Redlined Read online

  My life while you are gone is equivalent to seven days per week of one of your weekends. You will never know or understand the hectic weekdays trying to get things done. No wonder you like your job—just pack up and go and forget the house.

  Love,

  Lil

  P.S. Wanna trade places for a couple months?

  In a rare rejoinder, Dad defended himself in a return letter.

  Dear Lil,

  I don’t think that I have ever failed to recognize or appreciate the excessive amount of responsibility, work, and worry that has, because of my work being away from home, chick, and child, been so unceremoniously heaped upon your shoulders… .

  I wonder if you would care to “trade places for a couple months?” I wonder if you would care to be several hundreds of miles from home and loved ones, knowing that one or more are sick and there isn’t a damned thing you can do for them.

  All you’ll have to do is wait till the survey is over or till the weekend comes so that you can snatch a few moments of normal life together with your family, even though all of that time is gladly spent on home activities, only to arrive back in the field Monday morning, so tired from a lack of a good night’s sleep that you can’t get a decent breath of air till after you’ve had a night’s sleep.

  I’m not looking for sympathy. It’s just a little reminder that the hardships of life and livelihood manifest themselves in many forms and are not all one-sided. A trade in places can probably take place with the coming vacation. You and your mother can go someplace for a couple of weeks, and I’ll take care of the house and kids. Enclosed are my last two salary checks. I won’t need them.

  Love,

  Fred

  Mom had plenty of reason to be frustrated at her predicament. Unlike the persistent image of a 1950s housewife, engaged solely in domestic duties, she had a full-time job, managing all the family and business financial details as well as eleven tenants, two living just down the hall, with the bathroom they all shared just steps away from her bedroom door. All of this with her husband gone half the year. Her work nearly doubled the family income. She was a woman ahead of her time, in a society that provided no support for such a dual role.

  But what has struck me most in reading the letters and diaries from this era was Mom’s sad inability to recognize Dad’s efforts in containing her mother’s madness. Mom’s relentless and bitter complaints must have pained him even as he strove to demonstrate his devotion to hearth, home, and loved ones.

  CHAPTER 17: Tenth Anniversary

  Mom with ten mums from Dad for their 10th Anniversary, November 8, 1952.

  1952

  Among Dad’s greatest priorities and joys was planning and executing our yearly vacation, ensuring we’d have at least one week when we could hang out together, day and night, as a family. Our annual destination was Devil’s Lake State Park in Wisconsin. Grandma K never joined us. She could manage by herself for a week (she was self-reliant in daily living, which is why my mother so often depended on her for childcare, housekeeping, and cooking), and Dad probably insisted they have at least a few days of family time without her. On August 16, 1952, we headed north.

  After a six-hour car ride on 1950s highways, we arrived at a cabin in the woods with bunk beds and an outside hand pump. As soon as we settled in, Paul ran to try out the pump, pressing his arm up and down on the lever at a feverish speed, his face set with determination to pump as fast and hard as possible. He seemed fascinated that his own muscles could make water gush forth. At three, I was too puny to even budge the handle, but I wanted to see where the water came from. I stuck my head under the spout while Paul, in his enthusiasm, didn’t miss a pumping beat. He brought the handle full force smack on the bony ridge beside my right eye. Blinded by blood, I ran screaming toward the cabin. Dad flew out the door and scooped me into his arms, Mom right behind him, both of their faces grimaced in fear.

  “What happened?” Dad shouted.

  “Paul pumped my head,” I sobbed.

  “I didn’t do it on purpose!” Paul yelled. “She’s stupid! Just stuck her head under the handle while I was pumping!”

  “For God’s sake!” said Dad. “You have to watch what you’re doing!”

  Dad cradled me in his lap, pressing ice from the cooler against the bloody cut. “Do you think she needs stitches?” asked Mom as she dabbed Mercurochrome on the open wound.

