America Behind the Color Line

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America Behind the Color Line Page 51

by Henry Louis Gates


  When I began teaching the preschoolers how to twirl, the Centers for New Horizons did not have a teaching methodology for helping the children develop fine and gross motor skills. I saw this as an opportunity to help the children and myself. Not only could baton twirling assist the children in their total development, but teaching them, I knew, would help mend some hurt feelings of my own. I wanted to take the child with or without the pretty Easter model look—the child I could transform and make beautiful, the way I wanted to be as a little girl! If I could sum up the essence of my journey from then till now, I’d say I ain’t mad or sad, but I sho am glad that I had a chance in my lifetime to contribute to the world through the lives of children, sharing my God-given gift of talent and creativity.

  The children had their first recital in 1975, and a few years later, when they weren’t so little anymore, they came up with the name that has stuck to this day: the Twirling Elainers Baton Company. Over the years, we’ve grown older together, and we’ve multiplied. Many days I run into someone who says, Ms. Rhodes! Ms. Elaine! Don’t you remember me? You used to be my teacher! Or they’ll say, didn’t you used to be in the Bud Billiken Day Parade? Are you going to be there this year? Do a step when you get to 47th or 51st! You’ll probably see us all down by the pool at Washington Park. I’ll see ya there! You know y’all be getting down! I just smile and say, okay. I want the world to know that I was always positive in my daily values and that I always tried to model moral behavior—to be a good daughter, sister, aunt, and especially a loving mother to my son. I’ve been instrumental in the lives of more than six hundred students, throughout the Chicago metro area, in various schools, churches, and parks, in community organizations, annual city special events, and parades. I’ve taught African dance, fire twirling, acrobatics, aerobic fitness, swimming, cooking, and basic life skills. To this day, my baton is a spiritual and visible force in my life, conversation, and work.

  As a mom living with my son in apartment 407, I observed many people in the building who did not like themselves. I could see the connection between this attitude and a lot of negative outcomes. I knew there needed to be a support group or a way of embracing the people who lived at the Robert Taylor Homes—a way of helping them come together. Now that I had my own apartment, I began to work with other residents to organize self-help groups. Next to the laundry room on the second floor was the pram room, where you could store your things. This is where we met to talk about organizing tenants and having floor captains, local advisory councils, presidents of the buildings, and team councils. This was around 1978.

  People responded. A similar system had been in place before things changed. Most of the early residents in the Robert Taylor Homes were older. They weren’t teenagers. People were screened before they moved in. But later, you had younger adults running the apartments—more teenage moms. I felt that I wanted to extend myself as a tenant, as the head of a family, not just to my own family but to other people. I’ve always believed that if you’re in the community and you want to make it and you don’t see anybody else who’s doing it, you have to step up to the plate. I believe in myself, and I believe in the seven principles of Nguzo Saba: unity, self-determination, collective work and responsibility, cooperative economics, purpose, creativity, and faith. It’s about self-determination and taking initiative.

  I stepped up to the plate 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 in the community. I saw that one particular thing was happening over and over and over. I did not see people who liked themselves. There was nobody to give praise. I had learned that “praise before opens the door to so much more that all of God’s children have in store.” There was nothing positive at that time for parents, children, church, or community to do as a collaborative. I began to ask people, what is it that makes you all kill each other? Why don’t you like living here? What is the problem? And they began to tell me things like, I was mopping in front of my door and she stepped in front of me, so I hit her. It’s silly, but it was real.

  The violence and the drugs didn’t scare me. Sometimes I would cook for people. I just like people, and they know that. It sustained me to embrace people with kindness, to help them find the support they needed. I used to be on 47th Street, at the Robert Taylor management office, and on 43rd Street at Human Resources looking for ways to help. I was in touch with the city aldermen and with the police department. I was very positive. I knew how to go about finding people who could make a difference.

  I took time with other people’s children. I invested my life in helping my son and his friends. I think the reason I did okay was I always said to myself, I can’t let things get any worse. I have to get better; I have to do better for myself. I try until I can do. I complete tasks. I don’t like to boast, but I’m not a quitter. My mother—the head of the house—said to us, you all are going to make it. That was back in the 1950s and the 1960s, when you did as the older siblings instructed you to do; you followed suit. Now, with my two sisters in college and brother Jesse in the army, there was nothing left for me to do but to make it. Out of all of my brothers and sisters, my mama coughed and spit me out. I had to be able to do it.

  It wasn’t just about myself. I was a parent. I had to be a role model for Edwin, not only for the community. I knew if I didn’t save myself, I couldn’t save Edwin. Having Edwin has been the most touching thing in my life, but I felt I had to prove myself because I had a child out of wedlock. My mother was really embarrassed about it. I had to show that I could do it.

  Dr. William Glasser talks about the basic things people need in life—love, fun, power, freedom, and belonging. People need to feel that someone loves them and that they belong. I make other people feel that way, and they have given that back to me. And my creativity has allowed me to think outside the environment I’m in. Love and creativity have sustained me. I really do believe that.

