Staying on the Path

The warm, early spring day makes the dry heat in the dusty stairwell stifling. On the first landing, 10-year-old Kewone and 8-year-old Kendal stop at a door. Coming up behind them, their father, Keith Gatewood, calls out that the door across the way is his mother's. "She just had to make a run. She will be back soon," Gatewood tells the boys as he walks into the empty apartment.


Once inside, Gatewood goes into the kitchen and comes out carrying a box of assorted bags of potato chips. "I don't know what you guys eat so I just bought a lot of junk," he says. The boys seem apprehensive about looking at Gatewood. Nervous himself, Gatewood quickly suggests that they watch television in the bedroom, and, without speaking to him, they each grab a bag of chips and head to the back. Gatewood hangs the boys' jackets in a closet, noting that his mother likes her apartment to stay neat.


It's been almost two weeks since Gatewood moved into his mother's one-bedroom apartment in Austin, but there is no evidence of him there. The apartment is tidy in the careful way that an older woman who lives alone might keep her place. Slipcovers and plastic tablecloths are draped over all the furniture. A candle and two pictures, one of Martin Luther King Jr. and the other of Malcolm X, sit on a table in the living room. After a short while, Kewone and Kendal quietly begin walking around the apartment, looking over their grandmother's stuff and tinkering with things like an antiquated computer perched on a desk. A crowded table has photos of her children and grandchildren, some framed and others leaning up against the framed ones.

Kewone comes upon a picture of Gatewood sitting on a bed next to a baby. "That me?" he asks--one of the few times that Kewone speaks directly to his father. "Yes," Gatewood responds. He has spent the past four years in prison. It's been even longer than that--more than eight years--since he last spent any time with his sons.


"You don't remember me from back then …" he tells his son as more of a statement than a question. For several more moments, Kewone stares at the picture. Gatewood says that the boys' mother, Jackie, shut him out after she realized he was dealing drugs. "She was afraid to be with me," he says. "She thought she would get shot." Only recently, since he has seemed intent on straightening out, has she allowed him this time with their children. Compared to the thin boys, Gatewood is a lumbering man.

He wears a rounded, black knit hat over his bald head and, even inside, keeps on dark sunglasses because he broke his prescription glasses while in prison and can't stand to wear the thick, square ones the Illinois Department of Corrections issued him.


Eventually, the boys find a basketball and ask Gatewood if they can go outside. Gatewood tells them to shut the gate behind them. When they leave the apartment, he looks relieved and plays a Tom Petty cassette on an old boom box. Gatewood was happy to find the tape amid the things his mother had packed away for him. "It is kind of odd for a black man to like Tom Petty … but I've always been weird like that," he muses.


As it nears noon, he abruptly turns off the music and removes the change from his pockets. He takes off the dark sunglasses, slides out of his slippers and washes his hands. He then takes out a small turquoise and black rug and unrolls it on the ground.

Slowly, he lowers his large 6-foot-3-inch frame and folds it into a kneeling position. At the moment he begins saying his prayers, the living room is hushed. Outside, his sons' basketball can be heard slapping against the concrete, as can the swoosh of passing cars on West Augusta Boulevard.


Soon after Gatewood completes his prayer, the boys come back inside. Kendal says Kewone got tired, and Kewone sheepishly looks away. Gatewood later says he needs to begin making money so that he can buy his boys some clothes. He doesn't like what they're wearing now, calling them "sissy clothes," even though Kewone looks fashionable in his orange-checkered button-up shirt and matching fisherman's hat.


Gatewood suddenly decides two hours of waiting inside the apartment is too long and he can no longer stand the heat. He leaves the boys there and waits for his mother outside. After about twenty minutes, she comes down the street walking slowly with her next-door neighbor. Gatewood says his 67-year-old mother is now an elderly woman. "You got Kewone and Kendal," Gatewood's mother, Joyce, says as soon as she sees him.


The children hear the gate open and stand on the top of the stairs waiting for their grandmother. "Give your grandma some love," she says. She hugs them around their necks. Moments later, she hugs them again.


"These are Keith's boys," she tells her next-door neighbor.


As soon as his mother walks through the door, he seems antsy to escape the uneasy silence that has consumed the apartment and to take refuge in the place where he feels comfortable--the old neighborhood. He grabs his jacket and tells his mother he is going to try to catch up with an old associate to ask if he can borrow his car. He says he needs it so he can get his driver's license. The one in his wallet expired in 1999.

