The Studs Terkel Reader_My American Century

by Studs Terkel

  The Chicago Defender was our newspaper. You’d grab your newspaperman to see what was going on, black life in big cities. You were always there even if you never moved. Believe it or not, Cairo, Illinois, was one of those places they would brag about. [Laughs.]

  We’re talkin’ about the thirties. We had a world of dreamers. Black people were some of the most creative people in the world, because you had to substitute dreams of what you thought might be the real world of one day. “In the Sweet Bye and Bye” was one of the favorite church songs. “I’m Gonna Lay My Burden Down” and “When the Saints Come Marchin’ In.” There was a mobility. What kind of crown you gonna wear? My grandmother, an ex-slave, used to talk about the number of stars that are gonna be in her crown when she went to the Promised Land.

  I knew many ex-slaves who lived there. My grandmother used to sit around and tell us these stories. She’d mix fiction in with ‘em, but some of ’em were true. About her life as a little slave girl. She remembers when General Grant came down to La Grange, Tennessee, and set up the army of the Tennessee. She heard the cannons. She used to tell us stories about how they used to trick Old Marsey. She was what they called a house nigger.

  My grandfather on my dad’s side was what you’d call a field nigger. These two old-timers used to meet in our home in the winter months, when our parents thought they were too old to live alone on the farm. They used to sit there and tell these stories over and over. She used to tell the ones about when they heard how the Union army was coming down to free the slaves. They would put on this big act. They would go in and tell Old Marsey how sorry they were and that if the Yankees came in, they weren’t gonna give them their hams and this and that. And they’d go in the backyard and crack up laughing.

  She was a little girl when slavery was ended. Dad’s father was a runaway slave. He couldn’t read and write. He heard that the Union army was freein’ people and he cut out. He didn’t even know what state he came from.

  Some Sundays in church when they started singin’ those old hymns, those people would start laughing and answering each other from across the room. We kids couldn’t understand what on earth they were laughing about. I remember one of us got up enough guts to ask what was so funny. They’d say: “We’re not really laughin’, you youngsters would never understand it.” They were really laughing about the fact that they had survived: Here we are sitting up here, free. These are our kids here with us. I’ve got a home, and my daughter is a schoolteacher. That’s what I used to hear my grandmother say.

  The thing I remember about these folks was the immense dignity and pride in the way they walked. They walked like straight sticks. They made us stand like that. This always slays me, that all of us had to stand erect. They would go around asking you: “Boy, aren’t you gonna be somebody when you grow up?” They’d always say: “I’m never gonna live to see it.”

  Let me tell you about the day my brother got his master’s degree from Fisk University. My dad didn’t like any fooling around in church or when one of the great black speakers came to town. There were circuits of people who went around just to inspire you, to tell you about Africa, the sleeping giant. He didn’t like anybody talking while somebody was making a speech. Or laughing or snickering. I think of all the kids my dad used to whip for talking when he was principal of the school. In the Fisk University chapel, he was talking to me all through the graduation speech by Dr. Alain Locke, one of the great black scholars.

  My mother kept shushing my father. He just kept talking. She said: “Stop talking, people will think we’re country and don’t know better.” He kept talking. I looked up, and tears were running down his face. He told me that in 1893, when he ran away from home “to make somethin’ of himself,” he helped construct that building where my brother was getting his degree. He leaned over to me and said: “These seats look like the same old iron seats I helped screw into this floor. I used to sneak back in here after the other workers had gone and sleep at night. I never thought I’d live to see the day my son would get a master’s degree in this building.” You know the funny thing? He was almost laughing, as I used to see the ex-slaves do. It was a celebration of that fact that “I am here, I exist, and there’s still some hope.” This is one of the real miracles of these people.

  My dad used to tell me, when he was close to seventy-nine, that he didn’t think any white man ever called him “mister” over four or five times in his whole life. My mother had been called “girl” and “nigger” and “auntie.” She was a strikingly good-looking woman.

  My dad didn’t want to come to Chicago. He figured his thing was in the South. My parents were schoolteachers. My mother and dad put together a hundred and ten years in classroom teaching. They were old-time crusading schoolteachers, mother and father. My dad was known as a school builder.

  The school was the size of an average city apartment. They had about two or three other teachers. They were making about twenty-five dollars a month. The kids, believe it or not, learned advanced mathematics. [Laughs.] This is crazy, isn’t it? I learned Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales when I was in the ninth grade. I can almost do it now, in Old English. We had oratorical contests all the time. There was a premium being able to speak well, enunciate clearly. I’ve lost some of that in the city.

  That school to me was one of the most fascinating things I’d ever seen. A frame building. We had outhouses and no running water. They had a hydrant out in the backyard.

  I was five years old. I was playing like I was Robert S. Abbott. He was the publisher of the Chicago Defender. There were some little towns where it wasn’t permitted to land. It was considered inflammatory, encouraging black people to go north. The dream centered around the North.

