Dreams from My Father (18 page)

“Welcome,” Will said, pumping my hand. “We been wondering when we’d actually get to meet you. Thought maybe Marty just made you up.”

Marty peeked inside the auditorium. “How’s turnout looking?”

“Good so far. Everybody seems to be making their quota. Governor’s people just called to say he’s on his way.”

Marty and Will began walking toward the stage, their heads buried in the evening’s agenda. I started to follow them, but found my path blocked by three black women of indeterminate age. One of them, a pretty woman with orange-tinted hair, introduced herself as Angela, then leaned over to me and whispered, “You’re Barack, aren’t you?”

I nodded.

“You don’t know how glad we are to see you.”

“You really don’t,” the older woman next to Angela said. I offered the woman my hand, and she smiled to show off a gold front tooth. “I’m sorry,” she said, taking my hand, “I’m Shirley.” She gestured toward the last woman, dark and heavyset. “This is Mona. Don’t he look clean-cut, Mona?”

“Sure does,” Mona said with a laugh.

“Don’t get me wrong,” Angela said, her voice still lowered a pitch. “I’ve got nothing against Marty. But the fact is, there’s only so far you can—”

“Hey, Angela!” We looked up to see Marty waving at us from the stage. “You guys can talk to Barack all you want later. Right now I need all of you up here with me.”

The women exchanged knowing looks before Angela turned back to me.

“I guess we better get going,” she said. “But we really do have to talk. Soon.”

“Sure do,” said Mona before the three of them walked away, Angela and Shirley busy chatting away in the front, Mona leisurely bringing up the rear.

The auditorium was almost filled by this time, two thousand people in all, maybe a third of them blacks bused in from the city. At seven o’clock, a choir sang two gospel songs, Will took a roll call of all the churches represented, and a white Lutheran from the suburbs explained the history and mission of CCRC. A procession of speakers then mounted the stage: a black legislator and a white legislator, a Baptist minister and Cardinal Bernardin, and finally the governor, who offered his solemn pledge of support for the new job bank and recited evidence of his tireless efforts on behalf of the working men and women of Illinois.

To my mind the whole thing came off a bit flat, like a political convention or a TV wrestling match. Still, the crowd seemed to be enjoying itself. Some people hoisted bright banners bearing the name of their church. Others broke into boisterous cheers as a friend or relative was recognized from the stage. Seeing all these black and white faces together in one place, I, too, found myself feeling cheered, recognizing in myself the same vision driving Marty, his confidence in the populist impulse and working-class solidarity; his faith that if you could just clear away the politicians and media and bureaucrats and give everybody a seat at the table, then ordinary people could find common ground.

When the rally was over, Marty mentioned that he had to give some people a ride home, so instead of riding with him I decided to take one of the buses heading back to the city. As it turned out, there was an empty seat next to Will on the bus, and in the glow of the freeway lights, he began to tell me a little about himself.

He had grown up in Chicago, he said, and served in Vietnam. After the war, he had found a job as an executive trainee at Continental Illinois Bank and had risen fast, enjoying the trappings of the work—the car, the suits, the downtown office. Then the bank had reorganized and Will was laid off, leaving him shaken and badly in debt. It was the turning point in his life, he said, God’s way of telling him to get his values straight. Rather than look for another job in banking, he turned to Christ. He joined St. Catherine’s parish in West Pullman and took a job as the janitor there. The decision had put some strain on his marriage—his wife was “still adjusting,” he said—but according to Will, the ascetic lifestyle suited his new mission: to spread the Good News and puncture some of the hypocrisy he saw in the church.

“A lot of black folks in the church get mixed up in middle-class attitudes,” Will said. “Think that as long as they follow the letter of Scripture, they don’t need to follow the spirit. Instead of reaching out to people who are hurting, they make them feel unwelcome. They look at people funny unless they’re wearing the right clothes to mass, talk proper and all that. They figure they’re comfortable, so why put themselves out. Well, Christ ain’t about comfort, is he? He preached a social gospel. Took his message to the weak. The downtrodden. And that’s exactly what I tell some of these middle-class Negroes whenever I stand up on Sunday. Tell ’em what they don’t wanna hear.”

