We have to find young men and young women who came out of those environments and who are willing to go back and do some mentoring and some lecturing. What I have found, however, is that once most of those young men and women escape that environment, they never want to go back. They’ve escaped, and they never want to return to that pain. And unfortunately, too many are stuck in that environment.
That’s a very dangerous situation for a society that claims equality, justice, and opportunity for everyone, because the enemy, those who are now picking at the United States for its own lack of opportunity, can say, look there. You have a black people there and at least one third of them are living below the poverty line. No child among them under the age of eighteen has much chance of being in a house where there are two parents, a male and a female.
The break has to come within us, and as old as I am, I refuse to give up on them. I continue to go to places like Du Sable High School and Phillips High School to assist, if I get asked. But I’m not going in the Robert Taylor Homes. I used to. I’ll go if I have a friend who lives there, because they know how to deal with that situation. But as long as we allow, or force, that population to be concentrated with one another, and we reject them in various ways and do not provide them with an education to prepare them for the new world in which they must live, then we will continue to have the kind of separation of race and class that we have now.
ELAINE RHODES
Twirling for Success
Elaine Rhodes started a baton-twirling troupe for young women more than thirty years ago. “I stepped up to the plate,” she told me, “not only by strengthening my whole structure in myself but by beginning to think of those things that made me happy and then asking, what is it that’s wrong? I examined myself first, and then I examined the things I observed happening in the community. And I saw that one particular thing was happening over and over and over: I did not see people who liked themselves.”
We moved into the Robert Taylor Homes in 1962—my mama and me and my four siblings. I was nine or ten years old. I’m the baby girl of the family, and I have a brother who’s younger than me. Ruby L. Rhodes was my mama. She’s deceased now. I dedicate this vignette to her, my baton teacher and friend. Mama was active in politics and community activities. She was the founder of the original Henry Horner Home, the Angels of Mercy Twirlers, and the Robert R. Taylor Home Cadettes Baton Twirling Troupe. She stood by me through everything, and she taught me how to stand on my own.
When the Robert Taylor Homes first opened, they were a very positive symbol, not demeaning. We lived in 5322 State, at the corner of 53rd and State, in apartment 501. Then there was 5326 State and 5323 South Federal. Eventually, these three buildings were called the Hole, because they were shaped like the circumference of a U. They were big buildings, 22, 23, and 26, bam, bam, bam.
The windows had Xs on them because they were new. Not all of the buildings had been opened yet. It was just brand-spanking-new. There was a feeling of excitement. You could smell the newness of the tile, and the walls were beautiful. The banisters were shining; the stairwells were well lit. The elevators were shiny. Oh, it was just really great.
There were 10 apartments on a floor, and sixteen floors. So there were 160 apartments. If you had, say, two daughters and a son, you had to have a bedroom for the son. Or if you had two sons and a daughter, you had to have a separate bedroom for the daughter. The family structure would dictate how many rooms you would need for your apartment. The 01 apartments had four bedrooms, and a basic family of maybe six to eight lived in each one. The 02 apartments had two bedrooms; 03 had three bedrooms; 04 had two; 05 had three; 06 had two; 07, two; 08, three; 09, three; and the apartments on 10 had four bedrooms. If you had four bedrooms, you often had more than three or four people in a bedroom. People needed a place to stay, and relatives who weren’t officially residents were always staying with families there. People helped out their extended family. It became overcrowded. But everybody took care of their own business in their own way.
At first, we felt safe, because everyone who moved in was excited about their new home. I attended Farren Elementary, down the way on 51st and State. I could walk to school. Then we transferred to Mary Church Terrell Elementary, which is still standing but is closed now.
I remember Red Rooster, the grocery store. We used to have fun with the brand-new red carts. Red Rooster was near the Beasley Elementary School, at 5255 State. And I remember Mr. Berry, a black entrepreneur who owned the Starlight Paper Company and Starlight Supermarket. He helped families that didn’t have it. You could shop at his store even if you didn’t have money. He gave you credit.
I graduated in 1965 from Du Sable Upper Grade Center, a middle school for sixth through eighth grade. They built the middle school addition in 1964. Before then, Du Sable was just a high school. It opened in the 1930s because the Phillips High School caught fire and the students there didn’t have anyplace to go. It’s named after Jean Baptiste Pointe du Sable, a black man from Haiti who founded the city of Chicago. The city recognized him as its founder in 1999.
In the early sixties, Du Sable—the Big D, as we called it—was a very good high school. There were a lot of kids there, over four thousand, because of the Robert Taylor Homes. But by the mid-sixties, when I entered the ninth grade, the gangs and the teenage pregnancies made it into a different school. The gangs would try to recruit during school time on the school grounds. People who were seniors started transferring out of the school, to get away from the trouble.
Before things got bad, the 5322, 5323, 5326 residents had a softball team. Mr. J.B., the coach, lived in 5326. We had leagues and tournaments. You couldn’t just play one game. People would come out to watch the games. We even messed around and got some uniforms. We used to play softball against the other buildings and against different teams in the community. I held down third base. Nobody came home. Batted left, threw right. The 5322 building and 23 and 26, all of us formed one team. We were the In the Hole Kids.