  In 1879 was a great exodus. It was two years after the Tilden-Hayes Compromise. People were leaving the South en masse. They were called the exodusters. Some of ’em were kidnapped and brought back to Mississippi and Alabama.

  I came to Chicago when I was at Great Lakes during World War Two. That’s why I joined the navy, just to see Chicago. When I came in, the only blacks were mess stewards. But I’d rather be a mess steward and live around Chicago than be in the army around Louisiana.

  I heard about Chicago all my life. Some of the stories were fabricated. You’d hear folks say: “I didn’t know I was black until I looked in the mirror.” You go up there, you wouldn’t believe it. They got a congressman named Oscar De Priest, they got blacks in government, black lawyers, black policemen.

  It meant a great place where everybody’s treated equal. You could be what you wanted to be. You didn’t have to have white people abusing you. And they wouldn’t call your mother “girl” or your father “boy.” The whole works. Where you could become somebody. That’s the stuff we were steeped in as little children. During Negro History Week, people would tell us about the Harlem Renaissance. We had to recite Langston Hughes’s poems and Claude McKay’s. You used to have to stand up and sing “Lift Every Voice.” You sing about your day as if it were a reality. I never felt despair.

  Some of the poorest people I knew in the South never really felt outright despair. This optimism was based on the fact that some of the older folks, the cooks, the house boys, the chauffeurs, and even some of the field hands, felt that racism was such a ridiculous thing, they just figured it couldn’t last. Black people figured that one day God was gonna rise up and do some damage to the white people. God was “gonna mess the white folks up one of these days for the way they treatin’ us.” You know what was there, too? The feeling that if you just stick this out, don’t commit suicide, don’t let it get the best of you, you’re gonna win.

  When there was despair, you took it out in the church. You’d see it in funerals. Black people have really clung to a genuine love for each other. That’s why a funeral said so much. You can’t let this person die as though it was nothing happening. A great loss had been suffered. I learned to cry at all funerals, and I didn’t know who was dead. I had been inculcated with the idea
that something very valuable has passed. I was a little boy. I’ d sit there and just cry along with the rest of ’em.

  Someone has gone. You’d hear people say: He could have been this or she could have been this if she just had a chance. Sometimes one of the older sisters would lean over and kiss her buddy good-bye. When my father died, my mother went to the funeral home. Before they had the casket ready, she just sat there and patted his hands. She said: “These hands have done a whole lot...”

  The mortician across the street was a personal friend of ours. I hadn’t seen him for years. A lot of folks didn’t understand when I hopped on a plane and flew to Paducah just to say good-bye to him. I came back to Chicago just to meet my deadline. But I had to go by there and see old Bob Woodson, eighty-seven years old. And look at him and remember my childhood. This is the man who embalmed my mother and father. There was no such thing as an anonymous person. This is something that’s been lost in the big city.

  Oh, I was the biggest dreamer. I’d listen to Duke Ellington. They made us turn off the radio at a certain hour, but we’d sneak in there and hear Duke from the Cotton Club in New York. We finally got a radio to hear Joe Louis fight Max Schmeling. We had a prayer meeting that night. That tells you how desperate we were. Joe Louis was the greatest figure in our lives up until Martin Luther King.

  When I first came to Chicago in the forties, I rode the el and I read the newspapers. I would check out on what great name was gonna speak here. I’d go out there and if it was free, I would hang around and get a seat. And I’d walk these great streets. I would write back and say: “I went down South Parkway, can you imagine that?” Or “I stood at the corner of Forty-seventh and South Parkway Saturday night.” You’d put that in a letter. Or: I saw so and so. They said if you stood on this corner long enough on Saturday night, you’d see somebody from back home. That’s where all of us met and paraded.

  We always had a feeling we were on the move, that things were happening. Every time the NAACP would win any kind of little victory, it was a great moment.

  Up here you could just let your hair down. When I used to listen at night, it was not only to hear Duke Ellington from the Cotton Club. You also heard the man say: “Fatha Hines from the Grand Terrace in Chicago.” It seemed as though from the noise in there the people were just free. White people and black people in there together.

  What was it? Thirty-five years ago? My dreams have not expired entirely. There are moments when I waver between despair and hopelessness and flashes of inspiration. Years ago, when we were in trouble, we thought we could one day go north. Well, we are north now. We are at that Promised Land. The Promised Land has less hope now than it had when we were not in the Promised Land. We used to say “We’re being abused now, but one day we’ll have the ballot. One of these days we’re not gonna have presidents and governors who abuse us. One of these days the Ku Klux Klan is not gonna be around lynching us.” All that has happened. But we didn’t realize that there were some basic corrections that haven’t yet been made.

  How can you get out? My parents could say: “One day my children are gonna have it better if they could just get an education.” The catch is I might get a good job, but the community I’m living in is going to be so overwhelmed by other people’s poverty that I won’t be able to enjoy it. Do you realize I’m enjoying more luxuries now than the white familes for whom I used to work were able to enjoy? Yet I have less hope now for the vast majority of black people than I did when I first came here. I don’t see solutions to the problems the way I did then. There simply aren’t enough jobs to go around.

