figure in this saga is Willie Brown’s only daughter, Bonnie.
Willie Brown and Bonnie’s mother, Evelyn, divorced early. Bonnie was raised by her stepfather, Melvin Reed, who ran a bar in Mississippi, then worked for Brach Corp., the candymaker, after he came to Chicago. He died young, in 1961, of natural causes.
Bonnie is Bonnie Wallace now, a name she’s kept from her second husband, even though she never lived with him. At 54, she is still an attractive woman but childlike, untouched by responsibility or thought, not quite grasping what happened to her family.
Bonnie is a high school dropout: “I left Farragut just after I got in.” But she has a good job, mending the seats in railway cars for the Chicago & North Western.
She lives in a tidy apartment in the East Garfield Park neighborhood on the West Side. She loves to pull out photo albums of her family in sad and happy times-dinners, parties, Bonnie in Mexico, Amanda in the mental hospital, Joseph in his coffin.
Of her eight children, five are still alive.
“Once when I was 16, I went to Mississippi, and I was doing something I shouldn’t with a boy I liked a lot and there she was,” Bonnie says of her oldest, Evelyn, born when Bonnie was 17.
This was 37 years ago, in the years before easy welfare, when unwed motherhood still carried a stigma. Bonnie accepted an offer of marriage from a neighbor boy in Chicago, even though “I didn’t like him too much. I got married because you know how people talk when you’re going to have a baby.”
She lived with his family for three months, sleeping in the same bed with his mother, then moved out. Her second husband was Henry Wallace, whom she married after she became pregnant again at 20. She never lived with Wallace. Their son, also called Henry, was born in 1959.
Next came Oliver Little, who fathered Jerry, now 31.
Then Bonnie met Gerald Barnes, a part-time thief who lived off her for eight years. Her aunt, Ada Smith, says that Barnes “wasn’t worth two dead flies.” Bonnie says, “I loved him.”
Barnes’ parents had taken the train north from Hattiesburg, Miss., in 1951, also looking for jobs. They found work in factories and sent for their three sons.
Barnes, says Bonnie, was “the only man I ever lived with.” They never married but they had three children-Paul, now 30; James, born prematurely, who died 12 hours after birth; and Amanda, now 28. Paul and Amanda have been mentally ill. Both set Bonnie’s house on fire.
Gerald Barnes was murdered in 1968, “shot down in the street like a dog,” Ada says. Bonnie then married James Young, whom she met at work. By all accounts, Young was the best man in Bonnie’s life, but she kicked him out after two years because her son Paul didn’t like him. They remain friends.
“I could’ve stayed with him, and things would’ve been all right,” Bonnie says now. “Paul didn’t want no man around. I was silly and told my husband to leave. I think about that today.”
A fourth man fathered Gerald in 1968, and a fifth fathered a little girl, stillborn in 1972.
In 1970 Ada, who cleaned cars for the C&NW, got Bonnie her railroad job “because I didn’t want to see her bring those children up on welfare.”
Bonnie is vague about many things in her life, including when her children were born and about the order of their fathers. But she knows when she landed the railroad job-March 1970-and how much it paid-“$2.88 an hour, big money to me then”-and how much she gets now-exactly $14.99 an hour.
“But when I got Bonnie that job, she forgot all about her kids,” Ada says. A pattern of neglect, even abuse, began.
Ada, childless herself, took in some of the girls when they were young, including Bonnie and Amanda. She does not approve of the way Bonnie raised her kids and says so. Official reports back her up.
“She should’ve been in church at least, instead of running the streets to the taverns,” Ada says. “She’s man-crazy, that’s what I call her.
“That oldest child (Evelyn) was the real parent to those children.”
Ada says she drove Bonnie home from work one day to find a car from the Department for Children and Family Services (DCFS) outside. Inside, Bonnie’s daughter Amanda was found in a basement closet where Bonnie had kept her for “three or four days.”
A DCFS report says Amanda was a “survivor of repeated physical abuse, i.e., locked in a closet for three days, beaten with a hammer, tied to a chair, and sexually abused by (her) mother’s paramours.”
Bonnie denies she abused Amanda. But in 1974, the state took Amanda away from Bonnie and sent her to a foster home.
“I went to court and got her and brought her home,” Ada says. “She stayed with me a few months, until December. She set my house on fire, and then she went into Pritzker,” a children’s psychiatric unit at Michael Reese Hospital and one of many mental hospitals where Amanda spent her childhood.
