Special report

By Sylvester Monroe

T

hey say you can't go home again. So when I returned to the Chica­go housing projects where I grew up, it was with ambivalence. I was journeying back to my past, and I didn't know what I would find.

It wasn't that I was afraid. I'd been back to the Robert Taylor Homes and Prairie Courts many times in the 20 years since I left in 1966. But this time I was returning as a reporter, to retrace my life and those of my friends. What had happened to us, to Half Man and Honk, Pee Wee and Billy, and what did it say about growing up black? Black men are six times as likely as white men to be murder victims. We are two and a half times as likely to be unemployed. We finish last in practically every socioeconomic measure from infant mortality to life expectancy. Through portraits of our lives together and apart, I thought, we might find some answers as to why black men in America seem almost an endangered species.

No middle name: When I left Chicago for St. George's School in the fall of 1966, through an out­reach program called A Better Chance, all 11 of us were still in school. And at the wide-eyed age of 14 and 15, we still had dreams. I wanted to be a writer. I read F. Scott Fitzgerald and dreamed of authoring my own novel. I even started signing my name S. Vest Monroe, a bit miffed that my mother had not given me a middle name. The dream gave me hope. And my mother convinced me that without an education the dream was impossible.

Having to leave the safety and familiarity of home to get it was as difficult a decision as I've ever made. If it had been entirely up to me, I might never have gone to St. George's at all. I was happy at Wendell Phillips High, making straight A's, running on the track team, hanging out with a gang called Satan's Saints and dis­covering the wonders of women. Now I was being told that I could do better, much better, but it meant leaving home to attend an all-boys boarding school in New­port, R.I. It might as well have been the other side of the universe. Not only would I be away from my family and friends, there wouldn't be any girls and barely any other blacks. In fact, when I arrived at the front steps of St. George's on a damp Septem­ber night in 1966, I was one of only five blacks enrolled at the 200-student Episcopal school. It

118 AMERICA IN CLOSE-UP

Sylvester Monroe

2. continued

was culture shock on a mammoth scale.

The first person I met was Gil Burnett, my first faculty adviser. He was nice enough, but some­thing seemed to bother him. "Do you have other clothes?" he asked, scanning my wide-brimmed Dun-lop hat, dark glasses, Italian knit shirt, reversible-pleated baggy pants and brown and white Stacy-Adams wing tips.

"Yeah," I said. "Just like this." The next day he took me in his Land-Rover to the Anderson-Little knitting mills in Fall River, Mass., bought me a blue blazer, two pairs of gray flannel slacks and a plain pair of black tie shoes. I was thankful for the new duds. They gave me the look of a preppy. But I still found myself won­dering why I agreed to leave 39 th Street.

The main reason I was there, I reminded myself, was to please my mother and Leroy Lovelace, the schoolteacher largely respon­sible for getting me the scholar­ship. And my mother had given me an out, or so I thought. She said to me at the outset that I would never forgive myself if I didn't at least go and see what it was like; I could always come home. Secretly, I resolved to stay at St. George's exactly two weeks, long enough to make a show of it, then head for Chicago.

Sick call: After roughly two weeks, I had what I thought was a stroke of luck: I got sick — so sick, in fact, that I was admitted to the school infirmary. It was perfect. I'd call my mother, tell her what a godawful place boarding school was, and catch the first ride home. To make my pitch even stronger, I decided to find out exactly what was wrong with me.

"Hey, Doc, what've I got, any­way?" I asked.

"Oh, I think you're suffering from a really bad case of nostal­gia," she said.

I hadn't the foggiest notion what that meant, but it sounded pretty serious to me. Wonderful, I thought. There's no way Mom won't let me come home now. I went to the phone, already plan­ning my return.

"Hey, Ma," I began.

"Hey, how you doin'?"

"Not so good. I'm sick as a dog, Ma. This place is always cold, the food is terrible, and now I'm in the infirmary."

"What's the matter with you?"

"I can't keep anything down," I said. "The doctor says I've got a bad case of nostalgia. I think I ought to come home, OK?"

"Sure, you can come home -but under one condition," she said.

MINORITIES 119

"What's that?" I asked.

"The only way you're coming home before you're supposed to is in a box."

It was one of the hardest things she'd ever done, she confided years later. But she also knew she had to. It was three months before I got home again, for Christmas vacation, and somehow I man­aged to survive. I even found myself actually beginning to like the place and its teachers, who tempered no-nonsense classes with a touch of compassion.

My own capacity for learning hadn't been stunted by life in the Taylor Homes. In some ways, in fact, I was on an equal footing with my wealthier classmates. I had that love and support, that sense of self-worth, that can only come from the family. And as my mother proved, it could happen whether there was one parent or two, a few kids or a houseful.

