“Every merchant around here turns down thirty applications a day,” he said. “Adults. Senior citizens. Experienced
workers willing to take whatever they can get. I’m sorry.”
As we walked back to the car, we passed a small clothing store full of cheap dresses and brightly colored sweaters,
two aging white mannequins now painted black in the window. The store was poorly lit, but toward the back I could
make out the figure of a young Korean woman sewing by hand as a child slept beside her. The scene took me back to
my childhood, back to the markets of Indonesia: the hawkers, the leather workers, the old women chewing betelnut and
swatting flies off their fruit with whisk brooms.
I’d always taken such markets for granted, part of the natural order of things. Now, though, as I thought about Altgeld
and Rose-land, Rafiq and Mr. Foster, I saw those Djakarta markets for what they were: fragile, precious things. The
people who sold their goods there might have been poor, poorer even than folks out in Altgeld. They hauled fifty
pounds of firewood on their backs every day, they ate little, they died young. And yet for all that poverty, there
remained in their lives a discernible order, a tapestry of trading routes and middlemen, bribes to pay and customs to
observe, the habits of a generation played out every day beneath the bargaining and the noise and the swirling dust.
It was the absence of such coherence that made a place like Altgeld so desperate, I thought to myself; it was that loss
of order that had made both Rafiq and Mr. Foster, in their own ways, so bitter. For how could we go about stitching a
culture back together once it was torn? How long might it take in this land of dollars?
Longer than it took a culture to unravel, I suspected. I tried to imagine the Indonesian workers who were now making
their way to the sorts of factories that had once sat along the banks of the Calumet River, joining the ranks of wage
labor to assemble the radios and sneakers that sold on Michigan Avenue. I imagined those same Indonesian workers
ten, twenty years from now, when their factories would have closed down, a consequence of new technology or lower
wages in some other part of the globe. And then the bitter discovery that their markets have vanished; that they no
longer remember how to weave their own baskets or carve their own furniture or grow their own food; that even if they
remember such craft, the forests that gave them wood are now owned by timber interests, the baskets they once wove
have been replaced by more durable plastics. The very existence of the factories, the timber interests, the plastics
manufacturer, will have rendered their culture obsolete; the values of hard work and individual initiative turn out to
have depended on a system of belief that’s been scrambled by migration and urbanization and imported TV reruns.
Some of them would prosper in this new order. Some would move to America. And the others, the millions left behind
in Djakarta, or Lagos, or the West Bank, they would settle into their own Altgeld Gardens, into a deeper despair.
We drove in silence to our final meeting, with the administrator of a local branch of the Mayor’s Office of
Employment and Training, or MET, which helped refer the unemployed to training programs throughout the city. We
had trouble finding the place-it turned out to be a forty-five-minute drive from Altgeld, on a back street in Vrdolyak’s
ward-and by the time we arrived the administrator was gone. Her assistant didn’t know when she would be back but
handed us a pile of glossy brochures.
“This ain’t no help at all,” Shirley said as she started for the door. “We might as well have stayed home.”
Mona noticed I was lingering in the office. “What’s he looking at?” she asked Angela.
I showed them the back of one of the brochures. It contained a list of all the MET programs in the city. None of them
were south of Ninety-fifth.
barré
(Barré)
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