and turn off the light and cough. Though I was the goat in the stable that lets the stallion sleep, I couldn’t help it. I thought maybe I could rig my dreams. I tried to drift into sleep holding on to the image of us united and running the ChiChi.
FOUR
The first city to be mentioned in the Bible was built by an outcast. Poor Cain. The Lord rejected his harvest offering and then told him it was his own fault. How smug Abel must have been, but we mustn’t blame the victim. After all, that mark Cain negotiated from the Lord saved his life while Abel’s flock grieved for the touch of its dead master.
Cain was a fugitive, but as the son of Adam and Eve he was simply acting out the family tradition of exile. His wife, that roadside convenience, probably endured many a night of listening to Cain’s guilty tears and then many a morning of his loathing because she had witnessed his tears. Somehow he pulled himself together, and east of Eden, in the land of Nod, he founded a city, which he named for his son, Enoch.
Perhaps by the time Enoch grew up he was completely bored with his father’s neurotic, repetitive story of how harshly the Lord had used him. There, over the sputtering lamp and the darkening wine, was Cain, becoming morbidly self-pitying as he trotted out his old grievances and regrets. Perhaps Enoch and his mother exchanged a look, and one of them would say, My look at the time. We must to bed. And then they would abscond from the company of the anguished man.
I like to think that in this new city Cain found friends who welcomed his talk. Maybe some among them were true friends, but how could the founder of a city ever be sure people received him because they liked him. Perhaps it didn’t matter to Cain. An audience was an audience. Theoretically, the inhabitants of this city had to be his relations. If not, then they were phantoms, figments of Cain’s imagination. Hallucination was another family tradition. His parents believed in their conversations with a serpent.
* * *
The Chicago I grew up in was full of people who could not get away. They couldn’t cash checks; they couldn’t buy tickets out of town. State Street was Stuck Street. People without gas money went to work on State Street. They ate government cheese for lunch. The Dan Ryan Expressway slammed through property that had slipped from family hands before the Great Depression.
Liquor stores, beauty shops, check-cashing joints, gas stations, and tambourine Pentecostal churches in former drugstores made it impossible for me to understand what had been so fabled about Bronzeville. There were a couple of corners, but most everything was boarded up. My dad couldn’t get over the loss of the Regal, his favorite theater, the place with the balcony where he became a man, and Mom said she was tired of debating whether the Taylor projects could ever be cleaned up.
The South Side had been the scene of bitter anti-urban renewal meetings. The people, as represented by Mom, lost. She minded the high-rises we couldn’t see, those finished in the late sixties, so much so that she wouldn’t drive downtown with us to look at the Marina Towers or the Hancock building as they went up, the kind of Sunday excursions Dad liked to propose, almost as a joke. He liked to drive under the post office.
While he read the Hyde Park Herald , Mom sat defiantly with Voices . She and her white friends at the Unitarian church defended themselves against the charge that Hyde Park wasn’t just an integrated neighborhood, it was where white and black united to keep out the poor. The University of Chicago did what it felt it had to in order to house faculty in the neighborhood, to prevent the whole shebang from going to the dogs. I never particularly wanted to live in a spanking new apartment tower like Dr. Robert Hartley’s, but I wished we owned one of the cubic E Houses the university had bulldozed into place around itself in the early 1960s, especially after
FOUR
The first city to be mentioned in the Bible was built by an outcast. Poor Cain. The Lord rejected his harvest offering and then told him it was his own fault. How smug Abel must have been, but we mustn’t blame the victim. After all, that mark Cain negotiated from the Lord saved his life while Abel’s flock grieved for the touch of its dead master.
Cain was a fugitive, but as the son of Adam and Eve he was simply acting out the family tradition of exile. His wife, that roadside convenience, probably endured many a night of listening to Cain’s guilty tears and then many a morning of his loathing because she had witnessed his tears. Somehow he pulled himself together, and east of Eden, in the land of Nod, he founded a city, which he named for his son, Enoch.
Perhaps by the time Enoch grew up he was completely bored with his father’s neurotic, repetitive story of how harshly the Lord had used him. There, over the sputtering lamp and the darkening wine, was Cain, becoming morbidly self-pitying as he trotted out his old grievances and regrets. Perhaps Enoch and his mother exchanged a look, and one of them would say, My look at the time. We must to bed. And then they would abscond from the company of the anguished man.
I like to think that in this new city Cain found friends who welcomed his talk. Maybe some among them were true friends, but how could the founder of a city ever be sure people received him because they liked him. Perhaps it didn’t matter to Cain. An audience was an audience. Theoretically, the inhabitants of this city had to be his relations. If not, then they were phantoms, figments of Cain’s imagination. Hallucination was another family tradition. His parents believed in their conversations with a serpent.
* * *
The Chicago I grew up in was full of people who could not get away. They couldn’t cash checks; they couldn’t buy tickets out of town. State Street was Stuck Street. People without gas money went to work on State Street. They ate government cheese for lunch. The Dan Ryan Expressway slammed through property that had slipped from family hands before the Great Depression.
Liquor stores, beauty shops, check-cashing joints, gas stations, and tambourine Pentecostal churches in former drugstores made it impossible for me to understand what had been so fabled about Bronzeville. There were a couple of corners, but most everything was boarded up. My dad couldn’t get over the loss of the Regal, his favorite theater, the place with the balcony where he became a man, and Mom said she was tired of debating whether the Taylor projects could ever be cleaned up.
The South Side had been the scene of bitter anti-urban renewal meetings. The people, as represented by Mom, lost. She minded the high-rises we couldn’t see, those finished in the late sixties, so much so that she wouldn’t drive downtown with us to look at the Marina Towers or the Hancock building as they went up, the kind of Sunday excursions Dad liked to propose, almost as a joke. He liked to drive under the post office.
While he read the Hyde Park Herald , Mom sat defiantly with Voices . She and her white friends at the Unitarian church defended themselves against the charge that Hyde Park wasn’t just an integrated neighborhood, it was where white and black united to keep out the poor. The University of Chicago did what it felt it had to in order to house faculty in the neighborhood, to prevent the whole shebang from going to the dogs. I never particularly wanted to live in a spanking new apartment tower like Dr. Robert Hartley’s, but I wished we owned one of the cubic E Houses the university had bulldozed into place around itself in the early 1960s, especially after
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