True Vine: A Young Black Man’s Journey of Faith, Hope, and Clarity
By John W. Fountain
PublicAffairs, 372 pages, $26
Too much of what should be black history will forever remain unknown. The forced illiteracy of generations and the perversity of slavery that tore apart families and degraded what society the enslaved were able to fashion have left us with too little in the way of first-person narrative.
Even in the cases of those whose names and dwellings are known, we often can grasp only at a few strands of flimsy knowledge. We know Jean Baptiste Point du Sable, the first non-Native American settler of Chicago, only through a few records and a poetic speech by a British commander in the Revolutionary War.
Historians strive to fill in this record, combing musty volumes for what little trace millions of lives have left. Often we can do nothing to resurrect the undocumented, but we look ahead, hoping today’s generations will leave a trace of themselves for the future to decipher.
John W. Fountain fears that when the history of America’s 20th Century is written, little will be said of Chicago’s West Side. Much of its place in mainstream narrative seems taken up by simple reminiscences of those who left there 40 years ago, when people who looked like Fountain moved in and whites moved out.
But no history is simple, and Fountain’s autobiographical tale, “True Vine: A Young Black Man’s Journey of Faith, Hope, and Clarity,” gives us a window into lives that those outside the West Side seldom see.
Fountain’s journey from a childhood spent filling his belly with water in order to quiet hunger pangs to reporting for The New York Times might impress Horatio Alger. It is a journey made with a determination born of faith.
Fountain grew up in Lawndale, in a part of Chicago that residents call K-Town because, he writes, of all the streets there that “begin with the letter K. There is Karlov, Kedvale, Kostner, Kolin, Keeler, Kenneth, Komensky.” His grandparents bought a home there in 1956: “The majority of blacks who settled there were first-time home buyers just a generation or two removed from the Thirteenth Amendment.” To families like the Haglers, Fountain’s mother’s family, Lawndale at that time was their “Promised Land.” Lawns were plush then on the West Side, and the streets lined with well-kept homes. Boys on the family’s block in K-Town “played two-hand touch football in the street or in the vacant lot on Komensky,” his family’s street, and families gathered at the end of the summer to share in the bounty of a neighbor’s backyard apple tree.
Even in the good times, though, Fountain’s mother and stepfather usually lacked money, because “we seemed to do well as long as he brought his money home. The problem was, he didn’t always do that.”
By the late 1960s, when Fountain was at Lawndale’s Mason Elementary School, gangs were becoming more violent. And after the 1968 riots that followed Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, much of the black middle class fled K-Town, following the whites who had gone before them and slowly leaving the neighborhood to decay. In the neighborhood’s decline, the Hagler family–and Fountain in particular–found its own anchor in a church Fountain’s grandfather started, True Vine Church of God in Christ.
Although Fountain clearly was a driven and intelligent boy, his mother and his grammar school principal recognized the pitfalls an unguided K-Town teenager would face. Even with guidance, and the inspiration of spending summers at youth programs at colleges that helped spark a strong desire to continue his education, Fountain was a father at 17.
And he almost became just another dropout in a dead-end job after his freshman year in college. As a child, Fountain and his cousins mockingly imitated their relatives’ hand-clapping and speaking in tongues. But after he returned to Chicago from his first year at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, his dreams of college dashed, Fountain turned to his family’s God and pledged his fealty to Jesus.
Much of the rest of Fountain’s book is devoted to his struggle to find a way back to his dreams. And despite constant setbacks–conflicts with his girlfriend-turned-wife, lack of money for a car, a Truman College administrator who kept his stories from being published in a school paper–Fountain does find the way back.
His journey often was fraught with self-doubt. “Deep inside,” he writes, “I still burned with shame and I reasoned that I was less of a man for not being able to provide for my family other than through welfare and odd jobs.”
But encouragement came from the same person who provided the neighborhood apple fests, and strength came from Fountain’s faith in God. He found a job, earned enough to return to school and somehow scraped together money to buy a car so he could drive his family Downstate upon his return to school–his own private exodus from K-Town.
After writing about his return to Urbana-Champaign in 1984, Fountain jumps to 1999 and gives a brief summary of his intervening life: his divorce, his working up the reporting ladder from internships to regular jobs at the Chicago Tribune, The Washington Post and finally The New York Times.
Bittersweetly, he describes his attempts to write “True Vine” at his family’s old home in K-Town and the changes there–mostly for the worse–just since the mid-1980s.
Fountain, now a Chicago-area suburbanite, writes that though he misses his childhood home, “we as a people may rove from Promised Land to Promised Land until we have discovered that the Promised Land lies within us and ultimately in our willingness to stake a claim and to nurture, cultivate, and possess the land.”
“True Vine” does, as Fountain says in his epilogue, tell the story of “an unbelievable journey.” It is a book that many should read, especially those who think of the West Side, and America’s other devastated neighborhoods, as places devoid of hope. Its descriptions of life in a place so often forgotten evoke sorrow and rejoicing, sometimes on the same page. And Fountain’s observations of what went wrong in K-Town, and his personal confrontations with his city’s dark side, should leave no one unmoved.
If “True Vine” has flaws, it is in the integration of the lessons Fountain knows he has learned into the book’s compelling narrative. Too often he tells us that an incident in the story is significant by noting that it was something he “did not understand” at the time. At several points, what seem to be pivotal events in his life are glossed over, leaving the reader to wonder if they were too painful to write about, or if Fountain–or his editors–knew he had to keep to a particular length and just couldn’t explain something in detail. And a few times, having told us that he had made a change in his attitudes because of faith, Fountain recounts without comment or insight an incident that seems to contradict his declaration of a few pages before.
But these defects do not detract from the value of “True Vine” as a remarkable look at a world that we all know exists but that few outside its invisible confines know. Most of the book’s failings could have been solved with a little more attention from an editor and with a slight reworking of the manuscript. In the end, Fountain has accomplished well the task he set out to complete: His book is a vivid, insightful history of a place and time, a moving recounting of one man’s personal journey.
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AUTHOR AT BOOK FAIR
John Fountain, author of “True Vine: A Young Black Man’s Journey of Faith, Hope, and Clarity,” will be in conversation with Daniel Glick, author of “Monkey Dancing: A Father, Two Kids, and a Journey to the Ends of the Earth,” Saturday at the Chicago Tribune Printers Row Book Fair. Call 312-222-3986 for more information, or go to www.printersrowbookfair.org
