Never a City So Real

by Alex Kotlowitz

  Brenda and Millie grew up in the same high-rise, just floors apart. When they were in their twenties, single and swinging, they’d each use the other’s apartment as a place to take their dates. That way, they told me, men wouldn’t know where they lived. The two are inseparable. They’re good at sniffing out parties thrown by politicians, and on occasion they have dragged me along for the free food, and often good music and dancing. People often confuse them. “I’m called Millie all the time,” Brenda says. Because Brenda is more reserved, Millie will often negotiate with men who want to ask her for a date. The two used to breakfast at Moon’s, a working person’s diner up the street from Rockwell Gardens, next to a post office. “We’d be sitting there and guys would come in, and they’d say to Millie, ‘Who’s your friend?’ ” Brenda recalls.

  Millie laughs. “So I tell ’em, ‘C’mon, let’s get some coffee and breakfast, and I’ll tell you about her.’ ”

  “I wouldn’t know a thing,” says Brenda.

  “And I’m telling her, ‘Girl, order your breakfast, ’cause I know it’s taken care of.’ ”

  They can get a free ride anywhere in the city. Livery drivers will drop what they’re doing to tote them from one place to another. Once, they got a lift home from a tavern in an ambulance, with sirens screaming; another time they hitched a ride in a hearse.

  My friendship with Millie and Brenda revolves around food. It’s what we do when we get together: eat. Millie’s anxious because her son is on an aircraft carrier in the Middle East, so she calls, and we make lunch plans. Or I’m trying to get help for a young man I’ve known for years who I suspect is doing heroin, and so I call them. We make lunch plans.

  Chicago is a mecca for some of the nation’s finest chefs, but you’ll learn more about the city itself from its neighborhood restaurants—those establishments where the food is served in heaps rather than manicured slivers, where, if you eavesdrop wisely or linger long enough, you can hear the stories of the neighborhood, of its people, of its legends and of its stresses and strains.

  One day, over lunch at Manny’s, Millie tells me of their encounter with a well-known pimp on the West Side named, uninventively, Don Juan. He wore emerald green suits and strutted around the neighborhood as if he owned all the women there. He once boasted to a local reporter that “in fifteen years only one of my girls ever got frost-bitten.” He took a liking to Brenda, and one afternoon the two friends were traveling on the Madison Street bus, when Don Juan pulled up alongside in his emerald green Cadillac, first honking his horn, then pulling in front of the bus. Don Juan sent his driver on board; the man walked up to Brenda and said, “You ain’t got to ride no bus, baby.”

  “I ain’t going anywhere,” Brenda told him. “I’m fine.”

  “C’mon, baby, your friend can come, too,” he said, pointing to Millie.

  Brenda turned her back on him.

  Millie’s telling me the story, laughing and shaking her head, and out of the corner of my eye, I catch an older gentleman at the next table clearly enjoying the yarn. He hurriedly buries his head in his newspaper.

  Manny’s seems to invite eavesdropping, in large part because of the medley of people it attracts. One weekday morning, I’m there for breakfast, and at one of the nearby Formica tables, four regulars—all elderly men—start passing around something I can’t quite make out. One of them, a retired deputy police superintendent, is smoking a cigar. Another, who used to run a plumbing supply business, is doing all the talking. He’s a short man with a big mouth. He appears to be showing his friends some trinkets he’s hawking. He holds up a pacifier. When he shakes it, it lights up.

  “Kids love ’em,” he tells his friends.

  “Cost a nickel apiece. Sell it for a buck ninety-nine. Not bad,” one of them replies.

  The retired plumbing supplier shrugs. “Cost me twenty cents,” he says.

  The former deputy police superintendent gets the pacifier to light up. “Cute,” he says. “But how do you turn this thing off?”

  “Got to squeeze it.”

  I’m sitting a few tables away with Manny’s owner, Kenny Raskin, who looks over at the bearer of the pacifiers. “He’s been banned from here twice,” Raskin tells me. “He swears a lot and starts arguments with customers. But his brother convinced me to let him back in.” Raskin shrugs. “Eh, I don’t like to have enemies.”

