T-SHIRTS TELL OF LIFE, DEATH

What runs through your mind when a young black man with a shady
background gets shot?

Do you think "live by the sword, die by the sword"? Do your thoughts
turn to cloaked variations on the "those-people" chant, as in "I
would stay in Peoria, but it's not safe"? Or do you pause long enough
to think about it at all?

James Fairley sighs when he hears the question. He owns The Tee-Shirt
King, a custom-printing business along Western Avenue. Fairley
understands exactly where the question leads.

"I think, 'Here we go again.' "

He sighs.

"The next thing I know, someone will come through the door saying,
'My boy just got killed. What will it cost to get T-shirts made with
his picture?' "

He sighs.

"Of course, I give them the spiel. The more they buy, the less it costs . . ."

He sighs.

The more they die, the more money Fairley and others make copying
photos of the newly deceased onto cotton T-shirts. Fairley's sighs
capture both a personal mourn and a business dilemma.

"I didn't want to do this at first," he says. But the T-shirts became
such a touchstone of grief in the 'hood, he couldn't avoid it. "It's
like second nature now. The minute someone passes, the next thing
people want is T-shirts. It's like set the funeral day, pick out the
casket, get the T-shirt."

As far as anybody knows, the T-shirts don't have an official name.
Call them memorial T-shirts, dead-man shirts or R.I.P. Tees. They've
been around for more than a decade locally, longer in big cities
where a mish-mash of gangs, gangsta rap, drive-by shootings and
obscenely high homicide rates among young black men are thought to be
the impulse behind immortalizing dead youth on T-shirts.

Wearing the memory on a T-shirt is no longer a memorial solely for
victims of street violence and its collateral damage. People order
them when Sister dies of cancer, when Brother dies from the burdens
of diabetes, when Grandma dies of natural causes. They wear them to
the funeral, they re-order new ones on birthdays and anniversaries of
the death, they frame them and hang them on the wall.

"A lot of white people are starting to do it now," says Randy
Scronce, owner of A Cheep Tee. That's because a lot of white kids die
too young, too soon, also. Whether it's vehicle accidents in Tazewell
County or shootings in the Harrison Homes, the emotional aftermath is the same.

We are counting teenage traffic fatalities in Tazewell the same way
we have been tracking young-black-male homicides in Peoria. Perhaps
because the wounds of traffic fatalities are still raw, the public
focus is on holistic approaches, curbing deaths, saving lives. The
deaths are the current front-page, top-of-the broadcast news.

Meanwhile, Harrison Homes and other high-crime areas of Peoria are
little Lebanons where residents, public housing maintenance workers
and young black men are often endangered by conflicts not of their
own making. But their deaths have long since been relegated to
second-class news. Unless, of course, it happens in a middle-class
neighborhood. The public, political focus has shifted from saving
lives to cutting crime rates.

There is a difference between the two. Cutting crime rates is
impersonal, a measure of statistics and law-enforcement strategies.
Saving lives, as exemplified in the old stop-the-violence movements
and the best crime prevention initiatives, sends a valuable message,
a message of value. A life is worth something.

Some people hate the memorial T-shirts and all they represent. To
others, they are a prescription for the anonymity that accompanies
the loss of young lives.

Lest anyone hold on to the myth that poor black neighborhoods are
apathetic, that poor black men are somehow immune to the violence,
the T-shirts are a cry about a life that was worth something.

Ironically, family reunions and church contracts make up the bulk of
Fairley's business. But the T-shirts represent the most grief. Literally.

"If they want to do me a favor, they can stop killing each other," he
says. "I'd rather get business some other way."