Abad, Brittain, Ciullia, Cohen, Jacobson, Lawson, Pucinski, Ryback, Sanchez. What reads like a United Nations roll call is really a partial list of the classmates who accompanied me practically from high chair to high school during the late 1940s and early `50s. These and many other names from the old Cabrini neighborhood, names long thought forgotten, came up in conversation the other day. The occasion was one of those impromptu trips down memory lane taken by my sisters and brother and I that only work when everybody involved shares the same past.
It was obvious even to us that the years had dulled the sharp edges of our recollections. What is left are muted images composed almost entirely of pleasant memories. We know, of course, that our impressions are at least a little distorted, viewed as they are through the prism of time. That there wasn`t always enough money to go around for necessities much less for many frills. That scraping together our school tuition each month usually required belt tightening in some other area. And that such problems were hardly confined to our household-just about everybody we knew was in the same boat. Still, while these may not have exactly been ”wonder” years, we remember them as good years.
Who would have thought that our little development would one day come to symbolize much if not all that could be wrong with public housing? Back then, the Frances Cabrini Homes were just clean, cheap housing that families were glad to have until they could do better-nothing special. Though circumstances kept some families there longer than others, it was somehow understood that many were just ”passing through,” that they would stay there only until they ”got on their feet.” Yet others saw it differently.
For them, the little rowhouse was so much nicer than what they came from, whether it was a city slum or country shack, that they were quite content to remain indefinitely. Certainly, no stigma attached to living there. To the contrary, it often was viewed as a step up. Passing the CHA`s screening provided a seal of approval of sorts to families of modest means. It said that the head of household in this usually two-parent family was gainfully employed, that there was a prior landlord/tenant history of living standards and rent payment that had been verified and that the family would not likely be introducing undesirables into the development. You might say that most of the residents represented a high class of ”working poor” folks-temporarily
”poor” by conventional yardsticks maybe but by no means mired in the permanent poverty cycle plaguing so many public-housing residents of today. And a sense of community was very much a part of daily life there. People actually did borrow cups of sugar from each other just like in the movies.
The old neighborhood my family and I nostalgically recall exists today only in our mind`s eye. Sadly, it has been transmogrified into the infamous Cabrini-Green high-rise projects, where bullets have replaced baseballs and armed gangs rule streets we once roamed with carefree abandon. Our old school, St. Dominic`s, is long gone, as are most other landmarks of those days. I`ve heard that our church is still standing but that the interior is
unrecognizable, having once been partitioned to a third of its original size and inexplicably tricked out in lurid colors. Word is that somewhere down the line it was converted into some kind of urban ”mission.” I have no interest in seeing it now, preferring to remember its classical beauty and grandeur.
Good times and places notwithstanding, though, there`s no escaping the fact the old neighborhood was not always kind to black folks. Without minimizing the bigotry of some, the fact is it wasn`t always kind to everybody else either. There was the woman our church virtually ostracized because she was divorced; there were the kids, black and white, newly arrived from the country who were ridiculed for their ”clodhopper” dress and speech; and there was the anti-Semitic limerick we blithely chanted to and about the lone Jewish family in our school until someone-I think it was my father-put a stop to it. And so on.
Still, it was in this neighborhood that standards of right and wrong learned at home and at school were applied to real-life situations, shaping our values and personalities in ways too numerous to count. Maybe we are what we are not so much in spite of the neighborhood but because of it. By most criteria, we have each achieved a measure of success. We have or have had careers, own homes, travel and in general enjoy comfortable middle-class lives. All of our children had the opportunity to obtain college educations.
Then as now, most Chicago neighborhoods were home to one ethnic group or another. Not ours. With no particular pattern, every nationality we`d ever heard of and some we hadn`t lived next door to each other in relative harmony. This meant that we had schoolmates and, occasionally, real friends from many different cultural backgrounds as part of our everyday lives. It also meant some fairly predictable name-calling and fistfights with some of them, but at the time I don`t think we felt any more traumatized by a kid calling one of us ”nigger” than they did from being called ”dago,” ”hunky” or one of the many other insults, racial or otherwise.
Such incidents usually escalated to a brief scuffle, consisting more of flailing arms than anything else-until the next time. Racial epithets were almost always deemed to be fighting words. Sometimes the ensuing ”fight”
remained a war of words, and sometimes blows were actually exchanged; a lot depended on the reputations and particular skills of the combatants. Fighters fought and talkers talked. But even the ”fighters” were bound by an implied requirement to fight ”fair,” and we can`t recall anyone ever being seriously hurt.
