Notes from Chicago: Allen, Part II

If man is, or is searching to be omnipotent, I am willing to accept Chicago’s gigantism; but I should like the opposite to be accepted as well: a city which would fit into the hollow of one’s hand.

—Jean Genet, “The Members of the Assembly”

Now that my mother is gone, no longer alive, no longer here to relish in my achievements or to worry over my failures, now that she is no longer here for me to call on with my problems—the one person I never doubted, always knew I could trust—coming back to Chicago is always hard. My mother gone almost four years now. No reason for me to come back, since I’ve been estranged from my immediate family, my aunt and first cousins, for several years. And I don’t miss the city, although I have some close friends here. The city that made me not my city anymore since I left in 1992. A New Yorker now. Always will be, no matter where I find myself in the world. A certain kind of provincialism about Chicago that bothers me, gets under my skin, a racially segregated town pretending to be city, a folksy city pretending to be a town, although of course I can only view Chi through the distorted prism of my consciousness, all the bad memories, all the shit that I endured. A motherless child.

My mother’s death was made worse by the fact that she died during the COVID pandemic. I never got to say goodbye to her. Truth to tell, I was sick too and in the hospital in New York when she died—another story for another time—which meant I could not travel to Chicago to view her body. Instead, I inherited an urn of ashes after I was released from the hospital. No actual proof that she’s gone. Perhaps she’s still in that nursing home on Elston Avenue, laid up in her bed waiting for me to come pay a visit.

Sickness nothing new to her, nothing new for me—I like the sanitized smell of hospital rooms—because I was a sickly child (asthma, melancholia) being raised by a single mother who worked for chump change as a maid for rich white people—“daywork” she called it—in a sick, segregated city, after escaping segregated Mississippi, Faulkner country.

I have never forgiven, will never forgive, what that this country did to my mother, did to my family, the Griffus clan from Houston, Mississippi. Stacked the deck against us. Stacked the deck against me. Fucked from the start. Stunted. Tainted. Because the injustices they suffered planted inside me the eternal seeds of hatred and resentment that I will never uproot. For better or worse, I don’t take shit from white people because I witnessed the way this country wrecked the bodies of the Griffus men and women, including my mother, and distorted their minds and made them hate themselves and hate each other, made my aunt hate her own sister, my mother, and made her incapable of properly loving and raising her own children, the children (seed) turning against one another, turning against me.

But they, the Griffus women, made me who I am. My mother envisioned a better life for me through education and worked hard to see it happen. And my great aunt Beulah passed on the gift of storytelling. It was she who brought my mother to Chicago in 1949 when my mother was nineteen years old. The oldest sibling, Beulah was sickly (like me), but she outlived her younger siblings. She endured.

She said it her way: “I had everything but the clap.”

Saturday, August 17

Chicago’s oldest landmark, the Water Tower, is surrounded by a barricade of six-feet-high steel fences. The city is in lockdown mode preparing for protestors, demonstrations.

Once at Navy Pier, I stand at the railing overlooking Lake Michigan. Lake pretending to be ocean. Gulls arrowing above the water.

I’m standing outside the mile-long pavilion because the welcoming party for the Democratic National Convention is a dull affair. The Leo High School boys’ choir perform tepid renditions of songs like “Bustin’ Loose.” Food is plentiful. Single-serving-sized pies of deep-dish pizza. Chicago-style hot dogs. Dollops of cheesecake. Miniature squares of carrot cake. Signature Chicago cuisine. A thousand or so people moving about in a ballroom that could hold five times as many. I spy Mayor Brandon Johnson moving among the crowd shaking hands and posing for photographs. He’s taller than I expected.

Two DJs take the stage. Nothing unique or exciting. Then the great blues harp player Billy Branch comes on stage to perform with them, accompanied by a guitarist, bass player, and drummer. Billy wears a lime green blazer and a white fedora. Billy’s older now, in his early seventies, with that thick neck some older people get. I’ve known Billy since the late eighties when I was in grad school and trying to learn something about the blues. Billy fronted the house band at the now defunct club Blue Chicago.

Billy performs one song with the two DJs, then the guitarist performs a song with them, only for Billy to come back onstage. He abruptly stops the song he is playing to introduce Mayor Johnson. Perhaps because of the unexpected interruption, the crowd does not applaud when the mayor comes out onto the stage.

Johnson gives a short uninspired speech filled with platitudes like, The city that said ‘Keep Hope Alive.’ The city that said, ‘Yes We Can.’

The crowd applauds in an equally uninspired way.

Then more of the same, selling Chicago, all the cliches: the blues, “Keep Hope Alive,” deep-dish pizza, and hot dogs. What they’ve forgotten, the blues is about the unexpected. Shit happens. Expect the worse. Then figure out a way to make a way out of no way. As my ancestors did, the Griffus men and women.