  I wriggled and screamed, “No! No!” I was panicked at the idea of a needle poking through my throbbing skin. Mom and Dad decided I’d be okay, and within half an hour I was running around again with Paul, a large Band-Aid covering my swollen and bruised temple. A scar still reminds me of the accident, but that’s not what I took away from our trip. Walking through the woods, roasting hot dogs and marshmallows over crackling campfires Dad taught us to build, climbing towering bluffs, swimming in the warm lake, listening to Mom read Adventures of Huckleberry Finn around the fire’s dying embers, peering at a night sky blasted with stars—those remembrances will stay with me forever. But having Mom and Dad all to ourselves was the best memory of all.

  During the weeks spanning late October through early November of 1952, Dad’s destination was Kansas City, Kansas. Waking at five in the morning on November 1, Dad added the final touches to city maps for the day’s first four hours. He set aside the rest of the morning to create a special tenth-anniversary gift for Mom.

  He arrived at the local library just as it opened, pulled out a chair at the large wooden refectory table, and sat in the enveloping silence to compose a poem, calling up recollections of their wedding day. After working and reworking his draft, he copied the poem line by line with a fountain pen onto a sheet of crisp parchment paper. Back at the hotel, he preordered ten mums, one for each year they’d been married.

  Early Saturday morning, November 8, he rode the train home, prepared to surprise Mom for their anniversary with his poem, the mums, and a special evening he had planned. They’d eat dinner at a cozy German restaurant, Old Heidelberg, followed by the movie Ivanhoe. The finale for this perfectly planned celebration would be drinks at a favorite haunt from their dating days, Don the Beachcomber’s, in downtown Chicago. Wouldn’t his careful planning show Mom how much he loved her? That he appreciated her weeks alone, handling all the details of family life? That despite their separations, their love was still strong? That he was still part of the family?

  Dad arrived to a sullen November sky, hoping to find his wife in sunny spirits, rather than morose and angry. After entering the front door and setting down his suitcase, he called out, “Hello! I’m home!” Mom came dashing to the living room to greet him, throwing her arms around his neck, kissing his cheeks and mouth over and over.

  She took him by the hand, leading him into the dining room. “Oh, thank you, Fred. The mums arrived, and they’re just beautiful.” Mom saved the little card that came attached to the mums. Decorated with a spray of tiny blue forget-me-nots at the bottom and printed with “On Our Anniversary” at the top, it reads:

  To the dearest little wife and best friend anyone could ever hope for.

  Love, Fred

  A mini-album of black-and-white photographs taken on that day show Mom and Dad posing separately and together in our backyard. Her bouquet of ten robust mums held before her, Mom’s smile and eyes are lively. She’s dressed in a light, wide-collared wool coat with her dark curls swept off her face and lipstick brightening her mouth. Dad wears a suit jacket and tie, and a broad grin. They are ready for a perfect anniversary.

  That afternoon, Grandma K came down with a fever, but Dr. Peterson couldn’t get to the house until after eight o’clock at night. One of the tenants offered to babysit for Paul and me, but for whatever confluence of reasons, my parents decided against going out, abandoning their plans. Dad wrote in his diary simply this: “When Dr. Peterson came, he said that Lil’s mother had another strep throat. We stayed home.”

  Dad doesn’t write about Mom’s reaction, so I can only speculate. Deep d
own, Mom’s paradoxical feelings of fear and love toward her mother would have squirmed and churned in her gut and electrified her subconscious. If Mom went out, would her mother call her a “selfish ingrate,” as she had in the past?

  How can I leave my mother home sick? She was so good to me! Mom likely thought.

  The first hours of strep—consisting of a hot fever and a raw throat—aren’t pleasant, but they’re tolerable for a few hours, and a penicillin shot works fast. Another mother might have said, “It’s your anniversary. Please go out and have fun,” but not Grandma K. Of course, Mom’s mother couldn’t impose a strep throat onto herself, but it was another joyful occasion ruined by my grandmother.

