NOTES OF A NATIVE DAUGHTER

Sandra Cisneros

HOW TO EXPLAIN, Chicago, why you and me split?

Nelson Algren dubbed you a woman with a broken nose, albeit a lovely one, but you are guilty of breaking more than noses. Gwendolyn Brooks painted you as “grayed in, and gray,” and this is how I remember your bruised skies of October, November, December, January, February, March, April till May. Lorraine Hansberry fumigated your cockroaches. Richard Wright stalked your rats. Studs Terkel quoted a Chicagoan who said, “I always feel a chest-swelling when I drive along the lake. . . . Yet I know four blocks over is desperation.”

So much desperation in our neighborhood. We thought we deserved what we got because we were willing to live in such flimsy buildings. What did you expect? Rent’s cheap. Just like my mother and father thought they’d been punished when the baby died from the flood of bronchial pneumonia. Blamed themselves. Not the cold apartments, not the city, never the landlords, nor the building inspectors.

On the northwest corner of Western and Le Moyne, a Puerto Rican classmate drowned in a sea of fire; an open casket and the ugly wig terrible as a lie. On Twenty-First Street and Wolcott, a prizewinning poet and her daughters leaped from third-story flames and survived. But did not escape the aftermath of nightmares. Fire department blamed ladders too short for the buildings, not enough trucks, not enough equipment. Never enough of anything for a neighborhood not worth saving.

Our neighborhoods were the ones earmarked for urban renewal, we were told, and told to move. They didn’t tell us someone else’s renewal, not our own.

But I have you to thank, Chicago, for my education. Slim luck enough to have been born when museums had free admission on Sundays so working folks were welcome. My teachers were Hokusai and Brancusi at the Art Institute; my schoolroom, the basement of the Field Museum in the Egyptian tombs; color I learned at the Shedd Aquarium; Yesterday’s Main Street was my lesson at the Museum of Science and Industry; the Chicago History Museum taught me about fire.

In the neighborhoods we knew, booze was easier to find than books. On every block, liquor stores or taverns to mute the pain of dreams deferred. Few and far and rare, libraries to ignite aspirations. Before we learned to read and ever after, Mother took us to the library weekly.

My immigrant father’s overdose of Mexico City pride gave us the self-esteem to survive you, Chicago. We were the border. Between black and white at war with one another and at war with us. We knew from visits to our father’s home, there was more than one story in “history.” Knew to distinguish what was said in textbooks from what we knew ourselves from traveling south.

I discovered The Autobiography of Malcolm X and thereafter refused to serve the Master. I changed my name from sand-druh sis-narrows to sohn-druh seez-neh-ros, though I had to repeat and repeat it. And when my listener gave me back my name beautifully whole, it was a gift of respect and self-respect.

Those days were sick-and-tired times of I-can’t-wait. The Democratic convention of ’68 camped in our backyard, Humboldt Park; the first time I’d seen white people come visit. Those days were the days dimmed with Dr. King’s death. The city consumed by fire that gave no light. Our relatives, the last of the Mexicans on their black block, fled their Lawndale home. Walked, abandoning family photos, all their personal things, though aunty, with her indigenous Guanajuato skin, was the hue of her neighbors, if not darker.

Each night, sun hunkered in the West and gilded our rowdy village. I needed sunsets like I needed books. I needed an eternity of serene. Had to wait till Sunday to get my dose of lake. The blue coastline too expensive daily. I made do with what was affordable, within reach. When you least expected it, you might come upon an astonishing cloud, wild morning glories climbing an electric pole, the first green pips of spring breaking through the crust of winter. Something beautiful was necessary, needed to keep one nourished for the inevitable grief.

One long, hot summer, Mayor Jane Byrne sent Tito Puente to Humboldt Park to drum on his garbage cans for us instead of sending the Department of Sanitation to empty our cans, trash collection halved from twice a week to once, even though population and trash had doubled. And with that, doubling the population of urban creatures. Mother and I avoided our garden after sunset. Our curfew—fear.

