The Ballad Of Yummy Sandifer

I don’t know what it is to bury a child. I have buried parents and grandparents over and over that is still devastating and sad- woefully sad. The death is a void. A hole that may or may not close up. But will always be remembered.

I remember I had a student named Isiah. He wasn’t the first student I had that died and was not the last. But I remember that his life was short and sad and snatched from him and I teach little boys that look like Isiah, and they read about other boys that look like them dying violently. I just get happy that they were reading anything. It’s what I call a teachable moment.

I remember watching the parents of children I teach when their child dies. I watch a look in their eye if I can catch it. Sometimes you catch it like a bug in your eye. When Isiah died his mother came to school and I saw it in her eyes.
Sometimes the parent will walk in a fog, sometimes they will be so blinded with grief they are looking into your eyes but it doesn’t matter.

Sometimes,

Sometimes they look right at you. They engage your eyes like the other side of mirror. Their eyes check yours for a reality that is not staring back at them.

It’s a moment where the eyes ask, “This didn’t really happen, did it? I’m watching this right?”

All I have ever done is avert the gaze; I imagine after the reality check is done there is one of those moments of woeful sadness. Children feel this when they are young- the moment (a finite fraction of time) they realize they are lost in the mall, and mommy is not in eyesight. They are lost, only if for a moment.

Isiah died because he was shot in the head. He didn’t die immediately after he was shot. His brain died days later on a bed at Harlem Hospital.

Yummy Sandifer was 11 when he was shot in the back of the head two times in an aqueduct on the corner of S108 st and Dauphin in the Roseland section of Chicago. His dead body was found bloated and well into the process of rigor mortis when the ID was confirmed. The police had looked for this little boy. Manhunt for an 11-year-old murderer. The picture of Yummy that I remember is the one from the Time magazine article.  A pouty little black boy whose unkempt cornrows made him look only slightly older than the 11 years old that was truly given to him.

He was wanted for the murder of another little girl, Shavon Dean.
She was a sweet-faced child. She was pretty and joyful and demure, in the park because it was the last of summer and the sun was just right in Chicago’s South side, like Flatbush Brooklyn during Eastern Parkway’s celebration.

Yummy started shooting because he could. He wounded three other people that night because he was firing the gun at will into a park. Chicago’s heat has been known to make people explode. Quite literally.

Isiah was 12 when he died. He was almost out of the 7^th grade and had gone to a party near his Harlem home.

Isiah’s sister, Najee, had been my student year’s prior. They look just alike-pretty children, clean skinned and dark with thick eyebrows and perfectly erotic lashes. Isiah was angrier than Najee. The boys always are at 12 unless there has been some kind of catastrophe in the girl’s life. Isiah left my class on Thursday angry with me. I don’t remember what happened. But I remember being too tired to go after him after the class and discuss it. Graduation was coming and rehearsals were starting. Heat was in the air. He was shot Saturday evening.

Isiah was not violent like Yummy was. He was a sweet boy. I was his teacher, not his friend or his parent, that’s what I thought of him. I wondered what Yummy’s teacher thought of him. Of all the stories I have read of him, I have yet to read about how his teachers felt about him. He stopped going to school in the third grade, he was educated in Cullen Elementary is school it is rumored, and stopped attending at 8 years old. For the last three years of his life, he knew nothing of school.

The death of Yummy Sandifer was one of those moments when the heartstring of white America hummed a bit if not reverberated. This was a truly tragic waste of so much human life. Splashed on an aqueduct on the south west side of the city. Robert Sandifer was born in 1983 to an overlap of misery and abuse. He was born during the height of the city crack epidemic. If Chicago’s south side was hit anywhere near the way the Bronx was then he was lucky to be born. His mother was deep into her addiction when she birthed him, his father was incarcerated already. He developed into infancy as a chronic number in the Chicago Dep’t of Children’s services and was placed in his maternal grandmother’s care, along with 18 other children of differing ages and daddies.

