America Behind the Color Line (50 page)

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.

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.