Black Chicago Page 3

  It was never a question of God, but of gods of people who had developed a spiritual power that was strong enough for them to share it with anyone who made a very serious plea. Esu, Yemoya, Shango, Ogun, Oshun, Obatala’, none of their names were familiar to me, growing up on the Westside of Chicago, but the energies that they personified were real to me, had meanings that I couldn’t explain, still can’t.

  The Near West side was a beautiful place to come to grips with my ancestors, and the Orisha in an abstract sense they were all around me.

  I was given the job of killing the chickens, of making the sacrifices for the Sunday feast. Nobody else wanted to do it. Or else this was something that enabled us to survive and thrive drove me into doing what had to be done.

  Eleven fifty Wasburne was a shrine place. When I look back into it that’s the only conclusion I can reach. Everyday, including Sunday, was a holy day, all of the people were Orisha believers (if not worshippers) and the connections were serious.

  Every morning was started by Aunt Mary chanting, “Y’all ain’t up yet, whatcha gon’ do? Sleep all day?”

  Iyalosha meant something to me before it meant something. This smallish (I thought she was six feet when I was enchanted by her) woman with the Mississippi-styled pompadour laid it all out for us.

  She caused the fires to be lit, the ashes to be taken out, the babies to be born, love to be made, the chickens to be killed, the eggs to be laid, the gambling to begin, the atmosphere to be charged. Sister was stuff. She was in cahoots with shit that the rest of us shied away from. Why did she have fifteen dogs? (forty-five if the breeding season was on us).

  I know, some of the orthodox people will say; she didn’t come the regulation way, she didn’t get initiated, she didn’t serve, didn’t do the rituals, didn’t know the songs, couldn’t’ve been right.

  Who knows? They may be right. All I know is that she was an African spiritual guide for me; and those who paid attention.

  No, she wasn’t Cuban or Brazilian. She was a Mississippian, I’m sure, once proper investigations have been made, that the accident of birthing in that place will carry the same spiritual weight as a Gypsy singer being accredited in the caves of Cordoba, or a small town in Bahia.

  Long winded way of saying that she knew her stuff.

  But, let’s not lay it all on Aunt Mary, she was an appendage.

  My earliest understanding of The Religion swept Aunt Mary up into it, and also Uncle Percy, the Ascetic, her husband. Uncle Percy, the Gandhi-thin man who had once spent eleven years in the penitentiary for killing a man in a gambling dive.

  Down there, underneath the street, they performed unnamed rituals the whole day long and never took a backward glance.

  (Why did Aunt Mary really keep chickens in the pantry?)

  The basement contained the elements for a serious African belief system and the so-called Christian Church (Baptist) two doors east of us affirmed the elements.

  There was no doubt in my mind that the “church” was a cover for something deeper than the services that were announced on the billboard in front.

  (Why was there a pot bellied stove in the front of the church? a bit off to the side, midway between the altar and the front row. Strange stove, it wasn’t in anybody’s way but you could burn yourself if things got out of hand.)

  And why was the choir dressed in Elegba’s colors?

  And why did we have baptisms up there periodically, the initiates dressed in Obatala’s color?

  The preacher, the deacons, deaconesses (Uncle Percy was a deacon, Aunt Mary, a deaconess), the choir (four Mahalia Jackson ’s, five Ray Charles’) and all the motions of what was happening inside the Sunrise Baptist Church went ’way ’round Christian stuff.

  But that’s something I picked up on later in life. I had to make pilgrimages to other belief sites before I reached some conclusions about to what I had been exposed.

  The rhythms of the tambourine, the call and response of the singing, the fire glowing in the center of the “church,” the seriousness of being “saved,” of being put in touch with the Forces outside ourselves, Forces that often called people to clench their eyes and dance themselves away from this reality, cued me in.

  No, I wasn’t fooled for a minute. I knew that we were practicing The Religion, cleverly overlaid with just enough Christianity to make it “legit” for those who desperately needed assurances that their brainwashing had been successful. Or something.

