Nights in Tents

by Laura Love

  Downstairs in a small basement office, a husky man in casual clothing eyed us warily as the AA woman left. I explained to him that we had been directed by Occupy NATO to the church, and that we understood that the head priest had offered us shelter and sanctuary there. The man could not have been less welcoming as he said, “Oh no, no, no … uh uh. I do not know where you got that information, but it is most definitely not true. I’m not sure how you all got in here … but you gotta go right now. You’re not the first one that’s barged in here today, and you need to just turn around and go back to wherever you came from.” By then Ellen’s wick had shortened considerably, prompting her chilly rejoinder, “We got in here because the front door was wide open, which usually means you’re welcome, and we were told that Occupiers could stay here. The only reason we know your address is because it was posted on the Occupy NATO website. We were invited.” The man seemed to know more than he was admitting to, as he spat, “You need to leave this place right now—period.” Neither Ellen nor I could understand why he was so angry with us, since our demeanor had been friendly and pleasant until that last exchange, however, we simply did as we were ordered, turned away from him, and began to mount the stairs we’d been led in on. “Not that way,” the man barked venomously. “You need to go out the back door.” And with that he stomped us out a small basement exit, which he closed loudly behind us and locked audibly.

  “That went well,” I said to Ellen, whose hackles were still up. “I’m so glad we didn’t just drop you off, Laura. What the fuck was wrong with that asshole,” she fumed. “I dunno,” I answered, “but I remember getting another text about the ‘Wellington Ave. Church,’ that said they would put us up too.” We got back into the car to investigate that lead. After we told her what was up, Barbara began driving a long way across town, to 615 W. Wellington, where we came upon a much more inviting scene—a group of scraggly, travel-weary road warriors, brimming with as they immersed themselves in the political discourse I’d become so accustomed to in my adventures.

  There were blacks, whites, Latinos, queer people, transgender—you name it, all clustered around the closed side door of the church, some spilling out onto the sidewalks and parking strips of the surrounding dwellings in the city neighborhood. One of the first I recognized was a young man named Maupin, whom I’d met in Washington DC while Occupying Congress and the Supreme Court in January. I recalled his engaging personality, rail-thin body, and the mop of unruly, dark hair atop his head. When he’d introduced himself in DC, I immediately changed it to “Moppin” in my mind, because of that outstanding volume of hair. I also remembered the deep husky voice, ever present cigarette dangling from his lips, and the dirty, bagging-at-the-butt blue jeans. He had a craggy, earnest, working-class face, with a depression-era vibe, like Tom Joad (Henry Fonda) in the Grapes of Wrath. I could easily envisage him as a black and white Dorothea Lange photo, gracing the pages of her books, chronicling hungry, poverty-stricken Americans fleeing dust bowl states. I pictured him traveling westward among whole families of Okies and Arkies in rickety jalopies during the thirties, as they sought employment picking fruit for opulent landowners in California, Oregon, or Washington state. The sight of him warmed the cockles of my heart, and we embraced like kin as I told him how nice it was to see him. His infectious grin enveloped me as he held out a handmade 99% patch for me to wear. Ellen and Barbara felt it safe to leave me there, as I was certainly in the right spot. Then I saw “OccupyFreedomLa” and Sky “CrossXbones,” streamers from Los Angeles, which also eased my anxiety. They’d both ridden one of three buses from L.A., (paid for by some generous Occupy supporter) which ferried Occupiers to this church, which we were now calling, “The Convergence Center.” Just then, the side door to the church swung open, and it was announced that the dinner was ready and we were free to come in and eat.

  I knew most of them were flat broke, so the words were met with great enthusiasm as famished, tired folks filed into the brightly lit room, which was adjoined by an industrial kitchen, staffed by volunteers who had prepared our supper. The meal was offered to us by an organization called Occupy the Seeds, who had cooked up huge pots of brown rice, organic, home grown greens, and produce. They also provided sesame tahini dressing, fresh condiments, and a whole host of other real foods that were nourishing, visually appealing, and tasty. Watching the ragtag crowd descend ravenously onto the feast strengthened my associations with impoverished, opportunity-robbed soup kitchen patrons of decades past. Jacob Riis studies popped into my head, as I merged this scene with his sepia-toned photographs of shockingly poor tenement slum residents in New York City, after the turn of the twentieth century.