  The Robert Taylor buildings have been coming down for four years. Out of the original thirty-two, there are five buildings left: 4037 South Federal, 4429 South Federal, 4946 South State, 4947 South Federal, and 5135 South Federal. These will be torn down as well. People know it’s time for them to up and leave, but many are adopting the attitude that since they have nothing to lose, they might as well stay there till they’re kicked out. They’re not taking care of themselves. There’s still a lot of fighting at a couple of the buildings. People are fighting each other for control of the gangs. When cocaine came back on the scene in the late 1980s, and it got easy to get, the gangs came back big.

  The people still living at the Robert Taylor Homes know they’re gonna be put out, and they don’t have much get-up-and-go. They have been beaten down; they have been told what’s gonna happen, and they believe it. They have no creative thought process for getting out. Some people will change. Others won’t. And then some people are satisfied with whatever, and that has always been.

  When the Robert Taylor Homes were built, it was a criterion for living there that you have nothing, that you be on public aid. That changed in the late 1970s, when you paid rent on the basis of your income. My son and I were on public aid in 1976 when I moved back to the Robert Taylor Homes, though by the early 1980s, I no longer needed the support. Each time I had a salary increase, the rent went up. In Edwin’s second year of college, in 1989, he said, Mom, it’s time to move. I had waited a long time, because when I moved back in, my two-bedroom apartment was $17.36 a month. I wasn’t about to go anywhere. In 1989, when I was working as tutorial program director at the YMCA, the rent was $358 a month. There’s another program, and I don’t care to say the name, but one of the criteria for being in it is that you don’t have a GED. You don’t have a high school diploma and you don’t have a job, and you’re eligible for the program. What kind of a mess is that? You’re at the bottom of the heap.

  The kids who grew
up in the Robert Taylor Homes were raised by young mothers. Now the mothers are in their thirties, and their young kids have babies. When the residents got kicked out of the Robert Taylor Homes, they were given Section 8 vouchers if they were paid up on the rent and their utilities. Lots of them left the city. Lots moved down South. Many that stayed moved to the southeast side of Chicago, in the South Shore, ’cause it was the only place with buildings that had twenty to thirty apartments available, and they accept Section 8 there. It’s the only place these people could go. People who had been in the projects their whole lives were now in a different part of the city where it’s still predominantly black, though it’s more multicultural. The apartments in the South Shore have their own gangs and their own drugs, though it may not be as bad as the Robert Taylor Homes got. Lots of the people who lived in the South Shore apartments before are now moving out.

  The Robert Taylor area is ten to fifteen minutes from downtown. You could walk it in thirty or forty minutes. If you go to downtown Chicago and look at the expensive condominiums, you see they have the same structure as the Robert Taylor Homes. Maybe something was slightly restructured or the bathroom or kitchen was a little different, but the buildings are the same. Typical high-rise. And yet that downtown area is so rich. Black and white yuppies live there.

  The reason the redevelopers want the Robert Taylor land is that it’s right next to public transportation. I remember hearing about the redevelopment plan back in 1997. Most of the people living at the Robert Taylor Homes were scared. They didn’t know what to think. At that time, I was working in a community agency that dealt with residents who were going to be displaced. It would have been a good idea to address the problems at the Robert Taylor Homes, not to tear down the buildings.

  People wrote a report saying that the Robert Taylor Homes were the murder capital of the world. The report didn’t come from the building residents and the police; it came from the people who wrote it. People didn’t know how to challenge the report and ask, what facts made you say this is the murder capital of the world? They said it cost more to rehab the buildings than to tear them down. But the redevelopers wanted the land. They’re supposed to build townhouses, row houses, like single-family homes, with no more than two families in a single building. The new homes are supposed to have at least 25 percent occupancy by former residents of the Robert Taylor Homes, but they may not pass the screening process. And there will be a one-strike policy: those who violate their lease once will be out.

  It’s like subliminal advertising. You associate something with something else, and then people start believing it’s true. Yes, things got bad. But if problems like gangs and drugs and teen pregnancy persist, there’s a way to stop them. The system did not have enough policing to control the gangs. Each building had a booth inside with a couple of trained police officers, but all they could do is put on a Band-Aid. The gangs had more weapons than the police had.

  People need to learn to take initiative. The way to reach people who are having babies out of wedlock, or who are doing drugs, is through education. You have to get them to feel what the child is feeling, what’s happening with the child that they’re having. There’s a whole generation gone now, but it’s never too late.

  With most of the Robert Taylor buildings gone, there are less than nine hundred kids at Du Sable High now, instead of four thousand. There are still fights at school, but fewer. The gangs are still trying to recruit on the school grounds. But Du Sable has one to two computers in every classroom, and it was one of the first high schools in the city of Chicago to get hooked up to the Internet. The library has more than twenty thousand books and a large collection of books about African Americans. If you go to Du Sable High School, you’ll see my name and picture posted in the Hall of Fame. I’m noted as a successful student, a parent, a scholar, the director of the Twirling Elainers Baton Company, a provider of social services to community youth and adults—a positive role model, living and working then on the Greater Grand Boulevard.

