The nasal voice of the goofy man with thick glasses and a Tuskeegee airman shirt was touting the dangers of environmental hazards to the only five kids in school on a Saturday. For a Saturday class, they were pretty decently behaved. Granted, Diamond looked bored and shrugged her shoulders when questions were asked and Maqueze, a whale at twelve years old, was probably thinking about lunch. Alisha, however, and the sweet-faced brothers Charlie and Malcolm, were doing their best to come up with the answers that their instructor was fishing for.
It wasn’t the type of scene that you would guess would evoke grim fascination or a weighty sense of dramatic irony in any bystander.
That is until the assistant teacher piped up from the side of the room something the students may or may not have known.
“Did y’all know that you have one of the highest rates of PCB’s in Cook County?” he asked. “You know that lot over there by the closed General Foods? They left a bunch of transformers there for years. The chemicals in it leaked into the ground. Kids used to play there until they started coming to school with their hair falling out and somebody finally got it tested. Levels out the roof. Right here in Cook county.”
A few minutes later, on the subject of air pollution, the helpful assistant mentioned the nearby factory and the fumes fill the air the students breathe. And following that, in a discussion of how burning waste produces toxic ash, the assistant discussed the nearby dump, which still burns methane each night.
The lesson was taking place in the decrepit high school in the Chicago housing projects located in the far Southside of Chicago. The projects, so long established they are considered a historic landmark, lie so far South that it took me two hours to travel on public transit there. Needing to travel for an hour just to reach the nearest Red line stop, the residents are cut off from grocery stores, drug stores and any economic opportunity the city might have to offer. There’s no jobs here, just a boarded up store, a library with the doors locked and several charities located in isolated buildings with torn blue awnings.
The name of the projects evokes a kind of irony—Altgeld Gardens. For the three to four thousand residents crammed into several blocks of public housing , it’s less like gardens and more like a forgotten hell on earth. The warnings the assistant teacher gave were no joke. On one side of the high school and elementary school are blocks and blocks of shiny, new projects. On the other side, the brick buildings are closed—haunting rows, their windows like eyes with patches over them.
“They closed because people got sick,” our tour guide told us when I first drove through the projects. He spoke of people getting cancer and mysterious illnesses. Children are born without genitals, a little boy goes blind after playing in the grass. Residents complain of the drifting stench from the landfills, nauseating on a warm summer’s day.
I couldn’t face being a voyeur on the situation. Sitting in that van, I vowed to go back. I wanted to see what life was really like in the projects. I wanted to meet the people scraping out life in impossible circumstances.
I signed up to tutor the kids at Carver High in French and on a Saturday morning, in I walked on this lesson.
The kids were now trying on gloves and masks. There were giggles from some, and from all when Maqueze couldn’t get his mask to stay firm over his double chin.
Charlie had his pushed up like a crown, then flipped it down and to the side like a baseball hat. When he walked out of the room to the bathroom, he strutted like a king.
I smiled with the kids, laughed with them, and put on my own gloves and mask at their urging. I looked at these sweet-faced kids and wondered how these flowers could grow in such a toxic place. Those who should have been caretakers and gardeners—the government, social services, the privileged, you, me—had mistaken these bright little seedlings for weeds, lacing their home with chemicals and for the most part, abandoning them in a garden without water or sunlight.
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