What could a city girl like me do but major in human behavior? I knew since I was a teenager, a passenger grunting on the Armitage bus could take delight of himself in open day and force others to watch for added pleasure. For good measure, I sat thereafter next to the driver.

The crash of a windshield with a baseball bat meant the disappearance of a purse. Gold about the neck attracted the only runners our neighborhood knew. When driving, I knew to lock all doors. Once, at a stoplight, Father was escorted by knife a few blocks, deposited curbside, and kindly divested of his van. At least he made it to his bed that night, unlike cousin’s husband found asleep at the wheel, a bullet and a this-can’t-be-happening-to-me look lodged to the head.

To feed nine meant weekly visits to the local supermarket that stank of black fruit and sour beer. Nothing to transport the groceries home but me and Mother, a collapsible shopping cart, and our collapsible bones. Sweets meant another trek beyond the park and the Kedzie armory, to day-old vending machine doughnuts sold at half price to sugar the deal.

Every place we ever lived never had enough bedrooms for seven kids. Nights, we camped where we could. Three or four together, head to feet. On La-Z-Boys, rollaways, couch cushions. In rooms not meant for beds.

When I came home at night from work, I knew enough to avoid sidewalks and parked cars and sprinted the center runway of our street from bus stop to the safety of my door.

I answered Ginsberg’s “Howl” with my own poetry for those who lived like me, afraid for themselves and of one another. “North Avenue.” “Roosevelt Road.” “South Sangamon.” A house on a street named Mango.

I was all of twenty-two when on a car trip through Carolina’s Blue Ridge, I saw a country house with a swing dangling from a thick branch and a careless bike abandoned on the fenceless lawn. And thought, Kids grow up like this? I never knew.

Chicago’s Magnificent Mile made others feel magnificent but only made me ashamed of my shoes. To us, Michigan Avenue shops meant: Do not enter if you have to ask, “How much?”

Our downtown was South State Street. Smokey Joe’s for Super Fly wear. Ronny’s Steak House’s $2.95 T-bones. George Diamond’s, home of the original iceberg wedge salad. Three Sisters Dress Shop: Yes, we have layaway. Sears for boxes of popcorn. Van Buren Street temptation row—peep and burlesque shows where Harold’s library now stands.

And Goldblatt’s. A carnival. Department store bells dinging nervously. Escalators filled to capacity in both directions. Chaos in enticing bins. A sea of pastel nylon undies. Mountains of mismatched socks. An explosion of double-D brassieres. Miniature Lincoln Log cabins spouting incense from chimneys. Queen-size pantyhose. Windmill cookies. Butter toffee peanuts. Candy in glass bins. All within reach. Gimme a quarter pound of orange slices, please.

I was afraid for myself and of others. Tired of being on high alert, watching for the tiger in the grass from the corner of the eye. The walls at night that came alive with amber shimmering at the flick of a light. The scuttling and squeaking behind plaster.

Father said, pointing around our home, “Why would you want to leave? You have everything here.”

How could I tell him this was not the everything I’d asked for?

What did I want? No one had ever thought to ask me.

I longed for a space all my own to think. Quiet enough to hear my pen move across paper. Affordable but safe. Serene and clean. Peonies on the kitchen table. No mice, or rats, or crispy bugs allowed, ever. A lock on the door. A door, please.

“A city should be a place to live.”

The truth was, I was trying not to die.

Mother said, Go to school. Study hard. And wear a bra.

Father said, Go to college. And while you’re at it, bring back a husband.

Chicago said, We need girls like you . . . to teach high school.

I said to me, If you stick around, you’re everybody’s but your own.

I ran off at twenty-eight with that wild boy—my pen.

I’m sixty-one. My mother and father gone.

Chicago, how do I explain? For home to be a home, you have to feel that you belong.