Driving the Halsted bus gave Juanita Clark a good vantage point from which to keep an eye on her son. Quona was only 18 but he’d been living on his own for about a year, so she appreciated the occasional glimpse as she passed through Lakeview. Whenever she did spot him she pulled the bus over, passengers and all, to see how he was doing–make sure he was going to school, check on his health. “Quona always had a perpetual cold, always nose running,” she says.
Quona was about three when Juanita started driving for the CTA. The new job required her to rise before dawn and work weekends. She thought her two little ones, Quona and Jermel, would be better off with full-time care, so she sent them off to live with her mother in Michigan. She kept her 14-year-old son, Darryl, with her. Not long afterward Juanita separated from Quona’s father and brought her babies back home. When Quona was five his father was killed in an accidental shooting.
One day when Quona was about eight years old he wandered into the Green Thumb Plant Shop on Clark Street, around the corner from the family’s apartment on Roscoe. He asked the owner, Kathy McDonald, if he could work in exchange for a Mother’s Day present for his mother. She gave him a few tasks to do around the store and sent him home with a small plant.
On weekends he went with her to greenhouses to pick out plants and flowers. On the way home they liked to stop at an ice cream parlor. “He would say, ‘We’re going to shock everybody,’” says Kathy, who is white. “He’d come in and call me ‘Ma.’ Everybody’d look at him and we’d laugh.”
After a couple of years at Lawrence Hall, everyone–teachers, administrators, secretaries, students–knew Quona. He would strike up a conversation with anyone. “Once he made a relationship with you he was very loyal,” says Sandra Torrielli, a social worker who started counseling Quona when he was in eighth grade. He had sessions with her once or twice a week but stopped by other times just to hang out, she says. Occasionally she took him out to dinner.
Torrielli says Quona acted like he didn’t need to fit in. “He was a pretty unhappy kid with no clear sense of himself,” she says, “and it came out like he was bragging or with a false bravado that really was just covering how badly he felt.” Even at a school full of problem kids, Quona stood out, alienating others because he needed so much of the spotlight. “He always needed so much attention and would provoke them a lot,” she says. “And then if he got mad at them you would never know what he would say. He would say all these horrible things. He’d say some really revolting sexual things. . . . But sometimes they want to hear it and then other times the kids aren’t interested.”
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Williams was noticing changes too. One day when he was driving Quona and some other boys home from church, they were joking around in the backseat. Quona spoke in a feminine voice and coyly told the others not to touch him. Williams says he knew it was a just a joke but it still made him uncomfortable: “You had to figure he was going through a stage.”
