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.
Southside Tour. Saturday, June 13, 2009.
The first neighborhoods we passed broke any stereotypes I had about the Southside. The areas were entered were all black, but middle class. Places of cared-for yards and small businesses. Places that looked safe and were community oriented. Arvis told us about their history—many areas had been built for whites but when the first black people moved in, the whites fled leaving the community to grow and develop on it’s own. The shady streets are well cared for; block clubs post warnings about being noisy and parking.
Our tour shows me that the South side cannot be characterized in one generalization. It includes our safe refuge of Hyde Park, where the average level of education is seventeen and a half years and professors stroll down shady streets coffee mugs balanced on the handlebars of strollers; it includes the wealthy black neighborhood of Kenwood where Obama lives blocks from Louis Farrakhan, the leader of the nation of Islam; the middle class blacks of farther south. It includes Englewood, the second most dangerous place in the nation, a place where a nine-year-old girl was shot yesterday while bathing her dogs with her dad. It includes parks, cemeteries, Chinatown, the White Sox, and the ritzy apartments that house Mayor Daley and his cohorts. For this summer, it is my home.
Southside Tour. Saturday, June 13, 2009.
We drove back up Dan Ryan highway and I cried. I didn’t want anyone to see me, but I felt angry, nauseous. We had just visited Altgeld Gardens—less like gardens and more like hell on earth, these public housing projects fester in isolation, miles from any sign of humanity.
The projects are located off of 130th street, a street that juts out from one of the busiest highway in the nation. Cars zip by, in and out of the city, the people inside oblivious to the hell that is these people’s reality. We drove, passing gentleman’s clubs and megachurches. and listened to Arvis talking about the methane that still burns in the nearby dump each night, forty years after the dump shut down, sending poisonous fumes to the Gardens.
We turned off into an area of fields. We pull in and see a boarded up store. Then, we see homes. All along the east side, the brick buildings are closed—haunting rows, their windows like eyes with patches over them.
“They closed because people got sick,” Arvis says.
The projects are toxic—people get cancer and mysterious illnesses. Children are born without genitals, a little boy goes blind after playing in the grass.
The few buildings on the east side that are open have broken blue and white awnings and signs. They are charity centers—there are no stores in Altgeld.
We pass family services, Catholic charities. And then we see an elementary school. We see new houses.
A shiny new school? New, red brick houses?
Arvis says it before I can notice it for myself, but they closed the toxic homes and built new homes literally feet away. If that ground is toxic, how the hell is that ground not toxic?
Beyond that are more projects, rows and rows of new buildings, custom made. Two shiny, new Laundromats sit at the corner. There are lots of little playgrounds, yet all are void are children. It is sickening. I stare in awe at one some politician thought was a good idea—revamp the projects. Build them new homes. No one seems to notice that it’s the location that is toxic—not just because of the horrible chemicals but because of the location. Three to four thousand people are trapped here in an impossibly small amount of space. One bus arrives every day. There are no jobs, no hope, no escape. Nothing.
Arvis points to police cameras on every street corner—installed to watch for drug deals. So the people there are ignored—except when they are caught doing something illegal. I can’t believe it.
Later, someone, blinded by the new buildings, commented that the projects weren’t that bad.
They were the worst place I have ever seen in my entire life.
One hope: This is where Obama did his mission work. I have hope in the fact that we have a president who worked there.
Southside Tour. Saturday, June 13, 2009.
Slowly, throughout the tour, we found out about our tour guide’s incredible past. In his younger days, he knew Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, Harold Washington and scores of others who I know deplorably little about but who constitute incredible figures of Black History. These days, he is a friend of the Obamas. He has lived in Chicago for many years and has been involved in all aspects of the Black community. It was with his perceptive lens, knowledge base, wicked humor and cynicism that we saw the Southside of Chicago. It was an exhausting tour—three hours in a van with only one stop. Each place we were had a difficult history for us to understand. We were pummeled with painful statistics and a bitter history of betrayal by our government and our race. Arvis never let us forget our position—no one could escape the fact that we were white voyeurs, driving along in a huge, red van with tinted windows. He never let us forget that we were the only white people for miles and miles. Everything we saw illustrated a painful past and present marked by death, poverty, broken promises and no hope.
By the end of our tour, I felt physically sick with my race and our history.
After three hours, it got to be too much. We pulled into the Art and Culture Center at Southport and saw the sleek steeds and cowboy hats of folks gathering for a rodeo. All the cowboys were black. That wasn’t too much of a surprise for me. I had read or seen photos somewhere about a black rodeo culture. But Arvis figured no one had. “A Black rodeo!” he exclaimed over and over. “I bet you all can’t believe it! A Black rodeo! These folks here ain’t heard of a Black rodeo!”
I wanted to protest—I don’t have those horrible stereotypes that you think I do! I am here because I care—because I want to know. That’s why I am in this program! That’s why I am on this tour!
It only got worse when he explained his decision to live in South shore. South shore is an all-black community just south of Hyde Park that is economically integrated—the poor living right alongside rich people like Reverend Jesse Jackson. “I gave up on race integration,” he said, “And just went with economic integration.”
I felt hopeless, hopeless.
He talked about how for years in his education, he had been the only black student in his school. He talked about moving to South shore because it was easier, because he didn’t have to answer stupid questions asked by white people when he came home at night.
An incredibly intelligent, well-educated man. A man who was friends with some of history’s greatest. And my race had made him so uncomfortable that he no longer wanted to live with us.
Southside Tour. Saturday, June 13, 2009.
We had just eaten in happy oblivion at a Soul Food restaurant called B.J.’s Market when Arvis Averette arrived. The professor of economics at Columbia College was eager to go—ready to take us in the infamous Southside, a place we were all fascinated by and yet terrified of after years of hearing nothing more than stereotypes about it. After we had all piled in to the tan van, he lay out the rules. “I know you all think you all that and a bag of chips. Well, I don’t want no texting,” he said, looking back at us. “Otherwise, I put your lil’ happy ass out in the hood.”
