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  In pleasant weather, Mom walked arm-in-arm with her mother, quietly talking while we kids ran around on the wide lawns. Dad infused some fun into the long day by letting Paul and me (twelve and nine respectively) each take turns at the wheel, teaching us to drive on mostly empty roads within the grounds.

  After about an hour, we all met Mom to say goodbye to Grandma. She gave us flat-lipped kisses, a wan smile, and waved limply as she was led back by an aide down a long hallway. She seemed content.

  On the way home, we usually stopped for dinner at a roadside diner, its neon sign blinking, “EAT.” And we did! We seldom ate at restaurants and relished the kind of food Mom rarely cooked. Paul ordered an open-faced roast-beef sandwich with gravy on white bread. Billy and I ordered burgers with everything, a side of fries, and milkshakes. We enjoyed the family time and conversation, but afterward, torpid from the meal, we still had at least an hour more to drive home, always in the dark, from fall to spring.

  In her zeal to do the very best for her mother, Mom had chosen an institution so far distant that visiting Grandma was a burden on everyone. We kids had homework and school activities; Dad had little time at home. That November, Mom drove to and from Manteno alone—three hours to brood and curry resentment, which she dumped into a letter to Dad that very evening.

  November 23, 1958

  Dear Fred,

  After we were on our feet again financially and we didn’t need that room on the first floor for the income, if you had been the first to say, “Let’s give that room to Mama now—she’s helped us a lot,”

  I would have loved you more.

  Anytime we wanted to go out, we could go, and Mama would watch the children. We didn’t say, “Would you please watch the children,” we just went. I said, “Thank you, Mama,” but if you had ever said, “It’s swell of Mama to take care of the kids”—I would have loved you more.

  Now that Mama is in the hospital, if you were to say, “Mama would probably enjoy seeing us—suppose I drive you and the kids out there this Sunday, and maybe we could bring her something. She’s probably lonesome and has no one but us”— If you had said that, my dear, instead of regretting the “wasted” day, I would have loved you more.

  Somehow, someday, if Linda is married and her husband is “nice” to me as you were always “nice” to Mama, perhaps I’ll die of a broken heart.

  Love and tears,

  Lillian

  When I read the carbon copy of this letter, saved by Mom, I nearly wept at her blind injustice. I can only imagine what prompted her to write such unfair accusations. Perhaps Mom couldn’t bear alone the guilt she must have felt for not being able to cure her mother, and, to ease her own suffering, passed the blame onto Dad. He surely felt the sting of Mom’s cruel condemnation.

  He could have written a similarly toned letter, wishing for perhaps a smidgen of appreciation from Mom for fifteen years of tolerating Grandma K’s psychotic outbursts, her vitriolic, irascible, and dangerous behavior. But of course, Dad would have said nothing. Nurturing his own resentment, he would have withdrawn further from his wife, just as he had from his mother’s incessant condemnation. More bricks were added to a wall of bitterness, pushing them apart.

  CHAPTER 23: Black and White

  Dunk Tank, Riverview Amusement Park, Chicago, Illinois, http://livinghistoryofillinois.com.

  Despite the constant stress created by Grandma K’s mental illness, Dad’s travel, and the nonstop work on the rooming house, my parents somehow found time for family fun. Both when Grandma lived with us and after she was in Manteno State Hospital, Dad, Mom, and we kids often piled into our maroon Chevy and drove a few miles to Riverview, billed as the “World’s Largest Amusement Park.” Riverview had dozens of rides, including steep, screeching roller coasters, one so wild that the park displayed a whole trunk of clip-on earrings that tore off women’s ears when the “Bobs” careened around curves. A set of parachutes slowly hoisted riders, who peered down at the people below shrinking to bug size. Gut-churning fear built as the chutes rose … and rose … and rose—until they released with a sudden, violent jolt, dropping screaming passengers to earth, their stomachs left somewhere above.