This Saturday that Gatewood is spending with his sons marks his 17th day out of prison. He is determined not to return. He wants to become a regular family man who goes to work each day. But the transition will be excruciating. Every day, every week holds a struggle for Gatewood as he tries to keep himself from old friends and the "narcotics subculture"--as he calls it--that so deftly lured him in. As time goes on, frustration mounts and he finds himself grasping at his resolve. And, as he searches for work, Gatewood tries to breathe life into the relationships that wilted in his absence. He wants to make things right with his sons and their mother, while, at the same time, he feels responsible for his long-time girlfriend, Linda, who followed him into prison. From the moment of his release, Gatewood is anxious about her returning home. He envisions the two of them making this transition together.


On this journey, he will join thousands of men and women released from prison each year and returned to poor neighborhoods on the West and South sides. Some succeed. Most fail.


His mother's apartment is about two miles from the West Humboldt Park home, on North St. Louis Avenue just north of West Chicago Avenue, where Gatewood had lived since he was 8 years old. While he was in prison, his parents split up and moved out. Gatewood blames his father. "After [43 years] of marriage, the asshole retired and left her. Now he's like a chronic gambler." So far, he's only talked to his father once since he left prison and he doesn't plan on making much more contact. Still, his family was solidly middle class, he says. "Mother, father, two brothers, homeowners." In fact, they were one of the first black families to move into the neighborhood and watch it turn from Polish and German to black and Latino. The change, he says, was a saving grace for him. "I could finally go out and play. Before, the Italians, Germans and Polish would kill you."


Gatewood seems to relax a bit standing outside of his childhood home, a pink, cobble-brick house resembling a medieval cottage. This is the first really warm day after the long, cold winter, and there's a Saturday afternoon ease to it. Children are out riding bikes, their coats splayed on front porches. Teenage girls with their midriffs showing are taking strolls. And even the young guys on the corners seem less hunched over, less serious.


Gatewood points out a vacant lot. "That is where it all began. There used to be a house on that lot." Outside of that house was his first "tip"--the places where drug dealers set up shop, a territory he says dealers protect at all costs, even with their lives.

Gatewood says that he came to drug dealing sort of late in life. Unlike a third of Illinois prisoners, who can't read at a sixth-grade level, he graduated from high school and took a couple of college courses. He did a stint in the U.S. Army and, for a couple of years, worked normal jobs such as security at a bank in Oak Park. Then, in his late 20s, at a time when he was laid off, a friend offered him an opportunity to make one drug transaction. He made $200 in an hour--and he didn't want to stop.

"What spurred me to it was fast money," he says. While the one really in charge of the operation came from the suburbs, Gatewood moved up the ranks. Eventually, he moved from the street, where the drugs were sold, to the inside of an apartment, where the drugs were delivered and then distributed to younger guys who sold them.


Gatewood says the 800 block of north St. Louis Avenue used to be "hot." Double-parked cars once jammed the narrow side street, and thousands of dollars flowed each day. Since then, he says, the police, particularly federal agents, have cracked down. Also, violence between competing drug dealers has slowed the activity. "They locked people up for a long time. Other people are dead." Still, on this day in mid-March, Gatewood points out a group of young people standing around in a front yard. "That guy took my place. They are trying to re-create what was here, but it is not the same," he says. "It is not like the old days."


Except for his kufi, which is a skull cap worn by Muslim men, Gatewood fits in here. Even though more than one hot summer has come and gone since he ran these streets, people still know him. As Gatewood stands in front of his old home, a young man walking by in a black pea coat stops to shake his hand.


"You still in the game?" the young man asks.


"No. I am a Muslim now," Gatewood says. "We cannot still hang out. We are kind of like two separate communities now."

While in prison, Gatewood converted and changed his first name to Malik. He says Islam gives him a spiritual and moral base. But it also provides Gatewood a way to explain to his old buddies why he is avoiding illegal activity. He wouldn't want to be seen as a punk for opting out of the game.


Further down the block, a group of women sitting on some steps call over: "Keith, that you?" They all stand up to hug him, and one takes down his number for her sister, who is locked up.


Around the corner, another young man, wearing a do-rag and a red and black leather jacket, throws his arm over Gatewood's shoulder. "G-Man, G-Man, can you hook me up?" the kid asks several times. "Nah, man. Nah, man," Gatewood says as he keeps going down the street, trying to shake the boy off. When the kid finally gives up and goes back to the corner, Gatewood says, "I knew these guys since they were babies. They want to talk to me. They want some insights on selling. They want strategy on how to fight from an old soldier."


