Dreams from My Father (19 page)

“Not bad?”

“Yeah, not bad. You’re starting to listen. But it’s still too abstract … like you’re taking a survey or something. If you want to organize people, you need to steer away from the peripheral stuff and go towards people’s centers. The stuff that makes them tick. Otherwise, you’ll never form the relationships you need to get them involved.”

The man was starting to get on my nerves. I asked him if he ever worried about becoming too calculating, if the idea of probing people’s psyches and gaining their trust just to build an organization ever felt manipulative. He sighed.

“I’m not a poet, Barack. I’m an organizer.”

What did that mean? I left the office in a foul mood. Later, I had to admit that Marty was right. I still had no idea how I might translate what I was hearing into action. In fact, it wasn’t until I came to the end of my interviews that an opportunity seemed to present itself.

It was during a meeting with Ruby Styles, a stocky woman who worked as an office manager on the north side of the city. We had been talking about her teenage son, Kyle, a bright but diffident boy who was starting to have trouble at school, when she mentioned a rise in local gang activity. One of Kyle’s friends had been shot just last week, she said, right in front of his house. The boy was all right, but now Ruby was worried about her own son’s safety.

My ears perked up; this sounded like self-interest. Over the next few days, I had Ruby introduce me to other parents who shared her fears and felt frustrated over the lackluster police response. When I suggested that we invite the district commander to a neighborhood meeting so the community could air its concerns, everyone agreed; and as we talked about publicity one of the women mentioned that there was a Baptist church on the block where the boy had been shot, and that the pastor there, a Reverend Reynolds, might be willing to make an announcement to his congregation.

It took me a week of phone calls, but when I finally reached Reverend Reynolds, his response seemed promising. He was the president of the local ministerial alliance, he said—“churches coming together to preach the social gospel.” He said that the group would be holding its regular meeting the very next day and that he would be happy to put me on the agenda.

I hung up the phone full of excitement, and arrived at Reverend Reynolds’s church early the next morning. A pair of young women dressed in white gowns and gloves met me in the foyer and showed me to a large conference room where ten or twelve older black men stood talking in a loose circle. A particularly distinguished-looking gentleman came up to greet me. “You must be Brother Obama,” he said, taking my hand. “Reverend Reynolds. You’re just in time—we’re about to start.”

We all sat around a long table, and Reverend Reynolds led us in prayer before offering me the floor. Suppressing my nerves, I told the ministers about the increased gang activity and the meeting we had planned, and passed out flyers for them to distribute in their congregations. “With your leadership,” I said, warming up to my subject, “this can be a first step towards cooperation on all kinds of issues. Fixing the schools. Bringing jobs back into the neighborhood …”

Just as I passed out the last flyers, a tall, pecan-colored man entered the room. He wore a blue, double-breasted suit and a large gold cross against his scarlet tie. His hair was straightened and swept back in a pompadour.

“Brother Smalls, you just missed an excellent presentation,” Reverend Reynolds said. “This young man, Brother Obama, has a plan to organize a meeting about the recent gang shooting.”

Reverend Smalls poured himself a cup of coffee and perused the flyer. “What’s the name of your organization?” he asked me.

“Developing Communities Project.”

“Developing Communities …” His brow knotted. “I think I remember some white man coming around talking about some Developing something or other. Funny-looking guy. Jewish name. You connected to the Catholics?”

I told him that some of the Catholic churches in the area were involved.

“That’s right, I remember now.” Reverend Smalls sipped his coffee and leaned back in his chair. “I told that white man he might as well pack up and get on out of here. We don’t need nothing like this around here.”

“I—”

“Listen … what’s your name again? Obamba? Listen, Obamba, you may mean well. I’m sure you do. But the last thing we need is to join up with a bunch of white money and Catholic churches and Jewish organizers to solve our problems. They’re not interested in us. Shoot, the archdiocese in this city is run by stone-cold racists. Always has been. White folks come in here thinking they know what’s best for us, hiring a buncha high-talking college-educated brothers like yourself who don’t know no better, and all they want to do is take over. It’s all a political thing, and that’s not what this group here is about.”

I stammered that the church had always taken the lead in addressing community issues, but Reverend Smalls just shook his head. “You don’t understand,” he said. “Things have changed with the new mayor. I’ve known the district police commander since he was a beat cop. The aldermen in this area are all committed to black empowerment. Why we need to be protesting and carrying on at our own people? Anybody sitting around this table got a direct line to City Hall. Fred, didn’t you just talk to the alderman about getting that permit for your parking lot?”

The rest of the room had grown quiet. Reverend Reynolds cleared his throat. “The man’s new around here, Charles. He’s just trying to help.”

