“We’re defending our honor,” Mayne said. “Ain’t nothing more important than that.”

“Yeah,” said J.T. “And it is about business. Those guys come shooting down on our end, scaring people away.”

Pastor Wilkins asked Mayne and J.T. to describe how the fight had escalated. Pastor Wilkins’s original guess was mostly right: two teenage boys at DuSable High School got into a fight over a girl. One boy was in J.T.’s gang, the other in Mayne’s. Over the course of a few weeks, the conflict escalated from unarmed to armed-first a knife fight and then the drive-by shooting. The shooting occurred during the afternoon, while kids were playing outside after school.

J.T. said that because his customers had been scared off since the shooting, and because tenants in his buildings were angry about their lives being interrupted, he wanted Mayne to pay a penalty.

Mayne argued that the shooting took place at the border of the two gangs’ territory, near a park that neither gang claimed. Therefore, he argued, J.T. was ineligible for compensation.

My mind raced as they spoke. I couldn’t believe that a religious leader and a police officer were not only watching this mediation but were actually facilitating it. What incentive did they have to do so- and what would happen if people from the community found out they were helping gang leaders settle their disputes? I was also struck by how levelheaded everyone seemed, even J.T. and Mayne, as if they’d been through this before. These were the same two gang leaders, after all, who had been trying to kill each other, quite literally, with drive-by shootings. I wondered if one of them might even pull a gun here at any moment. Perhaps the very strangest thing was how sanguine the community leaders were about the fact that these men sold crack cocaine for a living. But at this moment it seemed that pragmatism was more important than moralism.

After a while the conversation got bogged down, with J.T. and Mayne merely restating their positions. Autry jumped in to try to refocus things. “How much you think you lost?” he asked J.T. “I mean, you don’t need to tell me the amount, but how many days did you lose business?”

“Probably a few days, maybe a week,” J.T. said.

“Okay, well, we’re going to bank this,” Autry said. “Put it in the bank.”

“What the fuck does that mean?” Mayne asked.

“Nigger, that means you messed up,” Autry told him. “J.T. didn’t retaliate, did he? I mean, he didn’t shoot over at you. It was just you shooting down at his end, right? So J.T. gets to sell his shit in the park for a week. The next time this happens, and J.T. fucks up, you get to sell your shit in the park for a week.”

Ms. Bailey spoke up. “You-all do not get to sell nothing when the kids are there, okay? Just late at night.”

“Sounds fine to me,” J.T. said. Mayne nodded in agreement.

“Then we have a truce,” Pastor Wilkins said. He walked over to J.T. and Mayne. “Shake on it.”

J.T. and Mayne shook hands, not warmly and not willing to look at each other. The pastor and Ms. Bailey each let out a sigh.

As J.T., Mayne, and Pastor Wilkins sat down to work out the details of the deal, I walked out front. There was Autry, smoking a cigarette on the sidewalk. He shook his head; he looked fatigued.

“This stuff is hard, isn’t it?” I asked.

“Yeah, I try to block out the fact that they could get pissed at me and kill me if I say something they don’t like. You never know if they’ll go home and think you’re working for the other side.”

“You ever get hurt before?”

“I got my ass kicked a few times-one time real bad-’cause they thought I wasn’t being fair. I’m not sure I want to have that happen again.”

“You don’t get paid enough,” I said.

J.T. came out of the club and stopped beside me. His head was lowered. Autry moved away.

“You wanted this, right?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said, “this is what I’m looking for.” He knew I’d been eager to see how the community and the gang worked out their differences. But he’d also made it clear that I could do so only if I had a patron, and I had to choose between J.T. and Autry. I chose J.T.

“Just remember, you wanted this,” he said. “I didn’t make you come here today. I didn’t tell you about this. You wanted this.” He pressed his finger into my chest every time he said “you.” I sensed that despite our last conversation J.T. felt I was slipping from his grasp.

“I know,” I said. “Don’t worry.”

“I’m not worried.” He let out a sinister laugh. “But you should really think about this. Just remember, I didn’t bring you here. I can’t protect you. Not all the time anyway. You did this on your own.”

“I get it, I’m on my own.”

J.T. smiled, pressed his finger into my chest one last time, with force, and walked away.

After nearly three years of hanging out with J.T., I began talking to several of my professors about my dissertation topic. As it happened, they weren’t as enthusiastic as I was about an in-depth study of the Black Kings crack gang and its compelling leader. They were more interested in the standard sociological issues in the community: entrenched poverty, domestic violence, the prevalence of guns, residents’ charged relations with the government-and, to a lesser extent, how the community dealt with the gang.

If I explored these subjects well, my professors said, I could explain how the Robert Taylor tenants really behaved, rather than simply arguing that they didn’t act like middle-class people.

Bill Wilson in particular was adamant that I adopt a wider lens on the gang and its role in Robert Taylor. Because sociology had such a strong tradition of “community studies,” he wanted me to write the definitive report on everyday life in high-rise housing projects.

He also said he’d started worrying about my safety in the projects.By this point I had taken up golf as a way to spend more time with Wilson, an avid golfer. “I’m having nightmares, Sudhir,” he said once in the middle of the fairway, staring out blankly. “You’re worrying me, and I really want you to think about spending some time with others.” He drifted off, never instructing me about which “others” I should be observing, but I knew this was code for anyone besides the gang.

I knew he had my best interests in mind, but it still came as a shock to me that I would have to widen my focus if I still planned to base my dissertation on this community. It meant that J.T. wouldn’t be the sole target of my attention, and perhaps not even the primary target. A few of my professors were seasoned ethnographers, experts in the methodology of firsthand observation. They were insistent that I avoid getting so close to any one source that I would be beholden to him.

Easier said than done. I hadn’t forgotten how agitated J.T. became when he saw me branching out into the community. I really didn’t feel I could tell him that my project was moving away from a focus on his leadership. By now J.T. wasn’t my only access to the community, but he was certainly my best access. He was the one who had brought me in, and he was the one who could open-or shut-any door. But beyond all that lay one simple fact: J.T. was a charismatic man who led a fascinating life that I wanted to keep learning about.

J.T. seemed to appreciate having the ear of an outsider who would listen for hours to his tales of bravado and managerial prowess. He often expressed how hard it was to oversee the gang, to keep the drug economy running smoothly, and to deal with the law-abiding tenants who saw him as an adversary. Sometimes he spoke of his job with dispassion, as if he were the CEO of some widget manufacturer-an attitude that I found not only jarring but, given the violence and destruction his enterprise caused, irresponsible.