A gray-haired man comes out of a house nearby. Gatewood stops him and tells him that he is trying to do better, trying to stay out of trouble. The man nods but doesn't answer. His eyes reveal his skepticism. Gatewood later says that seeing some of the older folks makes him feel bad. "I think that when they look at me they will always see the bad Keith. They will always be wary of me. And they have the right to be angry at me. They have the right to be scared. I terrorized this community." At one point, the people on the block organized against him and his associates. They would walk up and down the block, watching for illegal activity, and would call the police at any sign of trouble. "They would wear orange vests and stand on the corner and beat drums," he says.


Gatewood turns a corner, and something makes him linger for a moment. It's the memory of his first arrest. He and some other men were working a "tip" around the block from Gatewood's house. He points to a rusted viaduct where the police put a camera. "It was a Saturday morning. They had us on videotape selling to undercover agents. What makes it so bad is that, at just that moment, my mother was walking back from Osco, and I started walking alongside her. Then they swooped in and arrested me."


A man not given to emotion or guilt, Gatewood says one of the worst things about being in the game was that it hurt his mother. "I know she was embarrassed because of me," he said.

Leaving the old neighborhood, Gatewood says it feels good to be an outsider, to look at the game from afar. But he's clear that, in order for him to stay out of it, he needs a job quickly. A man nearing 40, like him, needs money in his pocket, not only to survive, but to have dignity, he says. Until he gets a job, he will have to borrow money from his mother, brother and aunts. "I hate asking my family for money," he says.


Gatewood has heard about STRIVE Chicago Employment Inc., an intense boot-camp-style employment program. When he goes to inquire, he's told that he will have to wait a month before another session starts, but is energized by the program director's suggestion that he might have a position open for someone who can assist ex-offenders. In the meantime, Gatewood tries his best to get a job on his own. He keeps a list of job opportunities and appointments in a blue folder with a rubber band around it. Written on a sheet of wide-lined notebook paper is a list of moving and transport companies that he found in the yellow pages. He plans to call and apply with each of them. He's hoping that the companies will see his size and offer him a job.


In late March, he makes a blind call to a social service agency on the North Side and gets a job lead. A trucking company is looking for drivers and will be doing interviews on Friday, March 28. He is looking forward to the interview because the job pays $47,000 a year, but he also is skeptical, knowing that it would be something of a miracle for a guy who hadn't worked for more than 10 years to land such lucrative work. Still, he spends an entire day borrowing his friend's car, taking the road test and getting his driver's license, which he needs in order to be considered.


When Gatewood leaves the interview, however, he looks dejected. His sense that it was too good to be true was right. The job required seven weeks of training in East Chicago, Ind. But because he's on parole, Gatewood can't leave the state. Also, the interviewer said the company doesn't usually hire ex-offenders.


After the interview, he goes to visit his younger brother, a factory worker who lives in Uptown, on the North Side, near where the interview took place. After a month out of prison, Gatewood is getting frustrated and feels like he is faltering. His younger brother doesn't want him to go back to illegal activity and tries to negotiate an artificial deadline for how long Gatewood should hold out. "My brother wants me to hang on for 120 days," Gatewood says. "I am trying to do at least 90 days until I return to the old me." Before they leave prison, inmates are told it will probably take at least three months to get a job. While prison officials don't intend for the 90 days to be a deadline, Gatewood has interpreted it as one.


A week later, on April 4, Gatewood learns that he soon will have no place to live. His mother, unable to afford the rent for her apartment, decides she is going to move into a senior citizens' building. By not staying with his mother, Gatewood notes, he would technically be violating parole. Joyce Gatewood feels horrible that her son will soon have nowhere to live. "Do you know anywhere he can go?" she takes to asking everyone she knows.


And even though it is early on, he's starting to fall out of touch with some of the things that might keep him focused. With the war on Iraq suddenly raging, his mosque seems like a less stable place. "Some of the brothers at the mosque are upset," he says.

"What is happening to the Muslims in Iraq hurts all of us." This is the first time since his release that he misses Friday prayers.
Gatewood says that his next week is totally open. He has no job interviews, no social service agencies to visit, nothing planned. "I am out there on the hard, hard road," he says. "But I can sense something good is about to happen."

The next month or so turns out to be arduous. Not only does he have no job, but Gatewood has nowhere to live. His relationships have become more complicated and stressful. Although Gatewood shows a cool exterior and wouldn't say it, he is also beginning to feel lonely and needs something to fill his idle days. "It is a pretty isolating life," he says. "I can't really associate with anyone."


