Never a City So Real Page 5
One morning, I stopped by the restaurant but Alexander wasn’t there. I ended up having coffee with the kitchen manager, Lewis Mosby, whom everyone calls “Cornbread.” Mosby is thickly built from his years lifting weights in prison. He told me that he was fifteen when he first met Alexander; he’d hang around the record shop. Alexander took a liking to him, but Mosby subsequently got in and out of trouble so many times that he grows increasingly soft-spoken and reticent with the telling of his story. As a teenager, he was adept at hot-wiring cars, and he became the in-house car thief for the Disciples, a street gang. He’d acquire an auto—using only a screwdriver—when the gang had to move drugs or guns. Mosby soon got caught, and he served three years for car theft and possession of a gun. He was released, then got arrested again, for possession of a gun, and did another five years. He was released, and then he was involved in a gang shootout, in which a girl was accidentally injured in the crossfire. Mosby, who was arrested for the shooting, had thirteen hundred dollars on him that he couldn’t explain away. He had his attorney call Alexander as a witness, hoping that Alexander would testify that he worked for him at the record shop. But when Alexander took the stand, he refused to lie; he testified that he knew Mosby was a gang member, that he hung out in front of an active drug building, and that he drove a Cadillac that had a television set in the back. Mosby cursed him under his breath, and then got sentenced to twelve years for attempted murder. Suffice it to say that he was in and out of prison twice again—at this point, to hear his story, I had to lean over the table—before his mother became ill with uterine cancer in 2000. “I wanted to be there for her,” he told me. And, besides, he added, his voice now almost a whisper, “I was tired.” He was forty-three years old. So, he turned to the only person he knew to turn to, Alexander. Alexander agreed to give him a job, but told him, “You’re not going to make it.”
Alexander believes in redemption. But he also exhibits the pragmatism of a businessman and recognizes that if his restaurant is to survive, the community around it must thrive. If his employees return to school, he’ll buy their books. “You’re not going to make it by working here,” he tells them. There’s Maurice Gaiter, a recovering heroin addict, who now helps manage the place. And remember the pimp Don Juan? In 1988, he discovered God and changed his name to Bishop Don Magic Juan. For two years, Alexander rented out a spare storefront to him for his church and provided him with an inexpensive apartment.
Alexander, who has never raised the price of lunch (meat and two sides for $5.95), may not know much about food, but his recipes, which come from his sister, keep folks coming back. (The crowd pleasers are the fried chicken and pork chops smothered in gravy, though I tilt toward the baked chicken with collard greens and yams on the side.) The customers here, who have included Snoop Dogg, the Cubs’ manager Dusty Baker, and Police Superintendent Terry Hillard, are mostly blue collar, usually lively, and mostly African-American, though not without a sprinkling of whites and Hispanics. I, for one, eat at Mac Arthur’s more regularly than anywhere else in the city.
I caught up with Alexander a few weeks after I met Mosby, and told him that Mosby took great pride in the fact that he was the employee whom Alexander entrusted with handling the restaurant’s cash—at times as much as two thousand dollars. “He trusts me,” Mosby had told me. “I can’t let him down.”
Alexander twirled a toothpick in his mouth. He smiled. “I still tell him he’s not going to make it,” he said. “I don’t tell him he’s the best I got. I don’t want it going to his head. I don’t want him to know I was wrong from the beginning.”
Brenda calls me. Can I meet her at Mac Arthur’s? Millie has hit a rough spot, and Brenda wants some advice, some help really, in reaching out to her friend. Mac Arthur’s just seems like the natural place to consider good deeds. When I suggest to Brenda that Alexander’s “soft heart” seems to wear off on others, she tells me about a previous lunch visit to Mac Arthur’s. She was ordering her food when she recognized one of the servers. It was a former client of hers. Brenda didn’t remember much about the woman’s situation except that the last few times she’d seen her there had been a remarkable decline in her bearing. She’d appeared tired; her clothes were soiled and her hair unkempt. Brenda soon learned that she was “on the pipe,” addicted to crack cocaine, and that she was shoplifting to support her habit. Brenda’s worked with so many young mothers that she couldn’t remember the woman’s name. “Hey, girl,” Brenda said when she saw the woman at Mac Arthur’s. “You look good.” She didn’t want to say much more as she didn’t want to embarrass her in front of all the customers. “I was real proud,” Brenda tells me. The woman—whom Brenda thinks she might have helped get into rehab but again can’t remember—smiled back, and handed Brenda her dessert, a banana pudding. “It’s on me,” the woman said. Brenda laughs to herself. “Ohhh,” she says. “That felt good.” We make a date for lunch.
