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Never
a City So Real by Alex Kotlowitz Rating: ••• (Recommended) |
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Characters In his new book, Never a
City So Real, Alex Kotlowitz finds a way to describe a place through
stories about some of the people who live there. In a few hundred pages, he
captures Milton Reed is a lanky,
long-legged man, and so I need to walk briskly to keep up with him. He
carries a large sketch pad under one arm, and he has stashed his sketch
pencils in the pockets of his beige cargo pants, along with a box opener,
which he uses as a sharpener—and which also affords him some protection. He
is not slowed down by his footwear: Nike running shoes from which he’s cut
away the heels. They resemble slippers more than sneakers. “Bought ‘em too
small’ he explains. We’re scooting past weed-choked vacant
lots and aging wood-framed homes that lean in the wind like prairie grass. We
pass a group of young African-American men, one of whom halfheartedly
attempts to conceal the marijuana blunt they’re sharing. They turn away from
us. Reed, who is also African-American, says to me, “You don’t have to worry
out here. They look at you, and think one thing: There goes a cop.” He lets
go with his signature laugh—an uninhibited cackle that comes in small,
staccato bursts, and often in response to his own observations. This is less
a sign of immodesty than an acknowledgment that it’s okay to laugh at his
stories and perceptions, some of which can be discomfiting in their
bluntness. The young men, who up to this point have been trying to deflect
our notice, now turn to see what’s so funny. Reed had invited me to join him at the
Bud Billiken Day Parade. Each summer, this parade winds its way through the
heart of The parade, which is held the second
Saturday in August, originated in 1928 as a salute by the Chicago
Defender to its paperboys. The Defender is one of the country’s
oldest African—American newspapers, and though it’s lost much of its vigor,
in the 1930s and 1940s it was considered essential reading in the black
community. Pullman porters would distribute the paper in southern towns,
where it helped lure victims of segregation northward. The parade’s name derived
from a small statue—a “Billiken”—which sat on the editor’s desk and which
parade organizers claim was a Chinese god who watched over children. But
Billiken, it turns out, was neither a deity nor Chinese. Around 1910, a small
The parade’s path winds through a part
of the South Side long known as Bronzeville, a neighborhood whose ups and
downs have inversely reflected the nation’s mood on race. It was a thriving
hub of black-owned businesses through the 1940s, the destination for blacks
who fled the South in what has been hailed as one of the largest internal
migrations in history Bronzeville, where such writers as Ida B. Wells,
Richard Wright, and Gwendolyn Brooks settled, was also home to Liberty Life
Insurance, the first black-owned insurance company in the North, and Overton
Hygienic Company, one of the foremost suppliers of African-American
cosmetics. The nation’s first black-commanded regiment, the 8th, was
stationed at the Armory on Giles Avenue, which was named after the regiment’s
highest ranking officer, Lieutenant George L. Giles, who was killed in World
War I. (The regiment’s members held off white hoodlums during the race riots
of 1919, stationing themselves on the fire escape of a nearby YMCA with
their weapons.) There’s much history here. The Pilgrim
Baptist Church, formerly a synagogue (in this city of ever-changing neighborhoods,
churches adorned with stars of David are a common sight), was designed by
Dankmar Adler, whose father was the synagogue’s rabbi, and Louis Sullivan,
with a helping hand from a young Frank Lloyd Wright (who worked for Adler
and Sullivan’s firm at the time). Some consider it one of the most beautiful
Sullivan interiors. The peaked ceiling structure boasts exquisite
ornamentation, organic forms juxtaposed with geometric designs. It’s also
here at this church where the blues musician Thomas Dorsey pioneered
modern-day black gospel music. (Dorsey authored “Precious Lord,” which has
been recorded by a divergent cast, from Elvis Presley to Johnny Cash.) A mile
south was the old Chess Records’ storefront where the Chess Brothers,
Leonard and Phil, played a Little Walter recording, “Juke,” and conducted an
early version of test marketing, placing a speaker in the corner doorway to
see if people at the adjacent bus stop responded. And there’s Meyers Ace
Hardware, once the site of the Sunset Café (which later became the Grand
Terrace), a hotbed of jazz in the 1920s and 1930s. Earl Hines and Cab
Calloway performed here regularly as did Louis Armstrong, who titled one song