  I see more antagonism now than I saw a few years ago. In the South it’s different. Some remarkable changes have taken place. I’d never hoped to see a crowd in Mississippi cheering a black halfback. But the North is another story.

  Whatever is happening to blacks is an extreme version of what’s going to happen to whites. Remember when people identified dope only with black kids? Now, in God-fearin’ white middle-class communities, they’re worried about their children and narcotics. Remember when common-law living was for black people? Now it’s in vogue among young whites.

  The ghetto used to have something going for it. It had a beat, it had a certain rhythm, and it was all hope. I don’t care how rough things were. They used to say: If you can’t make it in Chicago, you can’t make it anywhere. You may be down today, you’re gonna be back up tomorrow.

  You had the packing houses going, you had the steel mills going, you had secondary employment to help “get you over.” There was the guy spreading hope every day, the policy-wheel man. Policy was considered a part of our culture before the mob took it over. Everybody played policy. You were always hearing about somebody who hit the day. Oh, so and so hit. Somebody you always heard about was hitting or making it big. [Laughs.]

  Now it’s a drag. There are thousands of people who have written off their lives. They’re serving out a sentence as though there were some supreme judge who said: “You are sentenced to life imprisonment on earth and this your cell here.” What do you do if you’ve got a life sentence? You play jailhouse politics. You hustle, you sell cigarettes, you browbeat other people, you abuse the other cell mates, you turn men into weaklings, and girls you overcome.

  There are people who don’t see themselves making it in this automated society. Not many white people can figure things out either. You look at television and you see people pushin’ buttons sending people to the moon. You say: “Man, these are people so far ahead of me I don’t have a chance.” You see people using language and reading skills at which you’re incompetent. You say: “Hell it’s too late. Maybe I coulda learned but I blew it.” You write yourself off. Then you don’t see jobs even though you may have learned these things.

  A few of us are making it pretty good. This is one thing that frightens me. I think there are some people in high places who’ve decided this problem can’t be solved. We’re gonna do what we did in World War One: practice triage. We can salvage maybe one third that’s making it. Maybe close to another third is capable of being salvaged. The only thing we can do for the other third is contain them. Keep them from inconveniencing us. We’d just keep them where they are. There are not enough jobs for them. We’re not going to rearrange our society so that it’s possible for them to have some of the benefits we enjoy. In a few years you may have black people who are doing all right, who may lose identity with those who are not doing so well. Racism is keeping all the haves from getting together. [Laughs.] ] A few years ago, racism was used to keep black and white workers from getting together. Now it’s keeping the upper strata from getting together.

  When I got married, some years ago, there were no apartments available. My wife and I gladly lived in the building right across from the Robert Taylor Homes.10 I bought a long rope. In case of fire, we’d climb down those nine flights. We didn’t care. We knew everything was gonna be beautiful later on. What about people who say everything is not going to be beautiful because there are three generations of unemployed males in the family?

  That’s something we didn’t experience down south. You could always grub out a living, doing something. Food was cheaper. There were odd jobs for you. You can’t make it on odd jobs today. There are a lot of whites in this situation, too. They don’t want to admit it. They want black people to bear the whole burden of the crusade against unemployment. There are twenty-six million Americans living below the poverty level. Only around eight million of these are black.

  Would you live opposite the Robert Taylor Homes now?

  No, I would be frightened. I don’t think I could take it unless there were other people, middle-class like me, and we could get together and form some kind of protective association. I tried. I lived in Englewood. Englewood at the time I lived there was number three or four in crime in the country. I lived where the Blackstone Rangers and Disciples fought each other. Some of the property was middle-class, but it was really tough trying to rear children in that community
. My neighbors used to walk their dogs at night and gather in the schoolyard. These were not cute little pets. They were dogs that would bite if you entered their homes. When I first moved there, I used to see black women get off the bus at night and off jitneys as late as two in the morning and walk three blocks home on a summer night. They used to walk with purses and shopping bags in the late forties and early fifties. They can’t do that tonight.

  In 1950 the black population of Chicago was 49,000. At this moment it’s close to 1,500,000. A million more people. Most of them came here seeking employment, got stuck, and couldn’t go back home because there was nothing there. Our government set up some rules which made it more profitable for a family to break up in order to get welfare. So the black male living in poverty today can’t have the respect that black men had when I was a kid. You know the spiritual “Sometimes I feel Like a Motherless Child”? Today, it’s sometimes I feel like a fatherless child. That may be worse.

  The other day a black mailman was describing a ghetto scene. The father was giving his son a lecture about staying away from a vicious street gang, to get him to stop threatening and robbing storekeepers. The kid said: “Who in the fuck do you think you are? You ain’t shit. How in the hell are you gonna tell me what to do?” This man has no prestige with his own child.