I was fairly certain that the hotel’s neighborhood would have more people of color than most Caucasians were comfortable with but I was older and had most of my fears under control. My travels around the world helped me increase my ability to be the only white guy on the bus without any concern for my well being. Often the people on the bus were more surprised to see me than I was to encounter them. I was not always that way.
I was raised in a 100% white middle to lower income community that neighbored a town that was 80% black in a southern suburb of Detroit in the 1960’s. I only understood red lining in my adult life. I didn’t encounter a person of color in the flesh until I went to the public school in the ninth grade. I remember being anxious even though neither of my parents ever expressed any racist thoughts. My father declared on more than one occasion that “Negroes were just as good and bad as white people.” That seemed like a fair assessment to me.
Many of my white neighbors had come up from Southern states to work in the auto plants and they were very comfortable expressing their ingrained racism. They also had only two digits of IQ and I didn’t put much stock in much of anything that they said. So, I suspected that my apprehensions came from television influences more than anything I could recall.
I chose to become friends with a few black students in my school who were bussed in to create a semblance of integration. Even as a child I endeavored to be a humanist as long as someone had intelligence. I did harbor reluctance spending time with low intelligence and ignorant people regardless of where they came from or what their ethnicity was.
Michael, who was a tall, strapping, very dark skinned black man, was the captain of our high school debate team and I very much respected him. He once told me a story of how he walked down the main street of a well known white community just to see how many police cars he could get to follow him. I wasn’t sure that that was such a good idea in 1967, but he claimed victory when the number of cars reached five. At least he was wise enough to do his walking in the daylight.
At my college in New York City, I had a number of black male friends, some of whom turned out to be gay. I was the straight one at the time. At least in New York City, they were safer than gay black men in most other parts of my country where those three strikes against you could be deadly.
Later in life, as I explored my bisexuality, I discovered that black men could be amazing lovers. Many times, I enjoyed naked experiences in bed with these smooth skinned dark men who knew how to be sensuous and virile simultaneously. I also learned the joke about why black men often have very large appendages. Apparently, it was a case of the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh, and in some cases the Lord just kept on giving and giving.
I had chosen this hotel South of Chicago because it was an area that I hadn’t encountered before. I had worked in the Chicago suburban areas a number of times and had gone downtown on many occasions. I was familiar with much of Chicago but like many people who visit cities I had made well worn paths and hadn’t explored all of the City. I wanted to know more and so I had made my choice of hotel very consciously.
As I neared the area in my car, I chose to stop at a grocery store to pick up a few items. I wore a surgical mask and had my own bag to use. I noted right away that almost all of the shoppers were people of color and every one of them was wearing a mask. The few Caucasian shoppers were older and uniformly without masks. They almost seemed defiant. I didn’t see much happiness on the faces of the white people.
Before I went to the hotel, I wanted to have some time in a nearby park to enjoy some of the comestibles I had purchased. I saw on my GPS that the hotel was near a wildlife sanctuary and park which was perfect. I soon discovered that the sanctuary was completely inaccessible because it was bounded by a six foot rusty cyclone fence.
There was a different nearby park on the far side of a small neighborhood of 1960’s ranch houses. They were uniform in size and materials with all having a single floor of space with an attached garage and cement driveways. Golden brick with white aluminum siding created monotone boredom in its current state. They struck me as part of the middleclass suburban sprawl of the 1960’s. Most of the houses were in good condition and had recent model vehicles in the driveways. A few had significant disrepair with sagging gutters and disconnected downspouts and perhaps some roofing issues.
My GPS helped me locate the park which was five acres of open land with a large swing set and an area for playing basketball. The rest of the land was just open space that was reasonably mown grass. The seats on the swings looked mostly new, but the basketball area was poorly kept with weeds coming up through the cement. Rusted hoops with no nets suggested that money hadn’t been spent here in some time. Perhaps basketball hadn’t been played there much. The basketball area was enclosed with a high metal fence but the gateway had been bent open so that it could no longer be contained by a lock. There was sufficient parking for 15 cars, but weeds took over the cracks in the cement there as well.
I parked the car and enjoyed a small repast over 30 minutes. During that time, I was the only human utilizing the public space on a beautiful day. I didn’t observe any wildlife either, not even a bird, which I found peculiar. It was peaceful and quiet but the absence of life was a mystery.
I left the park and returned through the neighborhood where I noted the first person I had seen. A five year old black girl was adeptly riding her 20 inch bicycle along the sidewalk. No other people were observed in the development of more than one hundred houses. Where was everyone on this beautiful sunny, summer day?