My mama had a baton-twirling troupe in the 5322 building, and from the time I first performed, I loved it. More than anything else, being a twirler in my mama’s troupe gave me tenacity and confidence. I wasn’t considered pretty, but I had stamina, and I was an excellent student of my mama’s. My marching position was the caller, from the back line. My mama said I couldn’t be the leader—it wouldn’t be right, she said, me being her daughter, even though I was the best of them all. So I called out routines from the back line up to the front line. We had five lines, marching four across; then a front center mascot; and Mama.
The troupe didn’t practice every day, but I did. I practiced hard every day at home, with my mama coaching me harder each time I made up new twirls and dance steps for my partner and line marchers. She let me and the back line, the four of us, march all the way to 39th and Federal, down the fire lane, just to get the routines down. She would take out one line at a time to go over their routines. Then when we had it together, we’d march as a troupe down to 39th and Federal.
Mama’s coaching was brutal: Get those legs up! March on your toes! Point those toes! Shoulders back! Stomach in! Chin up! Left hand on your hip, and keep it there till you use both hands to twirl or unless you’re using your arms for choreography! Smile! Do not be distracted! Keep in step, breathe, keep going, go right into the next routine, and don’t forget the footwork. Let me hear those toe taps on your boots! Now do everything over till you get it right! Turn around and let’s go back and try it again!
We would practice for at least three hours at a time, in white, traditional majorette boots. Mama said they were a must! This type of drilling is what developed my performance level. Some of the girls could not keep up and stopped coming to practice, mostly the cute ones in the front line. I didn’t quit. I was determined that one day I’d be up front leading.
At Du Sable High, I wanted to be a cheerleader, but they were going with the cute girls with pretty legs. They had majorettes with uniforms who perform
ed for the basketball team—the Du Sable Panthers—but they just danced; they weren’t twirling. The team was going downstate to Champaign-Urbana in 1965, my freshman year, to compete in the citywide championship, and they needed the majorettes to go. Well, Ms. Nezelle Bradshaw appointed me captain of the majorettes. It was my job to teach the other girls and to take responsibility for the squad. From then on, it was no more back line. I was the leader. I was following in my mama’s footsteps. And I was beginning to understand that I could help others increase their self-esteem and develop their athletic skills through an activity that was part sport, part art. After the citywide championship, we twirled at every Panthers game through my senior year at Du Sable, and I was captain all four years.
Everything I think, feel, and do is generated by what happens inside me. My baton is the tool I use to twirl for spiritual development and self-support. When I pick up the baton—my “stick”—I can create, I can choreograph, I can dance, imagine, feel empowered, and yes, have a damn good time. And fortunately, I can reproduce the same skill and technique in others.
As a young girl living in the Hole at 5322 South State Street, apartment 501, I had a brick-house body with a side of big, beautiful legs and thighs. I had short, “nappy” hair, as they called it, and a dark complexion. More than my siblings, I looked like my mama. People teased me by calling me “Boston Blackie,” who was a white detective. It’s a good thing that the Black Power Movement came into being, for many reasons. Oh yeah, I was also called “Buckwheat,” a nickname given to one of the Little Rascals because of his hair. Ain’t that a blip; now that’s one of the hairstyles that’s been brought back into full circle.
The kids called me ugly too! I took it and dealt with it. I could fight, and I would if I got too mad. I’d beat up the boys and girls. I was a tomboy when I had to be, but I was really a back-line marcher, dancer, strutter, and twirler. Even in the back line, we were powerful as we sang one of the old church hymns, “Holding Up the Blood-Stained Banner.” We were jammin’ and kickin’ ass! You could hear the toe taps of our majorette boots louder than the whole rest of the troupe.
The violence at the Robert Taylor buildings began with the gangs, in the mid-sixties. You could tell when the community changed because we stopped playing softball. Different gangs would come from across town to recruit there, from the Ickes projects on 22nd and State Street and from Stateway Gardens and other projects. Some of the gangs were already started at the Robert Taylor buildings. Some of them began with the baseball teams. Certain teams started protecting themselves by fighting with the other team on the field during an argument, and most of the teams would get into rival fights after the games. Each gang had their own philosophy, their own identity. Part of it was the way they dressed, or danced. If they got one guy to go along with them, they had recruited him. That guy would bring along two or three friends. But it was one or two or three guys that started organizing the gang.
It got so you weren’t free to walk with your purse hanging. You could leave your door open just long enough to go knock on your neighbor’s door and say, hey, you got a cup of sugar or whatever. At that time, they began to put locks on the stairwell doors for the first time. We had a security system installed. And then we got guards for the elevators.
You began to see a difference then not only in the Robert Taylor buildings themselves, but in the structure of the families living there and the structure of the community within the Homes. Some family members had gone on to meet their maker because of gang violence. Some had been incarcerated. Members of the family were being taken away from the family as a whole, and that weakened the family structure. The sense of community within the Homes began to break down. The community no longer embraced certain families because of the violence.
