by Ben Austen
All of this compelled her into activism. At Cabrini, she raised five daughters and headed up the Chicago chapter of the Housing Tenants Organization. She ran a program for expectant mothers, since the infant mortality rates there were on par with those in the third world. She pressed for a new school to be built in the community, one she helped get named for the slave-turned-abolitionist Sojourner Truth. And she despised the idea of Mayor Byrne as a “white savior” coming to Cabrini-Green to rescue the poor black folk. With a flair for the incendiary, Stamps compared Byrne to the Ku Klux Klan and told news outlets that life at Cabrini-Green with the mayor there was like living in a concentration camp or a South African township under apartheid. “When you are not free enough to speak up or go out of your house, you are already victim to a form of death,” she said.
The tensions came to a head at the mayor’s “Spiritual Easter Celebration,” a daylong event held in the third week of Byrne’s stay at Cabrini. A giant white cross was erected on Division Street, and a choir sang along with Byrne that “God’s got Cabrini-Green in His hands.” The event featured a Ferris wheel, men playing the bongos, free cotton candy, and circus rides. Reggie Theus of the Bulls, Chet Lemon and Minnie Minoso of the White Sox, and members of the Bears and the Chicago Hustle, the Women’s Professional Basketball League franchise, all spoke from a stage about hope and revival. Byrne was introduced by one of her officials as “the newest and one of the truest residents of Cabrini-Green.” In her memoir, Byrne said she responded to the event’s low turnout by confronting the gangs directly, accusing them of scaring children away from the festivities. Division had become an actual dividing line between the Cobra Stones in the Reds on the south side of the street and the Disciples in the Whites on the north side. Even Disciples from the Whites and the Reds saw each other as rivals. Pleading from the stage, Byrne implored children to go back to their high-rises to get their friends, since they’d surely hate to miss the free food and games.
As the mayor sang an off-key “Easter Parade,” protesters waved placards, chanting, “We Need Jobs, Not Eggs.” Byrne contended that the demonstrators were all gang plants. But they included a range of Cabrini-Green tenants and other activists, among them Marion Stamps. Her organization counseled dozens of residents who were evicted when Byrne moved into Cabrini-Green, and they managed to reverse almost every single case. Stamps stood alongside members of Slim Coleman’s Heart of Uptown Coalition, a group that blamed the mayor’s eviction policies for creating tensions between poor blacks and poor whites, many of whom were former Appalachian coal miners who’d moved to Chicago’s North Side in pursuit of a better life free of black lung disease. Stamps said that the placing of the white cross in their black neighborhood felt like psychological warfare. She pointed out that Byrne managed to employ every convention of the white colonizer subduing a native population, appeasing them with religion, sports, petty entertainments, junk food, and trinkets. At some point the police decided they’d heard enough. As officers cuffed and hauled the protestors away, a lawyer tried to intervene. “What is he being charged with?” he shouted. “Who’s the arresting officer?” He was thrown into a paddy wagon as well. All the while, one Cabrini resident shrieked, “Assassins!”
Byrne left on a California vacation the following week, deciding then to end her residency at Cabrini-Green. In the twenty-five days that she lived in an apartment there, only one person had been shot. The crime wave had subsided. “We never will leave Cabrini and neither should anybody else,” Byrne wrote in her final diary entry. The mayor did return to Cabrini-Green occasionally. She showed up later that year when two Cabrini teens opened the area’s only newsstand. Over the summer she led the ribbon cutting of a new athletic complex named for Severin and Rizzato, the plaque stating, “This field is dedicated to all people who wish to live together in brotherly love.” A hundred dignitaries were in attendance, including family members of the slain officers. Byrne came out for a couple of baseball games, and her husband coached a team there for a few seasons. McMullen bought children mitts, and when the grass went weeks without a cutting, he called the park superintendent to get it done.
But Byrne’s bump in popularity from the Cabrini move was short-lived. Within a day of her leaving, news outlets were already going with the story of the housing development’s intractable problems: “Residents say services left with her.” The sixteen-member security detail set up to guard the lobbies and monitor closed-circuit televisions was disbanded; the CHA said funding dried up.
Byrne also undermined the goodwill she’d garnered with African Americans. For starters, she refused to get rid of Charles Swibel, who’d been abusing his position as head of the CHA since 1963. Swibel was one of Byrne’s biggest fund-raisers and closest advisers, and the two of them often rode together in her limo. From 1978 to 1982, nine different reports by auditors and consultants found that the CHA was in shambles. The ninth of these reports was conducted by Oscar Newman, the author of Defensible Space. Yet Newman concluded that the problems in Chicago went way beyond bad architecture: “In every area we examined, from finance to maintenance, from administration to outside contracting, from staffing to project management, from purchasing to accounting, the CHA was found to be operating in a state of profound confusion and disarray. No one seems to be minding the store; what’s more, no one seems genuinely to care.” By then each housing development in Chicago had an average backlog of a thousand unfilled repair requests. A survey of the 430 elevators across all CHA buildings revealed that 250 of them weren’t operating. After a nine-month investigation, the FBI charged six CHA maintenance workers with pilfering millions of dollars’ worth of paint, floor tiles, and roofing materials.
