Black Chicago Page 2

  He shuffled in, thru the long corridor, from the front door to the kitchen, his dark skin ashy from the evening breezes, a clear trickle of snot easing out of his left nostril.

  Dr. Antonio Davis’ (“what do you want to be when you grow up?”), unhesitating he answered, “a doctor,” as he fumbled with the spelling of State Street. Mother, father, and oldest sister weren’t at home, his friend had gone home (if anybody wanted to stretch “home” to include the Robert Taylor Projects) and he was out in the streets, trying to help himself survive.

  Whether through good fortune or prior info about the lady at 3806, he had stumbled into a place where he could receive a lot of attention, inspiration (“you want some fish?”), well designed psychological counseling and work to do.

  “Come tomorrow and rake the back yard and I’ll pay you. You have to do a good job now, okay?”

  The agreement made, he was ushered back out with a kiss, a little endearment (“you’ve got pretty eyes, whose eyes do you take after?” “My father’s”), a couple salami sandwiches, a piece of pie, an autographed book of poems and a stern reminder that he had a job to do after school the next day.

  “You don’t have to ask anybody anything, there’s a rake on the side of the house.”

  My cute little outline for the first story of the spring series fell neatly into place, it was supposed to open up on spring, the month of May, as a time of love.

  “Dr.” Antonio Davis never made another house call.

  The bleaching season turns many eggplant colored people grayish, edges walnut skins into yellowed butter, moves brick-brown to a softened orange, creates a palette that was never supposed to happen to the faces moving quickly through the city’s streets. But thats not something they’ve stopped to think about.

  The way people step is what you notice first when you get off the train, no Hollywood shufflin’, no contemplative foot dragging, none of the casual movement that we’ve become accustomed to in “EL-A” when we happen to be where people walk.

  No, none of that happens. There is a spring to the step in Chi, a slight lean into the tape. It could quite possibly be a muscular residual from the winter snow slogging and the wind chill factor fighting.

  The movement you notice and the color of the people. The colors of the moving people remain imprinted long after the people have stopped moving.

  In Chicago, as in Brazil, the color spectrum wanders from soot black to cloudy white, with varied denominations in between. The only distinction that happens here that doesn’t happen there is months and months of snow, ice, sleet, late buses and a climate that forces the strongest to weep on bitterly cold days.

  Picture Rio De Janiero, Brazil and Chicago in January and the contrast will immediately spell out the difference.

  People who need the right kind of sun can usually find enough of it in May, but barely. The severely bleached and leeched struggle thru something that mimics Count Dracula anemia. The more heavily colored offer a palette that is almost African-Impressionistic.

  Even the most Eurocentric of the Eurocentrists are forced to acknowledge that the mulatto beige of their coloristic dreams could never come close to the beige that they see on Wabash Avenue and Martin Luther King Drive ’round about high noon on May 7th or thereabouts.

  Real dark people, the “un-reconstituted,” the chocolate-cocoa hued branch suffer the reflections of past lives, charcoal lined down through their tear lines (those rivulet areas that trickle alongside the nose, past the cheeks) and around their mouths, its as though their real selves have held onto trace lines during the bleaching season.

  I didn’t quite know what to think when the neighbor of my friend asked, “you went to Du Sable, didn’t you?”

  “Yeah, why?”

  “I clipped this article about one of your high school heroes out of the paper a few weeks ago, thought I’d save it for you.”

  I don’t know what it was about the way he said it, maybe it had something to do with a white boy assuming that he knew who my high school heroes had been.

  I thanked him for the clipping, it was from a New York paper, strangely, dated 2/9/91, and the sportswriter, one of those racist liberals who would be shocked to be called that, was offering his warped version of Paxton’s history.

  “Several weeks ago in Chicago, a postal worker named Paxton Lumpkin died, at age 54. The name, with its crunchy alliterative juxtaposition of vowels and consonants, often brought a smile to a listener, just as Paxton Lumpkin, when he was a basketball player—so clever, so deft, so joyous, dribbling low the way Groucho Marx walked but dribbling the ball as if it were a yo-yo in his hands—brought a smile to the spectator.”