  Dad would have left the decision up to Mom. He knew that if he urged her to go out, she would have been distracted and worried, unable to enjoy herself. Did she apologize to Dad—or just expect him to understand?

  She surely noticed his crestfallen face: his eyes first grave, watching, waiting; then, when Mom said they shouldn’t go out, he would have turned away, his lips set into a tight line; and Mom would have read the disappointment in his slumped shoulders, his silent stoicism. Perhaps she also thought she saw blame, and she would have stored away a painful reprimand. Dad would not have made any overt accusations, but still, maybe Mom felt that Dad faulted both her mother and her for ruining the evening. How unfair! What was she to do with her mother feverish—and needing her?

  The only thing for Dad to do after Dr. Peterson left was to give Mom his poem honoring their ten years of marriage.

  To My Wife, Lillian, on Our Tenth Wedding Anniversary November 8, 1952

  The first four stanzas recall funny and poignant details of their wedding day. It ends like this:

  Though we’ve gone through much together,

  In sunshine and in stormy weather,

  Our spirits still are strong.

  Paul and Linda helped our travel

  Although to try these to unravel

  Calls more for patience, less of thong.

  And so ten years we’ve had each other

  As wife and husband, father, mother,

  And sweethearts from the start.

  You’ve meant the world and all that’s in it

  And if I’d twice more to begin it

  You’d still be my sweetheart.

  For years afterward, they often brought out the poem to share with us kids. I loved to hear it, loved to see how proud of their love they were. Dad gave a modest shrug and a pleased smile. I liked seeing Mom, basking in the devotion of his words; how by reading it to us kids, they honored their marriage. Surely my emotional mom cried after reading Dad’s words that night in 1952; surely they made love.

  It had to be moments like these that kept the spark alive, and why, as a child, I never discerned my mother’s unhappiness lurking beneath the unfailing cooperation and teamwork I witnessed when Dad was home.

  If I take away anything from what I discovered in the letters and diaries, it’s that their inability to talk openly and non-judgmentally about the issues they faced was the greatest threat to their relationship.

  I know they never even considered seeing a therapist or a marriage counselor at that time. I recall them referring to people who did such things as “weak.” Self-reliant people should solve their own problems. But I understand now that, without counseling, an open discussion between them would have been impossible.

  The years ahead would bring new worries, undermining my parents’ happiness further as racist housing policies and city neglect chipped away at our neighborhood, where they had staked their marital and financial future.

  CHAPTER 18: A Vision of Decline

  Grandma K with Dad, Mom, Linda, Paul, and Billy in our living room, 1954.

  1953

  For more than three years, my parents had used every waking hour to make a success of their rooming house, the combination of excessive toil and Dad’s travel tearing at their love, unraveling their relationship thread by thread. In May of 1953, a full decade before the first black family would move onto our block, Mom heard what would have been disturbing news for a white homeowner at the time.

  My parents rented one space in their two-car garage to a Mr. Birchler, who was about to move out of state. Mom wrote to Dad about Birchler’s comments:

  He told me that at 14th and Pulaski, where he now works at the A&P, the people are mostly all colored, whereas three years ago, they were mostly all white. He figures the same for this neighborhood within five years.

  I think we should be cautious about spending too much on improving our building. I, of course, do believe in upkeep, but not too much otherwise.

  Pulaski and 14th, where Birchler worked, was about two miles south of our home, in North Lawndale. Birchler’s comments appear spot on. The 1950 census reported that North Lawndale was nearly 87 percent white.30 Now, in 1953, Birchler noted that the residents were mostly black. The influx of African Americans in such close proximity surely alarmed my mother.