Give Them What They Want
Milton Reed is a lanky, long-legged man, and so I need to walk briskly to keep up with him. He carries a large sketch pad under one arm, and he has stashed his sketch pencils in the pockets of his beige cargo pants, along with a box opener, which he uses as a sharpener—and which also affords him some protection. He is not slowed down by his footwear: Nike running shoes from which he’s cut away the heels. They resemble slippers more than sneakers. “Bought ’em too small,” he explains.
We’re scooting past weed-choked vacant lots and aging wood-framed homes that lean in the wind like prairie grass. We pass a group of young African-American men, one of whom halfheartedly attempts to conceal the marijuana blunt they’re sharing. They turn away from us. Reed, who is also African-American, says to me, “You don’t have to worry out here. They look at you, and think one thing: There goes a cop.” He lets go with his signature laugh—an uninhibited cackle that comes in small, staccato bursts, and often in response to his own observations. This is less a sign of immodesty than an acknowledgment that it’s okay to laugh at his stories and perceptions, some of which can be discomfiting in their bluntness. The young men, who up to this point have been trying to deflect our notice, now turn to see what’s so funny.
Reed had invited me to join him at the Bud Billiken Day Parade. Each summer, this parade winds its way through the heart of Chicago’s South Side, a ribbon of predominately black neighborhoods, which runs from the Loop to Ed Sadlowski’s South Chicago. (Blacks and whites still live very separate lives here, as evidenced by the El platform in the Loop at the end of the business day: Those waiting for the northbound trains are virtually all white, those on the platform awaiting the southbound trains virtually all black.) Billiken, as far as I can make out, is the country’s largest parade. It lasts six hours and has fifty thousand participants. (By comparison, New York’s Thanksgiving Day Parade lasts three hours and has roughly five thousand participants.) Another million people line Martin Luther King, Jr., Boulevard, ten to twenty deep in places, and some spend the night in sleeping bags to secure a good viewing spot. Virtually everyone who attends the parade is African-American. In fact, an out-of-towner stumbling upon this hopping celebration might think that it was one of black Chicago’s best-kept secrets, except that it’s televised on two local stations. The truth is that the city’s imaginary borders can be as impenetrable as the Berlin Wall had been. A visiting friend once arrived at O’Hare airport and received a city map from a rental car agency; the map didn’t include the South Side.
The parade, which is held the second Saturday in August, originated in 1928 as a salute by the Chicago Defender to its paperboys. The Defender is one of the country’s oldest African-American newspapers, and though it’s lost much of its vigor, in the 1930s and 1940s it was considered essential reading in the black community. Pullman porters would distribute the paper in southern towns, where it helped lure victims of segregation northward. The parade’s name derived from a small statue—a “Billiken”—which sat on the editor’s desk and which parade organizers claim wa
s a Chinese god who watched over children. But Billiken, it turns out, was neither a deity nor Chinese. Around 1910, a small Chicago firm, the Billiken company, produced small figurines—sometimes in the form of penny banks—of a bullet-headed creature with pixie ears, a grinning mouth, and a rotund belly. It was the Cabbage Patch Doll of its day, a passing craze, and undoubtedly one of these figurines made its way to the desk of the Defender’s editor, Lucius Harper, whose nickname was “Buddy.”