Whining about being called names, even the ”n” word, didn`t earn much sympathy at home either. More often than not the old man would send us right back out to face the tormentor after a brief lecture aimed at ”toughening”
us up. He was cynical, but he was also practical. His job with the railroad took him to every part of the country, providing firsthand encounters with racism Southern and Northern style. At a time when lynchings were not uncommon, he just wouldn`t allow mere playground taunting to assume significance beyond its importance.
The racism of the old neighborhood was mostly that of omission rather than commission. If a black girl would never be chosen May Queen at school, neither would we be exposed to the racially motivated violence that was all too common in many parts of the country and, for that matter, the city in those days.
In fact, race was pretty much a non-issue until we approached the teen years, at which point things began to change. What had been irrelevant in matters like who got picked when for which softball team became very relevant to adolescents fumbling their way toward courtships. More accurately, it became very relevant to some of the parents. I can remember how crushed I was to learn that I wasn`t invited to the first quasi-boy/girl party in what I thought was my ”circle” of friends, kids I had known and played with most of my life. It fell to my father to explain, as he put it, ”the other facts of life” to me. It was, of course, because I was black and most of them were not. Dating was just over the horizon, and the dynamics of the group would never be the same. I stopped being interchangeable with the other girls when Post Office and Spin the Bottle replaced Pin the Tail on the Donkey.
This was sobering stuff for a 12- or 13-year-old, especially because dating was probably the last thing on my mind at the time. We had usually been invited to each others` parties, and I had just expected to be included like I`d always been. Naively, my thoughts still ran more to cake and ice cream and games and prizes than to anything remotely resembling dating. My father`s actual words are long forgotten, but knowing him, he probably told me something like, ”This was going to happen sooner or later-now that it has, stop sniveling about it.” Awash in self-pity, I would have ”sniveled” a while longer for effect, but it would be some time before I appreciated the irony of his reference to the ”facts of life.” Sarcasm aside, old Dad must have handled my first reality check fairly well. I emerged with my dignity intact and with no long-term malice toward white people in general or my fairweather friends in particular. I was, however, a lot wiser in the ways of the world.
Then the Milfords-an intern at a nearby hospital, his pretty young wife and baby-moved in next door. They were charming, gregarious-and white. I baby- sat for them and admired them greatly, even though I wasn`t sure why, since I had no similar feelings about other neighbors. They just seemed to exude a zest that set them apart from other people we knew, regardless of nationality. They were young, good looking and on the brink of a very good and prosperous life.
Years later, the perspective of maturity would take the mystery out of this attractive couple for me. With so much going for them, why wouldn`t they be excited and exciting? He survived his internship, and they moved on, only to be replaced by a bigot whose daughter was my age but who was forbidden to so much as speak to ”niggers,” as he openly referred to us. Here was a guy who could barely speak English but who had already incorporated racial slurs into his limited vocabulary.
And so it went in this little enclave. Never a racially motivated incident of epic proportions. Just enough static in the air to generate occasional friction at the hands of the prejudiced-malicious if not lethal in nature. Or petty indignities, carelessly inflicted by self-respecting whites even as they vigorously denied any racist implications. Take school, which was second only to the family in its day-to-day impact on our lives. For all of the teaching and preaching about ”brotherly love” that went on there, the school didn`t exist in a vacuum. Once in a while it, too, could be the source of slights, born of insensitivity if not a kind of passive racism.
For example, the archdiocese (or maybe it was the parish) would periodically undertake its own little census, requiring each nun to count the colored children in her classroom. Sister would ask us to rise, and much to our embarrassment, a physical head count would commence accompanied by the muffled giggling of the rest of the class. Standing there being inventoried like so many chairs or other things, I could feel my very identity being diminished. I was no longer the champion speller and honor-roll student. Being singled out this way was belittling and humiliating. Our white classmates found all of this amusing, and sometimes even Sister couldn`t suppress the hint of a smile.
These kinds of incidents left marks even if they didn`t permanently scar. But despite these highly offensive signs of the times, our school days are still more significant for providing us with a wealth of carefree, even innocent memories than for the occasional discordant notes, racial or otherwise. And thanks to the dedication of the B.V.M. order of teaching nuns, we were fortunate enough to receive a solid educational foundation.