  It was all wrong. I wanted to shred the piece, and scream—“No! That ain’t the way we saw him.”

  The crunchy, alliterative juxtaposition of vowels and consonants didn’t bring smiles to our faces when we streamed up and down the high school corridors with him, walking meditationally slow, his somewhat battered profile tilted toward the rim of the basket.

  His name was what it was, the same as Bidbody Dohicky’s and Jezub Kickover’s names were their names; nobody crunched or juxtaposed alliterative vowels and smiled. What makes these people say stuff like that?

  But yes, he was a heroic figure to many Du Sable high school students, and to others he was a dumb jock who didn’t have enough sense to go to his classes.

  The hero worshippers might not have been let down when he flunked out of Indiana U. after the first semester of his sophomore year, but the normal, run of the mill achievers certainly felt that he should’ve been a better representative of the Du Sable student body.

  The writer, Ira somebody, goes on to talk about how high school basketball teams represent “a kind of hope their stars holding out the possibilities of a glorious future.

  And how the Du Sable High School Panthers were an inspiration to the Black community “demonstrating for everyone that given an opportunity any underdog, by skill and drive and wit, could come out from under.”

  Bullshit.

  That’s the kind of clownish logic that’s responsible for the plight of many hundreds (perhaps thousands) of tall, young men, formerly mesomorphic (now running to wino fat) and physical types in between, milling around on ghetto street corners, usually adjacent to liquor stores, who fell for the hype that led them to believe that sports would do the trick.

  The piece ends on a note of pure invention; “you knew someone from Chicago was saying recently, whenever Lump entered a room, he lit it up, like he did the basketball court. He was still Paxton Lumpkin, the high school basketball star. He always will be.”

  It isn’t necessary to invent what Paxton Lumpkin once said, in a room that I was in, not recently; “you know somethin, man, doin’ that whole time I was yo-yoin that ball up’n down the court, I shoulda been yo-yoin my ass to classes more often. Yeahhh, that’s what I should’ve been doin’.”

  The Trees

  Chicago drives a hard bargain with its trees. There are people in the city that you wouldn’t want to be caught dead with. Or alive. But you feel a need to have the trees around you at all times.

  Lite years ago, when we were growing up in the city, winter whipped trees, (bark skins glistening within iced glazes, icicles forming holes in the upper branches) frequently scared the shit out of us on brutally cold nights.

  The trees whistled, groaned death rattles crackled like witchy old crones crackling, shadow-clawed us home from iced up romantic assignments.

  Eventually, inevitably, the ice melted, the tainted snow revealed black earth, fledgling grass underneath and tree buds shyly made promising appearances.

  A few weeks later the buds had become bold seducers, breezy green flirts that swayed overhead and offered freckled peeks at the sky. Flitting green leaves rustled against each other, or produced a shivering music with each humid gust of wind.

  The moisture in the air dried out after a short, passionate summer. And with the loss of humidity came a danci
ng—dizzy palette of reds, greenish yellows, velvety browns, frosted blues, autumn.

  Chicago drives a hard bargain with its trees.

  (Another Kind of Moulin Rouge) Reese’s the President’s Lounge, Chazz. May 19, 1991

  Men with well fashioned paunches, women with comfortable haunches, a transgenerational mix, everybody well dressed and smelling beautifully (“its called Monsieur Houbigant”) fancy African—Americans (“no gym shoes allowed”), a different kind of jet set (“you going on this cruise, man?”).

  Its Friday night on the Southside, the spring of 1991, late. It doesn’t begin to kick off til elevenish, and later.

  Reese’s (The Other Place, A Piece of The Rock, The Apartment, Lolisa’s, The Matador Room, The Dating Game, The Continental, Swingers, Artist’s, 82nd and East End, 50 Yard Line, Frances’, Felix, The Enterprise, The Line Room, Boss Martin, The Safari Room, The Tiger Lounge, Palm Garden, Selzer’s, The C and C Lounge, Shelter’s Lounge, 87th Avalon, Percy’s Palace, West Side Pick ’n Save, Westside Madison Ave, 4500 West, The Reggae Club, and a few hundred more) is the spot for a collection of “in” people.