  Scores of barkers called out to visitors walking along the midway, “Try your luck! Just hit the bottle in three tries! Hey, young man, don’t you want to win this big teddy bear for your girlfriend?” One of the games encouraged contestants to throw balls at a target, which, when hit, dumped a black man into a tank of water. Over the years, it had been called variously, the “Nigger Dip,” the “Dark Town Tangos,” the “Chocolate Drops,” the “African Dip,” and finally, the “Dip.”36 African American men were hired to taunt passing white men, getting many so riled up with insults that the visitors bought ticket after ticket. “Hey, little man,” jeered the large black man behind the high wire surrounding his drop seat, to a short guy. “I bet you can’t hit the side of a barn!” He attacked the man’s diminutive size, pea brain— you name it.

  Shouting racist epithets, the white man pulled back his arm and threw the ball with such fury, the target vibrated for seconds after the hit. It was obvious to me that the dunk-tank guy kept insults flying to make sure ticket sales were brisk. Dad made a few throws at the target but then walked away. He understood the psychology and wasn’t going to waste his money.

  My stomach went queasy watching the white men throw with such anger—red-faced, veins popping, enraged at being insulted by a black man. Surely, I felt, the black men’s pride was wounded by the nasty comments and by repeated dunkings, even though they gamely leaped back onto their seat, dripping wet, and started right in on the next dupe.

  The game was a perfect metaphor for prevalent racist attitudes seldom questioned by whites at the time. Blacks and whites were thoroughly segregated: by neighborhood, by opportunity, by the media, and even at our biggest amusement park. At the dunk tank, only blacks were dunked, and I saw only whites do the dunking.

  Dunk Tank, Riverview Amusement Park, Chicago, circa 1921, with permission of Derek Gee and Ralph Lopez, authors of Laugh Your Troubles Away: The Complete History of Riverview Park.

  Chicago’s prevailing racist attitudes were at work in our family as well. Whenever a tenant moved out, Mom used a two-pronged approach to find a new tenant. She advertised in the Chicago Tribune classified section and also hung a “For Rent” sign on the front door. At home, I was playing with my dolls on the colorful hooked rug Dad had completed during one of his travels, when the bell rang. Walking briskly past me, Mom disappeared around the corner into our short front hallway. I heard the twist of the knob, the creak of the front door opening. “Hello, ma’am. We’re interested in the apartment you have for rent,” a woman’s voice drawled.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” Mom responded in a polite tone, “but we don’t rent to colored. Sorry.”

  There was a mumbled response. Mom said, “Goodbye,” and the door shut.

  Heart pounding, my face went hot. My mother’s words, I felt, heaped pain and insult on the woman at the door. When Mom reentered the living room, I looked up from brushing my doll’s golden hair and asked, “Mommy, why did you say that—that you don’t rent to colored? Didn’t that hurt that lady’s feelings?”

  Very matter-of-factly, Mom gazed down at me and explained, “Linda, we can’t rent to colored. If we did, then the whole neighborhood would go colored, and we would lose our house. This is how we make a living.”

  It was the same reasoning Mom gave a few years later, when she was planning a birthday party for me. I wanted to invite Stephanie, an African American friend I often played with at recess in my first-grade class. Stephanie was smart and fun, but still, I knew to ask if I could invite her, instead of just giving Mom her name with those of the other girls. Mom said no. “If people see a colored girl coming into our house, they might think she lives here, and then there could be trouble.”

  When I passed out the invitations in the classroom, I could hardly look at Stephanie, I felt so downright mea
n. She held my eyes with clear and bitter understanding as I passed her desk. She said, “You only invite those little curly-haired girls, don’t you?” I wasn’t sure why she used those words, but I knew she meant “white.” I mumbled something of an excuse, my stomach twisting, wishing I could sink into the floor. Nothing I said could undo the insult.

  I couldn’t make the connection between my six-year-old friend coming to our house and the idea of trouble. I was as yet unschooled in how deeply whites felt the threat that blacks posed to their communities—that an African American moving nearby jeopardized everything for which the whites had worked and sacrificed.

