A ‘Legacy’ of Survival

“I was known as the Girl in the Window because no one knew who I was.”

The Girl in the Window--a haunting, painterly image of mystery, loneliness, perhaps tragedy, someone needing to be rescued. A fairy-tale figure.

The girl, whose name is Nickcole Collins, is no longer in the window, which overlooked one of Chicago’s most notorious housing projects, the Henry Horner Homes, once synonymous with drug dealing and gang-banging. Although Nickcole and her family are no longer there, they didn’t emerge unscathed. Her grandmother Dorothy and mother Alaissa spent years on welfare, her aunt Wanda was a crack addict and prostitute, and her adored cousin Terrell, a boy full of promise who was going to lead them out, was gunned down on the street.

Nickcole and her family are the subject of a documentary called “Legacy,” directed by Tod Lending, which premiered at the 2000 Sundance Film Festival, was nominated for a best documentary Oscar this year, and will play tonight on Cinemax.

The film is despairing, hopeful, and not a little ironic because Terrell’s death had an unexpectedly positive effect on the family. It pushed them forward, not backward. Nickcole graduated from high school and went to college, Alaissa got off welfare, Wanda cleaned up, and Dorothy--who had been holding the family together--bought a house with $10,000 donated anonymously by someone touched by her grandson’s senseless death.

It’s clear, though, when one meets Nickcole, that not all of these glad doings are simply Terrell’s legacy. It has a lot to do with her. The Girl in the Window was not some hapless, helpless princess looking for Prince Charming. She was merely staying above the fray, the drug dependency, the teen pregnancy. She led other family members by example.

“I looked out the window all the time and I saw what was going on,” Nickcole says evenly. “I saw the same guys in a gang talking to these girls. The same ones running around selling drugs, running from the police, having to worry about these babies. I would see them in a big circle talking about what they’re going to do to the next building. They’re going to be shooting at these buildings, shooting inside somebody’s house. It was just stupid, just plain ignorant. I didn’t want any part of it.”

Nickcole’s independence came at a price. Although she had plenty to occupy her--school, sports, baby-sitting her younger siblings, reading, TV--she was hassled whenever she came into contact with her neighbors, who referred to her as “the white girl, the Oreo, black on the outside, white on the inside.” Sometimes she and Terrell had to defend themselves with their fists on the way home from school. In one instance, a kid came up behind Terrell and slashed his face with a broken bottle.

“It’s an issue that nobody wants to talk about,” Lending says. “And that is the pressure within the black community to fail. The talk is always about the pressure from the outside, and there is pressure, obviously, there are glass ceilings everywhere. But what Nickcole was experiencing was a pressure that white society really does not understand and the black community has been running away from. And that is the pressure to fail from within. Because she wanted to make it, because she was bringing her books home and doing homework, she was chastised by members in her own community.” Lending says he regrets that he was unable to address this issue in the film--there simply wasn’t room for it. Originally, he was doing a documentary series for PBS about the effects of violence on teenagers called “No Time to Be a Child.” As if to dramatize the point, Terrell, whom he never met, was killed the day Lending arrived to shoot the first segment. Terrell was 14 at the time, Nickcole 16.

Rather than document the short-term effects the tragedy would have on the family, Lending decided to see what would happen to them over the long haul, beginning a five-year filming process. Initially, the narrator was going to be Alaissa.

Lending wrote a narrative for her and presented it to HBO, the film’s backer. However, executives there thought Nickcole was the “through-line of this story,” the one whom the audience would most identify with, and encouraged Lending to rewrite it with her in mind. (It’s noteworthy that there are no men in the picture.)

“There are two people who are the force that keeps the story moving and the audience attached,” Lending says. “As a voice on the screen, it was Nicki. People feel like this is a journal they’re listening to. She gives that sense of time passing. As a spirit, it’s Terrell. He’s always present, both in the film and in real life. He is as alive spiritually as he was when he was here. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Another, larger point is that once you’re in the projects and on the government dole, it’s difficult to get out. Nickcole was a fourth-generation welfare dependent (a fact she was embarrassed about).

There are several scenes in which Alaissa is offered a chance to work but finds a way to lose it, making the viewer frustrated, if not angry, with her. Nickcole says she was always on her mother’s case about this--an instance of the child assuming the role of a parent.

Still, Lending says, the psychology of welfare dependency, the sense of failure, is difficult to break. That’s why he’s in favor of welfare reform but unhappy with the draconian way it has been implemented. “There was a concern by a funder [of ‘Legacy’] that Republicans could take this film and say, ‘Oh, look, all you have to do is be strong and pull yourself up by your bootstraps and you can make it,”’ he says. “I argue and a number of other people have argued that no, you look at the film, they weren’t just pulling themselves up by their bootstraps, they also had support structures.”

“Legacy” plays tonight at 7 on Cinemax. The network has rated it TV-14 (may be unsuitable for children younger than 14).