by Richard Dry
“David!” she yelled and gave him a hug. He hung up the phone and patted her shoulder. “I can’t believe you’re back. Where’s Marcus?” She stood away from him and noticed that he would not look her in the eye.
“How you doin, sugar?” he said.
“Fine. Fine. What’s the matter? You look like I caught you with your pants down.” She laughed and hit his arm.
“Girl, you did. You caught me just now when I was about to make a call to somebody important, and you surprised me. I’m just a little disorientated, you know. Half of me is still in Chicago. How you doin, sugar?” He picked up the phone, put in a dime, then hung up again. He reached his finger into the return slot and fished out his money. “Man, I am out of it. How you doin?”
“Fine. Fine.” She looked at his eyes to see if he was on junk, but his pupils seemed normal.
“So, where’s my man at?” she asked.
“Your man? I don’t know where he at.”
“Maybe he’s waiting for me at home.”
“Could be. I haven’t seen him in a while. For all I know, he still in Chicago.”
“What you mean?”
“Yeah. I haven’t seen him since we broke up the band.”
“I just got a letter from him last month about the band.”
“Then he’s probably out there still.”
She dug in her purse and looked at the letter; the red postmark did say Chicago. “He never said nothin about you breaking up. He said something about working on a new gig and a record.”
“Well, that must be it. Listen, sugar, I got to get, if you know what I mean.” They walked out together into the winter afternoon, the sun directly above them so that neither they nor the buildings cast any shadow. He started to walk away in the direction she had come from. “I’ll catch you later.”
In an instant, she was alone on the sidewalk, holding the letter, completely baffled. She ran after him and grabbed his shoulder from behind.
“You got to tell me what’s happening. All I’ve got is this letter. What happened? Why did you break up?”
David looked down the street as if he were anxiously waiting for a bus to come.
“Lida, I’m going to tell you all I know. There’s probably some I don’t know, so don’t think this is everything.” He looked at his big hand and picked at a callus on his thumb. “It didn’t work out like we planned. They told us they’d pay us seven hundred for the gig at the Regal, but the booker gave us three hundred, which wasn’t enough to get us all back. Marcus had the idea that we try to find a regular gig, and we got one at the Orchard for the door, which got us enough to eat. But we couldn’t stay at my auntie’s place forever, and we ended up in this motel on the South Side.” David stopped and shook his head.
“But then our drummer quit on us. That was the beginning of the end. He came back here, so we lost the gig at the Orchard. We got this one cat to sit in, but that didn’t work, and I said we should come back home and get ourselves together as soon as we worked up enough money. But Marcus wanted us to make a record. Said he’d found a place that we could pay for studio time. There are so many bands out that way tryin to make it. It’s worse there than here, so he couldn’t find a gig to get up the cash for the album. I suggested we should use the last of the money to turn around some smack, just so we could get the money to come home, or to, you know, hold us over until another gig showed up. And we did make some money on that deal, but he kept on insisting that we spend the money on an album, that once we had an album, we’d be all right. He said he didn’t want to come back empty-handed. You know, he wanted to make his son proud. But I wanted to come back, so we split up the money. We’d been stayin at my auntie’s again in the Horner Projects, and one day last month, Marcus stole her purse right off the table and all the rest of the money. I’m not saying I’m still mad at him, but I didn’t see him after that. I worked at a hamburger joint for two weeks and then came back here. That was a month ago. I don’t know what happened to your man, but I don’t think he’s got his guitar anymore, so I don’t think he’s out there playing music. You know what I’m sayin?”
Lida shook her head.
“I’m sorry you had to hear it,” David added, “but I know you want the skinny. Listen, if you want to come on by my place, it’d be good to see you. You know, I’ll take care of you. But I’ve got to leave off and find someone myself right now. Things is hard again. You take care, and if you see Marcus, tell him to come on around and hook up with me.”
