Grandma K with Dad, Mom, Linda, Paul, and Billy in our living room, 1954.
For more than three years, my parents had used every waking hour to make a success of their rooming house, the combination of excessive toil and Dad’s travel tearing at their love, unraveling their relationship thread by thread. In May of 1953, a full decade before the first black family would move onto our block, Mom heard what would have been disturbing news for a white homeowner at the time.
My parents rented one space in their two-car garage to a Mr. Birchler, who was about to move out of state. Mom wrote to Dad about Birchler’s comments:
He told me that at 14th and Pulaski, where he now works at the A&P, the people are mostly all colored, whereas three years ago, they were mostly all white. He figures the same for this neighborhood within five years.
I think we should be cautious about spending too much on improving our building. I, of course, do believe in upkeep, but not too much otherwise.
Pulaski and 14th, where Birchler worked, was about two miles south of our home, in North Lawndale. Birchler’s comments appear spot on. The 1950 census reported that North Lawndale was nearly 87 percent white.30 Now, in 1953, Birchler noted that the residents were mostly black. The influx of African Americans in such close proximity surely alarmed my mother.
On a 1940 HOLC (Home Owners’ Loan Corporation) map of West Garfield Park, where Dad and his family still lived and worked, their community was marked yellow, “definitely declining,” according to the color code. Redlined areas started just a few blocks north of our street and continued east toward and around Garfield Park itself. On the map key, red is marked “hazardous,” and HOLC described this swath of red as “threatened with Negro encroachment.”31 It’s highly unlikely that Mom and Dad would have bought a home in an area about which such a damning assessment had been made almost ten years before their purchase.
My parents were undoubtedly clueless about the racist policy of redlining an area when blacks arrived, but they knew the outcome. If even one African American moved into West Garfield Park, property values would plummet for whites who wanted to sell, threatening the money, sweat, and marital harmony my parents had sacrificed in creating and maintaining our rooming house. They weren’t alone in their fear—or in their ignorance of redlining.
After a white mob had persecuted a new black neighbor, a white woman wrote the following defense of the antagonists, specifically calling out North Lawndale, the area Bircher referenced.
[The protestors] have seen what happens to so-called changing neighborhoods. A case in point is North Lawndale. It was a nice-looking section of Chicago. . . . Drive through it now and . . . [you’ll] really see blight. It is the mess a neighborhood gets into once it has changed that people object to.32
Another white Chicagoan wrote that he moved his family out of a transitioning neighborhood because of “fear and filth.”33
The ruinous result of denying, or limiting, mortgages and loans in redlined areas, of real-estate agents who sold houses to African Americans on contract at inflated and barely affordable prices, of the stereotyping and prejudice that crammed black families into burgeoning segregated neighborhoods—was infrastructure breakdown. Whites, blindly or willfully unaware of how these causes all worked together, blamed the victims, African Americans, while simultaneously feeling victimized themselves.
From whites’ point of view, families like ours had sacrificed and saved for years so they could own their own home. After working hard and doubling up (as my parents did with several roomers and Grandma K), they had finally made it, but now the rules were changing. For many whites, “it must have felt like bait and switch.”34 They were going to lose everything: community, friends, and the value of their home, which meant much more to them than just a place to live: it was the American dream achieved.
Of course, African American couples had the same dream. They, too, scrimped and saved to buy homes in good neighborhoods. They, too, wanted to own property, wanted their children to attend uncrowded schools. But while whites could live wherever they chose, blacks were vilified and terrorized out of white areas. They were denied mortgages and therefore the ability to build wealth from homeownership— as white families could. (Today, on average, white households have sixteen times the wealth of black households.)35
Forced to buy their homes through “contract purchases,” many blacks lost their entire investment when they missed a payment for any reason. Whites were laser-focused on the loss of their property values and the ruin they expected would follow when blacks moved into their communities. But the racist lending system, intended to protect white housing privilege, was about to sabotage it.
I discovered that less than four years after my parents had invested so much money, sweat equity, and marital sacrifice into the two-flat, Mom was already worried about their financial future in the neighborhood. She had learned from a departing tenant that the community directly south of our home was now populated mostly by African Americans. Perhaps their treadmill lives allowed only a fleeting contemplation of where they were headed before they were back to putting one foot in front of the other. Even the imminent arrival of another baby seemed to generate little discussion, at least not in their correspondence.