“Do they listen?”

“No.” Will chuckled. “But that don’t stop me. It’s like this collar I wear. That really gets some of ’em mad. ‘Collars are for priests,’ they tell me. But see, just ’cause I’m married and can’t be ordained don’t mean I don’t have a calling. Ain’t nothing in the Bible talking about collars. So I go ahead and wear a collar to let people know where I’m coming from.

“In fact, I wore a collar when some of us went to meet with Cardinal Bernardin about a month back. Everyone was real uptight about it. Then they got upset when I called the Cardinal ‘Joe’ instead of ‘Your Holiness.’ But you know, Bernardin was cool. He’s a spiritual man. I could tell we understood each other. It’s these rules again that keep us apart—rules of men, not rules of God. See, Barack, I’m in the Catholic church, but I was raised a Baptist. Could’ve joined a Methodist church, Pentecostal, whatever, just as easy. St. Catherine’s is just where God happened to send me. And He cares more about whether I’m about the business of helping others than whether I’m straight on my catechisms.”

I nodded, deciding not to ask what a catechism was. In Indonesia, I had spent two years at a Muslim school, two years at a Catholic school. In the Muslim school, the teacher wrote to tell my mother that I made faces during Koranic studies. My mother wasn’t overly concerned. “Be respectful,” she’d said. In the Catholic school, when it came time to pray, I would pretend to close my eyes, then peek around the room. Nothing happened. No angels descended. Just a parched old nun and thirty brown children, muttering words. Sometimes the nun would catch me, and her stern look would force my lids back shut. But that didn’t change how I felt inside. I felt that way now, listening to Will; my silence was like closing my eyes.

The bus came to a stop in the church parking lot, and Will walked to the front of the bus. He thanked everybody for coming and urged them to stay involved. “It’s a long road we’re traveling,” he said, “but tonight showed me what we can do when we put our minds to it. That good feeling you got right now, we got to keep it going till we got this neighborhood back on its feet.”

A few people smiled and offered an amen. But as I stepped off the bus, I heard a woman behind me whispering to her friend, “I don’t need to hear about the neighborhood, girl. Where these jobs they talking about?”

The day after the rally, Marty decided it was time for me to do some real work, and he handed me a long list of people to interview. Find out their self-interest, he said. That’s why people become involved in organizing—because they think they’ll get something out of it. Once I found an issue enough people cared about, I could take them into action. With enough actions, I could start to build power.

Issues, action, power, self-interest. I liked these concepts. They bespoke a certain hardheadedness, a worldly lack of sentiment; politics, not religion. For the next three weeks, I worked day and night, setting up and conducting my interviews. It was harder than I’d expected. There was the internal resistance I felt whenever I picked up the phone to set up the interviews, as images of Gramps’s insurance sales calls crept into my mind: the impatience that waited at the other end of the line, the empty feeling of messages left unreturned. Most of my appointments were in the evening, home visits, and the people were tired after a full day’s work. Sometimes I would arrive only to find that the person had forgotten our appointment, and I’d have to remind him or her of who I was as I was eyed suspiciously from behind a half-opened door.

Still, these were minor difficulties. Once they were overcome, I found that people didn’t mind a chance to air their opinions about a do-nothing alderman or the neighbor who refused to mow his lawn. The more interviews I did, the more I began to hear certain recurring themes. I learned, for example, that most of the people in the area had been raised farther north or on Chicago’s West Side, in the cramped black enclaves that restrictive covenants had created for most of the city’s history. The people I talked to had some fond memories of that self-contained world, but they also remembered the absence of heat and light and space to breathe—that, and the sight of their parents grinding out life in physical labor.