This time David jogged across the street, dodging the traffic, putting a solid but shifting wall between them. Lida watched him disappear and then sat down on the sidewalk against the building, the cold wall burning through her shirt.
SANTA RITA JAIL
HE CAME TO the front of the room holding The U.S. Riot Commission Report and Black Protest.
We are floating on our raft down the River of History. Yet many of you say, I’m not a part of the South and all that Jim Crow mess. I’m a city man from the West or the North. You say, I’m not a part of that Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn, river-raft shit; I’m a modern man in modern times. My problems all start and end with the ghetto, and the ghetto is something that started after Jim Crow, when we were free to be a part of the American Dream.
But that’s the blindness caused by the rushing river, brother. At times it seems to move so swiftly that we don’t even see how we got here and where we’ve been. We don’t even see that we’ve been floating in the muddy waters of the ghetto for a whole century and it brought us to this future, the present we are living, here in 2020.
It started with the Great Migration.
After 1910 there were months when ten thousand of us would leave the rural South. Over one hundred thousand a year during the wars. In the beginning of the century, ninety-one percent of our ten million brothers and sisters lived in the South, but by the mid-sixties, when we were twenty million strong, half of us lived in the North or West, mostly in the cities, where there was work to be found.
We’d see advertisements for better wages and freedom. The employers would pay for our train rides to the “Promised Land.” In 1944 the cotton gin, the mechanical cotton picker, all but exiled us southern sharecroppers. Between the forties and the seventies, almost six million of us moved out. Once we arrived in Chicago, New York, Detroit, East St. Louis, Phoenix, Oakland, or wherever they needed cheap labor, we moved into the old sections of town, like the immigrants before us. But unlike other immigrants, we were not free to live in the White parts of town. This is the very definition of a ghetto, a place in which a particular group is concentrated and to which they are restricted.
The Whites fled the cities to the suburbs. With them went their money, businesses, and the tax base for schools and municipal services. When the Depression hit, or when the boys came home from the wars and there were fewer jobs to be had, we lost jobs first. This is how it started. The poorer we got, the less desirable the neighborhood, the fewer jobs available, the worse the opportunities, the worse the dropout rates, the worse the crime, the worse the drugs, the worse the health conditions and sanitation. The ghetto became our next prison: overcrowded, deteriorating, and for many, inescapable.
Why are we so angry? Many people look at the most recent riots and see them as an isolated eruption of some crazy and lazy niggers taking advantage of a hyped-up case in the media. But you’re not seeing the River. Maybe you remember reading about the riots in Los Angeles after Rodney King, or you may have studied the first nine months of 1967 when there were riots in 39 cities, 217 “civil disorders” nationwide, 83 deaths, and 1,897 injuries. Or maybe you recall San Francisco and Oakland in ’66; Watts in ’65; Harlem, Rochester, Cleveland, and Philadelphia in ’64. But do you know about Detroit and Harlem in ’43 and ’35; Tulsa in ’21; or D.C., Omaha, Charleston, Longview, Knoxville, and Chicago in 1919; Chester, Houston, East St. Louis, and Philadelphia in 1917.
And many of these riots were not started by angry Blacks, but by an
gry Whites. When there wasn’t enough housing, the Black areas started to expand into the White neighborhoods, and we weren’t welcome. There were bombings and crosses burned, garbage thrown and fires started. There were drive-by shootings. Police machine-gunned a whole apartment building in Detroit. It all started a long time ago.