In January of 1953, Dad climbed aboard the Texas Chief southbound train in Chicago, heading for Houston, Texas. By the time he returned home in late February, he and Mom had been separated for thirty-five days. They were so desperate to be in each other’s arms again, they gave in to their passion and made love on the bathroom toilet seat, leaving Mom’s diaphragm in the bedroom.
Why the bathroom? Probably so they could lock the door against Grandma K and the kids. The result was a third baby, an unplanned love child. Dad related this anecdote to my younger brother, Billy, many years later. Billy has always been proud of his provenance.
During the months from early March to November, neither Mom nor Dad made any mention of the pregnancy in their letters. Mom wrote not one word about feeling ill. She didn’t insist that, with a third child, Dad needed to find a job in Chicago, or that their hectic, separated lives would have to change. There was no comment about the financial strain on the family or the added time and effort a new baby would demand.
“Mommy, why is your tummy getting so big?” I asked one day.
“I’m making a baby, and you’re going to be a big sister,” Mom told me, gently circling her hand around her expanded belly under the loose maternity dress. “I’ll need your help to change the baby’s diapers and give the baby a bottle.” I envisioned the fun I’d have feeding a real living doll—not one I had to just pretend to feed and change.
Dad waited until a week before the baby was due to inform his boss about the imminent birth and tell him that he couldn’t travel for a while. Dad doesn’t explain his reticence on the subject, but I think it may have been to allow his superiors, who had no empathy for family life, minimal maneuvering room to possibly replace him if he couldn’t leave town on their schedule.
“Well . . . I suppose we’ll have to go along with you on that one,” was his boss’s unenthusiastic response.
I stayed with family friends when Dad drove Mom to Garfield Park Hospital. She gave birth to my brother on November 12, and, as was typical of the era, stayed in the hospital for several days. When Mom and Dad arrived to pick me up, Mom carried a pale-blue bundle in her arms and laid it on the couch. “Here’s your new little brother, Billy,” she said, pulling away layers until the baby’s puffy red face, scrunched-up eyes, and shuddering little body appeared. This baby didn’t look anything like the baby dolls I’d played with. He was all twitchy! His eyes stayed tightly shut, and his head moved in random movements. And there was more that was strange. “What’s that on his leg?” I asked Mom, pointing to something hard and white.
Mom’s voice cracked a bit. “That’s a cast,” she said, gently running her hand down Billy’s encased leg. Her eyes glistened. “My poor little baby has a twisted foot. The cast will help fix it.” Billy was born with a clubfoot, his right foot turning inwards at the ankle, a common birth defect, easily correctable in the 1950s. Doctors turned the foot outward in stages, casting each rotation to hold the new alignment, replacing the cast often as the leg grew. Within three months, his foot was in the right position.
Mom was instructed to massage the leg twice daily. By this time, Billy looked to me like a real baby. His eyes were open more, and he smiled at us all. I could tickle him or make funny faces, or imitate his gurgling and cooing noises—and he’d laugh. I couldn’t wait to help with the massage.
Mom laid Billy onto a waterproof pad she had placed atop the white chenille bedspread on the double bed; she then spread cream onto his newly straightened foot and leg, and showed me how to rub and turn the leg to keep it in alignment. We cooed and smiled into Billy’s happy little face, squeezing and rubbing, singing him songs. An easy baby, he was a tonic for my mother, adding sparkles of delight to her life’s stress and slog.
In late January, Mom and I sat in Tilton Elementary School’s yawning assembly hall, surrounded by other moms with children spilling across their laps or crawling over the wooden seats, waiting to register for half-day kindergarten. I would begin two months before my fifth birthday, and I felt very grown-up, going to school like Paul. Starting midyear was common in many Chicago schools at the time, allowing what would otherwise have been an enormous class in the fall to be broken into two sections.
My kindergarten class photo shows no African American kids. Chicago schools were de facto segregated because attendance-area boundaries were determined by neighborhoods. But in the Jim Crow South, forced segregation was the rule of law at that time. Living in a child’s world, I couldn’t have known that just three and a half months after I began kindergarten, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously decreed that the “separate but equal” doctrine, underpinning southern school-segregation laws, was unconstitutional.
Mom had little time to contemplate the historic significance of Brown v. Board of Education. It was probably more important to her that my entry into Tilton meant she would have a break from managing three children all day, now that both Paul and I were in school. The worst of the remodeling was over, but not the stress of eleven tenants, two still renting bedrooms in our own flat.