In the first week of April, his mother moves out of her apartment into the senior citizens' building. For the time being, Gatewood stays at the Fullerton Hotel, a large, gray building on the corner of Pulaski Road and Fullerton Avenue. He says it is pretty nice, but drab and old--and the price is sinking him. It costs $31 a night for a room with a shower and toilet, $24 without.


Other endeavors cost him, too. On April 9, he went to Kendal's birthday party. While he was happy to be there, he says he had to borrow additional money from his family to buy Kendal the compact disc player he wanted.


He spends a couple of days a week applying to places that he has heard will hire ex-offenders. "I can't be choosy--I am in dire straits," he says. But not one place has called Gatewood for an interview.


On the days he is in a dark mood, he stays inside his small, dimly lit hotel room watching cartoons and old B-movies.


On April 11, he spends the afternoon sitting on a bench in a small tree-covered park in the village's downtown. Besides him, the only other people at the park are two mothers with little children. Gatewood watches them chatting. Then he looks around and says he likes the feeling of being there, anonymous and removed from temptation.


Still, his stomach hurts, something he attributes to stress. The biggest thing weighing on his mind is the impending release of his girlfriend, Linda. The two of them have been together nine years. When he was in prison, she would write him letters and drive down to see him. He says she spent many years working as a chef. Linda was a "good, law-abiding woman," he says. When he went "down" this past time, he says she tried to take care of his drug business and got caught. She's been at Dwight Correctional Center for two months and is scheduled to be released on May 24. Feeling responsible for her descent into criminal activity, Gatewood says he needs to find her a place to go once she's released. She couldn't be paroled to where he lives because IDOC won't allow two parolees to be released to the same address.


Gatewood worries about how Linda will deal with his new relationship with his sons and their mother, and how Jackie will deal with the return of Linda. Ever since he got out, he and Jackie have been talking regularly, although he says he wouldn't get back together with her. Another thing, he says, that Linda will have to adjust to: "I won't have money like I used to."

On April 22, STRIVE begins. Gatewood is excited. The four-week program is designed to update people's skills and get them to acknowledge and address deficiencies. The idea is that, by the time participants leave, they can walk into interviews with confidence. The class Gatewood attends is housed in a defunct hospital on the stretch of Kedzie Avenue that borders Humboldt Park.


During breaks, Gatewood likes to go to Humboldt Park, where he played as a child. One day, an old beat-up car screeches to a halt in front of him. A man turns down blaring music and leans out the window. "That you, G-man?" Gatewood walks toward the car and peers inside. After they talk for a minute, Gatewood takes the man's phone number. As the man pulls off, Gatewood quietly says he might call him, and shoves the piece of scrap paper into his coat pocket. Later he explains that the man was one of his old associates. "He is king of a narcotics empire and is wanted by the feds," he says. The man offered him a loan, new clothes and an automobile. But there is one thing Gatewood knows for sure: Nothing is for free. He muses that, if he went back to drug dealing, an old guy like him would probably end up doing something like transporting drugs or overseeing some of the younger guys.


He says there's only one reason he won't do it. Unlike some guys who romanticize prison life, Gatewood abhorred it. He says he didn't see much out-of-control violence, like the rapes and stabbings, but he couldn't stand being locked in a cell for hours at a time. And he worries that--with his record--if goes back to prison, he will get a 30-year sentence. "To really understand what freedom is worth, you have to sit in a cell for 23 hours a day," he says.


A week after the STRIVE program ends, Gatewood's determination is tested. May 27 marks 90 days since he left prison. In his mind, his time is up. If he goes back to prison now, he would almost feel justified--like he gave the straight-and-narrow life a chance--but no one would give him one.


He spends the early part of this Wednesday afternoon at STRIVE. He says STRIVE has given him numerous job leads, but, as of yet, nothing has panned out. Today, Gatewood says, he was supposed to meet a math tutor, but the tutor wound up canceling. So instead he writes a cover letter for a job at a warehouse. Then he sits in the small windowless computer room slowly typing a journal entry from a notebook into the computer. In his journal, he writes about how time has been both a friend and a foe. He writes that he goes through bouts of depression and is stressed out by the fact that he can't provide for his sons.


Now that he has entered their lives, Gatewood worries about his sons. He has faith that their mother, a preschool teacher, is doing a good job of raising them. But they live in the South Side neighborhood of Englewood. As the warm weather sets in, shootings start jumping off. "I got to get them out of there," he says. But, without a job or a place to live himself, he knows he has little ability to do anything.