  I often revisit the words of my sister Genice: “Mom has left behind a legacy to be carried on, and so it has been carried on.” I live my life serving people young and old. Nowadays, I am the Silhouette Rites of Passage facilitator at the Chicago Area Project. Our program is based on an African frame of reference but serves people without regard to race. We help female and male wards of the state—young people who have been taken from their families by the Department of Children and Family Services. Our goal is to teach them life skills that will prepare them for emancipation from the system and a life of independence.

  TAMMIE CATHERY

  A Mother’s Story

  Tammie is a twenty-nine-year-old mother of six, a survivor of the Robert Taylor Homes. She told me that she would run things differently if she had the chance. “If I was in control, what I would do to change the life of our people in the ghetto is I wouldn’t give up on you. You see, that’s the problem. We give up too quick. First of all, I would have to think about it and map out what I would want to do. I would like to clean up our community . . . I would start with the ones that want to do for themselves. And ask questions, ask about them, what they like, what they wanna do, how they wanna raise their kids, what kind of environment they want to live in.”

  When I was a kid, I lived on 61st and Marshfield with my mom and went to the grammar school over there, Earle Elementary. I was always doing sports and other activities. I was on the cheerleading team and was the cheerleader captain there.

  We moved from over there into the Robert Taylor Homes in 1987, but I didn’t go right away with my mom ’cause I didn’t want to move into the Robert Taylors. My mom was always telling us that when we were growing up, we were saying, I ain’t moving into the ghetto. But eventually I did.

  When I moved, I didn’t know no one. I knew people, but I was always a loner. I used to always hang by myself. When I graduated that year from Earle Elementary, I wanted to go to Du Sable High School. So I became involved in a lot of things at the high school, ’cause there was problems at home with the drugs and alcohol and it was like destroying a lot of our families over there.

  Basically, it was like you were raising your own at the Robert Taylors. It was like there was one big family, everyone in one big home and in different bedrooms. That’s how the building was. But in reality there was different apartments, and some people had their head on their shoulders and some didn’t. Everybody knew everybody else, and a lot of the people were related to one another. Just like families, they argued sometimes.

  Myself, I started off very good. Then I started getting peer pressure and arguing and fighting with my mom. I’d come home, and even if she hadn’t been high on drugs or anything, she’d still trip off on me or fuss at me. So it was very hard for me, and I started hanging in the streets. At this time, I was thirteen or fourteen years old. I always thought I was a superstar anyway.

  I decided, I’m gonna go up to Du Sable High School and talk to some of the peoples there. So I started hanging out with the high school kids. They knew I had abilities even before I came there, ’cause they heard about them from the grammar school. So when I graduated from Earle and came to Du Sable, I was kind of like a bad kid but I had a lot of good things in me.

  They got me hooked on the cheerleader team, and I was very, very good. I was on the volleyball team and the softball team. I was in a mixed choir, and I was volunteering. I used to work with some of the students, some of the basketball team and the football team. There was a lot of things that I started doing.

  I grew up around my aunt Rochelle Catherine, who was a cheerleader at Du Sable High School. One of the girls was the cheerleader liner and she had to baby-sit me. I used to get tired of sitting all them hours watching the girls practice. I used to cry and get mad. My candy was gone and I was ready to go home. So I started playing with the batons. My aunt gave me a baton: here, girl, get this baton—we’re almost finished; we’ll see you later. So my auntie Rochelle, she was like, you should become
a cheerleader instead of being always out there fighting, ’cause I was like a tomboy.

  So things changed. I was dedicated to twirling. It was like I came home from school, and even going through the trouble I was going through at home, I was doing everything I could so I wouldn’t get no punishment, ’cause you can’t come to baton practice, the girls would say. Oh, it like breaks our heart. It breaks our heart ’cause we loved it, oh, we loved to twirl, loved to twirl, we did. We did a lot of shows back then. We had Coca-Cola sponsoring us. And we did a show for Mayor Harold Washington. More companies were promoting us, and it kept a lot of us out of trouble.

  After that it was like everyone started getting older, becoming teenagers, and we started breaking loose. Some of us kept on. We always kept in contact with someone. We’d jump on a bus and see each other, or we’d visit somewhere; we’d bump into each other. That’s when my life went from good to worse. I lived with my grandmother before I had my first child ’cause I couldn’t take it no more with me and my mother. I was an A student. I stayed on the honor roll in high school. I didn’t finish, ’cause I had so much other stuff going on in my head. I didn’t have no one really to back me up, to keep me focused, keep me going. It was like I actually just gave up, so I hung with a street gang.

  Once I stopped going to school, started hanging out, it became like a lot of tragedies are happening. A lot of classmates started going to jail, dying; there was so many killings over there at the Robert Taylor Homes. It was a lot like Harlem. One building is one thing, the next building is another. Two different gangs. You step on someone’s toe, bump into each other, or one gang member liked the other gang member’s girl, or it was just ’cause of something stupid. Someone says something. You have a pair of Jordans, then they take your Jordans. Next thing you know, they coming back with the next building and they all get to fighting. But then it’s like always one person come here with a gun, then the next person.

 

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