In my junior year of high school, in 1968, I became pregnant. It was a difficult time for me. I was still living with my mama, and I began to think about taking the initiative to make some important decisions. I knew I was gonna go to school regardless. I didn’t consider getting an abortion, nor did I think about giving up my baby for adoption. My mama thought it would be best if I gave the baby up. She knew I had to finish high school and that I wasn’t financially ready to support a child. And she was concerned about the Rhodes family image. In our family it was home, church, school. School, church, home. That’s the way it was.
I became a teen mother in June of 1968. And as a teen mother, I realized that things had changed not only because I was a parent, but because my living circumstances were about to change. CHA—the Chicago Housing Authority—ran the Robert Taylor Homes and was saying, okay, you have an extra person living there now, so your rent is going up. If you were a child living in Robert Taylor and then you became a parent and your child was there with you, that changed the structure of your lease, because the baby wasn’t on the lease. That’s when I began to realize it was time to think about making it. And my mother was letting me know I was gonna have to get out on my own. I finished high school living at home with my mama and my baby boy, Edwin. My little brother, Louis, helped baby-sit while I attended day and evening classes in my senior year, and I graduated from the Big D on time with the Class of ’69.
In the summer of 1969, I left home to attend Alabama A&M in the town of Normal. I took Edwin with me. My mama was from Alabama, and there was family there who supported me all the way through college. In 1974, I returned to Chicago, and to my mama, with a bachelor’s degree.
We were back in apartment 501, and I knew things were bad, but I needed a place to stay. There was a lot of drug dealing going on in the buildings and on the streets. The older guys in the gangs had to handle the drug deals. Everything started getting uglier in the buildings, and most of my siblings had left home. My older sister, Genice, who had graduated as valedictorian of her class at Crane High School, had entered Northern Illinois University. The Baptist Training Union from our church, Greater Harvest, provided some financial assistance for her college education. Genice is the doctor in our family. She was a scholar even at a young age. My sister Peggy had graduated high school and was at the University of Colorado. My older brother, Jesse, was in the army. Louis, my younger brother, was in school. Louis was astute. He was a prominent athlete, but he excelled in academics. My mother sent him away to Amundsen High School on the North Side of the city because of the gang violence. That’s how devastating it was at the Robert Taylor Homes. I don’t know if it’s different now, but back then, she had to go through changes to get him into Amundsen because you couldn’t live in one area and go to the school across town.
When Jesse returned home from the army, wearing his uniform, the police beat him at the Greyhound Bus Station, claiming insubordination as the reason. Then when he came back to the 5322 building, a gang beat him with a bat. I got a call from St. Bernard Hospital. I never will forget it. My son was still very young at the time. Jesse has beautiful hands for a man, and he had a scar or something on his hand from the service. That was the only way I could tell it was my brother. To this day Jesse is not the same; he’s a disabled vet. A lot of tragedies have happened to families who lived in the Robert Taylor Homes, because of people’s mentality, I guess. Some stuff just makes no sense.
After a few months of living with my mama at 5322 State, she told me that Edwin and I would have to leave. I knew that was coming, and I had applied for public assistance and food stamps, using my mama’s address, and put Edwin on a waiting list for the preschool in her building. The Centers for New Horizons—CNH—sets up preschools on the South Side of Chicago, and kids who lived in the Hole went to Robert Taylor South Day Care. The Salvation Army took in Edwin and me while I looked for work and day care. Four months later, Edwin was accepted into the CNH preschool at Robert Taylor South.
There were some dark moments before I got the two-bedroom for Edwin and me at 5041 South Federal. The Salvation Army extended the limit for our stay more than once, but finally, after fourteen months there, we had to leave, and I wasn’t employed
yet. Just before it was time to leave the Salvation Army, I rented a slum apartment, for which I paid first and last month’s rent and a security deposit. It was a third-floor apartment, and the steps leading up to the second-floor outside landing were bad. The apartment was wet and damp, not good for a mother and child who both had asthma. And there was a gas leak. When it got bad, I called the fire department. On his way up the back steps, one of the firemen plunged his foot all the way through the stair and wrote up a report on the spot. The landlady then kicked me out on the spot, and attacked me while I was climbing the stairway with Edwin in my arms to get our belongings.
In 1976, there was an opening at Edwin’s preschool for a teacher’s aide. I applied for the position and was hired. The Centers for New Horizons had some power to hook up with the Chicago Housing Authority because the preschools were in CHA buildings, and the teachers for the preschools were recruited from those buildings. Once I was hired as a teacher’s aide, CNH told the Housing Authority that I needed a two-bedroom apartment at 5041 South Federal. And that’s how I got my placement in apartment 407 with my son at the Robert Taylor 5041 building.
It was when Edwin began preschool that my next life transition began. At that time the Centers were using an Afrocentric curriculum because all of the children in their preschools were African American. Edwin began his own cultural educational journey in room C with Mrs. Claude O. Jack. Parents who spent time in the preschool had to do volunteer work and weren’t allowed to volunteer in the same room with their children. So I volunteered with other classrooms in 1974 and 1975. I began to embrace the same knowledge and history that my son was learning. And I started teaching twirling to four little girls from room A.
America Behind the Color Line Page 50