  Why? Who knows? The situations fluctuate, the circumstances change, but the people remain the same, and the people are fickle. For desperately short periods one place (some would say “joint”) or another will become “popular,” fade in an invisible stretch and surrender to another place. There are no winners, losers, or players in this, no one becomes the head or the tail. It all just happens.

  It’s a bit like the dances; once it was the Walk, the Bop, the Funky Chicken, the Swim, the Monkey, the Mambo, the Twist, the Watusi, the Electric Slide.

  The Electric Slide, on an officially labeled “dance floor” in the Other Place, or in an unofficially labeled dance space in Reeses …

  The Tribality of it leaks thru. Here we are in 1991 and Africans in America are assembling, once again, to do something that no one else in the country has thought about doing.

  In Oakland, California a Mecca of Africanity in America, it’s gotten so good that top flight singers (“Who? That Li’l Short woman?”) call out the steps, like a square dance caller.

  The Electric Slide, as an example of what constitutes a construct of African-American aesthetics, makes for a superior example of what the deal is.

  The Electric Slide is a New African Dance, (yes of course, the Old Africans do it too, but with a different vibe behind it) … women predominant, men fill in the ranks and files, the movements are seemingly loose in the sense that most African dancing seems to be “loose,” but the animated and the loose bootied soon discover that they are not going to have an easy time of it if they delay the relaxation of a joint too long, or fail to catch the off rhythm, of an off rhythm. (If you miss you’re gone—)

  Everything is flung into the Electric Slide: fashion, it hardly makes any sense to make an attempt to get up and try to do the Electric Slide unless you’re prepared to do the Electric Slide. And be dressed right.

  Really simple dance, really; a motion with the left and right legs to the left front, a backward step to the side, three motions with the left shoulder, the right shoulder, a shuffle with the hips, a parking-the-can-motion with the whole body, several undefined dips and stops, a little inner play with the hands, eyes, and knee caps, all on rank and file display …

  An African American Academic, a “Big Wig” (check that out, Langston Hughes), cruising thru (yeah, they do quite a bit of that in Chicago, owed the whole business into African aesthetics—we’re not talking about the Motherland here, we’re dealing with Africanistic aesthetics, stuff that’s got to do with where we are here.

  Its always stuck in my craw, the way the Caucasoid academics have always given us Brazil and Cu-ba as incredible examples of African-Afrikan retention and clearly neglected to make any attempt at an understanding of what constitutes “retention.” If the Electric Slide don’t do it, then li’l duck!

  A certain, hip way of behaving accompanies all of this. The “clientele” drinks quite a bit, smokes (“I should’ve been dead quite a while back”) and colors its attitudes with this New African aesthetic (transplanted, re-worked).

  It colors the attitudes to the extent of weeding out the unhip (not “hep,” they were never “In.”) and the square.

  We must go to the “Game of the Mirrors” for a real understanding of how this is understood.

  Most of the places mentioned here; Reeses’, The President’s Lounge (#2), offer a mirrored reflection of African-American life in Chicago because they clearly reflect African-American life at a certain level.

  I’m sure Iyalosha Tanina Shongobumni would understand, and perhaps vote me an ash.

  Perhaps the mirror is a small attempt, perhaps a somewhat tawdry attempt to clench our jaws on the images that we’ve had of ourselves, wherever. Or maybe its a grand look at how we see ourselves beyond where we’ve been forced to be.

  In any case, Bird oversees it all. We have to mention Bird because he will eventually become, like Coltrane, Ellington, Diz, Miles and a precious few others, an icon, and icons are reflections.

  Backing up into the mirror.

  They perch on the barstools, demurely sipping frothy drinks from tulip shaped, long stemmed glasses, glancing into the spotless mirrors behind the bar.

  He sips his cognac, ties a bead onto her seductive eyelashes, pretends not to be attentive for a moment. A moment later their eyes lock as they lift frothy drink and cognac snifter simultaneously.

