can do when we put our minds to it. That good feeling you got right now, we got to keep it going till we got this
neighborhood back on its feet.”
A few people smiled and offered an amen. But as I stepped off the bus, I heard a woman behind me whispering to her
friend, “I don’t need to hear about the neighborhood, girl. Where these jobs they talking about?”
The day after the rally, Marty decided it was time for me to do some real work, and he handed me a long list of people
to interview. Find out their self-interest, he said. That’s why people become involved in organizing-because they think
they’ll get something out of it. Once I found an issue enough people cared about, I could take them into action. With
enough actions, I could start to build power.
Issues, action, power, self-interest. I liked these concepts. They bespoke a certain hardheadedness, a worldly lack of
sentiment; politics, not religion. For the next three weeks, I worked day and night, setting up and conducting my
interviews. It was harder than I’d expected. There was the internal resistance I felt whenever I picked up the phone to
set up the interviews, as images of Gramps’s insurance sales calls crept into my mind: the impatience that waited at the
other end of the line, the empty feeling of messages left unreturned. Most of my appointments were in the evening,
home visits, and the people were tired after a full day’s work. Sometimes I would arrive only to find that the person had
forgotten our appointment, and I’d have to remind him or her of who I was as I was eyed suspiciously from behind a
half-opened door.
Still, these were minor difficulties. Once they were overcome, I found that people didn’t mind a chance to air their
opinions about a do-nothing alderman or the neighbor who refused to mow his lawn. The more interviews I did, the
more I began to hear certain recurring themes. I learned, for example, that most of the people in the area had been
raised farther north or on Chicago’s West Side, in the cramped black enclaves that restrictive covenants had created for
most of the city’s history. The people I talked to had some fond memories of that self-contained world, but they also
remembered the absence of heat and light and space to breathe-that, and the sight of their parents grinding out life in
physical labor.
A few had followed their parents into the steel mills or onto the assembly line. But many more had found jobs as mail
carriers, bus drivers, teachers, and social workers, taking advantage of the more rigorous enforcement of
antidiscrimination laws in the public sector. Such jobs had benefits and provided enough security to think about taking
on a mortgage. With the passage of fair housing laws, they began to buy homes, one at a time, in Roseland and other
white neighborhoods. Not because they were necessarily interested in mingling with whites, they insisted, but because
the houses there were affordable, with small yards for their children; because the schools were better and the stores
cheaper, and maybe just because they could.
Often, as I listened to these stories, I would find myself reminded of the stories that Gramps and Toot and my mother
had told-stories of hardship and migration, the drive for something better. But there was an inescapable difference
between what I was now hearing and what I remembered, as if the images of my childhood had been run in reverse. In
these new stories, For Sale signs cropped up like dandelions under a summer sun. Stones flew through windows and the
strained voices of anxious parents could be heard calling children indoors from innocent games. Entire blocks turned
over in less than six months; entire neighborhoods in less than five years.