Dunk Tank, Riverview Amusement Park, Chicago, Illinois, http://livinghistoryofillinois.com.
Despite the constant stress created by Grandma K’s mental illness, Dad’s travel, and the nonstop work on the rooming house, my parents somehow found time for family fun. Both when Grandma lived with us and after she was in Manteno State Hospital, Dad, Mom, and we kids often piled into our maroon Chevy and drove a few miles to Riverview, billed as the “World’s Largest Amusement Park.” Riverview had dozens of rides, including steep, screeching roller coasters, one so wild that the park displayed a whole trunk of clip-on earrings that tore off women’s ears when the “Bobs” careened around curves. A set of parachutes slowly hoisted riders, who peered down at the people below shrinking to bug size. Gut-churning fear built as the chutes rose . . . and rose . . . and rose—until they released with a sudden, violent jolt, dropping screaming passengers to earth, their stomachs left somewhere above.
Scores of barkers called out to visitors walking along the midway, “Try your luck! Just hit the bottle in three tries! Hey, young man, don’t you want to win this big teddy bear for your girlfriend?” One of the games encouraged contestants to throw balls at a target, which, when hit, dumped a black man into a tank of water. Over the years, it had been called variously, the “Nigger Dip,” the “Dark Town Tangos,” the “Chocolate Drops,” the “African Dip,” and finally, the “Dip.”36 African American men were hired to taunt passing white men, getting many so riled up with insults that the visitors bought ticket after ticket. “Hey, little man,” jeered the large black man behind the high wire surrounding his drop seat, to a short guy. “I bet you can’t hit the side of a barn!” He attacked the man’s diminutive size, pea brain— you name it.
Shouting racist epithets, the white man pulled back his arm and threw the ball with such fury, the target vibrated for seconds after the hit. It was obvious to me that the dunk-tank guy kept insults flying to make sure ticket sales were brisk. Dad made a few throws at the target but then walked away. He understood the psychology and wasn’t going to waste his money.
My stomach went queasy watching the white men throw with such anger—red-faced, veins popping, enraged at being insulted by a black man. Surely, I felt, the black men’s pride was wounded by the nasty comments and by repeated dunkings, even though they gamely leaped back onto their seat, dripping wet, and started right in on the next dupe.
The game was a perfect metaphor for prevalent racist attitudes seldom questioned by whites at the time. Blacks and whites were thoroughly segregated: by neighborhood, by opportunity, by the media, and even at our biggest amusement park. At the dunk tank, only blacks were dunked, and I saw only whites do the dunking.
Dunk Tank, Riverview Amusement Park, Chicago, circa 1921, with permission of Derek Gee and Ralph Lopez, authors of Laugh Your Troubles Away: The Complete History of Riverview Park.
Chicago’s prevailing racist attitudes were at work in our family as well. Whenever a tenant moved out, Mom used a two-pronged approach to find a new tenant. She advertised in the Chicago Tribune classified section and also hung a “For Rent” sign on the front door. At home, I was playing with my dolls on the colorful hooked rug Dad had completed during one of his travels, when the bell rang. Walking briskly past me, Mom disappeared around the corner into our short front hallway. I heard the twist of the knob, the creak of the front door opening. “Hello, ma’am. We’re interested in the apartment you have for rent,” a woman’s voice drawled.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Mom responded in a polite tone, “but we don’t rent to colored. Sorry.”
There was a mumbled response. Mom said, “Goodbye,” and the door shut.
Heart pounding, my face went hot. My mother’s words, I felt, heaped pain and insult on the woman at the door. When Mom reentered the living room, I looked up from brushing my doll’s golden hair and asked, “Mommy, why did you say that—that you don’t rent to colored? Didn’t that hurt that lady’s feelings?”
Very matter-of-factly, Mom gazed down at me and explained, “Linda, we can’t rent to colored. If we did, then the whole neighborhood would go colored, and we would lose our house. This is how we make a living.”
It was the same reasoning Mom gave a few years later, when she was planning a birthday party for me. I wanted to invite Stephanie, an African American friend I often played with at recess in my first-grade class. Stephanie was smart and fun, but still, I knew to ask if I could invite her, instead of just giving Mom her name with those of the other girls. Mom said no. “If people see a colored girl coming into our house, they might think she lives here, and then there could be trouble.”
When I passed out the invitations in the classroom, I could hardly look at Stephanie, I felt so downright mean. She held my eyes with clear and bitter understanding as I passed her desk. She said, “You only invite those little curly-haired girls, don’t you?” I wasn’t sure why she used those words, but I knew she meant “white.” I mumbled something of an excuse, my stomach twisting, wishing I could sink into the floor. Nothing I said could undo the insult.
I couldn’t make the connection between my six-year-old friend coming to our house and the idea of trouble. I was as yet unschooled in how deeply whites felt the threat that blacks posed to their communities—that an African American moving nearby jeopardized everything for which the whites had worked and sacrificed.