Billy is into another song, but a body, a brain, can only take so much. I leave after spending ninety minutes at the party.

That night on the L, I sit down by a brother who looks just like Malcolm X. Eerie. He is not as tall as Malcolm, and his hair is longer, a small reddish afro cloud with a black pick stuck inside the back near the top. His daughter sits next to him, a girl who’s perhaps eight years old. At one point she stretches across him looking up into his face.

“You have to make me laugh now,” she says.

He does his best to.

Five minutes later, she embraces him. “I have to give you a hug,” she says. “You’re my dad. I love you.”

He returns her embrace.

Monday, August 19 (Day One of the Convention)

The Uber driver is a slim, attractive Black woman in her late twenties. Hair neatly styled above her smooth brown skin. She talks on her cell phone to a dude who, as far as I can surmise, is trying to woo her. I recognize myself in the cadences of her speech, that Southside Chicago drawl. When I first moved to New York, people used to ask me where in the South I was from.

She tells the man that she is a single mom with an eight-year-old son. Says she had cirrhosis of the liver but received a transplant. Now she needs another procedure.

Thinking: I had a student once, a young Black woman, who died during the semester while awaiting a liver transplant.

The would-be boyfriend starts checking online to find a hospital in Chicago that will accept her medical insurance. We drive another ten or fifteen minutes. He fails to find a hospital—No dice—but vows to keep searching.

Soon she pulls the car over to the curb. Says, “This is where the app is telling me to let you off.”

I can see the Hyatt at McCormick Place on my right a good five blocks away.

“Can you get me closer to the Hyatt?” I say.

“Okay.”

We try one street after another, only to find that each street is barricaded. Eventually, we are allowed to queue outside a barricade where cops do a security check of the car. A bomb-sniffing dog takes a whiff of the car’s interior while officers check the trunk and under the hood.

We are allowed to pass, but after searching for a clear path to the Hyatt, we circle back to the spot where Uber indicated I should be dropped off. Only then do I realize that the powers-that-be have cordoned off McCormick Place in such a way that no demonstrators will be able to get anywhere near the convention. Out of sight, out of mind.

“Sister,” I say. “I was listening in on your conversation. Good luck with everything.”

“Thank you, sir,” she says. “Have a blessed day.”

I exit the Uber and straggle along behind other people, delegates and reporters, making the five-block trek to the Hyatt. Cops everywhere. Chicago Police Department. Secret Service police officers dressed in black uniforms. And dogs wearing vests that read Do Not Pet.

We have to be sniffed by the dogs before we are allowed to pass through the metal detectors at the secured entry point.

A woman behind me says to the Secret Service agent, “I have a phobia for dogs.”

Cory Booker is the featured speaker at the Native American Caucus. Great choice since he has the gift for gab, a dynamic talker, charismatic to the core. He starts out with some opening remarks, then talks some about the importance of local participation in elections, before moving on to an extended riff on a Langston Hughes poem. “America was never America to me.”

Booker is African American improvisation at its best, what people used to call “nigger elegance” when I was growing up. He knows how to sample and signify, issue a call to get the audience to respond enthusiastically, a bullshit artist who knows how to make a crowd feel good.

Booker points out that the Native vote was the defining factor in several states during the 2020 election. Then he goes on to talk about one thing or another, punctuating his remarks with pithy one-liners.

“Leadership is an action and service!”

Tremendous applause.

“I got my B.A. from Stanford and my PhD on the streets of Newark!”

Applause.

“We’re the leaders that we have been looking for!”

Applause.

Booker says that he has known Kamala Harris for many years.

Booker: “I said to Kamala, ‘Please, baby, please run for US Senate.’”

Laughter.

And he goes on in this vein.

“Despair will never have the last word!”

Applause.

“Still, like dust, I rise!”

Applause.

“We are facing a symbolic storm,” he says. “They are trying to sweep away reproductive rights, trying to sweep away women’s rights, civil rights, union rights, voting rights. But let me tell you about a real storm.”

He narrates a story about one night during Hurricane Sandy when he was mayor of Newark and decided to take an early morning drive through the streets. During that drive, he chanced upon an old Black man standing on a street corner where a power line had fallen.

“I said to him, ‘Why in God’s name are you out here in this storm?’ And he said to me, ‘Mayor, I’m standing over here making sure nobody gets hurt.’”

“That is the strength of our ancestors!”

Applause.

Booker issues the call: “When we fight…”

The audience responds: “We win!”

Booker takes the audience to church.

He is the consummate politician, a man of the people. Lots of game.

For a time, I used to follow him on Instagram, where he posts hokey videos with life-coach messaging after his morning jog, sweat streaming down his face.

A man of the people making way for a woman of the people.