Faint disquiet: Looking back on it, I was pleased to show what black boys were capable of. Yet, there was a faint disquiet. What bothered me was thatseai£_p£cjple Гппп Н jf pasier tn prefenr] J ц/я^ something_else. "We're colorblind here,"~~a well-meaning faculty member once told me. "We don't see black students or white students, we just see students." But black was what I was; I wasn't sure he saw me at all.

Another St. George's teacher was surprised at my reaction when he implied that I should be grate­ful for the opportunity to attend

St. George's, far away from a place like the Robert Taylors. How could I be, I snapped back, when my friends, my family, everyone that I cared most about, were still there? But you're different, he continued. That's why you got out.

I'm not different, I insisted. I'm just lucky enough to have been in the right place at the right time.

What the teacher failed to understand was that my back­ground was not something to be ashamed of. As in the old James Brown song of the '60s, I wanted to "say it loud: I'm black and I'm proud!"

One of the greatest frustrations of my three years at St. George's, was that people were always trying I to separate me from other black [people in a manner strangely rem­iniscent of a time when slave owners divided blacks into "good Negroes" and "bad Negroes." Somehow, attending St. George's made me a good Negro, in their eyes, while those left in Robert Taylor were bad Negroes or, at the very least, inferior ones.

Ever since — through Harvard, through my 14-year career as a journalist — I have found myself looking over my shoulder on occa­sion. My mother had been right: having worked hard, I'd caught the break I needed to get out of the ghetto. But the men of my family were right, too: race is an inescapable burden for every black man.

Though economic-class divi-

sions are rapidly producing a nation of haves and have-nots, for blacks, race still tends to over­shadow all else. It doesn't matter whether you are rich man, poor man, beggar or thief, if you are black, there's an artificial ceiling on your ambition. Many people still perceive blacks, especially black men, as less intelligent, less productive and generally more violent than the rest of society.

I didn't have to go back to the Robert Taylor Homes to under­stand that. Recently, I waited 45 minutes one evening on Sixth Avenue in midtown Manhattan before a cab finally stopped for me. More than a dozen cabbies had passed me by for a "safer" white fare. It's the same in other cities, and it's not just cabdrivers. More than a few times, I've stepped into an elevator and no­ticed a woman clutch her purse a little tighter under her arm, or I've been walking on a deserted sidewalk with a black, male com­panion, when a white couple spots us and suddenly decides to cross the street.

To be sized up, categorized and dismissed all within the space of a nervous glance solely on the basis of race is more than annoying; it's demeaning and damaging to the psyche of an entire people.

Even among people of good will, race relations is old news, it seems — unless somebody gets killed. Sometimes I get the feeling people are thinking, "Why are there still Negroes?"...

Robert Taylor Homes, Prairie Courts: public housing projects in Chicago.

outreach program "A Better Chance": a program providing disadvantaged students with better educational chances.

Fitzgerald, F. Scott (1896-1940): American author of novels (e.g. The Great Gatsby, Tender Is the Night, This Side of Paradise) and short stories.

to make straight A's: always get the best marks (A's) at school.

Episcopal school: school run by the Protestant Episcopal Church, an American church, which before 1789 was associated with the Church of England.

Stacy-Adams wing tips: shoes with perforated parts covering the toes and sides.

Harvard: prestigious private university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, founded in 1636 by John Harvard (1607-38), an English Puritan clergyman in America.

120 AMERICA IN CLOSE-UP

Jessie de la Cruz

Л one-family dwelling in Fresno. A small, well-kept garden is out front.

"When I was a child growing up as a migrant worker, we would move from place to

place. In between, I'd see homes with beautiful gardens, flowers. I always looked at

those flowers and said: 'If I could only have my own house and have a garden.' We

couldn't as migrant workers. Now, as you walk onto my porch, everything you see is

green. (Laughs) I have a garden now."

She has six grown children; the youngest is twenty-one. She is active in National

Land for People....

She is fifty-nine.

I and my mother, we were living with my grandparents. My father went back to Mexico....

My happiest memories was when my grandfather had Sunday off. He would pick us up, wrap us in blankets, and put us around this big wood-burning stove, while he went out to the store. He'd come up with oranges and apples and good things to cat, something we did not very often have.

All the teachers were Anglos. They would have us say our name and where we lived, who we were. I-said: 'Jessie Lopez, American." She said: "No, you're Mexican." Throughout the years, teachers told me the same thing. Now all of a sudden they want me to say I'm an American. (Laughs.) I learned how to speak English and how to fight back.

I think the longest time I went to school was two months in one place. I attended, I think, about forty-five schools. When my parents or my brothers didn't find any work, we wouldn't attend school because we weren't sure of staying there. So I missed a lot of school....

