LOST IN DARKNESS, Spring 2002
JOT Writers on Home, Housing, and Homelessness
With transcript excerpts from the Lakefront SRO Oral History Project

This 64-page, perfect-bound issue features:
a stunning new design by Maria Warren;
a color cover print by Tony Fitzpatrick, "Woman at the Bridge;"
a photo essay by CITY 2000 photographer John Brooks;
an introductory essay by Laura Washington;
and OVER 40 JOT WRITERS.

This spectacular issue is presented as part of the Chicago Matters:Inside Housing series sponsored by the Chicago Community Trust. Visit www.chicagomatters.org, www.chipublib.org, www.wbez.org, and www.chicagoreporter.com for more information on the series. NWA is presenting THREE readings in support of this magazine. Visit our News page for more information!

Read excerpts from the magazine below. These are the pieces that were featured on WBEZ's "848." For more information go to our news page.

ALL THIS AND NOTHING
Tashana Jones

As I enter this place I call my own
I realize it’s very spacious, very in-depth
It excites me, I can’t help myself

I have all these new walls
I have all these beautiful new hardwood floors
I have all these new cabinets
I have a nice new remodeled kitchen
I have my own place to give me peace of mind

I have so many things, so many things I can’t name
Others wish they had what I have

This place I call my own is owned by someone else
The new walls I adore, I temporarily use, owned by someone else
The beautiful new hardwood floors, I walk
on them at someone else’s price, renting
The new cabinets and kitchen, I am borrowing them and
keeping them occupied for my time being here

I say again, boy, aren’t I lucky
I have all these things, but all I have is nothing
I have all this nothing, nothing I can call my own

THE SEARCH FOR THE EXTRA ROOM
Sharon F. Warner

One of the strangest things that seems to have been passed down in my family is the search for the extra room. I think it began with my mother, but I can’t be sure of that. Maybe my grandmother—and others before her—wanted an extra room too. What I do know is that my mother used to dream about having more space—literally dream about it.

When my parents were living in an apartment that was barely big enough for the two of them (I was living with my grandparents in Wisconsin), Mom used to dream that she opened the door and discovered another room. I don’t know how often she dreamed this, but eventually it came true. My parents moved into an apartment that was big enough for them and me—and eventually my little brother.

When I moved out on my own, my first apartment was a studio. I moved from there to a slightly larger studio. After that I had apartments with more room-- and more rooms. One had a full sized kitchen; another had a kitchen and a dining room; and the apartment I lived in while I was in Detroit had a room I used as a study.

When I came home from Detroit, I moved into my present apartment. And I became the person who was looking for the extra room. My apartment has good heat in the winter, air conditioning in the summer, a good view, and wall-to-wall carpeting. But it consists of only a good-sized living room, a large bedroom, a small bathroom, and a theoretical Kitchen. It took me years—and I do mean years—to get used the fact that there is not at least one more room..

Recently I was talking with my niece, who is almost 12. I don’t remember how the subject came up, but she told me that she wished she could have two rooms of her own. Then she could use one as a bedroom and have the other to study and play in. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Here she is, the third generation (that I know of) looking for the extra room.

I hope I can live long enough, and be rich enough, and fortunate enough, to buy our family and estate, or a compound. So finally there will be room enough—and rooms enough—for all of us.


CLARK AND ROSCOE
Susan House

I was waiting for a friend at the corner of Clark and Roscoe. It was cold and he was late. My back hurt, so I sat on the steps of a nearby closed store and tucked my backpack between my feet, pulled my poncho tightly around me, and wrapped my long scarf once over my head and twice around my neck.

People strolled past as I looked north and south, not sure of the direction he’d be coming from. No one paid any attention to me until one couple stopped at the corner and looked back. They held a whispered conversation punctuated with glances my way. I was wondering if I knew them from somewhere when the man came over and held out a dollar bill.

“No, but thanks anyway,” I said, surprised.

“Take it,” he said. “We want you to have it.” His eyes didn’t meet mine.

They thought I was a homeless woman! My cheeks flamed and my entire body shook. “No, no, really,” I stammered, but he dropped the dollar in front of me and ran back to the woman. I didn’t want that dollar. I hated that they thought I needed their charity. I wanted to cry. I wanted to hide my face, to shrink into the shadows of the doorway, but when I looked up again, they were standing directly in front of me.