Byrne fired Swibel only after HUD threatened to withhold federal funding to the city if she retained him. In his place, she installed her former campaign manager. At the same time, she also expanded the CHA’s board from five to seven members and appointed three white commissioners, changing the governing board from majority black to majority white. In 1983, after Byrne was voted out of office, her husband said he just so happened to bump into a pitcher from one of the Cabrini-Green Little League teams he coached.
“Hey, Mr. Jay, are you gonna be running the team?” the boy asked.
“No, Lefty. We got beat, ya know.”
DOLORES WILSON
LIKE OTHER TENANTS at Cabrini-Green, Dolores Wilson watched warily as Byrne’s time at 1150–1160 N. Sedgwick came and went. Her sons were harassed as they walked to work and returned home. Her two-door red Chevy, a gift from her son Michael, was towed and lost forever amid the mayor’s wholesale cleanup. At work, her colleagues were so tuned in to Cabrini-Green that they’d ask her about every violent event that had been reported in the news. “Oh Dolores, are you okay? What was all that shooting about last night at Cabrini-Green?” She hadn’t heard any gunfire. If there was a shooting on Chicago Avenue, how could she hear it from her building a half mile north on Division Street? Now crimes committed anywhere on the Near North Side, two or three miles away, were being identified as occurring near Cabrini-Green. “If you stubbed your toe at Cabrini-Green, it was in the news,” Dolores complained.
Her youngest brother was so spooked that he refused to visit her. “Don’t you read the papers, Dolores?” he beseeched her. “They’re talking about how many people are getting killed at Cabrini-Green.” He worked at Mother’s, a tavern with live music and a white clientele a short walk due east of 1230 N. Burling on Division and Dearborn Street. One night after his shift, Dolores’s brother stepped out of the Gold Coast bar and three white guys jumped him, knocking out two of his teeth. It wasn’t exactly funny to Dolores, but she definitely brought up the incident to her brother whenever she had the chance. “You said you’re not going to visit me? I have my teeth. My family has their teeth. You’re afraid to visit me because of what you read in the paper? Well, I’m not going to visit you from what I see happening to you.”
Hubert Wilson was promoted from assistant
head janitor in their building to head janitor. He was now on call twenty-four hours a day, and they moved from the fourteenth floor to a unit on the sixth floor. In case of an emergency, he had to be closer to everything. Their monthly rent—25 percent of their adjusted gross income—had been among the highest at Cabrini-Green. Most residents paid well under $100. But the new position included the benefit of a rent-free apartment. Dolores said she felt like a billionaire. They could keep their whole paychecks. She bought herself an extra pair of shoes and spruced up their apartment. “I had all my interior decorating going,” Dolores said. The kitchen was impeccable, with a shiny stainless steel microwave, a yellow-tile backsplash, and a countertop lined with porcelain jars and decorative kettles. And they even had extra room. Che Che, who worked for Otis Elevator and was married with a child, bought a house from one of his coworkers on the South Side. Michael got a job replacing furniture upholstery and moved with his wife into the Cabrini rowhouses.
Although Hubert now had a staff of guys under him, he refused to sit at a table with a pen. He liked physical work, and he still woke early to pull the garbage and run the compactors. The other janitors called him “Old Man,” even though he wasn’t much older than many of them. One morning two weeks after Byrne’s Easter festival, Hubert woke up with a bout of diarrhea. Dolores said she’d stay home to take care of him, but he shooed her off. He’d be fine. He didn’t want to miss work. And since he was going to work, so should she. Then, like every day over the past thirty-five years, they kissed and traded I-love-yous. Early that afternoon he phoned the water department to tell Dolores he felt ill again. He was going home; he’d eat some crackers and take a nap. When Dolores returned to their apartment that evening, she saw he was sleeping. Quietly, she warmed up leftovers so food would be ready for him when he awoke. Her daughter-in-law stopped by, and Dolores sent her to the bedroom to check on Hubert. She came running back into the kitchen. “I think Daddy’s dead,” she cried.
When the paramedics arrived, they made everyone leave the bedroom. Dolores had put her fingers on the nerve in Hubert’s neck; she thought she felt a pulse, but her own heart was pounding so hard it was difficult to tell. Hubert didn’t look any different than he normally did as he slept. The paramedics finally came out of the bedroom, wheeling Hubert on a cart, a respirator in his mouth. Dolores stood to reach for his hand. Was he going to be all right? Could she ride with him in the ambulance? One of the paramedics pulled her aside. “I have to tell you that your husband is dead,” she said. “We had to bring him out that way so people wouldn’t snatch at the body and scream. You know how people do.”
Dolores took a short bereavement leave from work. When she returned to the water department, she told her coworkers that she didn’t believe what the doctors said about the diarrhea putting too much strain on Hubert’s heart. She was pretty sure the paramedics killed her husband. It was an accusation delivered, as was her way, as a mouth-twisted aside, her voice remaining a trilling soprano. Her colleagues no doubt missed the simmering rage. “Oh, Dolores,” they assured her, “no doctor would ever lie to you.” But Dolores was if anything pragmatic. She didn’t shut down because of a long list of perceived wrongs. She stayed busy at work and at home. She was a fifty-two-year-old widow, and in 1981 she had been living at Cabrini-Green almost half her life.