The parade’s path winds through a part of the South Side long known as Bronzeville, a neighborhood whose ups and downs have inversely reflected the nation’s mood on race. It was a thriving hub of black-owned businesses through the 1940s, the destination for blacks who fled the South in what has been hailed as one of the largest internal migrations in history. Bronzeville, where such writers as Ida B. Wells, Richard Wright, and Gwendolyn Brooks settled, was also home to Liberty Life Insurance, the first black-owned insurance company in the North, and Overton Hygienic Company, one of the foremost suppliers of African-American cosmetics. The nation’s first black-commanded regiment, the 8th, was stationed at the Armory on Giles Avenue, which was named after the regiment’s highest ranking officer, Lieutenant George L. Giles, who was killed in World War I. (The regiment’s members held off white hoodlums during the race riots of 1919, stationing themselves on the fire escape of a nearby YMCA with their weapons.)
There’s much history here. The Pilgrim Baptist Church, formerly a synagogue (in this city of ever-changing neighborhoods, churches adorned with stars of David are a common sight), was designed by Dankmar Adler, whose father was the synagogue’s rabbi, and Louis Sullivan, with a helping hand from a young Frank Lloyd Wright (who worked for Adler and Sullivan’s firm at the time). Some consider it one of the most beautiful Sullivan interiors. The peaked-ceiling structure boasts exquisite ornamentation, organic forms juxtaposed with geometric designs. It’s also here at this church where the blues musician Thomas Dorsey pioneered modern-day black gospel music. (Dorsey authored “Precious Lord,” which has been recorded by a divergent cast, from Elvis Presley to Johnny Cash.) A mile south was the old Chess Records’ storefront where the Chess Brothers, Leonard and Phil, played a Little Walter recording, “Juke,” and conducted an early version of test marketing, placing a speaker in the corner doorway to see if people at the adjacent bus stop responded. And there’s Meyers Ace Hardware, once the site of the Sunset Café (which later became the Grand Terrace), a hotbed of jazz in the 1920s and 1930s. Earl Hines and Cab Calloway performed here regularly as did Louis Armstrong, who titled one song “Sunset Stop.” Musicians still come by the hardware store often, since, as one once said, “This place is as sacred to jazz musicians as the Wailing Wall is to Jews.” The store’s owner was once offered ten thousand dollars for a mural in one of the back offices, past the screwdrivers and furnace filters; it depicts a trio of musicians and a sultry singer whose head is cut off by wood paneling. Another time, twelve German trumpet players came here; each purchased plungers, and had the store’s owner sign them.
In the 1960s, when white establishments opened their doors to blacks, many of the businesses in Bronzeville suffered, and most eventually went under. The community is undergoing a revival, in large part because of a thriving black middle class committed to staying in the city and rebuilding this historic neighborhood.
Milton Reed has come to the parade in the hope of earning some money by drawing profiles. The previous summer, he told me, he made more than three hundred dollars, charging seven dollars a portrait. A line had formed in the morning, and it never let up. Reed and I reach the corner of King Drive and Muddy Waters Drive (the city has so many honorary streets, many named after obscure personages like Daniel D. “Moose” Brindisi and the Reverend Frenchie Smith, that it’s lost count), and Reed has me purchase two milk crates at a dollar apiece, so he can have a place for him and his subjects to sit while he sketches. “Let me get to work,” he announces, although there doesn’t seem to be much work to be had. No one has approached him. I use one of the crates as a platform so that I can see the parade over the crowd. From a nearby vendor, Reed orders himself a small container of rib tips, then worries it might get his hands too messy, so instead asks for a Polish sausage. I holler for him to get me some of the jerk chicken. The food is plentiful, as are renegade vendors whom the city, on this occasion, traditionally chooses to ignore.
I first met Reed in 1999, while visiting a woman in the Stateway Gardens Public Housing complex, which was then a collection of eight seventeen-story high-rises. He was in the living room of my hostess, where he was painting a gold-trimmed black panther on the cinderblock wall. He had a forty-ounce bottle of Colt 45 beside him, and he was so completely engaged in his work that he didn’t say a word. There was nothing out of the ordinary about the rendering, though it was clear that Reed had taken great care with it. He had first sketched the outlines of the panther in pencil, using a ruler and right angle, and then had gone to work with oil-based house paint. Because of its permanence, there was little room for error. I assumed at the time that the panther was meant to conjure up more radical days. I later learned, however, that a number of years before a woman had asked Reed to paint a black panther with gold trim on her kitchen wall to match her black and gold furniture, a common color pairing among public-housing residents. (“They all follow that same tradition,” Reed told me.) Word quickly spread, and soon Reed had a reputation. Public-housing residents came to know him as “Mr. Artist”—as in “Mr. Artist, how much you charge for one of them murals?”