Reverend Smalls smiled and patted me on the shoulder. “Don’t misunderstand me now. Like I said, I know you mean well. We need some young blood to help out with the cause. All I’m saying is that right now you’re on the wrong side of the battle.”

I sat there, roasting like a pig on a spit, as the pastors went on to discuss a joint Thanksgiving service in the park across the street. When the meeting was over, Reverend Reynolds and a few of the others thanked me for coming.

“Don’t take Charles too seriously,” one of them advised. “He can be a little strong sometimes.” But I noticed that none of them left with my flyers; and later in the week, when I tried to call some of the ministers back, their secretaries kept telling me they were gone for the day.

We went forward with our police meeting, which proved a small disaster. Only thirteen people showed up, scattered across rows of empty chairs. The district commander canceled on us, sending a community relations officer instead. Every few minutes an older couple walked in looking for the Bingo game. I spent most of the evening directing this wayward traffic upstairs, while Ruby sat glumly onstage, listening to the policeman lecture about the need for parental discipline.

About halfway through the meeting, Marty arrived.

After it was over, he came up and put a hand on my shoulder.

“Feels like shit, huh?”

It did. He helped me clean up, then took me out for coffee and pointed out some of my mistakes. The problem of gangs was too general to make an impression on people—issues had to be made concrete, specific, and winnable. I should have prepared Ruby more carefully—and set out fewer chairs. Most important, I needed to spend more time getting to know the leaders in the community; flyers couldn’t pull people out on a rainy night.

“That reminds me,” he said as we stood up to go. “Whatever happened to those pastors you were supposed to be meeting with?”

I told him about Reverend Smalls. He started to laugh. “Guess it’s a good thing I didn’t tag along, huh?”

I wasn’t amused. “Why didn’t you warn me about Smalls?”

“I did warn you,” Marty said, opening the door to his car. “I told you Chicago’s polarized and that politicians use it to their own advantage. That’s all Smalls is—a politician who happens to wear a collar. Anyway, it’s not the end of the world. You should just be glad you learned your lesson early.”

Yes, but which lesson? Watching Marty drive away, I thought back to the day of the rally: the sound of Smitty’s voice in the barbershop; the rows of black and white faces in the school auditorium, there because of the factory’s desolation and Marty’s own sense of betrayal; the cardinal, a small, pale, unassuming man in a black robe and glasses, smiling onstage as Will swallowed him up in a big bear hug; Will, so certain that the two men understood each other.

Each image carried its own lesson, each was subject to differing interpretations. For there were many churches, many faiths. There were times, perhaps, when those faiths seemed to converge—the crowd in front of the Lincoln Memorial, the Freedom Riders at the lunch counter. But such moments were partial, fragmentary. With our eyes closed, we uttered the same words, but in our hearts we each prayed to our own masters; we each remained locked in our own memories; we all clung to our own foolish magic.

A man like Smalls understood that, I thought. He understood that the men in the barbershop didn’t want the victory of Harold’s election—their victory—qualified. They wouldn’t want to hear that their problems were more complicated than a group of devious white aldermen, or that their redemption was incomplete. Both Marty and Smalls knew that in politics, like religion, power lay in certainty—and that one man’s certainty always threatened another’s.

I realized then, standing in an empty McDonald’s parking lot in the South Side of Chicago, that I was a heretic. Or worse—for even a heretic must believe in something, if nothing more than the truth of his own doubt.

CHAPTER NINE

T
HE
A
LTGELD
G
ARDENS PUBLIC
housing project sat at Chicago’s southernmost edge: two thousand apartments arranged in a series of two-story brick buildings with army-green doors and grimy mock shutters. Everybody in the area referred to Altgeld as “the Gardens” for short, although it wasn’t until later that I considered the irony of the name, its evocation of something fresh and well tended—a sanctified earth.

True, there was a grove of trees just south of the project, and running south and west of that was the Calumet River, where you could sometimes see men flick fishing lines lazily into darkening waters. But the fish that swam those waters were often strangely discolored, with cataract eyes and lumps behind their gills. People ate their catch only if they had to.

To the east, on the other side of the expressway, was the Lake Calumet landfill, the largest in the Midwest.

And to the north, directly across the street, was the Metropolitan Sanitary District’s sewage treatment plant. The people of Altgeld couldn’t see the plant or the open-air vats that went on for close to a mile; as part of a recent beautification effort, the district maintained a long wall of earth in front of the facility, dotted with hastily planted saplings that refused to grow month after month, like hairs swept across a bald man’s head. But officials could do nothing to hide the smell—a heavy, putrid odor that varied in strength depending on the temperature and the wind’s direction, and seeped through windows no matter how tightly they were shut.

The stench, the toxins, the empty, uninhabited landscape. For close to a century, the few square miles surrounding Altgeld had taken in the offal of scores of factories, the price people had paid for their high-wage jobs. Now that the jobs were gone, and those people that could had already left, it seemed only natural to use the land as a dump.

