Before he returns home to Chicago’s North Austin neighborhood from college each summer, Courtney Abbott strategizes so he can safely navigate the dangerous streets where he grew up.
“The first thing you have to do is talk to friends who are still in Chicago,” said Abbott, 21, who graduated from Illinois State University with a public relations degree. “You have to … ask them which neighborhood spots might be worse or better now, so you have a firsthand account.”
At school, Abbott said he walks everywhere because he can. At home in Austin, he can’t.
“Whether it’s two blocks north or two blocks south, I always drive,” he said. “You don’t want to be walking around the Austin community at 1 a.m. You never know what’s going to happen.”
Coming home for the summer is a rite of passage for college kids across America. But for students who made their way out of Chicago’s most violent neighborhoods in pursuit of higher education and a better life, a summer home is about more than mom cooking and handling the laundry.
These students run a gantlet to survive the summer and make it back to school in the fall, navigating the streets on the South and West sides where violence can be random and sudden, even in a year in which homicides and shootings are sharply down from a bloody 2012.
Students interviewed by the Tribune say the transition home can be particularly jarring after a school year at campuses that are idyllic by comparison. Some go into a survival mode of sorts, becoming homebodies, traveling in groups or avoiding gang-affiliated friends who might expose them to danger.
Some students say the problems in their neighborhoods become even more forbidding on their return, while others opted not to come home at all over the summer break out of concern over the violence and stress.
Willie Round, of the North Lawndale neighborhood, decided to take summer classes on campus at Central State University in Wilberforce, Ohio, before beginning his senior year in the fall.
Amy Harper, a special assistant to the university’s president, said Round’s decision isn’t unusual for its inner-city students.
“I’ve talked to more than one student from Chicago who says, ‘I don’t want to go home,'” Harper said. “That is not an uncommon sentiment for students who are from inner-city areas.”
In a telephone interview, Round said he recently dreamed he was killed, another young black Chicago man lost to the city’s gunfire.
“My story was on the news like any other news story: ‘A young kid from Chicago who was going to school,'” Round said. “That’s like my biggest fear.”
But at the same time, he misses his mother, his siblings and friends he’s known forever who can’t break away from the corners.
Round admits his neighborhood is dangerous, but it’s also where he feels most comfortable in Chicago.
“The people around there, I know they’re kind of dangerous, but they’re really not dangerous to me because I’ve known them all my life,” he said.
But Round’s mother, Deveta Gill, recalled how upset her son was when he was home for a week in May and saw a teen boy moments after he had been fatally hit in a shootout with police.
“I instill in (him) that’s where we live, it’s not who we are,” Gill said last week.
For others, the transition from the relative calm of a college campus to the mean streets near their homes has been difficult.
Angela Parker, 21, back at her East Garfield Park neighborhood home for the summer after attending Illinois Central College, a community college in East Peoria, fears she could be knocked from her bike and robbed as she pedals to work at a church camp.
“After you go away to a different environment and come back, (Chicago) is completely worse than you thought in the beginning,” she said.
Life in central Illinois was a world away, she said. Her biggest concerns were wild animals — raccoons, turkeys and three deer that once refused to back down as she approached her apartment dumpster.
“We don’t have to worry about stepping out of our house, worried about a drug dealer standing there, or a drug deal going wrong or a gang war and somebody getting shot,” she said. “Or me getting shot.”
Kierra Reese, 22, a senior at Illinois State University in Normal who is working at the school for the summer, said she, too, just feels more comfortable at college. The criminal justice major comes back to her North Austin home monthly for a few days at a time to check on her family, she said, “but I never stay.”
“It’s hard to see so many people just on the street wasting their lives and killing each other off,” said Reese, who grew up around North and Laramie avenues, near where 7-year-old Heaven Sutton was fatally shot last summer.
When she comes home, Reese said, she avoids the CTA, doesn’t carry a lot of cash and dresses conservatively so she doesn’t attract the wrong type of attention.
Reese said she has found a serenity on campus unlike in her West Side neighborhood.
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“When you walk outside, you don’t have to see balloons and tape and the shrines because someone got murdered on your street,” she said. “Me going away exposed me to a different lifestyle and it made me realize that there’s so much more to life than North Avenue and Laramie. Being away from that, it’s just like, why would I come back?”
Many of the students just learn to be far more careful on their return to their Chicago roots.
When he left Chicago to attend Ivy Tech Community College in Lafayette, Ind., Lloyd Dockery was pleasantly surprised to find he could pop on his headphones and let the music blast without fear of someone running up on him.
But in Morgan Park on Chicago’s Far South Side, a guy walking who can’t hear his surroundings makes for easy prey.
So Dockery, 18, puts those headphones away when he’s out.
“When you’re walking down the street here, the slightest noise makes you wary and turn your head,” he said.
Others cut ties with friends with gang affiliations or whose risky lifestyles could put them at risk.
Abbott, who will begin graduate school at the University of Illinois at Springfield this fall, said he learned that the hard way on one summer home. He was robbed by an old friend of cash, his car and his cellphone. But he said it taught him to leave some people from the old block behind.
“They were friends from your childhood,” he said. “Coming back, they have the same mindset. They’ve been accustomed to the ways of the neighborhood.”
Treviance Orr, 22, who attends Tougaloo College in Jackson, Miss., said corner dealers offer him work in the summer peddling drugs in his former Roseland neighborhood on the Far South Side.
“They know I’m a college student. They know I have financial issues,” he said. “And they’re just trying to help me out, I guess with a quick dollar. It’s in a bad way, but they’re trying to help me.”
Round, who is majoring in broadcast media-mass communications at his Ohio school, said he never realized the extent of Chicago’s problems until he left.
“I didn’t know my area was that violent until I stepped out and looked in,” he said. “People from different cities know about Chicago. … They’ll come and ask me, ‘Man, what’s going on back in Chicago?’ All I can say is, ‘It’s been that way.'”
Terrence Thompson, 21, majoring in media and cinema studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for the past three years, still prefers hanging out with his friends in his Washington Park neighborhood despite its problems.
Two summers ago, though, Thompson came perilously close to joining Chicago’s body count.
He was walking far south of his home with his girlfriend when they passed a group of young men on a corner. One grabbed his own waistband, appearing as if he was reaching for a gun. But another man in the group quickly announced, “No, he’s cool.” Thompson said he and his girlfriend walked away unharmed.
A couple of days later, Thompson said he came across the man who talked down the gunman on his Washington Park block.
“You almost got killed the other night because they didn’t know who you were,” the man told Thompson. “I recognized you being around.”
“I was like, ‘Thank you,'” Thompson recalled. “I had never seen his face before.”
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