  Indeed, over the years Manny’s has become neutral turf. During one stretch in the late 1980s, Raskin recalls, there’d be a group of First Ward politicos seated at one table, many of whom were under investigation for organized crime, and then a group of plainclothed detectives from the organized crime unit sitting a few tables away. “They’d talk to each other,” says Raskin. “They were friendly.” Manny’s is a political hangout, for politicians of all denominations, which in this fully Democratic city represents, some might say, the paragon of tolerance. On a recent election day, U.S. Senate candidate Dick Durbin brought his family here after he’d voted. Mayor Daley comes in occasionally (matzoh ball soup and corned beef sandwich), though he usually sends an aide to pick up his lunch. Harold Washington, when he was mayor, preferred the baked short ribs, and often he’d come in toward closing when the restaurant was empty to meet with constituents and advisers. The present governor, Rod Blagojevich, who lunches here regularly, signed his minimum-wage bill at Manny’s. And the former governor, George Ryan, a Republican, came here for lunch when he was wrestling over whether to commute the sentences of death-row inmates. While he was chewing on his corned beef sandwich, his cell phone rang. It was Nelson Mandela, urging him to clear death row, which Ryan did the next day.

  Manny’s is in a neighborhood that used to be predominately Jewish, but that is now more commercial than residential. It’s a quick cab ride from downtown, in a neighborhood of small clothing and shoe stores, just a few blocks away from the city’s once bustling Maxwell Street Sunday market. It’s been around since 1945, when Raskin’s grandfather, Jack, opened Sonny’s, which he soon changed to Manny’s, after his son. When Jack died in 1993, his funeral procession received a large police escort because the then-chief-of-police (chicken noodle soup and grilled American cheese sandwich) was a regular customer. Raskin, who sports a goatee and mustache, has put on a bit of a paunch over the years, which he explains is due to his habit of “nibbling” in the kitchen. “You grab a potato pancake,” he tells me, “or the corned beef, or take a piece of French bread and hollow it out and stuff it with a couple of meatballs.” His favorite meals, he tells me, are the beef stew and oxtail stew, both original recipes from more than half a century ago.

  A group of middle-aged women makes their way down the cafeteria line, ordering their breakfasts. Raskin gently waves. City inspectors, he tells me, gathering for their inspection of the newly rebuilt Soldier Field, the stadium where the Chicago Bears play. “I hate it,” he says, “ ’cause I feel like I’m under constant scrutiny.” And, indeed, a few weeks later one of them had him adjust one of the sneeze guards on the service line.

  A pacifier flies through the air, from the retired plumbing supplier to another friend. “What d’ya think?” the pacifier salesman hollers. Heads turn. Raskin smiles. “Once every couple of weeks,” he tells me, “I have to tell him to shut up.”

  The first place Brenda and Millie ever took me to was Edna’s Restaurant, where the minister tried to pick them up. It’s in a tough part of town. But as I would learn, Edna Stewart, the restaurant’s owner, is a tough woman. Edna is sixty-six, and her curled hair has turned gray. She sports large rectangular-shaped eyeglass frames that are so old—more than twenty-five years—and so garish—gold-trimmed—that they actually look fashionable.

  The restaurant is located on Madison Street, the main route through the West Side, which is a collection of pawn shops, currency exchanges, small clothing stores, storefront churches, and liquor stores (I once counted seventeen in a twelve-block stretch). Immediately following the death of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., this stretch of land
went up in flames, and nearly four decades later it’s still trying to recover. (Edna’s, not surprisingly, was spared by arsonists during the riots.) The restaurant is sandwiched between the offices of a family doctor and a small pharmacy on the corner, and it stands across the street from a vacant lot that extends nearly an entire block. Down the street is Marshall High School, which has one of the best girls’ basketball teams in the city (they have an astonishing record over the past twenty-five years of 766 games won and 84 lost, which makes it worthwhile to attend one of their games). A few blocks beyond that is Providence–St. Mel, an inner-city college prep school founded by a no-nonsense, former guidance counselor Paul Adams, who saved the school after the Archdiocese closed it in 1978, virtually abandoning the West Side.