My children were picking crops, but we saw to it that they went to school. Maybe one or two of the oldest would stay away from school during cotton-picking time around December, so we could earn a little more money to buy food or buy them a pair of shoes or a coat that they needed. But we always wanted them to get an education.

I musta been almost eight when I started following the crops. Every winter, up north. I was on the end of the row of prunes, taking care of my younger brother and sister. They would help me fill up the cans and put 'em in a box while the rest of the family was picking the whole row.

In labor camps, the houses were just clapboard. There were just nails with two-by-fours around it. The houses had two little windows and a front door. One room, about twelve by fifteen, was a living room, dining room, everything. That was home to us.

Eight or nine of us. We had blankets that we rolled up during the day to give us a little place to walk around doing the housework. There was only one bed, which was my grandmother's. A cot. The rest of us slept on the floor. Before that, we used to live in tents, patched tents. Before we had a tent, we used to live under a tree. That was very hard. This is one thing I

MINORITIES 121

hope nobody has to live through. During the winter, the water was just seeping under the ground. Your clothes were never dry.

My husband was born in Mexico. He came with his parents when he was two and a half years old. He was irrigating when he was twelve years old, doing a man's work. Twelve hours for a dollar twenty. Ten cents an hour. 1 met him in 1933. Our first year we stayed in the labor camps.

All farm workers I know, they're always talking: "If I had my own place, I'd know how to run it. I'd be there all the time. My kids would help me." This is one thing that all Chicano families talked about. We worked the land all our lives, so if we ever owned a piece of land, we knew that we could make it.

Mexicans have this thing about a close family, so they wanted to buy some land where they could raise a family. That's what my grandfather kept talkin' about, but his dream was never realized.

We followed the crops till around 1966. We went up north around the Sacramento area to pick prunes. We had a big truck, and we were able to take our refrigerator and my washing machine and beds and kitchen pots and pans and our clothing. It wasn't a hardship any more. We wanted our children to pick in the shade, under a tree, instead of picking out in the vines, where it's very hot. When I picked grapes, I could hardly stand it. I felt sorry for twelve-, thirteen-year-old kids. My husband said: "Let's go up north and pick prunes."

We stopped migrating when Cesar Chavez formed a union. We became members, and I was the first woman organizer. I organized people every­where I went. When my husband and I started working under a signed contract, there was no need to migrate after that....

We're in very marginal land. We survive by hard work and sacrifices. We're out of the Wcstland district, where the government supplies the water. There's acres and acres of land that if you go out there you can see green from one end to the other, like a green ocean. No houses, nothing. Trees or just cotton and alfalfa. It's land that is irrigated with taxpayers' money.

These growers that have been using this water signed a contract that they would sell, within ten years, in small parcels. It's not happening. If the law had been enforced, we could be out there right now.

It's the very, very best land. I worked it there. You could grow anything: tomatoes, corn, cantaloupes, vegetables, bell peppers....

I'm making it. It's hard work. But I'm not satisfied, not until I see a lot of farm workers settle on their own farms. Then I'll say it's happening.

Is America progressing toward the better? No, the country will never do anything for us. We're the ones that are gonna do it. We have to keep on struggling. I feel there's going to be a change. With us, there's a saying: La esperanza muere al ultimo. Hope dies last. You can't lose hope. If you lose hope, that's losing everything....

Anglo: Anglo-American descended from an English family.

Chavez, Cesar, born 1927, prominent Mexican-American, who organized the migrant farm workers in California into a union and led them- in a long, successful strike against vineyard owners.

122 AMERICA IN CLOSE-UP

• LUCKY OL' SUN DOWNERS

In Sun City, Arizona, they do not grow old as we who are here grow old. Young people can't live there, the hospital has no maternity ward and nobody laughs at a real tryer. PETER BLACK paid a visit

ONE of the irritating things about growing old is that numerous pleasant physical activities, such as sunbath­ing, wearing bright clothes and sexual collisions, are deemed unsuitable, even for the vigorous. It is felt that the old cut unseemly figures at such pastimes. But this is only when the young are around, doing the same things and showing up the old by looking beautiful.

There is something to be said for being able to take off your clothes on the beach without being obliged to make painful comparisons between yourself and the brown-skinned, flat-stomached young insolently kicking beach balls about with their hard bare feet.

Thinking less crudely along these lines, the ingenious hotel tycoon Del Webb created the first retirement resort town in the world out of 9,000 acres of cotton land 12 miles outside Phoenix, Arizona....

From a helicopter one would look down on a vast expanse of streets and houses forming concentric circles, crescents, whorls, as regular as thumbprints, interspersed by big splashes of green (golf courses) and little ones of turquoise (pools). Cars move along the streets, overtaking

what look like covered wagons with­out horses. At ground level the streets run between bungalows of varying size, and grandeur, and the covered wagons become golf buggies, luxurious toy versions of the hard necessity of less than a century ago.

