Our Black Year (3 page)

Initially Austin was a desirable, suburban-like neighborhood that attracted German, Scandinavian, Irish, Italian, and, later, Greek families who were looking to escape from the grittier parts of town. Well served by streetcars and Chicago's subway system—a mostly aboveground network known as the “L,” for elevated—Austin experienced explosive growth during the first few decades of the twentieth century. The population was entirely White until the 1960s, until Blacks started moving to nearby neighborhoods, followed by sleazy real estate agents exploiting the fears of Austin's White residents, sparking “White flight” and racial
strife. Then came the riots, fires, and looting on April 5, 1968, the day after Martin Luther King's assassination in Memphis. Within forty-eight hours an estimated 11 people had been killed, 162 buildings had been destroyed by fire, and 350 people had been arrested for looting. Bulldozers cleared away most of the charred ruins.

Four decades after the riots, on a crystal-bright winter morning, we rolled through, our two toddlers snug in their car seats. The neighborhood looked battered and dangerous, like it had never really recovered. We'd lived in the Chicago area for fifteen years and had been to Austin once or twice. That was plenty. Austin, like much of the West Side, is “Boyz n the Hood,” whereas Oak Park is Norman Rockwell.

When we crossed Austin Boulevard, the border between Oak Park and Chicago, concrete and dilapidated structures with boarded-up windows replaced the lush lawns and tall trees of our suburb. The smiling folks sporting iPods and North Face gear while jogging or dog walking had disappeared. In their stead were tattooed toughs wearing castoffs from the Salvation Army and hanging around the bus shelters that were swathed in graffiti. Drunks stood outside the check-cashing joint on Austin and Chicago Avenue. The antique shops, yoga studios, and coffee and craft shops had become beeper and cell phone supply stores, liquor stores, funeral parlors, and pawn shops. There was nothing warm and inviting about this place. The area felt lifeless, filthy, and hopeless. Beer bottles and garbage were everywhere, even embedded in the snow.

It was a bit scary, but it made me sad too. This is the image most of the country has of Black America. And I wanted America to see the real reasons why the West Side looked like this and the people there suffer the way they do. Still, I wanted to cover my girls' eyes, spin the Trailblazer around, and blast out of there.

When we pulled up to the curb in front of J's, I thought,
What the hell are we doing here?

“You get out,” I told John. “I'm not taking Cara and Cori outside of the car. Look at those guys just standing there.”

A cluster of unsavory types—they could have been bums, drug dealers, gang bangers, or maybe all three—loitered around the doorway.
These kinds of characters are fixtures in poor neighborhoods everywhere, but at least in other areas they're a little more discreet. On the West Side, they were brazen. These dudes had unkempt hair, dirty faces, and bloodshot eyes. They wore casual gear, looked tattered and grubby, and were clearly not going to work anywhere. They weren't talking or shopping; they were just standing around—because that's what drug dealers, pimps, and lookouts do.

They are part of the symbiotic relationship that keeps the impoverished, high-crime neighborhoods of America operational. The folks who are unemployed, depressed, listless, and frustrated know where they can get drugs—either to cope or to resell—because these guys are always there. Desperate store owners need the foot traffic, so they let the criminal activity persist right outside their door because it will bring customers into the store. This is why, in large part, those stores stock alcohol, candy, soda, and other junk food as well as basic dry goods and personal or household products. No one really
shops
at J's; instead, they stop in and buy on impulse. And J's can thank the shaggy street “entrepreneurs” out front, an unofficial marketing team, for the incremental uptick in sales.

Sitting at the curb in our truck, I was the intruder disturbing this delicate balance. The shady characters stared at me, as they did at everybody else, as if I was a threat or prey. I tried to disarm them with a smile. Then I turned to my husband.

“John,” I said, “I'm not going out there.”

After a moment, I exhaled. I knew I had to get out. This was the launch, however unglamorous, of The Project. It wouldn't work too well if I chickened out before it even started. After talking it over we decided that I'd go in alone and John would stay with the girls in the Trailblazer, engine idling, ready for a quick getaway. I gave John a slightly resigned, slightly fearful look and then stared straight ahead as I tried to channel my Liberty City mind-set. Then I pulled on the door handle, stepped on the sidewalk, and moved right by those punks, ignoring their stares.

Two weeks before the launch we researched business directories and collected phone numbers of organizations and individuals who could help us find Black-owned businesses. We also created two lists. One consisted of products (aside from food) that we would need immediately and throughout the year, the kind of stuff I had always bought at the Wal-Mart down the street: pull-up diapers, deodorant, toilet paper. The second list included the few businesses we would need during the early days of the experiment, such as fast-food restaurants, gas stations, a dry cleaner, a refrigerator repairman—our refrigerator was acting up—a grocery store, and a drugstore. Although fast food was not a staple of our family diet, we assumed we'd be eating at Burger King and McDonald's, as they both had impressive track records for franchisee diversity, and we were reasonably sure there were several Black-owned branches near us. In some cases we even tried to plot where these businesses were so we could fit them into our everyday routine as easily as possible. We were optimistic and naive enough to believe we could find what we needed, including restaurants near Oak Park and Oak Brook, the suburb where John worked.

We were trying to be as prepared as possible, but we didn't want to develop an extensive directory of products and businesses because we wanted to experience some uncertainty. The Ebony Experiment was supposed to be an adventure as well as an educational experiment, which included documenting the actual search for Black-owned businesses. Apart from supporting fantastic entrepreneurs, we were going to show that finding them is not so hard.

