Any Monday Prologue draft
ANY MONDAY Prologue Draft 1
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The year was 1935. Winter gripped Chicago in its vise, and tightened the screws. The omnipresent cold and snow and ice and wind, and bleak, barren days of gray skies, and gray rain, held the city in bond. And always the wind, now rising in a staccato, high-pitched keening, now falling soft and low and sorrowful, but always there, speaking only to itself.
Local folklore has it that winter in Chicago is twelve months long, and you can always find a pile of old, soot-blackened snow under a back porch somewhere, in August, if you look hard enough.
Chicago, in the winter of 1935 was a city of noise, of the sputter and roar of flivvers, the clatter of hooves, the thunder of wagons over cobblestones, the rusty wheels of streetcars grinding to a halt at the end of the block, the deafening screech and squeal of elevated trains overhead. It was also a city of silence, of abandoned freight sidings, rusted factory gates and fences, where the only structures still standing tall were the smokestacks of empty warehouses and factories and mills, a scene steeped in soot and grime, in loneliness and emptiness, in end-of-the-road futility
In Chicago, in the Nineteen Thirties, there was a district on the South Side, bounded on the West by the Stock Yards, on the East by Lake Michigan, on the North by Lake Street, and on the South by as far South as black people were allowed to live, that had come to be known as the Black Belt. Three decades earlier, around the turn of the Twentieth Century, this had been a neighborhood designed for the gracious living of the affluent white gentility, a neighborhood with wide tree-lined streets, well -groomed lawns and landscaping, gray stone mansions with turrets, cornices, conservatories, and porte-cochere driveways – in short, a neighborhood of staid, moneyed respectability, but by the Nineteen Thirties, an endless tide of black people rolling up from the South from farm to factory, from country to city, had swelled the population of the Black Belt to almost a quarter of a million, and the white people fled.
In the glory days of its youth, when an address on South Prairie Avenue, or South Indiana Avenue, was coveted, the Park Manor Arms on South Calumet Avenue had been a showplace. It was one of the first in the newest vogue for smart housing on the South Side, the three-story luxury apartment building. Even now, in the drab sameness of winter, one could see that this street had been an enviable place to live. There were still a few great old trees left standing in bleak patches of grass around once-scoured stone steps. Once imposing front entrances, that had taken on that special weathering that settles on brick and stone from frigid winters and torrid summers, and were now crumbling and cracked and broken, still clung to last memories of the dignified elegance of days gone by.
Though their time was past, many interiors in the Park Manor Arms retained pretensions of the Victorian era, and strong traces of bygone beauty. Thus the marble fireplace which had graced the drawing room or library of an earlier day, and considered an architectural masterpiece in its time, was now cursed daily by the present tenant for wasting so much of his precious space. Or the room that was separated from its neighbors by sliding doors, not walls (a fact that was glossed over by the landlord, if the tenant was sharp enough to ask about that). Never mind that the doors moved silently on hidden tracks, as though they were whisperings in mahogany, they were now hideously painted, scratched and gashed by the malice of sullen tenants and their unholy tribes of children which had used them as targets for flying darts, drawings in crayola, and back-stops for indoor baseballs. Or yesterday’s spacious dining room that had seated twelve at table, a beautiful room that still boasted flourishes of draperies and wall hangings, but which now strained to hold three beds and two rollaways, and a massive walnut sideboard with glass windows now held piles of diapers, baby furnishings, small toys, pots and pans, and canned goods.
The landlord of the Park Manor Arms had half a dozen ways of cutting corners and making money. The original apartments had been designed for the comfortable living of a single family. They contained eight rooms – a front parlor, a second parlor, dining room, kitchen, four bedrooms and one bathroom. This landlord had ingenuity, but more than that he had greed. So he took this apartment that had been built to house one family, and turned it into a swarming hive of humanity. The original eight rooms became eight one-room kitchenettes, into each of which he installed one small gas stove, one small sink, rented each room by the week, at ten dollars per week, and fattened his purse many-fold. (The white family had paid eighty dollars per month for all eight rooms.) If anybody ever had nerve enough to ask the landlord why he did not repair the broken-down furnace, or fix the leaking roof, or clean the stopped-up toilets, or replace missing stair steps, the reply was always the same, “Why, so they can break it up again? They ain’t never had nothing no way.”
On the farm, life had been ordered by the seasons; in the city life obeyed the clock. Hardly anybody in the Park Manor Arms owned a clock. The steeple bells in the Catholic Church tolled every hour, on the hour. The whistle from the shoe factory, over on Halsted Street, blew at eight o’clock in the morning, and five o’clock in the afternoon. The postman came sometime before noon. If the ice-man came around, it was either Monday or Thursday; if the fish man came, it was Friday. If the rags-and-old-iron man came, it was Saturday.