A few had followed their parents into the steel mills or onto the assembly line. But many more had found jobs as mail carriers, bus drivers, teachers, and social workers, taking advantage of the more rigorous enforcement of antidiscrimination laws in the public sector. Such jobs had benefits and provided enough security to think about taking on a mortgage. With the passage of fair housing laws, they began to buy homes, one at a time, in Roseland and other white neighborhoods. Not because they were necessarily interested in mingling with whites, they insisted, but because the houses there were affordable, with small yards for their children; because the schools were better and the stores cheaper, and maybe just because they could.

Often, as I listened to these stories, I would find myself reminded of the stories that Gramps and Toot and my mother had told—stories of hardship and migration, the drive for something better. But there was an inescapable difference between what I was now hearing and what I remembered, as if the images of my childhood had been run in reverse. In these new stories, For Sale signs cropped up like dandelions under a summer sun. Stones flew through windows and the strained voices of anxious parents could be heard calling children indoors from innocent games. Entire blocks turned over in less than six months; entire neighborhoods in less than five years.

In these stories, wherever black and white met, the result was sure to be anger and grief.

The area had never fully recovered from this racial upheaval. The stores and banks had left with their white customers, causing main thoroughfares to decompose. City services had declined. Still, when the blacks who’d now lived in their homes for ten or fifteen years looked back on the way things had turned out, they did so with some measure of satisfaction. On the strength of two incomes, they had paid off house notes and car notes, maybe college educations for the sons or daughters whose graduation pictures filled every mantelpiece. They had kept their homes up and kept their children off the streets; they had formed block clubs to make sure that others did too.

It was when they spoke of the future that a certain disquiet entered their voices. They would mention a cousin or sibling who came by every so often asking for money; or an adult child, unemployed, who still lived at home. Even the success of those children who’d made it through college and into the white-collar world harbored within it an element of loss—the better these children did, the more likely they were to move away. In their place, younger, less stable families moved in, the second wave of migrants from poorer neighborhoods, newcomers who couldn’t always afford to keep up with their mortgage payments or invest in periodic maintenance. Car thefts were up; the leafy parks were empty. People began to spend more time inside; they invested in elaborate wrought-iron doors; they wondered if they could afford to sell at a loss and retire to a warmer climate, perhaps move back to the South.

So despite the deserved sense of accomplishment these men and women felt, despite the irrefutable evidence of their own progress, our conversations were marked by another, more ominous strain. The boarded-up homes, the decaying storefronts, the aging church rolls, kids from unknown families who swaggered down the streets—loud congregations of teenage boys, teenage girls feeding potato chips to crying toddlers, the discarded wrappers tumbling down the block—all of it whispered painful truths, told them the progress they’d found was ephemeral, rooted in thin soil; that it might not even last their lifetimes.

And it was this dual sense, of individual advancement and collective decline, that I thought accounted for some of the attitudes agitating Will when we’d spoken the night of the rally. I heard it in the excessive pride some of the men took in the well-stocked bars they’d built in their basements, with the lava lamps and the mirrored walls. In the protective plastic that the women kept over their spotless carpets and sofas. In all of it, one saw a determined effort to shore up the belief that things had in fact changed, if only some people would start acting right. “I try to avoid driving through Roseland when I can,” a woman from neighboring Washington Heights explained to me one evening. “People down there are just rougher. You can see it in the way they keep up their homes. You didn’t see things like that when the white folks still lived there.”

Distinctions between neighborhoods, then blocks, then finally neighbors within a block; attempts to cordon off, control the decay. One thing I noticed, though. The woman so concerned with the cruder habits of her neighbors had a picture of Harold in her kitchen, right next to the sampler of the Twenty-third Psalm. So did the young man who lived in the crumbling apartment a few blocks away and was trying to make ends meet by mixing records at dance parties. As it had for the men in Smitty’s barbershop, the election had given both these people a new idea of themselves. Or maybe it was an old idea, born of a simpler time. Harold was something they still held in common: Like my idea of organizing, he held out an offer of collective redemption.

I tossed my third-week report onto Marty’s desk and took a seat as he read it through.

“Not bad,” he said when he was finished.