  I’d definitely be lying if I said that I understood, that I was clear about how our spirituality filtered through us, through our neighborhood.

  What I did understand was that Washbourne was not integrated, it was African, except for the Jewish-colonialist-trader on one corner of Racine and Washbourne and the franchised Gentile supermarket on the other side.

  I’m stressing the fact we weren’t integrated because it meant, after business hours, we were left alone. Somehow this state of affairs seemed to decrease our dependence on white walls to bounce off our Blackness.

  We could’ve been an African city within the city, and the spirits that meant something were fed and allowed free expression.

  People opened up with folk tales and went all the way down to haints.

  Years later, after being immersed in this rich mix, I started checking out other belief systems and they reaffirmed what I had been raised in.

  It was a bit like the trip that the racist anthropologists had taken, pretending to discover the origin of mankind in the caves of Europe, in the rice fields of China, everywhere but Africa.

  The difference for me is that I didn’t resist the idea of Africa. Somehow it seemed quite logical to me; if the origin of people happened in Africa, then that’s where spirituality first occurred where the idea for creation myths happened, where the idea of The Religion was formed, had to be.

  This realization enabled me to stop fighting with my Christian friends, all of those who were into the notion of monotheism.

  I began to see how the depth of The Religion created the kind of spiritual strength needed to withstand the pressures of chattel slavery in the African Diaspora.

  Everywhere I look in the world, I see African people who have migrated, immigrated, exported, imported. And I know that they/we are sustained and strengthened by the power of our Ancestors and the Orisha. Ase.

  Momma was as typical of a certain kind of Chicagoan as they come. When I say “typical,” I’m not talking about a stadium full of people, but rather a small roomful of people.

  She came to Chicago from Helena, Arkansas, back in the ’20’s, when a lot of other Africans left the South. There isn’t much I can say about that section because I didn’t get to know her ’til 1937.

  Small Kalahari woman (her nickname was “Lil’ Bit”), filled with passion and vinegar. Momma (never mother, mommy or mom) was my introduction to the inner city, the guts lined with experiences impossible to come by anywhere else.

  The primary level of things I had come to grips with dealt with her passion. Momma was a passionate woman. There were no half-nuts happening with her, she got the whole orgasm or somebody would be in serious trouble.

  She ripped numerous shirts off of an assortment of would be cheaters (“I don’t play that shit!”) and played the fool for a couple of men. But it was all Chicago passion, in a way; she knew what she wanted and she knew what they wanted.

  Sometimes she wanted spring, and you could tell; everything would be buds and sweetened water. The flavors would be darker after late June. If the man was going to be meaningful, we could be fairly sure that the first shirt she gave him would be burgundy or chicken hawk red.

  But it wasn’t only about shirts and aroused blood. There was a sense of Earth and Moon surrounding the woman, a kind of primeval happenin’: she was the right size (how tall was Leakey’s woman Lucy?) and the right shape (how many middle class kids can say they watched their “mother’s” titties flop around until they were ten?) and she was deeply involved in African religious pra
ctices.

  I can see it now, the superstitious mumbo jumbo that I never laughed at, mocked or thought funny. All of the incenses, powders, perfumes, candles, incantations, musical invocations, appeals to/for di-vine intervention (“O lawd! Help us!”), all of it.

  Difficult shit. Why couldn’t we just give up and not burn a candle for seven days? Why was it necessary to “clean” the house?

  “Clean the house?” What house?

  Take a fuckin’ upturned kleenex box and scrub, wash and fumigate the motherfucker. What the hell was that about?

  Yes, of course, I rejected some of the physical manifestations of her passion. Like being beaten about the head and shoulders by someone who seemed to be for the moment possessed by a demon or two.

  But I loved moving from one side of town to the other, changing school often enough to prevent me from getting tied into knots by math tables or unpleasant encounters with the neighborhood thugs. They were there, waiting on me, but they had to be swift about doing what they wanted to do because any delay would find me gone, moved away.