By the time of the launch we'd met with folks at the Chicago chapter of the National Urban League, a global civil rights organization that focuses on African American progress in business, education, and social programs through economic empowerment. They had given us the names of some Black businesses and entrepreneurs with whom they had been working, including Covenant Bank, located five miles from our home; Quench, a chain of healthy fast-food restaurants; a couple of Popeye's; some general contractors located near Oak Park; and Kimbark Liquor Store in Hyde Park, on the South Side.

When I called J's during one of my informal, prelaunch scouting missions, the woman who answered the phone had that stereotypical slurred speech I call the sleepy mumbles. I'm not trying to be mean here; I know Black folks use an informal style of banter when talking among ourselves. I can talk that way too. But in professional settings I choose not to. And I've come to expect that anyone who owns a business would try to speak as professionally as possible. Although I could barely understand what the woman at J's was saying, I launched into my brief, perky speech anyway.

“Hi, my name is Maggie Anderson,” I'd said, “and we're trying to support Black businesses this year. Could you tell me whether you're Black owned?”

“Yeah, well, I'm Black,” she said.

“Are you the owner?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay. Thank you.”

I wrote down the address of J's Fresh Meats, searched for food stores nearby, and found a second place, Mario's Butcher Shop. It was in the middle of a Black neighborhood, and based on that alone, I thought it might be Black-owned.

J's was Black-owned, for sure, but it was not what I would consider a grocery store. Inside, the space, about forty feet long, was cramped, dirty, and a little foreboding, sort of like the way it feels to walk into an abandoned building. Two more unsavory characters lurked in the aisles; one leaned against a dust-caked ATM machine while the other stood in the middle of the floor. Neither was shopping. They stared at me, looking angry. As I passed I could feel their eyes following me. I kept moving, looking at the goods. Almost nothing here was worth buying. There were no price tags on anything, and there was no meat—fresh or otherwise—at J's Fresh Meats. It had those flip-top freezers, where I could see some ice cream, a few burritos, and frozen pizzas—convenience store crap, basically. In the refrigerator case were sugary drinks, juices, and not much else, not even milk.

I was surprised that being inside J's could trigger that much anxiety in me. Growing up in Liberty City, I'd seen dumps like this on every thoroughfare. The Cuban-owned corner store and the Dominican-owned
7-Eleven always had canned goods, cleaning supplies, junk food, frozen junk food, cheap dried spices, soda, and, most of the time, alcohol. We also had a Jewish-owned liquor store and an Eastern European–owned decrepit grocery mart in the strip mall at the corner. All of those places were where the prostitutes handled their business.

The funny thing was that no Jews lived in our neighborhood, and almost no Europeans. In fact, all the shop owners in our part of town were something other than African American. Beyond draining money from the neighborhood, this was a source of racial tension, exacerbated by the fact that the merchants were openly condescending.

When we wanted real food, we got on the bus and headed to the White or gentrifying neighborhoods with full-service grocery stores stocked with produce, meat, fish, dry goods, fresh bread, and household products. My neighborhood was lucky in that respect: At least we had buses to take us there. Plenty of predominantly Black neighborhoods don't.

The depressing lineup of products on the store shelves in my old neighborhood and in J's is a common component of all food deserts—usually urban, poor neighborhoods with no decent food stores. Mainstream, full-service grocery stores traditionally want to have little to do with predominantly Black neighborhoods. Reasons vary, but the conventional wisdom is that those neighborhoods lack spending power and are dangerous, and that acquiring land is challenging, as is demolishing buildings and site cleanup. Local politics and opposition to commercial development can also play a role.

Regardless, the condition is a prevalent one. In 2008, for example, a report compiled by the New York City Department of City Planning found that “three million New Yorkers live in neighborhoods with high need for grocery stores and supermarkets.” Minorities predominantly inhabit those neighborhoods, including Central and East Harlem as well as the South Bronx. According to the report, “Food dollars are likely being spent by residents in high need areas at discount and convenience stores whose line of food products is limited, of poor quality, and generally more expensive than the same products sold at supermarkets....
These stores do not generally carry produce and meat at affordable prices or at all.”

A 2004 report published in the
American Journal of Public Health
told a similar story. Researchers examined the availability of healthy foods in the minority neighborhood of East Harlem versus a neighboring slice of the city, the predominantly White and affluent Upper East Side, and found that “overall 18 percent of East Harlem stores stocked recommended foods compared with 58 percent of stores in the Upper East Side.” The report also concluded, “East Harlem residents have many more undesirable stores [defined as those having less than one item from five healthy food and beverage groups identified by researchers] than do their affluent neighbors on the Upper East Side.” These disparities may contribute to diabetes in East Harlem, something that the 2008 report also suggested.

After perusing the merchandise at J's, I thought,
Just get something and get out of here
. I grabbed a bag of potato chips, a few other packages of junk food, and diapers. When I got to the cash register, positioned on one of those glass counters with candy inside, I noticed that the clerk, presumably the woman I spoke with on the phone a few days earlier, was petite, tiny even. Her uncombed hair was pulled back in a rubber band. She was a little darker than me, with a small, pretty face, marred somewhat by acne, and she was young, maybe twenty-six.

She was standing on a milk crate. Out of the corner of my eye I caught something moving near its base and looked down to see a pair of unkempt kids—maybe eight and eighteen months old, probably hers—playing on the filthy floor. I also noticed—because it is my habit to look whenever I see a young Black woman who appears to be a mother—that she was not wearing a wedding ring. I glanced back at the woman and asked if she accepted plastic, which she did. This was unusual, as we would later discover. Businesses in Black communities that accept debit and/or credit cards are as rare as a beat cop strolling down the sidewalk.