“Do you need help?” the woman asked. “Should we call the police?”

“No, no, don’t do that.” I desperately wanted the awful episode to be over. “I’m okay, I’m okay.” With concern and pity mingled in her face, she pressed that damned dollar bill into my palm then she and her boyfriend walked away, still whispering and glancing back at me while I tried to disappear into the dark, while that money burned my soul.

GRAVEYARDS IN THE GHETTO
Michael Bowie

Picture this; let’s build a prison
But call it a project
Say it’s for development
So no one will object

We’ll make them look pretty,
Yet plain
None of them different
Yet none of them the same

They’ll look clean and green
But in reality just a dream

Decorated with flowers
And trees
Hiding the stench of pee stains
In the hallways
And some other disease

Picture-like windows
To look out
Unprotected
So kids can fall out

Even elevators, make sure they
Never work
Walking up unlit stairwells
Is bound to get you hurt

Good foundation
But holes in the walls
Make nice tunnels
For criminals to crawl

All of them will be
Secure and protected
Some police presence
But not that effective

Even visited by the president
And other political figures
Make them think they’re
Some kind of special niggers

And the best part
Of this design:
To destroy
The black mind

Let’s begin the construction
Of destruction.


A DREAM HOUSE DEFERRED
Charlene K. Smith

Part of family left the south during the history migration, the black migration to find a better life in the north.

My mother, myself and two brothers, boarded the train to that glorious, land of milk and honey. My mother told us that we need not take any play clothes because people were always dressed very properly every day in the north.

We arrived in Chicago one star-lit night. We saw the beautiful skyline, buildings much taller than any we had ever seen in Helena, Arkansas.

I said to myself, “This life we are going to live will be just the life we have always wished for.” We were met at the train station by our family members who had come before us. They welcomed us to our new city. That night we were taken to our room. “This is your new home.” I looked and wondered, “What in the world is this?” A one-room home in a large house with everything in one big room. As I would learn later, the house was once a mansion, housing one family. The large house had been divided to house migrant workers leaving the south.

In this room our world existed. A let-out couch, a full bed, a dresser, and a coffee table. I guess this represented our living room and bedroom. On the other side of the room we had an ice box, and a chrome kitchen table with four chairs, Our clothes hung on the wall with a sheet around them to keep the dust away. A bedroom dresser sat immediately under the clothes on the wall. The kitchen was part of the kitchenette. It consisted on one small little room with a small gas-burning stove. and a small sink to keep the dishes clean.

“This is your place,” stated my aunt, who lived across the hallway from us in one room with her husband. ‘By the way,” she said, “you will have to go down the hall to the bathroom. All of us on the second floor use that bathroom. There are five rooms on this floor. We all have to share that bathroom.”

I must admit my feelings were confused. I wondered, “Why did we ever come here?” Life in the south was not that bad. People were still making a meager living chopping and picking cotton, farming, and doing whatever to make ends meet.

The next morning, upon arising, I looked around this dreadful room. My tears started to flow, silently, then louder. I could not stop crying. I cried for three days and nights. The crying was the cleansing of the sorrow that existed inside. This was the dream house? Yes, this was the dream house, but the dream did not belong to me. Langston, “What happens to a dream deferred?”


IT’S NOT JUST A HOUSE
Frank Diaz

When people tell me their neighborhood isn’t what it used to be, I can only grin and think, “I know… my house isn’t even there anymore.” I went back looking for the places in which I lived. Here in Chicago, I lived in three places. In Pilsen, I lived in a beautiful two-story graystone with a big basement and a dirty attic, where I first discovered dirty magazines left behind by a previous tenant. As a teenager growing up in that house I learned to sleep to the sounds of city traffic, and at 2:30 on any summer morning, when I couldn’t sleep, I would notice the click of the stoplight changing colors. That two-story graystone on Ashland Avenue is gone. Today that spot is a parking lot for a Mexican bakery.