She was soon offered the chance to leave Cabrini. Her grandmother, the one who moved around for much of her young life, had settled down in Englewood on Chicago’s South Side. She’d bought a corner house, with a coach house behind it where she let four men who’d been homeless live rent-free. When she passed away, the property went to Dolores’s mother, and when she died Dolores’s brother was named the executor. But he already had a house of his own, and their sister Connie had become an evangelist and given up on worldly possessions, selling off her furniture and quitting her job at the post office. The family assumed Dolores would take it. This was her opportunity to get out of public housing once and for all; she could own a place of her own. But she wasn’t interested. She felt settled at Cabrini-Green. She told her brother, “I’m in the projects, but that’s my home. I love my home just like you love your home.” The property went to her grandmother’s church, on the same street, and the church kicked out the squatters, demolished the two buildings, and turned it all into a parking lot.
PART TWO
CABRINI GREEN HARLEM WATTS JACKSON
6
Cabrini-Green Rap
ANNIE RICKS
ANNIE RICKS WAS born on August 1, 1956, in Riverview, Alabama, the youngest of her mother’s ten children. They lived in a one-room cabin, and Annie and her siblings arranged their narrow beds like jigsaw pieces around a potbelly stove. They had an outhouse, a slop jar, a well from which the children towed water for cooking and cleaning. Her mother took care of a white minister’s family, earning $2 a day, working seven days a week. The Ricks children wore the hand-me-downs from the minister’s flock. Riverview was a mill town on the banks of the Chattahoochee River, bordering Georgia. While Annie was growing up, there were separate schools for whites and blacks, separate parks, libraries, hospitals, and cemeteries. Annie would live in Chicago for almost fifty years and never once return to Alabama, even after Riverview and three other mill towns were incorporated to form a new city and their names and segregated schools were no more. “I told my own children they were blessed they didn’t know about wells and snakes and the real prejudiced Jim Crow law,” Ricks would say.
A constellation of freckles dotted the bridge of Annie’s nose and reached her high cheekbones, which would sharpen to points each time she announced with a sly smile, “But I can’t be mad.” It was something she’d repeat her entire life, a calming mantra for whenever she felt adrift in the dark waters of a rage. She didn’t know her father. He’d left when Annie was six months old. At bring-your-dad-to-school days, she just said he was dead, which to her he was. “You know you’re stubborn?” her teacher said. “Yes, ma’am.” Her mother would tell her, “You’re the strongest of my kids.” When Annie was six, her uncle died, and the body was laid out in the front room of her aunt’s house. Annie’s sisters wept. One of them tore up her only pair of shoes on purpose to get out of going to the funeral. But Annie stared at her uncle without emotion until the casket was closed. She figured he had to be in a better place.
Annie’s oldest brother was the first to leave for Chicago. When he settled into a job, he sent for their mother. Annie, being the baby, made the journey next. It was 1967, and a cousin and her husband were back in Alabama, visiting from Chicago. They let ten-year-old Annie ride with them on the return trip north. The cousin was also named Annie, and everyone in the family called her “Little Annie” and Ricks by her middle name, Jeffrey. For the drive, Ricks put on her best dress and had her hair pressed. They rode through the night, reaching Chicago in an early-morning downpour, stopping first at Little Annie’s South Side apartment. To Ricks, it looked like her cousin had struck it rich. The tidy apartment had a shiny stove and wood cabinets and an indoor bathroom with a sink, a flush toilet, and a bathtub that included a curtain and a shower. “Jeffrey, you want to take a bath?” her cousin offered. “Yes, ma’am!” Little Annie turned on the tap, and Ricks watched gape-mouthed as steaming water poured out. She luxuriated in the hot bath, soaking and submerging and twisting for a full hour. Then her cousin fixed her a breakfast of eggs, toast, grits, and rice, her first meal as a Chicagoan. After she ate, Ricks asked if it might be possible for her to take another bath. The second one lasted longer than the first.
Within a year, the other Ricks children had followed Annie to Chicago. Their mother found a place for them in North Lawndale, a West Side neighborhood that had recently made the transition from a population of 100,000 whites to one of 100,000 blacks, a couple of generations’ worth of shifting demographics time-lapsed into a few turns of the seasons. They lived on the top floor of a three-story walk-up in a three-bedroom apartment with a big kitchen, a living room, and a
balcony. Ricks’s mom would tell them, “Don’t let the streetlights catch you.” And Annie knew to be home each night before dark. But then she’d step onto the balcony and chat with friends whose parents were less confining in their rules. That’s how Annie met Ernest Roger Bryant. His family lived in a similar walk-up a couple of doors down. She’d whistle, and Ernest would appear at his window. They talked for hours. He was two years older, and they started going together when Annie was twelve. He’d pluck at her globed afro, teasing that it wasn’t her real hair.