Not to gloss over the minor racial incidents, but looking back, we see them for what they were, more infuriating than damaging. We survived, with mind and body intact and with neither much worse for the wear. Race was hardly the common denominator for all of our childhood run-ins any more than they were confined to white kids only. These kinds of experiences were just an inevitable part of growing up in a lively, multicultural environment and were neither extraordinary nor particularly threatening. Indeed, it just may be that the old neighborhood`s greatest claim to fame was its very ordinariness. Nothing really dramatic ever happened. One year just rolled into the next.
It`s spring. All up and down our street the tiny patches of lawn have been dug up for grass and flower-seed planting. Hopscotch, roly-poly, kites, jump rope, roller skates, bikes and, of course, softball are but a few of the attractions competing for our attention. School isn`t out yet, so there`s homework to be done and maybe music to be practiced before dinner. A doting uncle who took his role as head of the family seriously thought we should have music lessons and had salvaged an old upright player piano from somewhere for us to practice on.
Summer at last. The season stretches ahead with no end in sight. We`d race through our daily chores, half listening to instructions with one ear, the other cocked for the siren call of a bat hitting a ball or the omnipresent ”thwack, thwack” of double-dutch jump ropes slapping the pavement. The call of the wild, city style. The mere threat of punishment by confinement to the house was usually enough to inspire model behavior, at least for the day. Once outside, the goal was not to be seen or heard from again until time for the next meal. That way you couldn`t be sent to the store or called to bring in the laundry or made to watch a little sister or brother or given some other disagreeable task. Some sort of reprimand was a certainty when you finally did turn up, but that would be after the fact and a small price to pay for hours of uninterrupted play. Mothers calling from front and back doors for Salvatore, Rosemary, Bobby, Virgilio or Willie competed with the sounds of street peddlers like Joe, the fresh-fruit-and-vegeta ble man who with his green horse-drawn cart was a daily fixture, along with the ice cream, popcorn and lemonade vendors, the scissors grinder, knife sharpener and junk collector. Some organized activities, such as Mr. Jones` Drum and Bugle corps, scouting and dance classes, continued through the summer. Mostly, though, kids played, grownups worked.
Summer was much like any other time of year except, of course, there was no school. The term vacation was a euphemism that had little to do with the generally accepted meaning of the word since hardly anyone went anywhere. Here and there a few kids might attend a church-sponsored camp for a week or two, or some black kids might be sent ”down South” for a while, but most of us were underfoot until school reopened. Fathers still went off to work each day while mothers kept house and us.
By mid- to late August, telltale signs that summer was ending would start to appear. Signs such as the trip to the South Side for the Bud Billiken Day Parade, followed by the biggest picnic of the year. And closer to home, the carnival rides and booths being assembled for the annual Feast sponsored by a local parish.
It`s autumn. Once again school, and church by extension, will become the focal point of our lives. We try on uniforms, passing last year`s pieces down to the next little sister, hunt up book satchels and other paraphernalia and make endless lists of supplies we need or think we need. We buy or receive as gifts the clumsy and largely useless pencil boxes popular at the time, and we`re ready for the first day of school.
Although we might find one or two new faces added to our class, or a couple of families might have left the neighborhood over the summer, there are seldom any real surprises. Some years there aren`t any changes at all. As a group, we have moved through grammar school remarkably intact. There is very little difference in the composition of our First Communion group picture and our 8th grade graduation picture. In a way, the familiar sameness was reassurring, providing a comfortable sense of continuity as we each passed from grade to grade along with a corresponding kid from the Jacobson, Kelly, Dominic, Marshall or other family we`d started school with.
It`s winter. Coal has been delivered to every household and sits piled in a heap beside each front door waiting for the man or the biggest kid of the house to shovel it down the chute. We learn early how to wield a poker, to stoke or bank a fire or to throw coal into the big furnace that dominated the tiny utility room. Major and not-so-major holidays provide the framework for the season. We`re either preparing for one or celebrating it-at home, at church, at school. We roll along from Halloween to Thanksgiving to Christmas to New Year`s, through Lent and on to spring again, with assorted birthdays and other family-related occasions mixed in.