  On a 1940 HOLC (Home Owners’ Loan Corporation) map of West Garfield Park, where Dad and his family still lived and worked, their community was marked yellow, “definitely declining,” according to the color code. Redlined areas started just a few blocks north of our street and continued east toward and around Garfield Park itself. On the map key, red is marked “hazardous,” and HOLC described this swath of red as “threatened with Negro encroachment.”31 It’s highly unlikely that Mom and Dad would have bought a home in an area about which such a damning assessment had been made almost ten years before their purchase.

  My parents were undoubtedly clueless about the racist policy of redlining an area when blacks arrived, but they knew the outcome. If even one African American moved into West Garfield Park, property values would plummet for whites who wanted to sell, threatening the money, sweat, and marital harmony my parents had sacrificed in creating and maintaining our rooming house. They weren’t alone in their fear—or in their ignorance of redlining.

  After a white mob had persecuted a new black neighbor, a white woman wrote the following defense of the antagonists, specifically calling out North Lawndale, the area Bircher referenced.

  [The protestors] have seen what happens to so-called changing neighborhoods. A case in point is North Lawndale. It was a nice-looking section of Chicago… . Drive through it now and … [you’ll] really see blight. It is the mess a neighborhood gets into once it has changed that people object to.32

  Another white Chicagoan wrote that he moved his family out of a transitioning neighborhood because of “fear and filth.”33

  The ruinous result of denying, or limiting, mortgages and loans in redlined areas, of real-estate agents who sold houses to African Americans on contract at inflated and barely affordable prices, of the stereotyping and prejudice that crammed black families into burgeoning segregated neighborhoods—was infrastructure breakdown. Whites, blindly or willfully unaware of how these causes all worked together, blamed the victims, African Americans, while simultaneously feeling victimized themselves.

  From whites’ point of view, families like ours had sacrificed and saved for years so they could own their own home. After working hard and doubling up (as my parents did with several roomers and Grandma K), they had finally made it, but now the rules were changing. For many whites, “it must have felt like bait and switch.”34 They were going to lose everything: community, friends, and the value of their home, which meant much more to them than just a place to live: it was the American dream achieved.

  Of course, African American couples had the same dream. They, too, scrimped and saved to buy homes in good neighborhoods. They, too, wanted to own property, wanted their children to attend uncrowded schools. But while whites could live wherever they chose, blacks were vilified and terrorized out of white areas. They were denied mortgages and therefore the ability to build wealth from homeownership— as white families could. (Today, on average, white households have sixteen times the wealth of black households.)35
/>
  Forced to buy their homes through “contract purchases,” many blacks lost their entire investment when they missed a payment for any reason. Whites were laser-focused on the loss of their property values and the ruin they expected would follow when blacks moved into their communities. But the racist lending system, intended to protect white housing privilege, was about to sabotage it.

  I discovered that less than four years after my parents had invested so much money, sweat equity, and marital sacrifice into the two-flat, Mom was already worried about their financial future in the neighborhood. She had learned from a departing tenant that the community directly south of our home was now populated mostly by African Americans. Perhaps their treadmill lives allowed only a fleeting contemplation of where they were headed before they were back to putting one foot in front of the other. Even the imminent arrival of another baby seemed to generate little discussion, at least not in their correspondence.

  In January of 1953, Dad climbed aboard the Texas Chief southbound train in Chicago, heading for Houston, Texas. By the time he returned home in late February, he and Mom had been separated for thirty-five days. They were so desperate to be in each other’s arms again, they gave in to their passion and made love on the bathroom toilet seat, leaving Mom’s diaphragm in the bedroom.

  Why the bathroom? Probably so they could lock the door against Grandma K and the kids. The result was a third baby, an unplanned love child. Dad related this anecdote to my younger brother, Billy, many years later. Billy has always been proud of his provenance.

  During the months from early March to November, neither Mom nor Dad made any mention of the pregnancy in their letters. Mom wrote not one word about feeling ill. She didn’t insist that, with a third child, Dad needed to find a job in Chicago, or that their hectic, separated lives would have to change. There was no comment about the financial strain on the family or the added time and effort a new baby would demand.