Here, I’ll read to you from Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City:
The sporadic bombing of Negro homes in 1918 was but the prelude to a five-day riot in 1919 which took at least thirty-eight lives, resulted in over five hundred injuries, destroyed $250,000 worth of property, and left over a thousand persons homeless.…
The Chicago riot began on a hot July day in 1919 as the result of an altercation at a bathing beach. A colored boy swam across the imaginary line which was supposed to separate Negroes from whites at the Twenty-ninth Street beach. He was stoned by a group of white boys. During the ensuing argument between groups of Negro and white bathers, the boy was drowned. Colored bathers were enraged. Rumor swept the beach, “White people have killed a Negro.” …
Pitched battles were fought in the Black Belt streets. Negroes were snatched from streetcars and beaten; gangs of hoodlums roamed the Negro neighborhood, shooting at random. Instead of the occasional bombings of two years before, this was a pogrom. But the Negroes fought back.…
One result of the Riot was an increased tendency on the part of white Chicagoans to view Negroes as a “problem.” The rapid influx from the South had stimulated awareness of their presence. The elections of 1915 and 1917 had indicated their growing political power in the Republican machine—a circumstance viewed with apprehension by both the Democratic politicians and the “good government” forces. Now the Riot, the screaming headlines in the papers, the militia patrolling the streets with fixed bayonets, and the accompanying hysteria imbedded the “Negro problem” deeply in the city’s consciousness.
Civic leaders, particularly, were concerned. They decided that the disaster demanded study, so Governor Lowden appointed the non-partisan, interracial Chicago Commission on Race Relations to investigate the causes of the Riot and to make recommendations.…
The Commission was very specific in its charges and did not hesitate to allocate responsibility for the conditions which produced the Riot. Even governmental agencies were asked to assume their share of the blame. To the police, militia, state’s attorney, and courts, the Commission recommended the correction of “gross inequalities of protection” at beaches and playgrounds and during riots; rebuked the courts for facetiousness in dealing with Negro cases, and the police for unfair discrimination in arrests.… The City Council and administrative boards were asked to be more vigilant in the condemnation and razing of “all houses unfit for human habitation, many of which the Commission has found to exist in the Negro residence areas.” In such matters as rubbish and garbage disposal, as well as street repair, Negro communities were said to be shamefully neglected. Suggestions were made that more adequate recreational facilities be extended to Negro neighborhoods, but also that Negroes should be protected in their right to use public facilities anywhere in the city.
The Board of Education was asked to exercise special care in selecting principals and teachers in Negro communities; to alleviate overcrowding and double-shift schools; to enforce more carefully the regulations regarding truancy and work-permits for minors, and to establish adequate night schools. Restaurants, theaters, stores, and other places of public accommodation were informed that “Negroes are entitled by law to the same treatment as other persons” and were urged to govern their policies and actions accordingly.
Employers and labor organizations were admonished in some detail against the use of Negroes as strike-breakers and against excluding them from unions and industries.…
As to the struggle for living space, a section of the report directed toward the white members of the public reiterated the statement that Negroes were entitled to live anywhere in the city. It pointed out several neighborhoods where they had lived harmoniously with white neighbors for years, insisted that property depreciation in Negro areas was often due to factors other than Negro occupancy, condemned arbitrary advance of rents, and designated the amount and quality of housing as “an all important factor in Chicago’s race problem.” The final verdict was that “this situation will be made worse by methods tending toward forcible segregation or exclusion of Negroes.”
Not all of the Commission’s advice and criticism was directed at public agencies and white persons, however. The Negro workers who had so recently become industrialized were admonished to “abandon the practices of seeking petty advance payments on wages and the practice of laying off work without good cause.” There was an implied criticism of the colored community, too, in a statement urging Negroes “to contribute more freely of their money and personal effort to the social agencies developed by the public-spirited members of their group; also to contribute to the general social agencies of the community.” Negroes were also asked to protest “vigorously and continuously … against the presence in their residence areas of any vicious resort” and to assist in the prevention of vice and crime.…
In addition to the specific recommendations of the type referred to above, the report proposed a long-range educational program grounded in the belief that “no one, white or Negro, is wholly free from an inheritance of prejudice in feeling and thinking.… Mutual understanding and sympathy … can come completely only after the disappearance of prejudice. Thus the remedy is necessarily slow.”
The long, slow river of leaving.