“Sunset Stop.” Musicians still come by the hardware store often, since, as
one once said, “This place is as sacred to jazz musicians as the Wailing Wall
is to Jews.” The store’s owner was once offered ten thousand dollars for a
mural in one of the back offices, past the screwdrivers and furnace filters;
it depicts a trio of musicians and a sultry singer whose head is cut off by
wood paneling. Another time, twelve German trumpet players came here; each
purchased plungers, and had the store’s owner sign them. In
the 1960s, when white establishments opened their doors to blacks, many of
the businesses in Bronzeville suffered, and most eventually went under. The
community is undergoing a revival, in large part because of a thriving black
middle class committed to staying in the city and rebuilding this historic
neighborhood. Milton
Reed has come to the parade in the hope of earning some money by drawing
profiles. The previous summer, he told me, he made more than three hundred dollars,
charging seven dollars a portrait. A line had formed in the morning, and it
never let up. Reed and I reach the corner of King Drive and Muddy Waters
Drive (the city has so many honorary streets, many named after obscure
personages like Daniel D. “Moose” Brindisi and the Reverend Frenchie Smith,
that it’s lost count), and Reed has me purchase two milk crates at a dollar
apiece, so he can have a place for him and his subjects to sit while he
sketches. “Let me get to work,” he announces, although there doesn’t seem to
be much work to be had. No one has approached him. I use one of the crates as
a platform so that I can see the parade over the crowd. From a nearby vendor,
Reed orders himself a small container of rib tips, then worries it might get
his hands too messy, so instead asks for a Polish sausage. I holler for him
to get me some of the jerk chicken. The food is plentiful, as are renegade
vendors whom the city, on this occasion, traditionally chooses to ignore. I first met Reed in 1999,
while visiting a woman in the Stateway Gardens Public Housing complex, which
was then a collection of eight seventeen-story high-rises. He was in the
living room of my hostess, where he was painting a gold-trimmed black
panther on the cinderblock wall. He had a forty-ounce bottle of Colt 45
beside him, and he was so completely engaged in his work that he didn’t say a
word. There was nothing out of the ordinary about the rendering, though it
was clear that Reed had taken great care with it. He had first sketched the
outlines of the panther in pencil, using a ruler and right angle, and then
had gone to work with oil-based house paint. Because of its permanence, there
was little room for error. I assumed at the time that the panther was meant
to conjure up more radical days. I later learned, however, that a number of
years before a woman had asked Reed to paint a black panther with gold trim
on her kitchen wall to match her black and gold furniture, a common color
pairing among public-housing residents. (“They all follow that same tradition’
Reed told me.) Word quickly spread, and soon Reed had a reputation.
Public-housing residents came to know him as “Mr. Artist”—as in “Mr. Artist,
how much you charge for one of them murals?” Reed, who’s now in his late forties,
has salt-and-pepper hair and a trimmed beard and mustache. He likes to talk,
and he unabashedly offers his opinions to just about anyone, including to
the cadre of young drug dealers outside his building. “They tell me they’re
in business,” he says. “I tell ‘em they need to get a real job.” Reed’s
full-time job is as a maintenance worker at the Dearborn Homes, the
public-housing complex where he lives. Since the early 1990s, however, Reed
has been kind of a Diego Rivera of the projects, painting the imaginings and
realities of the dispossessed, of the men and women who live in America’s
poorest neighborhood, an area beset with the kinds of problems one might expect
in a place where ninety percent of the families are headed by a single parent
and where violence has become such a way of life that a banner on a local
church calls for a “Peace Truce” and a local tombstone maker, Elmo’s,
advertises, “While U Wait. Before You Go, See Elmo.” Reed himself grew up in public housing,
in the He began his part-time career as a
professional artist by painting fairly mundane likenesses: apples, oranges,
and peaches in people’s kitchens; cartoon characters like Betty Boop, the
Flintstones, and Pikachu on the walls of children’s rooms; fish and dolphins
in bathrooms. Also, early on, he was often asked to sketch likenesses of
Jesus Christ, but it irked him that virtually everyone wanted Jesus to be
white. It was as if people had been beaten down for so long that they no
longer believed that anyone who resembled themselves could amount to much.