  We (my sister and I) were true nomads; a cardboard box, the clothes on our backs. Gypsies and Bedouin desert people in the National Geographic were role models, heroic figures to me, still are.

  The nomadic thing for us wasn’t a search for water, or fresh pasturage for the goats, it was usually a desperate attempt to find a room because we had been evicted. Yeah, loved the adventure of moving, hated being evicted. Being evicted meant that you came home from school (about eighteen of them) and the lady next door would have a note telling you where the cardboard boxes had been re-routed.

  “Lil’ Bit” knew her world. She didn’t know downtown because there wasn’t a large number of Black people living downtown. Her world was the Southside ghetto, the Westside ghetto and the Northside ghetto.

  She knew the people in her world, a master ghetto psychologist. I noticed that she did several things upon arrival at a new den, uh place. She immediately got into her neighbors, if she didn’t already know them.

  She would determine, number one, who was likely to have some money to loan her. Number two, if there was a nice middle aged woman she could trust her children with, if she had to make an extended run.

  Beyond that it was a matter of getting the low down on everybody’s business. I guess it was her way of securing her place in the scheme of things, no matter how brief the time frame was going to be.

  The information that she treasured would include the whereabouts of the nearest gambling scene. It wasn’t difficult to find the gambling room.

  In most of the broken down buildings we lived in somebody would have a pair of dice, a deck of cards or some other way to mess off some money.

  If she couldn’t find the game, she’d invent one. I can close my eyes for a second and picture the sight of the lady kneeling on the edge of a rough blanket, surrounded by a grizzled collection of hard edged ex-cons, men with keloid knife slashes across their faces, women who gave the impression of being from the Stone Age.

  She won and lost, but the deeper impression for me was her involvement in the game, the opportunity to take a chance.

  If you’re going to be alive, she seemed to be saying, you must gamble.

  She was an artist of life, surviving but never thriving for longer than it took to spend the “relief” check. She was also another kind of artist, a person who decorated her environment.

  It never took longer than a few minutes for her to decide where a picture she clipped from the magazine should be pasted up, where the strips of paper should be strung from which length of overhead pipes.

  It was these little attentions to aesthetics, in a sense, that made life bearable. Her artistic senses, like her cooking was compounded by emergencies.

  Never knew anyone who could transform scraps of stuff into edibles as well as she could. Perhaps, if any producer ever bought the idea, the show could be called “the Ghetto Gourmet.”

  I’ve joked about her cooking on other pages, years after I had passed the stage of damned near starving. I can’t joke now, looking back at skillets and pots that were filled with stuff that gave us the courage to face winter ravaged Chicago mornings.

  Or make it through a day that would’ve been empty, had it not been for her ability to transform an onion and a wedge of cornbread into a bowl of Mexican chili, a fried chicken breast, a bowl of meatballs and spaghetti or whatever a fertile imagination wanted to pretend the fried cornbread and onion dish called “kush” was.

  The Lady’s entrepreneurship was much less successful than her way with scraps of scraps, “Lil Bit,” the wine seller. I can still smell the babyshit-sour odor of a dedicated cheap wine drinkers breath in my face.

  What was it? Some crazy law that said you couldn’t buy wine from the local bodega until twelve o’clock on Sunday morning, time enough for the people who had the shakes to be shaking into spasms.

  She decided to take up the slack by buying a case of red and white port on Saturday and re-selling it on Sunday morning.

  The idea was to make a dime off each bottle ($0.50 per pint). It never happened. Some shakers got it for $0.40, some for $0.30, many for nothing at all.

  Maybe the idea behind the whole get rich scheme was simply to serve the community wine when they needed it. In any case, profit was not the motive with her that it was with some people.

  What she lost on wine sales she made up for it with her emotional investments, her love thang. My Momma was a lover.