Mom may have heard of the violent mob action that accompanied blacks entering white neighborhoods in the previous few years, the kinds of attacks that could very well target our home. In 1949, the year we moved into our two-flat, it took only a rumor of African Americans entering a neighborhood to spawn a white riot. In Englewood, on Chicago’s South Side, a local labor organizer invited a few black people to the house for a meeting. A neighbor, seeing African Americans entering the home, assumed it was being “sold to niggers.” Up to ten thousand whites rioted for four days, pelting the property with stones and beating bystanders. That violence exploded over mere speculation. An NAACP memo documented, between 1949 and 1951, three bombings, ten actual—and eleven attempted—incidents of arson, and “at least eighty-one other incidents of terrorism or intimidation” against blacks.37
The federal government had created redlining, which caused the value of whites’ homes to fall; fear of losing equity in their homes exacerbated whites’ racism and maintained segregation of the races, creating a vicious cycle of stereotyping. Chicago whites had few ways to get to know African Americans as individuals, and prejudice ruled. Whites presumed that blacks would let their property deteriorate, that they would bring dilapidation to their community, no matter what their class, veteran status, or education. That, in turn, ensured that blacks were terrorized out of white neighborhoods, continuing the separation of the races.
In Mom’s letter to Dad in 1953, in which she had related the dire warnings from her departing tenant, Birchler, about how North Lawndale had become “mostly colored,” she also related her concern about another group:
You know that rooming house the Birchlers are living in? It really tears down our neighborhood because they take all trashy people in, and of course, you know how the front windows look—trashy. Birchler told me the building is just about infested with hillbillies and a lot of the roomers are drunks, let the bathtub overflow, etc.
My mother recognized as early as 1953 that all was not well with the neighborhood, but my parents’ hectic lives precluded action. By the latter 1950s, the large apartment building at the end of our block was becoming increasingly populated by “hillbillies,” a word my parents only used for those southern migrants with a slovenly lifestyle.
Many of the children’s faces and clothes were a dusty gray, their ears, neck creases, and fingernails black with grime. Billy, open and friendly, invited one such boy to play, maybe having met him in the alley. The kid thanked my brother by stealing his piggy bank. Mom somehow got the family phone number and called the boy’s mother, politely explained what had happened, and requested that the bank be returned. “I ain’t responsible for my kid’s debt!” was the defiant rejoinder, delivered in a virtually unintelligible southern twang, followed by a curt hang-up.
In sixth grade, a six-foot-two boy with a strong southern accent, who was clearly older than the other classmates, said to my school friend Stephanie, “Shut up, you nigger,” when she objected to him butting in line ahead of her. My heart thumping with indignation, I cringed and turned to Stephanie, whose mouth twisted with contained anger. She drew herself up and said, “Only low-class people use that word.” He sniggered and mumbled something incomprehensible.
I put my hand on her shoulder and said, “That boy’s a stupid jerk. He’s so dumb, he’s flunked a bunch of times. Pay no attention to him.” But of course my words couldn’t take away the pain. Smart and pretty, Stephanie undoubtedly had been forced to hear these kinds of insults more than I could have known, from people far less accomplished and classy than she was.
In my seventh-grade class, a girl from Tennessee disrespected our teacher, who sent her to the principal’s office with a stern rebuke and a call to her mother. Instead of chastising her daughter, the mom charged into our classroom near the end of school the next day, heaped more insults onto the teacher, and stormed out with the girl in tow. We all just sat, mute and stunned.
Some of our middle-class neighbors caused us trauma as well. When we played catch, badminton, or Ping-Pong, an errant ball or birdie might fly into our neighbor’s yard to the west. The owner, Mrs. Beedle, marched scowling out her back door and snatched up the offending missile. With chin-jutting, silent defiance, she stomped back into her house.
Bumping into Mrs. Beedle on the street one day, the usual rush of traffic roaring by, Mom greeted her with a friendly “Hello,” then spoke of the toys occasionally landing in the Beedles’ yard. “Mrs. Beedle, why don’t you tell me if something is wrong, so we can work it out?”
“I have no intention of doing so,” said Mrs. Beedle, glaring at Mom. “You’re the mother. It’s your responsibility to make sure your children do no wrong. And if this doesn’t stop, there’s going to be trouble, and I won’t be the one to have it!” She turned on her heels and walked on, leaving my mother fuming.
I only learned about Mrs. Beedle’s belligerent confrontation with my mother when I found her letter to Dad, in which she recounted her fury at this obnoxious woman. I was struck by how few of our neighbors were in any way neighborly. I recalled the Stones, the couple who had destroyed my parents’ just-furnished basement apartment with cigarette burns on the couch and their filthy lifestyle, and the alcoholic Mr. Ramis, who had bled all over the sheets. Most of the tenants were decent people, but I realized that white people, no matter how slovenly, nasty, or careless, had no problem finding housing in our community.