CHAPTER 2
AUGUST 1983 • RUBY 45, LIDA 23, LOVE 4
FOR ALMOST THREE years, Lida didn’t hear from Marcus. Love could walk up the stairs on his own now, holding the rungs under the handrail. Ruby had given up on her new line of clothing after the majority of it was returned to her as remainder from the department stores. She’d applied for the civil-service exam but could not read and write well enough to pass it. She took the first jobs offered to her: at the age of forty-five, Ruby worked as a crossing guard for Prescott Elementary from two to four every day and then went to the Calison Calculator Company on San Pablo to clean the offices from six to eleven. This allowed her to spend mornings with Love.
In the afternoons, Love stayed home by himself until Lida got back from Sears. He watched TV most of that time. The TV was set right in front of the living room window, and he sat on an oval rug two feet away. Lida left pretzels for him to eat, and he sat for most of the afternoon with a pretzel in his mouth, his tongue jutting in and around it, licking off the salt.
Some days he watched the raindrops on the windows, the tapping all around him. He’d kneel on a chair and put his finger against the pane, touching the drops from the inside, following them as they slid to the bottom. The first time there was thunder, it rattled the glass and he ran to the couch and put the pillows over his head until he fell asleep.
A million little events transpired every day that he never found the words to talk about with anyone else. In the middle of the afternoon, during Electric Company, the mailman walked up the stairs to the porch, and then the mail dropped through onto the floor. One time, a truck pulled up outside. A man carried a package to the door and knocked. Love stood in front of the door and waited for the package to come through the door. When the man stopped knocking, Love looked through the metal slot and saw the truck drive away.
Every day after Spiderman, kids walked down the block coming home from school. Some waved at him through the window, most ignored him, and a few others stuck their tongues out at him. He liked these kids the best because they paid him the most attention: if he stuck his tongue out at them, they’d point their middle fingers up in the air. He looked up to where they were pointing but never saw anything except the clouds and some seagulls.
One time a man came and peed by the steps and left a gold can. Love begged Lida to give him the can when she got home, but she just crumpled it up and threw it away. An
other time two cars crashed, and the men got out and yelled at each other. Then one of the men went to his car, came back, shot the other man, and sped off. The ambulance came, and two men lifted the shot man off the street. Then the police came and started talking to the people who gathered around the accident. They came and knocked on his door, but went away when nobody answered.
One day Love ran out of pretzels and went to get more from the kitchen. He knew where his mother kept them, in a bag in the cupboard over the counter. He climbed up on a chair that got him to the top of the stove and walked across the cold burners onto the counter. His head reached to just below the bottom of the wooden cupboard doors. He reached up and pulled on the brass handle. Inside were shelves of cans and then, above that, a shelf of jars with metal clasps. Each jar contained a different-color food—red beans, white beans, yellow twisty pasta swirls. And behind the jars was the blue bag of pretzels.
He reached up above him blindly, stretching on his tiptoes, pushing aside the jars. His fingers grasped the foil pretzel bag, and when he’d pinched it a little, he pulled it out quickly. As his toes and ankles gave out on him, the bag pulled down the big jar of white beans. He watched it, his mouth open and the bag of pretzels clutched to his chest. The jar fell from the cupboard, down in front of his face, onto the counter, rolled a few inches to the metal stripping, and fell off the counter. It smashed on the floor, beans and glass everywhere. Love stayed still a moment, holding his breath, hoping that it might pull itself together and fly back up to the cupboard. But nothing moved.
He knew he would have to clean it up before his mother came home; some days when he’d messed up, she’d come home and scream at him, which was okay because later she would apologize and hug him and give him a dollar; but other times she would see whatever he’d done—broken plate, spilled juice, pee on the couch, knocked-over lamp—and she’d go straight upstairs and lie on her bed and wouldn’t talk the rest of the night. This was how it was most times now, so he had to clean it up.