  His lascivious off eye wink indicates that they were made for each other. She doesn’t deny it with a licentious pout of her full lower lip.

  Two stools to the left; matters are not going quite so smoothly. His eye punch is too aggressive, her beer is too flat, they are using the mirror for the wrong purposes.

  The players in “The Game of the Mirrors” must be of age, minors are prohibited from playing.

  Grade “A” players are role models of distinction. Some of them have actually reached the point of being able to use the mirrors telepathically.

  One world renowned “mirror man” has been known to imprison selected Ladies in the mirror, to hold them in glamorous captivity for hours on end.

  A sense of Africanity, of African-American aesthetics governs these behaviors; a certain, hip way of behaving (“don’t talk to me, you’re drunk”), a musical way of speaking (“she’s got a loud voice”), a Hip if you buy the adjective.

  The President’s Lounge is packed, it’s Friday night and the regulars are in the scene.

  The graciously long bar lengthens our perspective from the door, a small sitting area back there under the silent screen T.V., the dance floor on the other side, adjacent to the other bars.

  (It’s many yards narrower than the Other Places’ large bars, its satellite bars (“where you wanna sit, over there?”), numerous waitresses and cleverly distributed cocaine salespersons).

  Middle aged jocks in full plumage prowl the space, tall glasses held at port arms, granting and receiving the low keyed versions of high fives.

  Rakish hats, caps and berets fish for the glittering strobes, accentuate the conked eyes and pregnant glances.

  Color coordinated brothers (“yellow on yellow in yellow, on Black”) play out man—women games that are so intricately mapped that they sometimes forget the purpose for their cool activities.

  High tech types who were once ghetto—brother man—stays, stare at the ensemble groups, romanticizing about other times, pleased to be on the scene but proud of not being a part of the scenery.

  The African—colored—Negro—Black—African music pulls dancing bodies onto the dance floor where they play choreographic con games, fleece slick minds of kinetic energy and suck up on nebulous Africoid tits.

  Chazz is symbolic of most of it. Brother Chazz, Brother Chazz, the symbol, representative, objective relief.

  It might seem that Chazz was always there. He was there when Duke Ellington swung into town wearing a camel’s hair, wrap around, col
larless sports jacket,

  Chazz was wearing a variation on the Theme, the following Thursday. He has always been stylish without seeming to be profile conscious. That really takes some effort in our community, a place where to style is, to profile, a notorious trait.

  Watched the brother many a night, in front of the President’s Lounge, cop a stance in the parking lot of the Dating Game, take childish delight in the company of bonded brothers, look wisely innocent inside the Chicago Post Office, trade barbed shitticisms about town.

  His frontal life seems to be a dance. How long has he been doing the latest dance? How many dances has he learned? known? been a part of? Will be a part of?

  When Chazz dances, the place he is dancing in dances with him. Seen him dance with the President’s Lounge many times, caused stiff asses at the bar to sway.

  His dance succeeds because it is never interrupted by life; no sore loins, no fallen arches, blitzed out love affairs, concerns about bills to be paid or crazy international behavior. Brother Dances …

  Chazz dances now, for himself—us, a sacred Dance to honor the moment. In some ways he is the Essential Dancer, a lot of his stuff traditional, some of it made up.

  His dance forms the foundation, our foundation, for the interactions we have with each other: the pick ’n roll, the give ’n go, the spicy screen, the slip ’n slide … Michael Jordan, Chazz guards his position obviously, not jealously, and that keeps him on the top, year after year, keeps us going back ’n forth to Reeses’ and the President’s Lounge.

  I’m going to have to stop what I’m doing right here and think about the Orisha in print … May 23, 1991, rainy day (Saturday), in Chicago.

  I wasn’t introduced to the idea of Ancestor worship, the way some fortunate people were. In some rare way the Orisha have always been part of my existence.

  I can never remember when I wasn’t appealing to one divine energy or another. Never could figure out why I had to, what was happening in my head that forced me to make offerings, sacrifices.