working parents, the odds were usually better at the Jacksons’ house, where Mrs.
Jackson had both a wood-paneled station wagon and a little sports car. Sometimes
we’d hitch rides with the various staff members or visitors who buzzed in and
out. What we sacrificed was control. This would become one of my early,
unwitting lessons about life in politics: Schedules and plans never seemed to stick.
Even standing on the far edge of the vortex, you still felt its spin. Santita and I
were often stuck waiting out some delay that related to her father—a meeting
that was running long or a plane that was still circling the airport—or detouring
through a series of last-minute stops. We’d think we were getting a ride home
from school or going to the mall, but instead we’d end up at a political rally on
the West Side or stranded for hours at the Operation PUSH headquarters in
Hyde Park.
One day we found ourselves marching with a crowd of Jesse Jackson
supporters in the Bud Billiken Day Parade. The parade, named for a fictional
character from a long-ago newspaper column, is one of the South Side’s grandest
traditions, held every August—an extravaganza of marching bands and floats that
runs for almost two miles along Martin Luther King Jr. Drive, through the heart
of the African American neighborhood that was once referred to as the Black Belt
but was later rechristened Bronzeville. The Bud Billiken Day Parade had been
going on since 1929, and it was all about African American pride. If you were
any sort of community leader or politician, it was—and still is, to this day—more
or less mandatory that you show up and walk the route.
I didn’t know it at the time, but the vortex around Santita’s father was
starting to spin faster. Jesse Jackson was a few years from formally launching a run
to be president of the United States, which means he was likely beginning to
actively consider the idea during the time we were in high school. Money had to
be raised. Connections needed to be made. Running for president, I understand
now, is an all-consuming, full-body effort for every person involved, and good
campaigns tend to involve a stage-setting, groundwork-laying preamble, which
can add whole years to the effort. Setting his sights on the 1984 election, Jesse
Jackson would become the second African American ever to run a serious
national campaign for the presidency, after Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm’s
unsuccessful run in 1972. My guess is that at least some of this was on his mind at
the time of the parade.
What I knew was that I personally didn’t love the feeling of being out there,
thrust under a baking sun amid balloons and bullhorns, amid trombones and
throngs of cheering people. The fanfare was fun and even intoxicating, but there