These things make up a lot of the traffic. One of them could contain a posse of the volunteer sheriff force — on routine patrol, unarmed but uniformed, reporting to the county sheriff's office any unusual sight such as a loose dog, a gorilla on a bicycle, a children's nurse wheeling a pram, an alien from space, or a group of young people. Any of those would be equally improbable in this place. They would not fit Del Webb's central idea, that retired folk who wished to enjoy themselves actively would be more contented especially as they grew older, if competitive and potentially irritating age groups were kept way from them. Hence the rules against the young.

One spouse in each couple must be at least 50. Residents undertake not to have children of school age living at home. These two regulations are enough to produce the uni­formity of age.

I asked my guide, tanned and bust-

ling Mildred Toldrin: 'Suppose a 50-year-old man brought a 20-year-old wife here?' 'He wouldn't. She'd feel too much out of it.' 'What if she came anyway, and had a baby?' 'She'd think twice about that too, because they'd have to leave. If she wanted a family, she wouldn't want to live in Sun City. It isn't a suitable place for children to live in. They should be with their own age groups, it's not good for them to be always with older people. We've had five births in 18 years, all to visitors passing through.'

As a clincher, she added that there were no schools in the city and no maternity wards in the Walter O. Boswell Memorial Hospital. (The Boswell family owned the land.)

Mrs Toldrin was an old hand, a resident since 1960, widowed five years ago and energetically involved in promoting the place. She drove me round in one of those comfort­able American cars,... to the Bell Recreation Centre, where you begin to see the point of Sun City. Ten buildings covered 27 acres. Inside them, well-matured men and women were at play on 19 pool tables, 16 lanes of ten-pin bowling, eight shuffleboards; or exchanging books (40,000 on the shelves) in the library; or up to their armpits in the thera­peutic pool; or painting still life, carving wood, firing pottery, turning metal, weaving rugs and baskets, fashioning silver ornaments and sculptures. Outside, the sun beat down on the sun court, with its huge swimming pool, tennis courts and bowling greens....

When phase one of the even larger Sun City West is complete, some 80,000 elderly people will have chosen this way of life. Similar devel-. opments exist, are being built or planned right across the winter sun­shine belt of the US, all of them confidently predicted to earn high profits for their developers. We must assume that either many comfortably off Americans over 50 go barmy, or that these cities offer something older people need and enjoy.

MINORITIES 123

Sun City, Arizona

If it seemed sad and bizarre to me at first, and I think these must be part of the first impressions of every visiting European, as though they were being conducted round a kind of Forest Lawn cemetery for the living, it was because the realism of the policy of separation contradicts so bluntly the sentimental picture of ideal old age most of us carry about.

In this the old live as part of the family unit, respected for their wis­dom and experience, fussed and petted by their grandchildren in whom they see reminders of their own golden time, their presence among the family emphasising how life is a continuing procession.

But of course this is all rot, belong­ing to TV serials like 'The Waltons.' In the real world the old folks who live with their children's families get on everybody's nerves because they keep falling about, stepping on their teeth and glasses, handing out opinions nobody wants to hear; there is argument about which TV channel to watch, who gets the newspaper

first, why don't they go for a walk, and must the children play that in­fernal gramophone. The only way to avoid this fate is to be rich enough to live in a huge house where there is one lavatory for every two residents. Even then the old will irritate the young.

'We enjoy having them as visitors,' said Mrs Toldrin. 'My grandchildren come to see me four times a year. I'm delighted when they come, and I'm delighted when they go. Anyway, there's nothing to stop me going to stay with them if I want to. They don't lock us in here, you know.'...

There must be a lot to be said for a community where people are sym­pathetic because they face the same problems of coping with the separ­ations and ailments of age and have a good many interests and challenges in common. It must be a bit like living on campus, except that a then uncertain future has been ac­complished. And nobody laughs at anybody. It is one of the pleasant American virtues to admire anyone

who has a go....

A loner would have a bad time, but a loner wouldn't consider going there. Some over-50s who go to look the place over recoil from the tightly structured life. (The metal-working shop, filled with burly old fellows in blue overalls, reminded me so much of a prison movie that I had to con­centrate on asking: 'How long have you been here?' and not: 'How long are you in for?')

There is no corner shop or local bar. A keen gardener who wants to raise vegetables rents a plot in the agricultural section. It is slightly against the social ethos of the place to have a private swimming pool. Deed restrictions bar putting up tacky outbuildings. The objective is to keep out untidiness and the un­expected, to combat at all times those lurking enemies of age, boredom and solitude....

Yet, as Americans joke about New York, Sun City is a great place to visit but I'd sure hate to live there....

124 AMERICA IN CLOSE-UP

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