  She loved a variety of men, tall, short, small, large, thin, fat, bald, non-bald, smart, dumb. She loved my father, who was not too tall or too short, but very dark, smart and handsome.

  They had a childish attraction that produced two children and then a deep romance that gave birth to a serious friendship, years after the midday brawls and midnight love feasts.

  I’m 99% certain that Daddy was her first love. How many men could she have loved before getting married and pregnant at 16?

  The fact that they had two children to raise before they were twenty years old was never a drag for them. Momma was the primary keeper of the kids but we were quite well behaved and considered “cute,” which made it easier for her to stash us (together or separately) with responsible friends.

  If I had been a “Love Detective” I would’ve had enough evidence to convict both of them to eternal damnation. I was always running into Momma (most often Daddy) with someone, obviously off to do some sort of adulterous stuff.

  I don’t know if they busted each other on occasion, but my guess is that they did. And when they did, there was hell to pay.

  They had wall to wall lovers and didn’t seem to care a lot about who knew it. Momma thrived on complex relationships with simple men. Daddy was the other way, he loved simple relationships with complex women.

  They were hot when they were hot and never cooled down until she died and he was killed.

  I didn’t know that they were bonafide writers until they were both gone. It dawned on me, checking out a collection of letters he had written her from prison. I wasn’t privileged to read her replies.

  However, I was exposed to many of her creative ideas on paper whenever she had to write a can’t miss begging note to somebody in the building, or invent an artful reason for keeping me from school.

  I always feel that she is nourishing me whenever I come back to Chicago, to walk the familiar streets and search for faces that I once knew in other forms.

  I always feel her presence here and everywhere.

  The Blues

  We are re-exposed to them on the PBS channels across the country, in Chicago its WTTW. They are a bunch of Black guys sitting at pianos and entrenched guitar stools, plunking, strumming and singing their hearts out.

  It isn’t really singing, really. It’s more like someone using their voices to reach back into a different emotional frame of reference.

  These grizzled old African men dig down into themselves in front of mostly white audiences, mostly
younger types who can afford to go slumming in the latest yuppie blues havens.

  Shamefully, the young African people have turned their backs on these men, on this music, on their ancestors. We can only pray that they will wake up one day and realize what the so-called Blues means.

  A Night at the Sutherland

  The Sutherland Hotel is/was (if it hasn’t been destroyed) located at 47th and Drexel Blvd., northeast corner and at one time, it had the hippest jazz club in the city in the premises.

  This, mind you, was during the London House period, the Brownshoe in Old Towne, the Blue Note, the Regal Theatre and a whole collection of lesser known spots (The Flamingo Lounge, McKies, the Pershing Hotel, the C and C Lounge, places where music was played live and APPRECIATED.

  The Sutherland Lounge in the Sutherland Hotel was a leader. Never knew who owned the place, didn’t know what the inside deals were, or why, but it was the place to go and check Art Blakey out, Ahmad Jamal, Lou Donaldson, Diz, Bird would’ve played there if they had lived long enough.

  Miles Davis was there the night my friend Raoul decided to take this white girl he had blundered into. At the time, when Miles tripped into the Sutherland he came to play, not to shuck ’n jive.

  The audience had a lot to do with it, they wouldn’t allow him the space to play with them, he had to play for them or else people would start talking directly to him, on stage, and not heckle …

  Marvelous horse shoe shaped stage up there behind the bar. The tables were something else, but the waitresses were fairly cool and didn’t try to coerce you into ignoring the music.

  Miles Davis, a super hip audience, Raoul and the white girl. She was a good looking motherfucker, that was something we all acknowledged. A real white girl, not a frizzy hair Sephardic from the Westside, but a real tall Scandinavian type from the far Northside.

  Sherman, one of our least polite types had openly quizzed Raoul about Margreta.

  “How the fuck did you cut into a White Bitch like that, man?”

  He patiently explained; “I pulled her at Oak Street Beach, a place you unadventurous motherfuckers wouldn’t even think about going to.”