Goodness transforms a bad year in a boy’s life

They decided to mark the anniversary with a party.

August 8 had come again, a date that stuck in their memories the way a birthday might.

At the small red-brick home where Tavon Tanner and his family had spent much of the past year living with a relative, there was an air of celebration.

In the kitchen, partygoers prepared ribs, chicken and sausage. Someone trimmed the small lawn out front. Out back, the barbecue grill was fired up. So many deviled eggs were crammed into the refrigerator that someone joked, "There's going to be a lot of gas."

It was a perfect Chicago summer day, a lot like the same day last year, but nothing like it at all, not for Tavon and his family.

On the night of August 8, 2016, Tavon, who was 10, was shot while sitting on his West Side porch with his mother. A bullet pierced his back near the base of his spinal cord and ripped upward through his body. In the weeks afterward, it wasn't guaranteed he would live.

He did.

In the year since, he has endured eight surgeries, seen his face and his scars displayed all over the news, listened as his name became shorthand for the violence that threatens Chicago's children.

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He missed a lot of school and had to take night classes to catch up so he could be promoted to sixth grade. He goes to the doctor regularly to verify that his organs are healing. It still makes him mad that no one has been arrested for the shooting.

Despite all that, Tuesday was a day that he and his relatives described with words like happy, joyful, grateful, blessing.

"We could have been putting on T-shirts and sitting at the cemetery," said his mother, Mellanie Washington.

"I'm still here," Tavon said.

Tavon is 11 now, lean and conspicuously growing, back to playing basketball though his leg still hurts sometimes. He's still shy in an interview. He looks healthy.

He went to the barber Tuesday morning so he'd look sharp for the party. His family laughs that they knew Tavon was getting better when he started caring about his hair again.

For his anniversary "taper" cut, Tavon sat in the barber's chair quietly, with a red-striped cape draped across his chest and legs, while the electric razor buzzed over his scalp. The spot on the back of his head that had been rubbed bald during the weeks he spent in a hospital bed was almost back to normal.

Almost normal. That describes a lot of his life now.

Tavon has shed much of the fear that for months kept him from leaving the house alone, encouraged by his weekly counselor at Lurie Children's Hospital, who gave him what he calls "homework."

The assignment? Go outside for an hour.

Now he walks to the gas station, the Walgreens and the Subway by himself.

"I'll be back, Mom," he'll call to his mother.

"You going by yourself?" she'll answer, glad that he's willing, but still worried.

It also helps that the family moved far from the violence and gangs of the West Side, into a quiet, ethnically mixed Northwest Side neighborhood where parks are safe and plentiful and the neighbors are friendly.

"Some of them will look like they've seen us somewhere before," Washington said, but if they're recognized from the news, no one says so.

Washington and her kids — Tavon's twin sister, older sister and younger brother — still watch the TV reports of other kids who were shot. In the year since Tavon's shooting, the count continues to climb.

"If they didn't survive," Washington said, "it touches me."

Sometimes, she said, Tavon will watch a story about another child's shooting and say, "I wish they could get away like we did."

But the wonderful, terrible truth is that Tavon's family may never have gotten away from a violent neighborhood if not for the help of Thompson Bailey, a Denver real estate investor who heard about Tavon on the news. He got in touch with the family and has stayed in touch.

When he learned how much trouble Washington had had finding a North Side landlord who would accept her Section 8 voucher, even after the shooting, he made some contacts. He found her a place. He flew to Chicago and took her to check it out to make sure she liked it. She loved it.

His generosity didn't stop there. When he heard about her long commute by public transportation to her job at a Niles nursing home, he asked her if she had a driver's license. She didn't. He asked if she'd be willing to get one if he gave her a car.

Now, for the first time in years, thanks to the gift of a 1994 white Lexus, she's able to drive herself and her kids around.

"I didn't have the resources to change the neighborhood," Bailey said Tuesday via text, "but I DID have the ability to take them out of it and get them a fresh start some place safer."

For the anniversary party, though, they came back to the old red-brick house, owned by Washington's favorite aunt, where they've found sanctuary off and on for years, where they lived through the worst of the past one.

Washington took the day off work, glad to have a job that let her.

The kids turned the music up loud. Everybody ate well. Tavon, whom his mother likens to a soldier, had a good time. They thought about last August 8, but not too much, just as they sometimes discuss it, but not a lot.

As terrible years go, this one was as good as it could be.

Mary Schmich is a columnist for the Chicago Tribune. Contact her at mschmich@tribune.com. at twitter.com/maryschmich or on facebook.com/maryschmich.