  Mom may have heard of the violent mob action that accompanied blacks entering white neighborhoods in the previous few years, the kinds of attacks that could very well target our home. In 1949, the year we moved into our two-flat, it took only a rumor of African Americans entering a neighborhood to spawn a white riot. In Englewood, on Chicago’s South Side, a local labor organizer invited a few black people to the house for a meeting. A neighbor, seeing African Americans entering the home, assumed it was being “sold to niggers.” Up to ten thousand whites rioted for four days, pelting the property with stones and beating bystanders. That violence exploded over mere speculation. An NAACP memo documented, between 1949 and 1951, three bombings, ten actual—and eleven attempted—incidents of arson, and “at least eighty-one other incidents of terrorism or intimidation” against blacks.37

  The federal government had created redlining, which caused the value of whites’ homes to fall; fear of losing equity in their homes exacerbated whites’ racism and maintained segregation of the races, creating a vicious cycle of stereotyping. Chicago whites had few ways to get to know African Americans as individuals, and prejudice ruled. Whites presumed that blacks would let their property deteriorate, that they would bring dilapidation to their community, no matter what their class, veteran status, or education. That, in turn, ensured that blacks were terrorized out of white neighborhoods, continuing the separation of the races.

  In Mom’s letter to Dad in 1953, in which she had related the dire warnings from her departing tenant, Birchler, about how North Lawndale had become “mostly colored,” she also related her concern about another group:

  You know that rooming house the Birchlers are living in? It really tears down our neighborhood because they take all trashy people in, and of course, you know how the front windows look—trashy. Birchler told me the building is just about infested with hillbillies and a lot of the roomers are drunks, let the bathtub overflow, etc.

  My mother recognized as early as 1953 that all was not well with the neighborhood, but my parents’ hectic lives precluded action. By the latter 1950s, the large apartment building at the end of our block was becoming increasingly populated by “hillbillies,” a word my parents only used for those southern migrants with a slovenly lifestyle.

  Many of the children’s faces and clothes were a dusty gray, their ears, neck creases, and fingernails black with grime. Billy, open and friendly, invited one such boy to play, maybe having met him in the alley. The kid thanked my brother by stealing his piggy bank. Mom somehow got the family phone number and called the boy’s mother, politely explained what had happened, and requested that the bank be returned. “I ain’t responsible for my kid’s debt!” was the defiant rejoinder, delivered in a virtually unintelligible southern twang, followed by a curt hang-up.

  In sixth grade, a six-foot-two boy with a strong southern accent, who was clearly older than the other classmates, said to my school friend Stephanie, “Shut up, you nigger,” when she objected to him butting in line ahead of her. My heart thumping with indignation, I cringed and turned to Stephanie, whose mouth twisted with contained anger. She drew herself up and said, “Only low-class people use that word.” He sniggered and mumbled something incomprehensible.

  I put my hand on her shoulder and said, “That boy’s a stupid jerk. He’s so dumb, he’s flunked a bunch of times. Pay no attention to him.” But of course my words couldn’t take away the pain. Smart and pretty, Stephanie undoubtedly had been forced to hear these kinds of insults more than I could have known, from people far less accomplished and classy than she was.

  In my seventh-grade class, a girl from Tennessee disrespected our teacher, who sent her to the principal’s office with a stern rebuke and a call to her mother. Instead of chastising her daughter, the mom charged into our classroom near the end of school the next day, heaped more insults onto the teacher, and stormed out with the girl in tow. We all just sat, mute and stunned.

  Some of our middle-class neighbors caused us trauma as well. When we played catch, badminton, or Ping-Pong, an errant ball or birdie might fly into our neighbor’s yard to the west. The owner, Mrs. Beedle, marched scowling out her back door and snatched up the offending missile. With chin-jutting, silent defiance, she stomped back into her house.

  Bumping into Mrs. Beedle on the street one day, the usual rush of traffic roaring by, Mom greeted her with a friendly “Hello,” then spoke of the toys occasionally landing in the Beedles’ yard. “Mrs. Beedle, why don’t you tell me if something is wrong, so we can work it out?”