In Humboldt Park, I lived in a classic bungalow to which I came back from college every summer to play basketball in the public court around the corner and to sleep in the finished basement. In this house, I hosted a weekend-long visit from my five best friends from college, who to this day will cringe as they recall the snoring serenade my siblings and I gave them. That classic bungalow on Thomas Street is gone. Well, it’s hard to tell if the bungalow that remains on that block, the one with no number over the front door, amongst dingy walkups and burnt out apartment buildings, is my bungalow or the one that used to be next door to me.

In Logan Square, I lived in a red brick, three-bedroom pigeon roost with very little heat. That house was my father’s rehab masterpiece. He and a few fix-it guys put in endless hours of electrical, drywall and floor-buffing work. I never came around to help after I moved out. My sister was the first of us to move out, once she got married to one of my five college buddies. (At least he can’t say he was surprised about the snoring.) One of my two brothers brought his wife-to-be for dinner – THE dinner – one summer weekend. I brought a few girlfriends, probably three of them, for visits and arguments about stuff I don’t really remember. That house is still there, facing the sunrise and the eagle monument on Kedzie and Wrightwood streets. It’s the only one of the three structures in which I’ve lived that’s still standing. The others are mere pictures in an album inside a bottom drawer in my mom’s armoire.

I know my house may not be there anymore, but those spaces still stand for home.

3544 SOUTH STATE STREET
Pat Guy (Tricia)

Okay, so I stepped in the elevator and pushed the button for the tenth floor. Ding, ding. The door opened after a little prodding from the other elevator passenger and myself.

“What floor do you want?” I asked.
“Six,” is all he replied.

Up we went. The moment the door shut my mind took me to this place. I was a familiar place; I had been there several times before. In reality, I knew it only took a few minutes to travel from the first to the tenth floor, in any given elevator, in any given, city. But not in a public housing project, especially not in a Chicago Housing Authority project.

The Stateway Gardens elevator was the given. It took only seconds to become familiar with the smells associated with the place. Urine and outright shit at times. Somebody ought to check the baby; they apparently needs to be thrown out.

I pushed the buttons for the sixth and the tenth floors again and waited. Memphis, Tennessee. That’s where I was born and reared. It’s about six hundred miles from here, twelve hundred round trip. We traveled by car, of course, and the tires rolling on the pavement made the same sounds I heard here, standing in the elevator. Two, three, four, five, six, I repeated in my mind. Ding. Paxton was our first stop and it was coming up. We had to stop for gas and fluid changes. As we approached, the exit sign read, “GAS FOOD and REST.” We reduce our speed 30 miles per hour, as the sign instructed, and entered the exit. As the car slowed down, I could hear the boys waking up in the back seat. Gina wanted to pee (apparently the smells had gotten to her) and I desperately wanted a cup of coffee. The smell didn’t bother me much. I had changed worse than that over the course of my adulthood. They reminded me of the smells emulating from a 100 year old male’s body. Uggh. And the smell of freshly opened chitterlings before the cleaning process had begun.

The doors opened. I noticed that the lights on the outside of the elevator were as dim as the ones on the inside. I didn’t see a soul, which made me wonder who had pushed the sixth floor button anyway. “Excuse me,” the other passenger said, as he exited the elevator. I had all but forgotten about him, he was so quiet as he stood next to me, not saying a word. I had a while to go yet. It takes about twelve hours to make it from here to Memphis. We were about half-way already. I got my coffee, Gina went to the bathroom, and the other passenger got off. I had to help the elevator door close. It was taking too long. Besides, it was scary out there. Scary, because of the corners, stairs, and darkness. you could easily walk into someone right in their face. You’re just that close.

Once before I was here in this building. No, not this one, but it looked just like this one, and I went up the stairs. I was only going to the second floor. I could not see my hands in front of my face; I had to hold on the wall, kept my hands in front has I went up.

There were no riders on the sixth floor who wanted to go along with me, and the doors closed (I was truly happy about that). No one likes to be friendly anymore, and that might be the wages of the big city. Even in a closed area like this, no one says anything to anybody. Oh, I forgot. I didn’t live there. Yet, anyway. For the remaining way on my journey to the tenth floor, I decided to talk to myself. This action was not unlike other times, places, when I’d openly and freely conversed with myself on the issues of the day. No one else could answer quite like I could.

Besides it’s the places in my mind I’d rather deal with now.

© 2002 Neighborhood Writing Alliance
All rights revert to the authors.