Santaru Stephens is brushing sunshine yellow paint on a rough brick wall at Clybourn and Division. Shadows are forming across his mural on this crisp fall day, and he’s pulled the hood of his paint-speckled sweatshirt over his head to keep warm. He looks vulnerable standing alone on the narrow sidewalk with cars and trucks streaming behind him as they take shortcuts through the Cabrini-Green neighborhood.
In the first panel a family watches television in a cozy living room, the daughter nestled in her father’s lap and the son lying on the floor. In the next the boy turns to his father and asks, “Why is there such violence in the world?” Mounted knights engage in a fierce medieval battle. Police frisk a man who is leaned up against the hood of a car. A girl says, “Father, I’m scared to go to school.” Then, “Father, they’re rioting in the streets.” A man in a multiracial crowd holds a newspaper urging “Justice for all.”
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A gun is stuffed into someone’s rear pocket. Four people of different races have the same expression of fear. A woman whose hands are folded in prayer pleads, “Lord, will there ever be peace for our children?” A boy says, “They’re arresting that man.”
Other kids, at Cabrini and elsewhere, have been intrigued by his work. “It’s good for young black kids to see somebody of their own race do something positive like this. They always ask me, ‘Did you really do this?’ They find it hard to believe. I say, ‘Yeah. What’s so big about it?’”
A middle-aged man in a baseball cap and coat carrying a rumpled plastic Jewel bag checks the progress on the wall. “I like what you’re doing, brother,” he says.
“Not right now, guys,” he says politely. “Not right now.” It’s getting late.