  “I have no intention of doing so,” said Mrs. Beedle, glaring at Mom. “You’re the mother. It’s your responsibility to make sure your children do no wrong. And if this doesn’t stop, there’s going to be trouble, and I won’t be the one to have it!” She turned on her heels and walked on, leaving my mother fuming.

  I only learned about Mrs. Beedle’s belligerent confrontation with my mother when I found her letter to Dad, in which she recounted her fury at this obnoxious woman. I was struck by how few of our neighbors were in any way neighborly. I recalled the Stones, the couple who had destroyed my parents’ just-furnished basement apartment with cigarette burns on the couch and their filthy lifestyle, and the alcoholic Mr. Ramis, who had bled all over the sheets. Most of the tenants were decent people, but I realized that white people, no matter how slovenly, nasty, or careless, had no problem finding housing in our community.

  CHAPTER 24: Brothers and Sisters

  Billy with classmates at his Lutheran school, 1963-1964.

  1963

  As our block was integrating in West Garfield Park, a quarter of a million people gathered in the nation’s capital for the August 28 March on Washington, where Martin Luther King gave his iconic “I Have a Dream” speech. In the distance, towering amidst the throngs demanding equality for African Americans, the Washington Monument rose like a giant exclamation point. Our family watched the news that night but heard only a part of King’s speech. “Look at that crowd!” Mom said, staring at the TV.

  “I’ve never seen so many people in one spot,” I said, awe-struck by the sea of bodies pressed shoulder to shoulder, filling every inch of space, starting at King’s podium and stretching far into the distance, past the Washington, DC, mall.

  “The man sure can express himself,” Dad said grudgingly. With his love of words and poetic mind, Dad recognized brilliant writing when he heard it, but he found it hard to reconcile his prejudices with King’s cogent appeals to justice. “He’s a good speaker,” Dad went on, “but that doesn’t mean the time is right.”

  “This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism,” King intoned in his speech, rejoining head-on the common attitude Dad had expressed.

  We gathered in the dining room, which served as our family room, where the broad television, a ubiquitous piece of furniture in middle-class 1960s homes, sat squat at the east side. At fourteen, I absorbed the mesmerizing rhythm of King’s language and his repeated calls for justice, but I was too young to discern their real power—in the cadence of his delivery, his southern preacher’s gift to raise the stakes for the millions of blacks who heard in his inspiring words a call to action; in his repeated references to the Constitution’s promise of freedom and his expanded metaphor of that promise as a “bad check” to the “Negro people,” a check t
he crowd that day had come to cash.

  Just about every sentence in King’s speech is quotable, but one dream, which he had specifically envisioned for Alabama, had some promise of possibility on our block: “I have a dream that one day … little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.”38

  Within days of moving in, the son of our first African American neighbors and my little brother shouted greetings to one another across the yard between them. “Hey!” yelled Billy, hands cupped around his mouth. “What’s your name?”

  “Junior,” came the shout back. “What’s yours?’

  “Billy. Can you come over to play?” Soon, Billy and Junior, both age nine, were hanging out in our yard or playing basketball in the alley. Junior suggested a game he called “Cops and Niggers,” a variation on Cops and Robbers. Both boys, unconcerned about their racial status vis-à-vis one another, took turns at each role. “Now you be the nigger, and I’ll be the cop,” said Junior, and they happily exchanged parts, running and hiding, shooting back and forth, the black character arrested or escaped. The two races of children weren’t the “sisters and brothers” King had envisioned, but for the first time in our lives, whites and blacks, kids and adults, came to know—and like—one another.

  But integration wasn’t all Kumbaya. Just a week before King’s speech, Billy and the boy living in the second-floor apartment rode their bicycles to Madison Street late one afternoon. Earlier in the summer, our garage had been broken into and Billy’s bicycle stolen. The thieves left behind a rusty, falling-apart bike. With Dad’s help, Billy dismantled the bike— pedals, bearings, wheels, chains, etc.—sanded, primed, and spray-painted it black, then reassembled it. It shone like new, and Billy was rightly proud of his summer project.