  After the repast, I looked around the space and wondered aloud to FreedomLA if I could set my tent up anywhere in the room after we folded up the tables. “Oh, the church is only offering us meals and a meeting place. I’m afraid there’s no overnight camping here,” was her response. What was with this vexing habit of Chicago churches to giveth and taketh away in the same breath, I wondered, as I mulled over my options. A few moments later, as I was talking with someone else, FreedomLA interrupted and said, “Hey, they’re talking about lodging over there, so you should listen in.” A young woman had mic checked the crowd to say that we were being offered lodging on the South Side of Chicago by the head priest at St. Sabina’s Church at 7800 Racine Street. She said it was only one short bus ride off the Red line, which we could catch about a mile away. Knowing nothing of Chicago Transit stations, I scrambled to write down every bit of information in sharpie, on my right arm, as she read off the instructions to St. Sabina’s. It was approaching 11:00 p.m., Seattle time, and I was fried from my long day of travel, so I stood there trying to order my thoughts and gather the energy to walk to the bus stop carrying my backpack, sleeping bag, and tent. Barbara and Ellen were probably just arriving home in Algonquin by then, and I wasn’t even considering asking them to turn around and retrieve me. They both worked hard at their day jobs—Barbara, as a production manager for scholastic book publishers, and Ellen, as a talented, yet meagerly compensated photography teacher at a local community college. In addition, Ellen also attended classes in political studies. Knowing their crazy schedules, I’d rather have slept over a heating grate than call them back at this late hour. If all else failed, I probably could have gotten myself a hotel somewhere, though I was loathe to do so. It was probably safe to assume that few, if any of the others in my group, could afford to plunk down a credit card (as if they even had credit cards) for a night of comfort in a big, expensive city, so I was damned if I would either. Just having the option put me at a distinct advantage to many of my comrades and I felt the weight of my privilege in every step I took. A young woman among us climbed the base of a street lamp to be seen as she shouted out that two bicycle rickshaw cabbies were willing to cart up to three people each to the Red line station. I looked where she was pointing, and saw two skinny, sweaty guys, both professional peddlers, sitting on the seats of their oversized three-wheeled tricycles. Both had spent the entire day carting around sight-seeing tourists to pay their bills, and earn the privilege of living in the Chicago metropolitan area. How exhausted they must be, yet here they were offering me and my fat ass, a mile ride to the CTA station—for free. I was grateful in the extreme, as my younger, fitter counterparts beckoned me forward to mount the narrow seat with a slender girl named Audra, who’d arrived that morning on one of the L.A. buses, along with a slight, elderly black man named Lendon, who lived in the deep South Side of Chicago—a long bus ride from the last stop on the line. All together, with our bodies and our bags, we must have weighed over 500 pounds, yet our driver cheerfully bade us aboard his buggy, and told us that he too was a dedicated Occupier, and wanted to support us in any way possible, in addition to attending NATO actions in the coming days. Ten minutes later, we exited his chariot, and I begged him to take a five dollar tip, which he steadfastly refused. Sneakily, I shoved it into his jeans pocket as he turned to leave. He smi
led back at me, as I thanked him profusely for his personal contribution to the quality of my life that night.

  Lendon was a distinguished man who possessed a straight back and three-foot-long salt and pepper dreadlocks, which nearly touched the floor as he sat regally in the train seat. He was colorfully dressed in an assortment of vintage clothing from head to toe. He was a feast for the senses—his rich mahogany skin providing the perfect backdrop to his unique attire, as his mellifluous voice articulated his affinity for Occupy, and his hopes for the future of the 99%. He advised us to exit the train at the Seventy-Ninth Street stop, and then to catch the bus toward Ford City, which would take us to Racine Avenue. He leaned in and lowered his voice, “Just so you know, it is a black neighborhood, but the main priest at Saint Sabina’s, is a white guy by the name of Michael Pfleger. He’s been there a long time and he’s a good man. He’s notorious for rabble rousing and supporting liberal causes and social justice movements. He’s well known in this neighborhood, so if you get lost, just ask someone where Saint Sabina’s is and you should be fine.” Until I met Lendon, my only working knowledge of Chicago’s South Side, was that it was the “baddest part of town,” which I had gleaned from Jim Croce’s monster seventies hit, “Bad Leroy Brown.” So now, I was adding a Catholic Church named Saint Sabina’s to my base of wisdom, though it rankled me that I was having such a hard time remembering how the locals pronounced the word “Sabina.” I wanted the “I” to sound like the one in Tina, but no—it was not to be. Every time I went to say it, I had to back up and start again until I got it right. That is until I came up with a handy mnemonic that involved me imagining the priests referring to their Sunday sermons as the Sabina Monologues.

  I hadn’t seen a section of town like this in years, but as Audra (who admitted to being uneasy about our surroundings) and I rode the bus past the numerous boardedup buildings interspersed with thriving ghetto industries; liquor stores, pawn shops, beauty parlors, bars, churches, usurious check cashing marts, Newport cigarette billboards-, and the like, I was instantly reminded of my childhood days spent in the depressing Omaha, Nebraska ghetto of the 1960s. North Twenty-Fourth Street, in Omaha, shortly after the riots in L.A., was not a pretty place. The bloody Watts Riots, in South Central Los Angeles, had started in August of 1965, when a young black man named Marquette Frye was pulled over by a white state patrolman, who suspected him of driving under the influence of alcohol or drugs. The relationship between the police and the underserved community was already strained, at best, but as a gathering crowd of residents watched the officer, Lee W. Minikus, arrest Frye, they became agitated and angry, eventually resulting in an insurrection that played out for six chaotic days and left millions of dollars in property damage, as well as thirty-four deaths and scores of reported injuries. Fourteen thousand National Guard troops were called upon to restore order to the area and a curfew was imposed over forty-five square miles. When it was all said and done, very few changes were implemented to ease the suffering of the neighborhood residents, despite the fact that then Governor Pat Brown and a gubernatorial commission found the schools there to be inadequate, the housing substandard, and unemployment rates to be unacceptably high.