His precarious housing doesn't help the situation, he says. He and Linda, now just 10 days out of prison, spend a couple nights at her aunt's house, a couple nights at his mother's, a couple of nights at his brother's. "We are at the end of the line," he says. "You can only borrow from relatives and friends so much."


Complicating matters is Linda's reaction to being released, which he witnesses during a visit to the old neighborhood. At a house a couple doors down from where he grew up, some middle-aged men and women sit around eating chips and drinking beer. He points to one of them: "That's Linda." She is wearing sweatpants, Gatewood's oversized New York Yankees jersey and his beige kufi. She is leaning against the fence eating Cheetos. He suspects she is back selling drugs. "Why else would she want to spend her days on this block?" he says. "She says she is bored. But she comes home with too much money. That is how I know: She comes home with too much money." Gatewood says he urged her to start looking for a job.


Linda briefly talks to him and then heads down the street. Gatewood goes around the corner and watches some young guys work. He notes that this "tip" just reopened, as did one on the next block. They are run by warring factions of the Vice Lords. If the young men on either corner venture toward their rivals' corner, they will get shot. Simple as that, Gatewood says.


Gatewood has spent the last three weekends attending funerals, two for family members and one for an old acquaintance who was caught in a hail of bullets during a drug deal gone bad. "Senseless," he says. "It really makes you think about things."

In June, out of nowhere, a moving company calls. Gatewood had applied there during his first weeks out of prison. Does he still want a job? A week after he gets the call, he takes the hour-long bus ride to a western suburb where the company has offices. All the way there, Gatewood worries about his criminal record. STRIVE instructors tell ex-offenders not to lie: "I've made mistakes, but I've changed" is the answer the instructors have prepared him to give when asked about his past.


But, to his surprise, the rugged-looking white man who interviews him never asks. The man just wants to know whether he has worked for moving companies before. Later, Gatewood, ever boastful, says he is a great salesman and was able to convince the man that he had been doing such work for years. Without much fanfare, the man offers Gatewood a job.


Gatewood is ecstatic. For the first week or so, he has to take the bus there, waking up in the wee hours of the morning to get there by 8:45 a.m. But he eventually learns that one of his co-workers, a short Mexican man whom he jokingly calls Bandito, also lives on the West Side and is willing to drive him.


The company specializes in doing small moves. Yet Gatewood, who never filled his days in prison going to the gym, soon notes that the physical work is taking a toll on his body. Still, the fact that he has money is a blessing. He is paid $10 an hour and gets tips, something that he loves because it immediately gives him some bills to put in his pocket. Sometimes customers will also offer the movers the stuff they don't want, like books, chairs and vases. Gatewood accepts these things and gives them to his mother as gifts. Joyce Gatewood, who has gotten used to her son spoiling her, is also elated. More so than anyone, she spent the last months trying to help her son. She asked everyone, from next-door neighbors to members of her church, if they knew of jobs he could work or a room where he could sleep. She says she never gave up hope. "I am so proud of him. He is like a different person. All he needed was a job."


Gatewood buys new designer clothes and several new pairs of gym shoes, which he likes to keep perfectly clean. He moves quicker and with more confidence. He gets new glasses, revealing his brown eyes. Gatewood calls Kewone and Kendal more often, saying that he feels more comfortable now that he can take them places. One day in early July, he takes them to see Chris Rock's movie "Head of State." All the way there on the bus, the boys talk and playfully push and shove each other, like brothers might naturally do. They are beginning to be more at ease with Gatewood, who smiles as he chides them. After the movie, the boys want to play video games and ask their father for money. Gatewood complains about how expensive the games are, but he seems happy to oblige them.


Gatewood also gets himself back to the mosque. He says that, while waiting for a job, he chanted the prayers three times a day and held onto Islam as a spiritual base. But he seemed to fall out of touch with organized religion. Now something about having a job has given him the confidence to find a mosque to start attending regularly. He even buys the traditional Muslim garb to wear there for Friday evening prayers.


But the job is not a panacea. A few weeks after Gatewood begins working, Linda gets picked up in the old neighborhood for associating with other known felons--a parole violation. She has to spend the next few months in Cook County Jail. Gatewood tries to shrug it off, but admits that it saddens him to see her there. He writes her long letters and tries to visit her on his days off. He still holds onto some faith that she will want to change.


And he has trouble finding a place to live. At one point, he decides he wants to live in Schaumburg, a northwestern suburb, far from the troubles of the old neighborhood. But he never makes the move. He eventually buys an old, bluish-green Mazda van. But even several months after finding a job, he doesn't have an address or a telephone. He says he likes to be unreachable.