Last Summer on State Street

Felicia "Fe Fe" Stevens, a 12-year-old living in the Robert Taylor Homes, a public housing complex of 16-story brick towers on Chicago's South Side, narrates the summer of 1999, when she loses her three closest friends as the neighborhood is demolished around them. She compares the group's dissolution to the jump rope game All in Together, in which players leave the rope when their birthday month is called: Tonya exits first, then Stacia, then Precious, leaving Fe Fe alone.

Fe Fe, Precious, and Stacia spend their days jumping double Dutch in the square, a cement area on the third floor of building 4950. The Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) has begun demolishing buildings across the Robert Taylor corridor, and displaced residents flood into 4950. Among them is Tonya, a timid girl Fe Fe's age. Fe Fe invites her to play rope. Stacia, from the Buchanan family, a clan affiliated with the Gangster Disciples (GDs), a powerful Chicago street gang, is openly hostile and whips the rope across Tonya's arm. Precious, Fe Fe's lifelong best friend, smooths things over, and the four girls begin playing together.

Violence intrudes almost immediately. Gunshots erupt, and the girls scramble into Fe Fe's apartment, where her mother, Janice, whom Fe Fe calls Mama, shelters them. When Mama walks Tonya home, Fe Fe sees that Tonya's mother, Rochelle, is hostile and the apartment nearly bare. Fe Fe suspects Rochelle has a crack addiction. Mama begins caring for Tonya, providing clothes, braiding her hair, and feeding her.

A flashback to April 1999 shows the CHA demolishing the building directly across from Fe Fe's. Mama Pearl (Lucille Perkins), a woman in her 70s who serves as Fe Fe's grandmother figure, warns her to stop associating with the Buchanans. The demolitions raise anxiety over who will be deemed Lease Compliant, the CHA's designation for tenants eligible for Section 8 housing vouchers. Families with criminal records, like the Buchanans, cannot receive vouchers.

A bullet lodges in Fe Fe's window one night, and police conduct a warrantless sweep, ransacking the apartment and dragging Fe Fe's 16-year-old brother, Meechie, to the precinct. He returns claiming he is fine, but Fe Fe senses a growing distance. On July 3rd, Mama takes all four girls downtown for fireworks at Grant Park. Tonya whispers that she wishes they never had to go back. But gunfire erupts as they exit the bus home, and back in the apartment, Meechie stops Mama from opening the door to police, confessing that officers choked him during the sweep.

Mama sends the siblings to her sister Auntie Nora's house in Roseland, a neighborhood of single-family homes. Fe Fe is attacked by local girls for being from the projects. Meechie returns from a nearby street badly beaten. Uncle Tim, Nora's husband, insists Meechie go home; Fe Fe senses her uncle knows something she does not yet understand. Back at 4950, Mama discovers guns and drugs hidden in the apartment. Meechie packs his weapons and storms out. His last words to Fe Fe: "You told her, huh?"

Tonya also vanishes. Older gang members yank her from the square. Stacia calls Tonya "a hoe," but Fe Fe refuses to believe it. When Fe Fe visits Tonya's apartment, Rochelle either slams the door or laughs. Fe Fe confronts Stacia, and in anger references an incident from the previous year when she witnessed a grown man assaulting Stacia in the building's elevator, the event that prompted Fe Fe to befriend her. The mention shatters their bond.

When Tonya reappears, she confides her truth: Drug dealers who supply Rochelle have been sexually abusing Tonya, taking her away for days. A dealer named Gravy gave Rochelle drugs and took Tonya; Rochelle did not intervene. Tonya begs Fe Fe to stay silent, saying the men threatened to kill her mother.

Stacia and her sisters begin hunting Tonya. Fe Fe, Precious, and Tonya flee into the apartment of Precious's family, the Browns, when the group storms the square. Fe Fe's stress triggers severe migraines. Mama enrolls her in church at New Hope Seventh-day Adventist Church, where Fe Fe finds peace.

The catastrophe peaks on July 30th. A drive-by shooting erupts as the Browns head to choir rehearsal. Police swarm the block. Mr. Brown (Stan), Precious's father and a pastor, is arrested alongside gang members. Meechie is handcuffed and taken to county jail, where he will receive a six-year sentence. Police also arrest members of the Buchanan family.

The aftermath devastates everyone. Stacia's brother Sweat is killed by police during the raid. The younger Buchanan children, including Stacia, enter foster care. The Browns move to Hyde Park. Fe Fe and Precious share a tearful goodbye, chanting their rope refrain: "All in together, any kinda weather!" Fe Fe tells Mama everything about Tonya's abuse, and Mama calls to report child neglect, believing Tonya will be placed somewhere safe.

Mama reveals the family is Lease Compliant and will leave public housing. Mama Pearl becomes Fe Fe's informal history teacher, describing the Mecca Flats, a Black apartment complex demolished in 1952 by the Illinois Institute of Technology, and calling the pattern "sheeping," the perpetual herding of Black communities. She presses Fe Fe to name her ambitions; Fe Fe says she wants to inspire young people, like her teacher Ms. Pierce. Meechie writes from prison, and Fe Fe writes back, calling him a "landmark," someone who cannot be torn down. When Fe Fe and Mama Pearl visit Meechie, Fe Fe encounters Stacia at the prison, now living with her brother Ed in Indiana and visibly pregnant at not yet 13. When Fe Fe mentions that Tonya was taken from Rochelle, Stacia goes blank and walks away.

Fe Fe and Mama move to 57th and Michigan. Fe Fe attends a performing arts high school, then Oakwood University in Alabama, and pursues graduate work in Southern California with Precious. Around age 32, she encounters Stacia at a grocery store in Chicago. Stacia recounts finding Sweat dead during the raid, gathering her siblings, and fleeing to Indiana with Quan, her older brother and the block's gang leader, who was killed by rivals that same year. Stacia hands Fe Fe a journal containing entries from 1999. Fe Fe reads how Stacia, her sisters, and their friends chased Tonya, beat her, and slashed her face with a razor. Then someone, likely their friend Meka, returned and shot Tonya in the chest. Tonya was never rescued; she was murdered.

Fe Fe channels her grief into a Master of Divinity focused on inner-city youth and survivors of abuse. She tells Mama about Tonya's death. They mourn over a photograph from the fireworks trip, the four girls smiling. Mama says, "Let's remember her like this." Fe Fe holds onto Stacia's journal for years, ignoring her messages, until guilt compels her to respond.

Stacia eventually writes: "Let's go back." Fe Fe, Meechie, Stacia, and Ed meet at DuSable High School, still standing as a Chicago Landmark, and walk to the empty field where their buildings once stood. Nothing has been built. Fe Fe leads a prayer for forgiveness. Meechie echoes her words about survival: "We Chicago Landmarks," the phrase Fe Fe wrote to him while he was in prison. As they prepare to leave for a meal at Mama's house, Fe Fe sees Stacia lingering by her truck. She calls her name: "Come on. You've got to eat." Stacia smiles and accepts, just as she did years ago when Fe Fe first invited her to play rope.