  That uprising had triggered nationwide civil rights unrest and upheaval, which spread from city to city, until it finally reached the Nebraska town where I lived. In a matter of days, my poverty-plagued, mostly African American, Midwest neighborhood had turned into a shot-up, burned-out, still-smoldering, brick and plywood jungle, newly remodeled by the seething rage that had propelled black folks to rise up and demand change. Some had asked peacefully, while many others were out of patience with due process and preferred to achieve it “by any means necessary,” from a color-consumed nation run mostly by wealthy white men, who were no more willing to do right and soften the stranglehold they enjoyed on the means of production than they are now. At that time, as in these times, they wielded ultimate power and control over the quality of black people’s lives and were mainly responsible for the deplorable conditions that most lived under. I remember in 1969, seeing a large gathering of very angry people assembled near our dilapidated shack off North. Twenty-Fourth Street. They were on the verge of setting the whole block on fire—again, after a white Omaha policeman shot a fourteen-year-old black girl, who was coming home from the store, walking through an abandoned lot with some groceries when she was spied by the officer, who said he mistook her for a tall, heavyset male suspect, who had allegedly robbed a liquor store nearby and was still at large. The officer said that he thought she was the perpetrator, as he pulled out his gun and shot her dead. His attitude was far short of contrite, and his words had been delivered with indignation and disdain. They were seen by many of us to be more of an explanation than an apology. That incident sparked days of demonstrations and uprisings in the Omaha ghetto where residents had gathered spontaneously outside the police station and chanted things like, “Burn, baby, burn” and “Hell no, we won’t go.” Those public displays of outrage instantly struck me as the way to go to get people’s attention and leave a lasting impression when things were intolerable. I remember my mother listening intently to the local radio station to hear what was happening in our little corner of the world. She’d just come home from her mind-numbing, short-lived factory job (at a place called Components Concepts Corporation—what the hell does that mean?) and was telling me and my sister what her coworkers were saying. The job, which was to assemble plastic gizmos of some kind, required little or no thought, so she and her fellow employees helped to alleviate the crushing boredom by talking to each other throughout the day. My mother was almost giddy when the riots broke out near us, because the conversation at work suddenly veered away from mundane small talk and insipid gossip, which my mother abhorred, to topics that mattered to her. If she couldn’t interest any of them in discussions about art, literature, opera, and classical music, then this was the next best thing. Before the unrest, she would come home from work, throw her purse down on the floor and scream things like, “If I ever have to hear another woman describe how happy she gets when her baby pees on her, I’ll hang myself.” We knew she was not to be toyed with when making such statements. In fact, scarcely three years earlier, Mom had done just that, during a particularly stressful time in our lives where we were living in a neighborhood surrounded by racists, had very little money, and she was trying to complete her college education, so we knew she was capable of following through on such things. Trying to free her from the yellow braided laundry rope she swung from after she’d stepped casually off a chair, noose encircling her neck, had not been pleasant, and I never wanted to go through that again. She was never given to selfcensorship when it came to talking to her children, so, my sister Lisa and I were thrilled to hear her rattle off terms like, “racist honkeys,” “pig motherfuckers,” and “blue-eyed devils,” to describe the fury she and her colleagues were feeling. We were tickled by her gift for constructing ghetto sentences that somehow managed to smoothly integrate bits of classical literature. We found the juxtaposition delightful, when she’d string together phrases like, “Those rabid jackals think we’re all just a bunch of animals. Goddamn peckerwoods just shot that little girl down like she was a common cur. Hath not a nigger eyes! Hath not a nigger hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions! A pox on all those crackers’ houses!” At nine years old I didn’t know exactly what it all meant, but I do remember being enthralled by watching people who’d had enough, reached their boiling point, and just gone off.

  The South Side of Chicago exuded the same bleak, forgotten, broken, hopeless feel that Omaha had back then, and the familiarity of the scene made me all the more anxious to revive some of that “Burn, baby, burn,” “Hell no, we won’t go,” spirit that had so affected me back in 1969. Audra and I got off at the intersection of Seventy-Ninth and Racine, on the advice of the heavy black woman who drove the bus. Her voice was loud and authoritative, making her sound mad, even when she wasn’t, and her breas
ts were so large they almost obscured the steering wheel beneath them, which made it hard for me to focus on anything else, but she was every bit as knowledgeable and helpful as Lendon said she’d be. We stood there momentarily, and saw a large stone building that looked like it might be St. Sabina’s, but upon closer inspection, was not. We ventured into an alley where we encountered half a dozen or so young black men, who were hanging around outside a rundown neighborhood bar.