Fire sears the Wallace family history.
According to Bonnie, her son Paul set fire to her rented house in 1967. The blaze trapped little Henry, then 8, and Evelyn. Henry was killed, and Evelyn suffered serious leg injuries that have kept her from holding a steady job; she lives partly on disability checks now. Amanda, then 2, was there but unharmed, at least physically.
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Bonnie bought a house in 1972. In 1988, Amanda burned it down. It was the only home Bonnie ever owned and led to her move from the South Side to the West Side apartment she now rents.
“I think she was angry at my son (Paul), but she hurt me,” Bonnie says.
Bonnie says Paul, like Amanda, received psychiatric treatment as a child and spent a year in Tinley Park Mental Health Center.
Insanity, like unemployment and single-parent families, is part of the pattern. A Yale University study has shown that mental illness is 2.86 times more likely among the poor than the rich. Schizophrenia, one of Amanda’s diseases, is 7.85 times more likely.
Bonnie doesn’t see it that way. Paul and Amanda, she says, acted not from diseased minds but from spite.
“It always hurt me for my children to be doing things,” she says. “It seems like they were doing this just to hurt me.”
Joseph’s death is more of the same.
“That hurt me more than when my own son died,” Bonnie says. “I gave birth to her (Amanda), and she gave birth to my grandson and she took his life. It seems like she still trying to hurt me. It isn’t right, you know.”
Paul lives now on a tidy street in Marquette Park and, according to the family, is only occasionally employed.
“If Paul’s got a job and money, we don’t see him,” his sister Jerry says. “We only see him when he hasn’t got money.”
Evelyn says that in his teens Paul worked for his uncle, Ralph Barnes, a drug dealer, and was badly cut on the face in a drug-related brawl. Two months later, she says, Ralph-Gerald’s brother-was beaten to death over drugs.
Two of Bonnie’s children have high school diplomas-Gerald, an army veteran who the family says is studying to be an X-ray technician, and Jerry, who also studied X-ray technology but lives on welfare in a public housing project and has one daughter.
Evelyn, like Ada, views her family with a stern and thoughtful eye. Now 37, she is a high-school dropout but works hard as a volunteer on local school councils at three West Side elementary schools. She has six children by four men. In some ways, her history matches that of her mother.
“I been engaged three times and only married once,” she says.
After the 1967 fire, Bonnie moved in with her father and sent Evelyn to live in a project “where I got involved with a guy. I got married to him in August 1972, and separated in December 1972. I didn’t know I was pregnant at the time. Now he’s an alcoholic.”
This liaison produced Evelyn’s oldest child, Marie, 20, a high school graduate. Next came Sabrina, now 17, and then two sons, Archie, 15, and Samuel, 13, by Archibald Mitchell, a native of Belize.
“I was engaged to be married to him, but he was already married, so that sort of canceled that,” she says. She remains fond of Mitchell, who is nearly 70 now and helps support the two boys.
Most of Evelyn’s boyfriends “have been older than my mother,” she says, because boys her own age teased her about the burn scars on her legs while older men “accepted me for what I was.”
Two other boys, Lorvell, 10, and Demetrius, 9, are the sons of George Adams, who lives in Gary and sends money “when he works.” He’s not working now.
Archie, Evelyn’s oldest son, is the apple of the family’s eye. An honor student, Archie has taken part in the state science fair. His newspaper clippings go into Bonnie’s scrapbook beside those of Joseph’s murder.
Evelyn, terrified that her sons will turn out like the other men in the family, has enrolled them in the Better Boys Club.
“The only man I can use as an example is my grandfather (Willie Brown),” she says. “We got no other males because they got killed at an early age. I put that in their heads. I tell them I don`t want this to continue. So far it’s working.”
For the boys, maybe. Bonnie, at 54 just became a great-grandmother and Evelyn, at 37, a grandmother. Evelyn’s younger daughter, Sabrina, gave birth in October to a baby girl, Marquisha Regina. Sabrina is 17, just as Bonnie and Evelyn were when they had their first babies. And she is unmarried.
Bonnie, looking to the future, sees bleakness. “When I was 12 or 13, it was worse than when my mother was 12 or 13. And when this baby is 12 or 13, it’s going to be much, much worse.
“In my life, things got worse and worse. It’s the people in the world. There’s nothing wrong with the world. What’s wrong is us.”