Gwennatta Davis left the Conservative Vice Lords long before she went to prison, but her gang tattoos got her beaten up there anyway. She was 15 when she got them: a five-point star and the letters CVL on her upper left arm, part of her initiation into the gang, which had operated near her home in North Lawndale since the 60s. At first, she says, “it was just fun hanging around them. It was just for kicks. I was just following the crowd, wanting to be like the other kids in the neighborhood.” But initiation also involved having sex with several men and beating up a girl who’d recently strayed from the gang. For the next ten years, that’s basically how life went. “The men controlled the women,” she says. “You had to do whatever they said.”
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Upon graduation Spruth enrolled at Moraine Valley Community College in Palos Hills, where he benefited from tutoring specifically designed for students with learning disabilities, and then he transferred to SAIC. While in college he volunteered at the Howe Developmental Center in Tinley Park, organizing a variety of programs that incorporated everything from papier-mache to playing air guitar to Led Zeppelin. After that he spent a year and a half as a volunteer and another year and a half as an employee at the Garden Center for the Handicapped in Burbank. Four of the center’s 60 clients were his former high school classmates.
After Spruth earned his master’s from SAIC in 1992 he landed almost immediately at Cook County Jail, taking on extra projects for the inmates in his free time. Seven years ago he spearheaded the creation of two jail libraries. Four and a half years ago he organized a gardening class for the women’s furlough program. Working with women who had gang symbols or pimps’ names burned in their flesh had a profound impact on him. “These women are trying to get their lives together. They have children. And they’re marked by these idiots,” he says. “How are you supposed to get your life back together when you’ve got some idiot’s name on you? How are your kids supposed to not think that’s cool when they see you naked in the house or the shower? You smoke, your kids are gonna smoke no matter how bad you are. If you’re involved in a bad relationship with a guy, your kids are going to follow that path, because you’re the coolest person they’ve ever met.”
Two weeks later Spruth met the other artists at the shop. He spent the next year and a half training under them and now has free access to the shop and its equipment. “To this day, I get emotional just thinking about it,” he says. “It’s about being prepared for the moment, because the moment’s going to come when you don’t expect it.”
Now living in a halfway house, he was recently hired as a cook at a Hooters in Lansing, Indiana. He says he’d like to go to college and eventually become a high school English teacher but his track marks are holding him back. “I feel like half a person with the reminders of my past stuck upon my body,” he says.
A guard at Cook County Jail who would give only his last name, Alvarez, says he sees men all the time with gang tattoos on their necks, faces, even foreheads. “There’s no way they can hide it,” he says. “If there’s a gang war, there will be a problem. There’s a lot of older guys that just want out. Some younger guys too–they’ve just had enough.”