A dump—and a place to house poor blacks. Altgeld may have been unique in its physical isolation, but it shared with the city’s other projects a common history: the dreams of reformers to build decent housing for the poor; the politics that had concentrated such housing away from white neighborhoods, and prevented working families from living there; the use of the Chicago Housing Authority—the CHA—as a patronage trough; the subsequent mismanagement and neglect. It wasn’t as bad as Chicago’s high-rise projects yet, the Robert Taylors and Cabrini Greens, with their ink-black stairwells and urine-stained lobbies and random shootings. Altgeld’s occupancy rate held steady at ninety percent, and if you went inside the apartments, you would more often than not find them well-kept, with small touches—a patterned cloth thrown over torn upholstery, an old calendar left hanging on the wall for its tropical beach scenes—that expressed the lingering idea of home.

Still, everything about the Gardens seemed in a perpetual state of disrepair. Ceilings crumbled. Pipes burst. Toilets backed up. Muddy tire tracks branded the small, brown lawns strewn with empty flower planters—broken, tilted, half buried. The CHA maintenance crews had stopped even pretending that repairs would happen any time soon. So that most children in Altgeld grew up without ever having seen a garden. Children who could see only that things were used up, and that there was a certain pleasure in speeding up the decay.

I took the turn into Altgeld at 131st and came to a stop in front of Our Lady of the Gardens Church, a flat brick building toward the rear of the development. I was there to meet some of our key leaders, to talk about the problems in our organizing effort, and how we might get things back on track. But as I cut off the engine and started reaching for my briefcase, something stopped me short. The view, perhaps; the choking gray sky. I closed my eyes and leaned my head against the car seat, feeling like the first mate on a sinking ship.

Over two months had passed since the botched police meeting, and things had gone badly. There had been no marches, no sit-ins, no freedom songs. Just a series of miscues and misunderstandings, tedium and stress. Part of the problem was our base, which—in the city, at least—had never been large: eight Catholic parishes flung across several neighborhoods, all with black congregations but all led by white priests. They were isolated men, these priests, mostly of Polish or Irish descent, men who had entered the seminary in the sixties intending to serve the poor and heal racial wounds but who lacked the zeal of their missionary forefathers; kinder men, perhaps better men, but also softer for their modernity. They had seen their sermons of brotherhood and goodwill trampled under the stampede of white flight, their efforts at recruiting new members met with suspicion by the dark faces—mostly Baptist, Methodist, Pentecostal—now surrounding their churches. Marty had convinced them that organizing would break this isolation, that it would not only stop the neighborhoods’ decline but also reenergize their own parishes and rekindle their spirits. That hope had been fragile, though, and by the time I met with them they had already resigned themselves to their disappointments.

“The truth is,” one of the priests told me, “most of us out here are looking to get a transfer. The only reason I’m still around is that nobody’s willing to replace me.”

Morale was even worse among the laity, black folks like Angela, Shirley, and Mona, the three women I’d met at the rally. They were spirited, good-humored women, those three, women who—without husbands to help—somehow managed to raise sons and daughters, juggle an assortment of part-time jobs and small business schemes, and organize Girl Scout troops, fashion shows, and summer camps for the parade of children that wandered through the church every day. Since none of the three actually lived in Altgeld—they all owned small houses just west of the project—I had asked them once what motivated them to do what they did. Before I could finish the question, they had all rolled their eyes as if on cue.

“Watch out, girl,” Angela told Shirley, causing Mona to chuckle merrily. “Barack’s about to interview you. He’s got that look.”

And Shirley said, “We’re just a bunch of bored middle-aged women, Barack, with nothing better to do with our time. But”—and here Shirley threw a hand onto her bony hip and raised her cigarette to her lips like a movie star—“if Mr. Right comes along, then watch out! It’s good-bye Altgeld, hello Monte Carlo!”

I hadn’t heard any jokes from them lately, though. All I’d heard were complaints. The women complained that Marty didn’t care about Altgeld. They complained that Marty was arrogant and didn’t listen to their suggestions.

Most of all, they complained about the new job bank that we had announced with such fanfare the night of the rally, but that had turned out to be a bust. As Marty had planned it, a state university out in the suburbs had been assigned to run the program—it was a matter of efficiency, he explained, since the university had the computers already in place. Unfortunately, two months after it was supposed to have started, no one had found work through the program. The computers didn’t work right; the data entry was plagued with errors; people were sent to interview for jobs that didn’t exist. Marty was livid, and at least once a week he would have to drive out to the university, cursing under his breath as he tried to pry answers out of officials who seemed more concerned with next year’s funding cycle. But the women from Altgeld weren’t interested in Marty’s frustrations. All they knew was that $500,000 had gone somewhere, and it wasn’t in their neighborhood. For them, the job bank became yet more evidence that Marty had used them to push a secret agenda, that somehow whites in the suburbs were getting the jobs they’d been promised.