  My first visit to Edna’s was on a hot summer day in 1991, and accompanying Brenda, Millie, and me was a playwright from New York who had been assigned to write the television script based on my book There Are No Children Here. He was a gentle, softspoken man, but after we had spent a few days together I began to get uneasy; I began to think that he didn’t believe all that I’d written. So I took him to the most decrepit of the high-rises, introduced him to the meanest of the gang members, pointed out the wealthiest of the drug dealers. And on this, his last day, I thought I’d introduce him to Brenda and Millie who, I’d hoped, would affirm all that I’d written. At first, however, the lunch didn’t go exactly as I’d anticipated—because Brenda and Millie, while they’re realists, are also almost inexplicably upbeat. I say inexplicably, because given where they’re from and what they do, they have every reason to be cynical, if not outright pessimistic. So over our lunch of fried chicken and liver, collard greens, and candied yams, Brenda and Millie filled the screenwriter not with horror stories but with tales of people who were managing, who were getting by despite all that bore down on them. Then, just as they were regaling him with inspirational tales, a young boy maybe fourteen or fifteen years old ran into the restaurant and ducked behind the heating grille. A gaggle of boys suddenly appeared outside, and one of them pulled a pistol out of a brown paper bag and started shooting. Needless to say, we feared for our lives, and we ducked under the table. As we lay there, one on top of the other, all I could think was, Now the screenwriter will believe me.

  Then, we heard an enraged voice shouting, “What do you think you’re doing? Shoo. Get away from here.”

  Shoo? I peered out, and there was Edna in her apron, her arms flapping, heading straight at the boy with the pistol. He didn’t run, or shout, or strike back: He was too stupefied. As Edna started lecturing him, the gun dropped to his side, and while I couldn’t hear what she was saying, it was clear that the shooter and his friends were hearing every word. She threw her hands up and reentered the restaurant, muttering something about “these kids should know better.” As for the boys, they skulked away.

  I know this is probably not the best way to lure people to Edna’s. But, trust me, such an incident has never happened there since. Everyone knows Edna. “I’ve been here so long, my name rocks,” she said, by which she means people respect her. It’s the African-American equivalent of Manny’s, having fed such visiting luminaries as Dick Gregory and Al Sharpton, and musicians like Flava Flav and R. Kelly. The local congressman, Danny Davis, used Edna’s to announce his reelection campaign. And Jimmy Carter lunched here when he was helping construct a nearby Habitat for Humanity home. It’s also a lunch spot for local police officers.

  Edna grew up on the city’s South Side, and her home was a gathering place for neighborhood children, especially when they were hungry; her father, a former sharecropper, believed in a simple equation: “If someone came by, they got to eat.” And so Edna and her sisters’ friends ate sweet potato pie, or fried chicken, or her mother’s specialty, rainbow cake. If friends stopped by on Sunday mornings, they could share in her father’s pork brains and eggs, a dish that Edna serves at her restaurant.

  Edna got pregnant in her sophomore year, and never finished school. She soon married, not her son’s father, and they lasted eight years together. And though it’s been more than forty years, her ex-husband still comes by the restaurant regularly. “He brings a container and wants his dumplings,” Edna says. “He doesn’t think he needs to pay. He must think we’re still married.”

  With seven hundred dollars from her father, Edna bought the restaurant in 1966, and soon after, a mixed-race couple began frequenting the place. “They’d just come into the restaurant, sit for an hour, maybe have some cornbread and syrup,” Edna recalls. “One day they said, ‘Would you like some customers?’ And I’m looking at ’em like, how you gonna bring me some customers?” Turns out, they were part of the advance team for Martin Luther King, Jr., who was about to come to the city, purchase a home on the West Side, and run a campaign for open housing (which is what ultimately led to my father-in-law getting involved in testing). Edna’s became the gathering spot for the civil rights workers, including Jesse Jackson and Dr. King, and she would often stay open late so they would have a place to eat after their marches.