Reed, who’s now in his late forties, has salt-and-pepper hair and a trimmed beard and mustache. He likes to talk, and he unabashedly offers his opinions to just about anyone, including to the cadre of young drug dealers outside his building. “They tell me they’re in business,” he says. “I tell ’em they need to get a real job.” Reed’s full-time job is as a maintenance worker at the Dearborn Homes, the public-housing complex where he lives. Since the early 1990s, however, Reed has been kind of a Diego Rivera of the projects, painting the imaginings and realities of the dispossessed, of the men and women who live in America’s poorest neighborhood, an area beset with the kinds of problems one might expect in a place where ninety percent of the families are headed by a single parent and where violence has become such a way of life that a banner on a local church calls for a “Peace Truce” and a local tombstone maker, Elmo’s, advertises, “While U Wait. Before You Go, See Elmo.”
Reed himself grew up in public housing, in the Robert Taylor Homes, a complex of twenty-eight buildings adjacent to Stateway. The Robert Taylor Homes and Stateway Gardens stretched over two miles, the longest contiguous alignment of public housing in the world. Reed liked to draw as a kid, and after dropping out of high school, he earned his GED and went on to a junior college, where he took commercial art classes. He then worked for eight years at a graphic arts firm, and while he didn’t particularly like the job—it stifled his creativity, he says—the company did send him to more art classes, where he learned about perspective and composition.
He began his part-time career as a professional artist by painting fairly mundane likenesses: apples, oranges, and peaches in people’s kitchens; cartoon characters like Betty Boop, the Flintstones, and Pikachu on the walls of children’s rooms; fish and dolphins in bathrooms. Also, early on, he was often asked to sketch likenesses of Jesus Christ, but it irked him that virtually everyone wanted Jesus to be white. It was as if people had been beaten down for so long that they no longer believed that anyone who resembled themselves could amount to much. “They’ll say, ‘Why you draw him so dark?’ ” he told me. “I’ll say, ‘Jesus wasn’t really white,’ and they’ll say, ‘Look, I’m paying you, do it the way I say. I know how Jesus look.’ I mean, they probably met Jesus in person, so I can’t argue with them. I give ’em what they want.”
Soon, people began to make personalized requests. First, there were the panthers. Then, of all things, it was landscapes. He remembe
rs the first time it happened. A young woman told Reed she wanted a sky with clouds over water and trees. She said she wanted the sunlight coming off the water. “I said, ‘I understand,’ ” Reed recalls. “ ‘Let me try to make you feel good.’ ” The landscapes caught on. Drab cinderblock walls became lakes surrounded by oak trees. Beaches with palm trees. People so treasured these soothing natural scenes that they’d throw parties where friends could get their pictures taken in front of them. It was as close as many of them would get to finding a refuge from the dankness of their neighborhood.
Women asked Reed to paint them lounging by the water, a vicarious escape. Soon, one asked Reed to paint her by her lake naked, and that, too, caught on. Reed, though, refused to have women model in the buff out of fear that their boyfriends might not approve, and so he’d undress them in his head. One client told Reed, “Oooh, that look just like me. That’s how my breasts look. It’s just like you was looking at me. You got a good imagination.”
Disapproval in this neighborhood can get ugly, and Reed quickly discovered that people didn’t take kindly if he painted the same mural in one apartment that he’d done in another. Reed told me that once, in an elevator, a client threatened to beat him up if he didn’t change a neighbor’s landscape, and so now he always makes sure to choose different hues for the water, or rearrange the placement of the trees, or choose different kinds of trees. “I’m giving them something,” he told me, “that they can never have in their life unless they was rich.” And so, he goes on to say, they want something that reflects their own sensibilities. They want something unique because there’s not much they can call their own.