Yummy received his nickname because he loved cookies so much.  Robert, his birth name, lies at the top of his tombstone. Yummy was reportedly beaten with extension chords, hangers, belt, shoes, and had cigarette burns on this body on different occasions while in the custody of his grandmother. He was taken from his grandmother’s care after a truancy case, and moved to a group home on the other side of the city. After he is moved into this place, accounts of his physical well-being are unknown because he runs away from there soon after. The group home was his last documented address. He was 10 years old when he ran away. He came to back to the south side because he called it home. He would never leave it alive again.

Yummy Sandifer’s bloody body was found there. It was hot outside, he lay on the pavement with two sizable holes in his head, one so profound it was visible under his funeral makeup. This is a small cross street on the South Side of Chicago by the Metra train, Chicago’s version of the LIRR, where a series of aqueducts  serve as markers for the “100’s”-the moniker of the south side addresses that run in the triple digits. This is where Yummy terrorized and stole from children his age and older, and adults as well. He boosted cars and could drive extremely well. His size was not a factor that he allowed to hinder him. This child had to transcend his size and age like he had to transcend pain and abandonment before he could develop language. The Black Disciples took notice and sponsored him. He was gun wielding 11-year-old bag man who trolled the “100’s” with grown ass killers. Time Magazine called him, “troubled.” The Chicago Tribune called him a monster.

In the book, “Yummy, the Last Days of A Southside Shorty” the author G Nero taps the pulse of the boy who was these things and more, and translates graphic novel style to young boys everywhere.

My students love the story of Yummy Sandifer. They let it tornado across them, they are blown away by the drawings that paint the west side of this city like a stern cold windy crime scene. It’s like reading  a story and staring at the illustrations through glass.
My students love the picture in the story when Yummy gets his first gun. There is light that hits the drawing just so it looks like the weapon has a spot light. This is when Nero builds more tension in the story. This is when my boy students come and make their predictions- every year, they pinpoint the part of the narrative where Yummy’s death felt real to them- it is this moment. Staring at the picture of the boy holding a gun illuminated in black and white, and reading that now the boy was a Black Disciple Gang Member. Acceptance, and Death.

Isiah’s last words to his best friend before he stopped talking was, “don’t let me die on this floor.” His best friend Kyrie carried him to Harlem Hospital on his shoulders.

My students know plenty of Yummy stories. This year a 14 year old boy who went to school in my building was gunned down in broad daylight on the street 4 blocks south of Yankee stadium. My students took pictures of his bloody lifeless frame and tagged each other on Facebook. They read the story of Yummy over and over because they are present in the narrative. A narrative more like a ballad,  a tragic cacophony that was far too brief, turned into prose that they seek out like a kindred spirit.

Isiah would have loved to read this story. But he died before it was published.

Most of the time it’s the pictures that draw my boys into Yummy’s story. It is not the concept of the story. They know this concept like they know the last names of their half siblings. It is the sites of Yummy’s world. It is the stencil of Chicago’s south side. Yummy’s mug shot looks like it could belong in their yearbook.

The aqueduct where Yummy was finally murdered is no longer traffic laden as it was when the “100’s”  experienced so much of the gun violence that knighted this part of Chicago Chiraq.  The street is bare looking, like the stenciled out pictures in the story.

108^th street and Dauphin doesn’t distract with the proximity of a park. The train tracks split it in two even sections of the south.

I drove up to the end of the block and got out and walked into the aqueduct half expecting Yummy to still be there. Or maybe a chalk outline, or maybe some blood. I wanted to drive into this cul-de-sac and find something that was freshly gored and appalling. But it has been so long.
The aqueduct has been painted over a number of times, his name that was scratched into a pillar that housed a broken streetlight was long gone. It was so long ago. 20 years ago and nothing tangible and photographable really remains of the terror of that summer night. A little boy was told to get on his knees and wait. And then three shots rang out, two contacting with the back and right side of his head, one bullet exiting above his eye and landing in the pillars that jutted out above his tiny frame. The disturbing echo of the bullet contacting with the metal. The spray of the blood from his tiny face. The burning hands that shake even after the trigger has reverted. The drop of the body. The shivering. The rattle. The shit. Laid out over an icing of broken glass in this tiny Chicago side street. All that was cleaned up and painted over and washed away. The glass remained.

At the top of the block where Yummy lay dead for 24 ours before he was discovered sits a stop sign missing an “s.”