At around midnight of the same day I began school, Mom wrote Dad a ten-page letter, filling him in on her latest woes. Never one to let weariness interfere with duty, she often relinquished sleep to update Dad on the home front. It must have felt good to unload her frustrations in every letter.
“I was not able to get to bed one single night before twelve thirty, one, one thirty, or two, and then get up by eight. It has been just miserable being so far behind in everything,” Mom explained. She ended with: “No break at all— never reading, never having time to read to the children or even sit down and talk to them or Mama.”
Dad offered several possible remedies to her grievances in his February 9 response. First he suggested that when he was home on a weekend, once or twice a month, he would relieve her of all childcare and housekeeping duties, so she could “devote undivided time to keeping up-to-date” on income-tax preparation throughout the year, so as not to be overburdened at the last minute. He added:
It’s high time you GOT SOME HELP for cleaning day. We are not so impoverished that you should do all that yourself. . . . It’s not the cost I’m worried about, it’s YOU YOU YOU. Please, Lil, let’s do something about it while you still can enjoy all those little moments which mean so much to you; moments with some reading, the children, and whatever else you want. These are times I feel utterly helpless and useless in not being able to give more of myself to you.
In Mom’s ten-page letter, she had included this comment after her exhaustive list of completed chores: “As your mother so aptly puts it, ‘No use in complaining.’”
The remark was classic Grandma Gartz. Even though they lived only a half block east at this time, my grandparents seemed content to watch their daughter-in-law twist in the wind during Dad’s lengthy travels. Mom had written to Dad, “As you know, your mother seems determined not to do anything for us or let Pop or Will either. . . . She’s always belittling me.”
Dad was in solid agreement with Mom on his family’s condescending attitudes. Throughout his life, Dad had experienced firsthand his mother’s controlling and belittling nature. Will was in the thrall of their mother, and easily controlled by her, while Dad resisted. But still, Dad valued family, and he could never fully withdraw from her psychological grasp.
Grandma G’s disdain for my mother probably arose from jealousy, recognizing that Mom was at least as competent and hardworking (the latter being the pinnacle of life values). Perhaps, like many mothers-in-law, she was in competition with her son’s wife. I believe she put Mom down so she could feel superior.
One winter, when Dad was gone for six weeks, a defective load of coal was delivered to our two-flat, and Mom awoke in the middle of the night, shivering in a freezing house. To check the furnace, she exited the back door to a blast of frigid air, walked down the stairs and around the house, and descended into a dark gangway, where she entered the basement and tried to relight the bad fuel.
Grandpa had spent the previous thirty years working with furnaces, but he didn’t come to her rescue. Mom dropped by her in-laws’ house one day during the crisis. “That furnace is driving me crazy,” she said. “I have to dig out that bad coal and replace it over and over. I go back upstairs covered in coal dust.”
I know the dismissive, disdainful look that would have settled on Grandma’s face, the wave of her large, veined hand as if shooing a fly. “You’re young yet!” she admonished. “That work is nothing! At your age, no work should be too dirty or low.”
Mom concluded her letter to Dad with the implication that he was on a vacation: “So enjoy yourself, dear. There’s work when you get home. I feel like an army that’s just holding on until help comes.”
Four and a half years earlier, Mom had been able to rely on Grandma K as a comrade-in-arms, but by the time Billy was born, Grandma K was sixty-seven years old and declining mentally and physically. She hadn’t spun out of control prior to Billy’s birth, as she had before Paul’s and mine, but her behavior had grown unsettling in new ways. She wore the same dress for days at a time, refused to bathe, complained of pains in her legs, and fainted.
My parents never used the term mental illness or discussed Grandma’s condition with us. The subject was taboo— and shameful. Neighborhood kids sometimes taunted me, “Your grandma’s crazy! She was in the nuthouse.”
How they found out, I don’t know. Had Mom mentioned it to a neighbor, and the osmosis of gossip spread it around? A hot wave of shame washed over me, and I wasn’t even sure why, so I just screamed, “You’re a liar!”
But I knew things weren’t right. I never doubted Mom was in control of the household and us kids, and I never saw my parents fight openly. But she couldn’t control Grandma. If she tried persuasion, such as “Mama, let me wash your hair. It will feel so good,” Grandma lashed out at her, “Mind your own business!” or screamed non-sequitur epithets: “Streetwalker! Whore.” I could see in Mom’s eyes a hesitancy in dealing with her mother that I never observed in her interactions with tenants, Dad, or us kids.
I understand now that, just as she had been as a child, she was still afraid of her mother.