School and after-school hours are a swirl of activity: choir rehearsals, various pageant preparations, practice for the annual piano recital, the grand May Procession and the myriad other church-related ceremonies to come. And scouting and trips to the library. And Sunday afternoons whiled away in one of the local movie theaters or, for a time, in the school auditorium, where a dime would buy a feature, albeit dated, film. Add visits to grandmothers and other relatives who didn`t live in the neighborhood, homework, favorite radio (and for the fortunate few, TV) programs, chores, general free time, and before you knew it, another year had gone by.
It hardly matters at this stage of the game, but in our musings we can`t help but wonder where our classmates are now? Is Phillip a priest? Did John go into politics? Is Marian a teacher? Is Pat on the stage? When a black person achieves the most modest of goals, if an association with Cabrini, however slight can be made, it is noted, often prominently. However, it is always with the inference of an ”against all odds,” miraculous ”escape from the ghetto” implication.
Isn`t it curious that in all of these years no similar ”miracle”
accounts for even one white Chicagoan of any distinction, modest or otherwise? It is an improbable stretch to conclude that after we grew up, ALL of our old classmates, the white ones in particular, left the city. Or conversely, that they are still here but that in all of these years not one of them ever did anything good OR bad that would cause their background to be made public. Maybe they all changed their names. My guess is that they have conveniently eliminated this chapter from their biographies for two reasons: first, they are ashamed to admit it, and second, nobody would believe them anyway.
Another thing: How is it that the media, and apparently everyone else, remains implacably blind to the prehistory of Cabrini? Try as we might, we can`t recall seeing a reference to anyone or anything good or bad predating
”Cabrini-Green.” The fact is, the original Frances Cabrini Homes were neat little two-story rowhouses occupying an area bounded by Hudson, Cambridge and Chicago Avenues and Oak Street. The area surrounding the rowhouses was a bustling-immigrant, poor-to-working-class, largely Italian community that included numerous shops and stores frequented by everyone in the neighborhood. Under color of urban renewal, pre-mall, even pre-chain ”mom and pop” grocery stores, butcher and poultry shops, hardware and dry goods stores, pharmacies and bakeries all were demolished to make way for high-rise additions to Cabrini. Because the Frances Cabrini Homes of our day had about as much in common with today`s Cabrini-Green as Mayberry did with Dodge City, it never merited any news coverage. It`s as if this entire era never existed.
In addition to the topography, virtually every other aspect of life as we knew it has since been turned on its head. Then, working-class nuclear families constituted the overwhelming majority of the residents. Now, poor, unemployed, single-parent households, usually female-headed, predominate. Then, the neighborhood was completely integrated; now it is completely segregated. Then, working men as fathers were conspicuous by their presence and not by their absence. ”Wait till your father gets home” carried a threat of punishment from Dad when he got home from work that night, not when he dropped by on the day a welfare check arrived or on his way to see his parole officer. The self-styled ”hoods” of the neighborhood bore more resemblance to Benny and the Jets than to the El Rukns.
Today, tourists are cautioned against accidentally driving in or near the neighborhood much the way people in war-torn countries are warned against straying onto battle fronts or into sniper alleys, and with good reason. We never knew anyone who had been mugged, much less shot. We never knew or even heard of anyone whose home had been burglarized.
Of course, such things had to have been happening in the city, even in those days, and, of course, there had to have been crime in the neighborhood, whether we knew about it or not. And it is highly unlikely that all of the young JDs (juvenile delinquents) and JD look-a-likes hanging out on street corners or in pool rooms were choirboys. But without an exception that we were ever aware of, even the hoods observed a kind of protocol unknown to today`s thugs. Things like hats not removed at appropriate times or profanity within earshot of women, particularly older women, would almost always earn the offender a reprimand from his peers. ”Watch your mouth, man, here comes Miz So-and-So,” or ”Excuse me, Miz So-and-So, I didn`t see you.” Some things just weren`t done.
It had to do with respect and with variations on the time-honored if unspoken prohibition against fouling one`s own nest. ”Dissing” your own community or its residents would have been decidedly uncool, and the hapless miscreant who thought otherwise was more likely to earn enmity than admiration. The persona most of these guys worked so hard to project was that of a somewhat rebellious cool cat, appealing to the ladies, deferential to elders but quite capable of ”duking it out” with counterparts when the occasion arose.