  Edna’s has become a destination for European tourists looking for authentic soul food. And now business is hopping on Sundays with white folks who visit the nearby Garfield Park Conservatory, one of the nation’s botanical treasures: four and a half acres of flowers and plants under one roof. The cornbread and peach cobbler are Edna’s own recipes, and her favorite dish is the fried catfish. But it’s her macaroni and cheese, the simplest of dishes, that may be her most popular. “No cream,” she tells me. “But I’m not going to give you my recipe.”

  Edna doesn’t know how much longer she’ll keep her restaurant open. She had inquired about the vacant property across the street, and learned that the owner was asking six hundred fifty thousand, an indication that speculators have begun looking this far west. Edna told me that not long ago, on a Saturday afternoon, Wallace Davis, who owns a catfish joint down the street, called her and asked her to come down to his place.

  “I’m too busy,” Edna told him.

  “You got to see this,” Davis said.

  “Maybe later,” Edna replied.

  “No, now. I tell you, you got to see this,” Davis insisted.

  So Edna took off her apron and walked the two blocks to Wallace’s Catfish Corner (where on summer weekend nights, blues musicians give concerts in the adjacent parking lot). Davis took her back outside and pointed across the street. Edna saw an elderly white woman and her grown daughter tending a garden outside a brownstone. It was clear they’d just moved in.

  “They’re coming,” Davis said.

  One day, Brenda suggested we try a new place she’d discovered, so I picked her and Millie up at work, and we drove three miles west of Edna’s, on Madison Street, past the blue mosquito-zapper-like lights posted high on the lampposts (they’re police-run video cameras, installed to deter street crime), past the grocery store Moo and Oink, past the New World Hatter hat store, to Mac Arthur’s, which may well be the West Side’s most popular restaurant. On Sundays, Mac Arthur’s, which serves its soul food cafeteria style, periodically has to lock its doors because the line has doubled back on itself twice. Weekdays, the wait is more reasonable, usually fifteen minutes at most. Brenda and Millie so like the food here—especially the short ribs and banana pudding—that they’ll sometimes come as often as three times during the week. Besides, they tell me, they like to support Mac Arthur’s because the owner has what Brenda describes as “a soft heart.”

  Mac Arthur Alexander, the restaurant’s owner, knows nothing about food. His niece, Sharon McKennie, who manages the store and is in charge of the cooking, says, “He wouldn’t know wheat bread from white bread.” When I ask Alexander his favorite dish, he tells me that it’s the liver, which “they deep-fry and then bake a little, or something like that.” Alexander, who is fifty-eight, went to Vietnam in 1968 and returned eight months later without his left leg below the knee, the result of a mortar round that he believes was friendly fire. H
e now wears a prosthesis, and though he has a limp, most people don’t notice. After coming home, he opened a record store, Mac’s, even though he didn’t know much or care much about music; then he began investing in real estate in Austin, my father-in-law’s old neighborhood. He did well for himself, and decided he wanted to give back to his community. And so in 1997, he opened Mac Arthur’s—in part because there wasn’t a decent restaurant around, and in part because he could hire people from the neighborhood. He now employs sixty-two people. Word has since gotten out on the West Side: Mac Arthur Alexander believes there are second acts in life. “Mac,” says one employee, “aims at the people who’ve had it hard. That’s where he gets his joy. He’ll give ’em nine or ten chances.”

  Alexander is reserved, almost shy. He arrives at work each morning, usually in a flannel shirt, and then disappears by the time lunch hour rolls around. Too many people want to talk with him, he says, often about work. Periodically, Alexander gets letters from people in prison, asking him for a job when they get out. Alexander usually obliges, although he knows many of them won’t make it. The turnover, he concedes, is high. But that seems okay with him. There’s a Zen-like quality about Alexander, and when he tells me the story of how a number of years back one of his employees stole three thousand dollars from him, he seems more bemused than agitated, even though he says he has a good idea who did it. (He couldn’t prove it, so he never confronted the employee; he simply had fewer people handle the restaurant’s money.) “I’ve gotten had several times,” he tells me. “But it’s hard for me to fire someone. They usually fire themselves.” People don’t like to disappoint Alexander, so more often than not those who have done so just stop showing up for work.