When I arrived at the hotel lobby, I watched a black woman checking in a dark skinned customer. I also noted an older black woman who was on the housekeeping staff. Both of the women were wearing cloth face masks, but the male guest had no face covering. When the housekeeping woman lowered her face mask, I was able to see that she didn’t have many teeth remaining. Her thin lips barely opened when she spoke.
My night’s stay at the hotel was uneventful, although it was an unpleasant surprise to discover that the hotel wasn’t providing any coffee service in the morning. Most hotels had either stopped breakfast or simplified what they provided because of Covid-19 restrictions, but coffee was always available. So, I began my drive to Wisconsin without my usual morning beverage.
I had decided to take Kedzie as my path north, through the city. It was a straight street that kept me a couple of miles west of the downtown area. I accepted that traveling this way would take about two hours to get to the lovely lake drive just north of downtown Chicago. I wasn’t in a hurry to get where I was going and I was up early so that my travel began around 7 AM. I suspected correctly that I would encounter morning traffic headed downtown. I also encountered road work which was pretty consistent with everywhere I traveled across the US.
The large number of Baptist churches along Kedzie informed me that I was still in neighborhoods full of black people. They were also the only ones I saw walking along the sidewalks. I was cheered when a very nice athletic field opened on my left and I saw more than fifty people in colorful athletic clothing doing their morning workouts. This park was well maintained and well used, unlike my experience from the day before.
When the signs on the businesses changed from English to Spanish, I knew that the population was shifting into being predominantly Hispanic. Both of these neighborhoods had a distinct absence of people on bicycles but there were many areas where people were waiting for the local bus. That was another way in which I saw the population demographics adjusting.
The Hispanic area had large older brick apartment buildings with no single homes on Kedzie anymore. In both neighborhoods, buildings were in good repair but just simple pragmatic structures serving a housing purpose. There was no architectural beauty. I did encounter one older red brick building which seemed to be a former government housing project. Windows were either covered with plywood or broken glass remnants. Both neighborhoods had good amounts of green space but as often as not, the space was a cemetery.
As I crossed under the highways heading downtown, I saw that there wasn’t much traffic and I could have made better time to my destination by joining them, but I reminded myself that I wasn’t in a hurry and that I wanted to learn more about Chicago neighborhoods, so I stayed on Kedzie until I reached Irving Park. By then there had been a change to a better class of older building that reminded me of the brownstones of Brooklyn. Here, bike lanes appeared on my road and a number of colorfully garbed cyclists were making their way rapidly along the path made available for them. The green spaces were lovely parks where mothers with strollers were observed.
When I was on Irving Park, more upscale coffee shops were noted and I saw Black Lives Matter banners hung from balconies. Gay pride flags were also flown to recognize the Pride month of June. It was only in seeing them that I realized their absence in the black and Hispanic neighborhoods. None of the houses and none of the businesses in those areas displayed social statements. Perhaps the Black Lives Matter banners were absent because those people were only too well aware of the racial problems in our country. Perhaps the strong, conservative Baptist faith kept those same people from understanding the travails of the LGBTQ people.
I was fairly certain that all of the neighborhoods I traveled through were mostly Democrats, so there were no Trump flags or signs. Those were easily observed along any rural road in any state of the country even six months after the election was over. How did we get to such an emotional divide in our country that harkens back to Civil War times?
I only drove on the beautiful lake drive for a short distance and returned to my small road exploration near Loyola University. Upscale high rise apartment buildings were the norm here and even the runners seemed to be better dressed. The sense of six figure incomes was readily felt but it was a beautiful area and I could understand why people would choose to live there. It just took money.
By the time I got to Northwestern, the college professor houses were in good supply and here again it was easy to see why people could be happy in these living conditions. Leaving Northwestern behind, I traveled the shore on the “Circle the Lake” road which at that point was Sheridan. Large, single family mansions were in place on both sides of the road. Here there were buildings with architectural interest that exhibited beauty and grace. The only people of color that I noted were those who were working on the landscaping or those who were doing road repair.
The contrast from my starting neighborhood of Markham to Lake Forest was remarkable. It felt as though I had just taken a visual tour of systemic racism at work. That didn’t suggest that the Lake Forest people were racists but perhaps they had been given advantages not available to their darker skinned Metro Chicago residents. Sometimes, a picture is worth a thousand words.