Heart on sleeve

LIKE TWO TEES IN A POD Sisters Diamond and Whit-ley Cumbo flaunt their new Elemental shirts.

On a recent rainy Thursday afternoon, Romell Lawrence and Yanier Moore (who goes by “Blak”) are hard at work—which is to say, the two men behind Elemental Apparel are driving around Bronzeville, selling T-shirts at ten bucks a pop out of the back of a gold Pontiac Trans Sport minivan. All the schools in the area just let out, and every few minutes, Lawrence’s cell phone rings with a new order.

Near 46th Street and Ellis Avenue, Armanie Dameron, a 15-year-old Dunbar Vocational Career Academy High School student, bounds into the rain from a high-rise apartment, clutching an umbrella and $50. “I need one for me and one for my auntie, my mama, my sister and my other auntie,” Dameron says. Though Elemental Apparel (773-299-4771) sells tees with several different slogans—“Ain’t No Money,” “Miss My Projects,” “Stop Phony Kickin’ It”—Lawrence knows exactly what she wants: five shirts emblazoned with the phrase “It’s Ugly Out Here.” On the back is a poem by Blak, a laundry list of hard times: pregnant teens, unpaid loans and “plenty of sisters in debt.” When asked why she and her family want the shirts, Dameron exclaims, “’Cause it’s ugly out here for real! They’re telling the truth.”

Lawrence and Blak estimate they’ve sold more than a thousand “It’s Ugly Out Here” shirts, propelling Elemental from a little-known six-year-old company to a recognizable South Side brand since the shirt’s release four months ago. “Everyone on 39th be wearing them,” says Whit-ley Cumbo, a Bronzeville Military Academy student, while buying a shirt with her sister, Diamond, in a White Castle parking lot at 35th Street and King Drive. “Everybody got ’em on.”

“‘It’s ugly out here’ is basically the urban youth way of saying there’s a recession and times are tough,” says Lawrence, 26, a recently unemployed security guard.

“We’d been saying it and hearing it for a few months,” says Blak, 38, who was laid off in June from his after-school counseling job with Bronzeville’s Institute for Positive Living due to a funding shortage. “Someone would ask you for some money and you’d say, ‘Man, it’s ugly out here!’”

Illinois’s unemployment rate increased by a half-percent in September, to 10.5 percent. But Blak says that doesn’t accurately reflect life in depressed areas of the South Side. “I know four or five times more people who aren’t working than who are.”

Like Lawrence and Blak, Elemental is a product of the Ida B. Wells housing projects. The two became friends while living in adjacent units of “the Wells,” as it’s called, before demolition was completed last year. After giving up a life of gangbanging and drug selling, Blak became a regular performer on the spoken-word scene in the ’90s but grew tired of the audiences. “Those people were already so-called conscious. I wanted to do stuff for people that came from backgrounds like mine,” he says. While writing three novels, published by Random House in the mid-aughties, Blak began commenting on his ’hood with T-shirts featuring his poetry and slogans, such as “No Place Like Home,” created when the city first threatened to demolish the Wells.

“When I do a shirt, I’m like the weather man telling you the conditions outside,” Blak says from behind the wheel of the minivan, pointing at dark storm clouds. “I’m not going to try and brighten up the day. If it’s raining, I’m going to tell you it’s raining.”

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