It is impossible to imagine, even for the sake of discussion, any of these guys bashing one of our elderly neighbors in the head to steal her purse or breaking into one of our homes. As to murdering one of our brothers or sisters for their jackets or gym shoes, the very thought would have been so reprehensible as to defy any sane person`s worst nightmare. Even now, the idea still borders on the grotesque.
There was never a time when crime or fear of crime dictated our goings and comings in the neighborhood. Or when women and children quaked in fear at the approach of a couple of black boys. Never a time when the birthday girl or graduate or favorite nephew was warned against letting anyone see their newly acquired watch or other gift lest they be relieved of it and possibly murdered in the process. Such fears were not part of even the most overprotective parent`s wildest imagination. Today we have become so inured to these and similar horrors that outrage is increasingly reserved for the most heinous acts.
Meanwhile, the ”gang bangers” and ”drive-by” shooters continue their murderous rampages while the rest of us resort to self-righteous handwringing or fingerpointing or both. We clamor for this appalling cycle to be broken in Cabrini-Green and other ”inner city” neighborhoods even as we disagree on the causes and remedies. The roots of these problems have become so entrenched that they verge on being accepted as permanent.
In the final analysis, the causes of the sorry conditions in Cabrini-Green and similar areas may not matter. As the effects continue to be visited on succeeding generations, the resulting ”underclass” of asocial predators will continue to grow until a critical mass either overwhelms the rest of us or once and for all the underlying problems are faced and solved. Accepting that ”we have met the enemy and it is us” may be the single most difficult hurdle for Cabrini-Green and similarly troubled neighborhoods.
This is not ”blaming the victims”; it is facing some harsh realities. Lost in the finger-pointing rhetoric is the inescapable fact that every one of these teenaged ”gangbangers” goes home somewhere every night. Every one of them is somebody`s child. All too often, the fact that he now arrives with a pocket full of money, regardless of its source, outweighs any parent-child relationship that might once have existed. The result is the same whether the parent(s) are subsumed by the newfound wealth or are simply neutralized. They are no longer in control-the money is. The downfall of a community can be mathematically calculated by multiplying the number of such households. No community can harbor gang members, drug pushers and even murderers, turning a blind eye to their actions for a share in the proceeds of their ill-gotten gains and then profess outrage when the thugs turn on ”decent people.” In the end, responsible people must take responsibility; for themselves, for their children, for their children`s actions and ultimately for their communities. Then and only then can there be any hope of reversing the deadly trend engulfing Cabrini-Green and its residents.
Not long ago a group of concerned citizens came together as Chicago Public School alumni to highlight the diversity of public school graduates and to lend their time and talents to today`s schools and students. The group turned out to be a veritable Who`s Who of Chicago because public school education of a generation or two ago was the rule, not the exception. I have to believe that if a similar gathering of Cabrini alums of this same era ever assembled, the roll call would be equally as impressive.
However, this is not likely to happen. We really can`t go home again. Not unless we`re willing to come face to face with conditions in the old neighborhood unlike any we ever dreamed of much less experienced. And, of course, the racial divide we casually bridged as children would likely be insurmountable today. Too much has changed. Too much has been lost. Few if any of us really care what happens in this neighborhood that we once called our own but are now ashamed to acknowledge and even more afraid to venture into. The truth is that it`s unlikely any Cabrini residents of our era, black or white, feel any connection whatsoever to today`s Cabrini-Green or its population. The old neighborhood as we knew it simply ceased to exist once city officials and other powers-that-be conspired to subvert the intent of public housing from its original mission to one of containment of poor blacks. Cabrini-Green evokes a knee-jerk image: A murder of other atrocious incident has ocurred, and a reporter will interview some wretched-looking black man or woman in or near a squalid apartment, with the camera panning down a littered hall, room or yard. Menacing-looking toughs in expensive athletic outfits with beepers on their belts will be seen loitering in the background, and responses by kids to simple questions will be practically unintelligible. We`ve seen it all before, and it is still as incomprehensible as it ever was.
Cabrini-Green might as well be a Third World country for all of the connection it has with the black-white ”mainstream” of the city. It may be wistful thinking, but I can`t help but hope that in time and with the concerted efforts of people who can make a difference, Cabrini can experience a rebirth of the spirit of Frances Cabrini Homes. Maybe then its residents will one day be able to look back on their lives there as fondly as we do on ours in the little rowhouse on Cleveland. All things considered, they were pretty good years.
