He had it all worked out in his head: how much time it would take to hire and train a replacement for me, the need to
leave a respectable budget in place. As I listened to him lay out his plans, it occurred to me that he’d made no particular
attachments to people or place during his three years in the area, that whatever human warmth or connection he might
require came from elsewhere: from his gracious wife, from his handsome young son. In his work, it was only the idea
that drove him, the idea that a closed plant symbolized but that was larger than the plant, larger than Angela or Will or
the lonely priests who had agreed to work with him. That idea might take spark anywhere; for Marty, it was simply a
matter of finding the right combination of circumstances, the right mix of compounds.
“Marty.”
“What?”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
We had eventually come to an agreement: He would provide me the consultation I still desperately needed; the fee he
received would help subsidize his work elsewhere. In our weekly meetings, though, he would remind me of the choice
I’d made, that there was no risk in my modest accomplishments, that the men in fancy suits downtown were still calling
all the shots. “Life is short, Barack,” he would say. “If you’re not trying to really change things out here, you might as
well forget it.”
Ah, yes. Real change. It had seemed like such an attainable goal back in college, an extension of my personal will and
my mother’s faith, like boosting my grade point average or giving up liquor: a matter of taking and assigning
responsibility. Only now, after a year of organizing, nothing seemed simple. Who was responsible for a place like
Altgeld? I found myself asking. There were no cigar-chomping crackers like Bull Connor out there, no club-wielding
Pinkerton thugs. Just a small band of older black men and women, a group characterized less by malice or calculation
than by fear and small greeds. People like Mr. Anderson, the Altgeld project manager, a balding, older man one year
short of retirement. Or Mrs. Reece, a plump woman with a pincushion face who was president of the official tenant
council and spent most of her time protecting the small prerogatives that came with her office: a stipend and a seat at
the yearly banquet; the ability to see that her daughter got a choice apartment, her nephew a job in the CHA
bureaucracy. Or Reverend Johnson, Mrs. Reece’s pastor and head of the only large church in Altgeld, who, the first and
only time that we met, had stopped me the minute I mentioned the word organizing.
“CHA ain’t the problem,” the good reverend had said. “Problem is these young girls out here, engaging in all manner
of fornication.”
Some tenants in Altgeld would tell me that Mr. Anderson didn’t repair the apartments of anybody who opposed Mrs.
Reece and her slate of candidates during LAC elections, that Mrs. Reece was in turn controlled by Reverend Johnson,
that Reverend Johnson owned a security guard service under contract with CHA. I couldn’t say that any of this was
true, nor in the end did it seem to matter much. The three of them only reflected the attitudes of most of the people who
worked in Altgeld: teachers, drug counselors, policemen. Some were there only for the paycheck; others sincerely
wanted to help. But whatever their motives, they would all at some point confess a common weariness, a weariness that
was bone-deep. They had lost whatever confidence they might have once had in their ability to reverse the deterioration
they saw all around them. With that loss of confidence came a loss in the capacity for outrage. The idea of
responsibility-their own, that of others-slowly eroded, replaced with gallows humor and low expectations.
barré
(Barré)
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