I explained the project as best as I could. It was being overseen by a national poverty expert, I said, with the goal of understanding the lives of young black men in order to design better public policy.

My role, I said, was very basic: conducting surveys to generate data for the study. There was an eerie silence when I finished. Everyone stood waiting, watching J.T.

He took the questionnaire from my hand, barely glanced at it, then handed it back. Everything he did, every move he made, was deliberate and forceful.

I read him the same question that I had read the others. He didn’t laugh, but he smiled. How does it feel to be black and poor?

“I’m not black,” he answered, looking around at the others knowingly.

“Well, then, how does it feel to be African American and poor?” I tried to sound apologetic, worried that I had offended him.

“I’m not African American either. I’m a nigger.”

Now I didn’t know what to say. I certainly didn’t feel comfortable asking him how it felt to be a nigger. He took back my questionnaire and looked it over more carefully. He turned the pages, reading the questions to himself. He appeared disappointed, though I sensed that his disappointment wasn’t aimed at me.

“Niggers are the ones who live in this building,” he said at last. “African Americans live in the suburbs. African Americans wear ties to work. Niggers can’t find no work.”

He looked at a few more pages of the questionnaire. “You ain’t going to learn shit with this thing.” He kept shaking his head and then glanced toward some of the older men standing about, checking to see if they shared his disbelief. Then he leaned in toward me and spoke quietly. “How’d you get to do this if you don’t even know who we are, what we’re about?” His tone wasn’t accusatory as much as disappointed, and perhaps a bit bewildered.

I didn’t know what to do. Perhaps I should get up and leave? But then he turned quickly and left, telling the young men who stayed behind to “watch him.” Meaning me.

They seemed excited by how things had turned out. They had mostly stood still while J.T. was there, but now they grew animated. “Man, you shouldn’t mess with him like that,” one of them told me. “See, you should’ve just told him who you were. You might have been gone by now. He might have let you go.”

“Yeah, you fucked up, nigger,” another one said. “You really fucked this one up.”

I leaned back on the cold step and wondered exactly what I had done to “fuck up.” For the first time that day, I had a moment to ponder what had been happening. Random thoughts entered my mind, but, oddly, none of them concerned my personal safety: What the hell is Bill Wilson going to do if he finds out about this? How am I supposed to know whether to address an interview subject as black, African American, or Negro? Did every Ph.D. student have to go through this? Can I go to the bathroom? The sun had set, and it was getting colder. I pulled my jacket tighter and bent over, trying to keep out of the wintry draft.

Yo! Freeze, you want one?”

An older man walked in with a grocery bag full of beers and offered a bottle to one of the young men guarding me. He passed out beers to everyone there. Pretty soon they were all in a better mood. They even gave me a bottle.

By now it was well into the evening. No one seemed to have anywhere to go. The young men just sat in the stairwell telling one another all kinds of stories: about sexual conquests, the best way to smoke a marijuana cigarette, schoolteachers they’d like to have sex with, the rising cost of clothing, cops they wanted to kill, and where they would go when their high-rise building was torn down. This last fact surprised me. Nothing in our records at the university suggested that these projects were closing.

“You have to leave?” I asked. “What kind of neighborhood will you be going to?”

“Nigger, did someone tell you to talk?” one of them said.

“Yeah, Julio,” said another, moving in closer. “You ain’t got no business here.”

I shut my mouth for a while, but some other men stopped by, and they were more talkative. I learned that the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) was indeed tearing down the Lake Park projects in order to build condominiums and town houses. Some residents were staying on as squatters, and the gang was helping them by pirating electricity.

It was clear to me at this point that the young men I’d stumbled upon in this stairwell were junior members of a broad-based gang, the Black Kings, that sold crack cocaine. The older members explained that the gang was trying to forestall demolition but that it wasn’t a pure act of charity: When this building was torn down, they would lose one of their best drug-selling locations.

Once in a while, I tried to interject a research question-What kinds of jobs did the people who lived here have? Why weren’t the police in the building?-but they seemed less interested in answering me than in talking among themselves about sex, power, and money.

After a few hours, J.T. returned with a few other men, each of them carrying a grocery bag. More beer. It was late, and everyone seemed a little punchy. The air was stale, and some of the young men had been wondering when they might be able to leave. For the moment, however, the beer seemed to settle them down.

“Here,” J.T. said, tossing me another bottle. Then he came closer. “You know you’re not supposed to be here,” he said quietly. He seemed to feel sorry for me and, at the same time, curious about my presence. Then he, too, began talking about the scheduled demolition of the Lake Park projects. He explained that he and his men had holed up in this building partly out of protest, joining the residents to challenge the housing authority’s decision to kick them out.

Then he asked me where I was from.

“California,” I said, surprised at the change in topic. “Born in India.”

“Hmm. So you don’t speak Spanish.”

“Actually, I do.”

“See! I told you this nigger was a Mexican,” said one young gangster, jumping up with a beer in his hand. “We should’ve beat his ass back then, man! Sent him back to his people. You know they’re coming around tonight, you know they will be here. We need to get ready-”

J.T. shot the young man a look, then turned back to me. “You’re not from Chicago,” he said. “You should really not be walking through the projects. People can get hurt.”

J.T. started tossing questions at me. What other black neighborhoods, he asked, was I going to with my questionnaire? Why do researchers use multiple-choice surveys like the one I was using? Why don’t they just talk with people? How much money can you make as a professor?

Then he asked what I hoped to gain by studying young black people. I ticked off a few of the pressing questions that sociologists were asking about urban poverty.

“I had a few sociology classes,” he said. “In college. Hated that shit.”

The last word I expected to exit this man’s mouth was “college.” But there it was. I didn’t want to push my luck, so I thought I’d just keep listening and hope for a chance to ask about his background.

By now everyone seemed fairly drunk and, more alarmingly, excited at the prospect of a gang war with the Mexicans. Some of the older men started talking logistics-where to station the gang members for the fighting, which vacant apartments could be used as look-out spots, and so on.

J.T. dismissed their belief that something was going to happen that night. Once again he ordered two of the younger men to stay with me. Then he left. I returned to my seat, sipping a beer now and then. It looked like I would be spending the night with them, so I tried to accept my fate. I was grateful when they said I could go to the bathroom-which, as it turned out, was another stairwell a few floors up. Considering that water, and probably urine, were constantly dripping onto our own landing, I wondered why they didn’t use a lower floor instead.