I took some shots of the corner and of the street sign, and went to the park where this boy monster sprayed a summer evening with bullets some lifetime ago. I saw children in the park as they would have been on that day. They reminded me of my students. They were young looking, the tight brown skin and disheveled hairstyles, boys experimenting with different levels of nudity and sporting shirts tucked into basketball shorts. Pretty girls smiling back. Some jumping rope. Black women scattered on benches in the background looking on and talking to each other.

An old man came up to me as I leaned against my car and took pictures of the park. He asked what I as doing there.
I told him I wanted to find out more information about what happened to Yummy Sandifer.

He remembered him. He remembered when the cops were searching for the boy for a laundry list of over subeonable offenses.

That was a long time ago, he says with a laugh.

“And you remember Hadiyah, right?”

I stopped and looked into his eyes, braced myself for whatever slip of that sadness void he was going to reveal.

“Your daughter?”

“Nah,” he snuffed. “That gal what had got shot aftuh the naguation.”

Hadiyah Pendelton was from the South Side of Chicago too. Right by Vivian Gordon Harsh Park. She had performed at Barak Obama’s inauguration right before she was killed.

“I remember her.”

“Yeah,” he snuffed again, and looked far into the park with a serious but slack gaze.

“But ma graanndbaby, she been shot. Twice. Ovuh by Vernon. Dat wasn’t too too long ago.”

Vernon is the street right next to where Yummy was found.

I stared into the park with him. I looked at the girls playing hand games and missed my 7^th graders. In my mind I was thinking about visual aids for a fiction/informational text lesson with that graphic novel. Anything to keep me from the moment when I had to look this man in his eye and say goodbye to him.

“Well, Thank you for talking to me.”

“Uh, yeah, yaah,” he almost interrupted me, an then peeled himself from his leaning stance on my car and limped over to the park. I got a good picture of him walking away. A solitary, grieving man, walking towards playing children framed in a colored twilight of billowed clouds.

I spoke to 6 people on the south side this night. A couple of boys returning form a basketball game with assorted bare chests and shirts tucked into shorts that told me in a semi southern drawl about their friend who was shot last year because of a fight he had at school. A young lady visiting her boyfriend on Ashburn who lost her god sister to a drive by literally in the park.

An old man who told me he was Jesus and was looking for the “nigga on the bike.” He had a bullet wound on his left calf. I saw it under the shredded camouflage pants that were apparently the only article of clothing he owned.

At the end of the graphic novel the young protagonist examines whether or not Yummy’s decisions could have changed the course of his life.  He questions if there is ever a moment where he wonders what he could have done wrong.

One of my students, Ali, a black skinned slight boy with a young athletes frame, once said that he wondered what Yummy was thinking right before he died. He wondered if the boy wanted to take it all back. If he wanted to do something right.

Ali would say these things in confidence-we were either alone together or it was after school and the audience is class was much more intimate. Ali’s brilliance sometimes makes him vulnerable in class, and his thoughtfulness is vilified by the rest of the wolf pack society of 12-year-old boys he navigates.

He would talk to me about what it was like to be that young and kill people.

“I’m twelve now, and I couldn’t even imagine holding a gun.”

He once told me in a reading conference that he couldn’t stop thinking about a gun pressed up against the boy’s head.

“Do you hear the bullet before it kills you? Do you stop hearing as soon as it hits you? What if hearing is the last sense to go?”

If that is true then Yummy lay bleeding out o the pavement listening to his 11-year-old heart pump out the last bits of blood in his tiny broken body. And then maybe it was just the wind. Maybe he heard the train rattle by above the aqueduct. Or the footsteps of the two brothers that lowered him to his knees and burned two bullets in his head  and running away before his 49 lb frame crashes to the ground.

The final drum before the deafening silence.
The Quietness that stifles the echo after the train passes over the aqueduct. A hush that undershadows the hum of the violent South Side of this city. A calm before a storm. Before the crackle of the gun breaks out into shrieks and sprints. Reboot. repeat. On this night, Chicago is quiet. Not like the Bronx. I imagine it that makes the gunshots easier to distinguish. Easier to hear.

When I drive home passed Chicago State University, I pass a flower wreath by the side of the road lit up by a candle under a baby’s face.