“They’ll say, ‘Why you draw him so dark?’ “he told me. “I’ll say, ‘Jesus wasn’t
really white and they’ll say, ‘Look, I’m paying you, do it the way I say. I
know how Jesus look.’ I mean, they probably met Jesus in person, so I can’t
argue with them. I give ‘em what they want.” Soon, people began to make personalized
requests. First, there were the panthers. Then, of all things, it was
landscapes. He remembers the first time it happened. A young woman told Reed
she wanted a sky with clouds over water and trees. She said she wanted the
sunlight coming off the water. “I said, ‘I understand,’” Reed recalls. “‘Let
me try to make you feel good.’” The landscapes caught on. Drab cinderblock
walls became lakes surrounded by oak trees. Beaches with palm trees. People
so treasured these soothing natural scenes that they’d throw parties where
friends could get their pictures taken in front of them. It was as close as
many of them would get to finding a refuge from the dankness of their
neighborhood. Women asked Reed to paint them lounging
by the water, a vicarious escape. Soon, one asked Reed to paint her by her
lake naked, and that, too, caught on. Reed, though, refused to have women
model in the buff out of fear that their boyfriends might not approve, and so
he’d undress them in his head. One client told Reed, “Oooh, that look just
like me. That’s how my breasts look. It’s just like you was looking at me.
You got a good imagination.” Disapproval in this neighborhood can
get ugly, and Reed quickly discovered that people didn’t take kindly if he
painted the same mural in one apartment that he’d done in another. Reed told
me that once, in an elevator, a client threatened to beat him up if he didn’t
change a neighbor’s landscape, and so now he always makes sure to choose different
hues for the water, or rearrange the placement of the trees, or choose
different kinds of trees. “I’m giving them something,” he told me, “that they
can never have in their life unless they was rich.” And so, he goes on to
say, they want something that reflects their own sensibilities. They want
something unique because there’s not much they can call their own. Reed
keeps a record of all his murals, but he never signs his work, out of fear
that the housing authority might come after him for defacing their property,
though truthfully they should have been compensating him for
beautification—_and, on occasion, for keeping people out of trouble. Once, a
woman who lived on the tenth floor asked Reed to paint the city’s downtown
skyline on her living room wall so that it would be as if you were looking
right through the cinderblock at the Not all of it makes sense to him. “I
hate to tell you,” he said. “Some people got some weird imaginations.” One
woman asked him to paint on one wall a rendering of Jesus (Caucasian, of
course), and on another wall a man, standing, his pants unzipped, urinating
on a tree. “I can’t know what goes on in these people’s heads,” he said. “I
would think that that’s wrong, just to have a person on the wall, taking a
leak. And then she said, ‘I don’t like that penis, make it bigger.’ So I
says, ‘Wanda, they don’t come that size.’ She says, ‘Maybe yours don’t.’ So I
did it. Just like she asked.” Some of Reed’s work reflects the fact
that death is very much a part of this neighborhood. Drug dealers, with their
deep pockets, are his modern-day Medicis. One asked Reed to paint scenes of a
young man injuring a policeman, an officer getting shot as he exited his
squad car, and an officer getting run over. He obliges such requests because
the money can be quite good, and they treat him to free beers, but he
despises the work. He can only hope that maybe his renderings will be
cathartic and thus help forestall future confrontations between the drug
dealers and the police. (Once, he heard that the police were looking for the
artist who had done these murals, and he made sure to disappear for a while.)
More often, though, his customers request tombstones that read REST IN PEACE and include the name
of the deceased friend or relative. In one apartment, a gentleman asked him
to draw ten of them in his bedroom. “You know what?” Reed says. “I think it
really helped a lot of people, kind of calmed them down.” The
people Kotlowitz selects to profile in Never a
City So Real provide detailed pictures of life in Steve
Hopkins, September 25, 2004 |
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ã 2004 Hopkins and Company, LLC The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the October 2004
issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/Never
a City So Real.htm For Reprint Permission,
Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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