“Marty’s just looking out for his own,” they grumbled.

I had tried my best to mediate the conflict, defending Marty against charges of racism, suggesting to him that he cultivate more tact. Marty told me I was wasting my time. According to him, the only reason Angela and the other leaders in the city were sore was because he’d refused to hire them to run the program. “That’s what ruins a lot of so-called community organizations out here. They start taking government money. They hire big, do-nothing staffs. Pretty soon, they’ve become big patronage operations, with clients to be serviced. Not leaders.
Clients.
To be
serviced.
” He spit the words out, as if they were unclean. “Jesus, it makes you sick just thinking about it.”

And then, seeing the still-fretful look on my face, he added, “If you’re going to do this work, Barack, you’ve got to stop worrying about whether people like you. They won’t.”

Patronage, politics, hurt feelings, racial grievances—they were all of a piece to Marty, distractions from his larger purpose, corruptions of a noble cause. He was still trying to bring the union in then, convinced that they would replenish our ranks, deliver our ship to shore. One day in late September, he had asked Angela and me to join him at a meeting with union officials from LTV Steel, one of the few remaining steel operations in the city. It had taken Marty over a month to set up the meeting, and he was brimming with energy that day, talking at a rapid clip about the company, the union, and new phases in the organizing campaign.

Eventually the president of the local—a young, handsome Irishman who’d been recently elected on a promise of reform—entered the hall, along with two husky black men, the union treasurer and vice-president. After the introductions, we all sat down and Marty made his pitch. The corporation was preparing to get out of the steelmaking business, he said, and wage concessions would only prolong the agony. If the union wanted to preserve jobs, it had to take some new, bold steps. Sit down with the churches and develop a plan for a worker buyout. Negotiate with the city for concessionary utility and tax rates during the transition. Pressure the banks to provide loans that could be used to invest in the new technology needed to make the plant competitive again.

Throughout the monologue, the union officials shifted uneasily in their chairs. Finally the president stood up and told Marty that his ideas merited further study but that right now the union had to focus on making an immediate decision about management’s offer. In the parking lot afterward, Marty looked stunned.

“They’re not interested,” he told me, shaking his head. “Like a bunch of lemmings running towards a cliff.”

I had felt bad for Marty. I had felt worse for Angela. She hadn’t said a word throughout the entire meeting, but as I pulled out of the union parking lot to drive her home, she had turned to me and said, “I didn’t understand a word Marty was saying.”

And I suppose it was then that I understood the difficulty of what Marty had tried to pull off, and the depth of his miscalculation. It wasn’t so much that Angela had missed some of the details of Marty’s presentation; as we continued to talk, it had become apparent that she understood Marty’s proposal at least as well as I did. No, the real meaning of her remark was this: She had come to doubt the relevance to her own situation of keeping the LTV plant open. Organizing with the unions might help the few blacks who remained in the plants keep their jobs; it wouldn’t dent the rolls of the chronically unemployed any time soon. A job bank might help workers who already had skills and experience find something else; it wouldn’t teach the black teenage dropout how to read or compute.

In other words, it was different for black folks. It was different now, just as it had been different for Angela’s grandparents, who’d been barred from the unions, then spat on as scabs; for her parents, who had been kept out of the best patronage jobs that the Machine had to offer in the days before
patronage
became a dirty word. In his eagerness to do battle with the downtown power brokers, the investment bankers in their fancy suits, Marty wanted to wish such differences away as part of an unfortunate past. But for someone like Angela, the past
was
the present; it determined her world with a force infinitely more real than any notions of class solidarity. It explained why more blacks hadn’t been able to move out into the suburbs while the going was still good, why more blacks hadn’t climbed up the ladder into the American dream. It explained why the unemployment in black neighborhoods was more widespread and longstanding, more desperate; and why Angela had no patience with those who wanted to treat black people and white people exactly the same.

It explained Altgeld.

I looked at my watch: ten past two. Time to face the music. I got out of my car and rang the church doorbell. Angela answered, and led me into a room where the other leaders were waiting: Shirley, Mona, Will, and Mary, a quiet, dark-haired white woman who taught elementary school at St. Catherine’s. I apologized for being late and poured myself some coffee.

“So,” I said, taking a seat on the windowsill. “Why all the long faces?”

“We’re quitting,” Angela said.

“Who’s quitting?”

Angela shrugged. “Well … I am, I guess. I can’t speak for everybody else.”

I looked around the room. The other leaders averted their eyes, like a jury that’s delivered an unfavorable verdict.