Rarely has a more unlikely, unprepared, unready country folk turned its eyes, and its mind, to the stone and steel of a big city. They had come from dog-trot cabins and falling-down shacks on the edge of the cotton field. In one day’s time they had been snatched up from the red clay and the gray clay, from the big sky, the simple, the artless, the unhurried world of their nativity, and hurled into the industrial maelstrom, the inexplicable civilization of the metropolis. They knew nothing about the indoor toilet with running water, flushed with a pull chain. Nobody had explained that to them. So they dipped their pots into the toilet bowl and used this water for cooking and washing, and then worried when they looked around for the privy and couldn’t find one. In the kitchen they faced a contraption called a gas stove in dull wonder, and looked around beside it for the wood box. They were expected to know all about these things that everybody else knew, and all they had was the hard, narrow vision of their experience back home.
But in the city they had to learn many things, and quickly, such as how to walk on ice, and watch out for black ice, and be careful of the slush that freezes at the curb, because you can slip and fall when you go to step down into the street. They learned to lean into the wind, and dress in layers. They learned about the great stone lions on the steps of the Art Institute down town, and the landmark clock at the State and Madison entrance to Marshall Field’s, and the tower on the Wrigley Building at night all lit up with a million pinpricks of light, straining to reach the stars. And they learned about all the other monuments to the cold, impersonal forces that spawn, nurture, and command the life of the city, and control the subdued hysteria of the masses that it held at bay by the red light at street corners, and released by the sudden flash of green.
Down home, when a stranger in town looked for the colored folks, he always tried down around the bend in the river, or over near the railroad tracks. When black people came to Chicago, and began to move into the Black Belt, there was a tendency for folks from the same state, or the same city, to settle close to each other. So when a newcomer asked, “Any folks hereabouts from Louisiana, or Tennessee, or Alabama?”, he was told, “Try back over yonder behind the church for Louisiana,” or “Right around that corner for Tennessee,” or “Two, three blocks west of here for Alabama”. Sometimes in the summer, you could see two or three men, squatting on their heels, in the manner of country folk back home, talking in small, simple ways of the big things in their lives, as plain folks have always done, reducing world ideas to the parameters of their own finite realm of being.
For these people, the street was the only other place to be – it was like another room in their own house. Every family knew every other family. You couldn’t walk three blocks down the street, in any direction, without somebody knowing where you lived, and what you had done along the way to wherever you were going. There were no front porches. If you sat down outside it was on the front steps, or you dragged a chair out on the sidewalk, or you sat on the curb. If you had a front window, you sat in that, or maybe out on the fire escape. The neighborhood was a world in shambles. Non-stop bedlam spawned endless squabbles, accusations, jealousies, fist fights, gun fights. Life was lived in the street, in the back alley, in the cellar, on the roof. Life was one voice speaking, one music playing, one anger, one eloquence, one pulsing, impassioned heart.
And the little ones who had hid, peeping around behind their elders when they first came to the city – they grew up knowing all about the smells of ripening garbage, the stench of bad plumbing, plaster dripping from the walls, the baby who choked to death when he tried to eat the roach he was playing with. They learned early on that kitchenette rats will eat anything, tin cans, cement caulking, burlap, hardwood, all kinds of rat poison, and any size cat. By the time they were twelve or thirteen they were man-boys and woman-girls. They knew how to survive in a hostile world. They knew how to turn the lights back on when the company turned them off; they knew how to steal electricity from the building next door. They worked out a fool-proof system for shoplifting from the grocery store. The first man passed the merchandise over to the second man in the next aisle, who passed it to the third man near the door who whisked it out the door to the man in the parking lot, who flew.
In the vestibule of the Park Manor Arms the odors of cabbage and garlic and onions had seeped into the walls and into the very tiles on the floor. Some mail box doors hung by one hinge, some yawned empty, and there was no end to the names of long-gone tenants scrawled on the walls.
The unlucky tenants whose only window opened on the air shaft between the Park Manor Arms and the building next door, could not open that window between May and October because the air shaft, which was already filled with trash and garbage and rubbish, now came alive with vermin and clouds of flies and mosquitoes, and that was the end of the air shaft until the first freeze.
Sometimes a tenant had to walk through the rooms of two or three of his fellows, through their homes, through their lives, to reach the door that opened to the hallway, that led to the long flight of stairs, down to the street, which was itself the jungle which had so numbed and blunted the consciousness of its children that no sight, no sound, no smell was unknown, where the most improbable was commonplace, and chaos was the order of the day.
Yet there were people in this building, working people, lower-class hard working people, who insisted on upward mobility, to whatever degree they could attain. They wanted a better education for their children. They wanted their children to go to the dentist, and get their vitamins every day. They wanted a decent place to live. The most courageous among them dared to dream of the penultimate: owning a home of their own. The little house with the front porch and a patch of green grass in the front, and a stand of hollyhocks in the side yard. Down home the dream had been the forty acres and the mule. Up here it was some little old house but, by grabs, it would be their own little old house.
