August 8, 2017

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SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY The South Side Weekly is an independent nonprofit newsprint magazine written for and about neighborhoods on the South Side of Chicago. We publish in-depth coverage of the arts and issues of public interest alongside oral histories, poetry, fiction, interviews, and artwork from local photographers and illustrators. The South Side Weekly is dedicated to supporting cultural and civic engagement on the South Side and to providing educational opportunities for developing journalists, writers, and artists.

Volume 4, Issue 37 Editor-in-Chief Hafsa Razi Managing Editors Julia Aizuss, Andrew Koski Director of Staff Support Baci Weiler Deputy Editor Olivia Stovicek Senior Editor Emeline Posner

Politics Editor Adia Robinson Music Editor Austin Brown Stage & Screen Editor Nicole Bond Visual Arts Editor Rod Sawyer Editors-at-Large Christian Belanger, Mira Chauhan, Mari Cohen, Jonathan Hogeback, Yunhan Wen Contributing Editors Maddie Anderson, Maria Babich, Bridget Newsham, Adam Przybyl, Sam Stecklow, Margaret Tazioli Video Editor Lucia Ahrensdorf Radio Editor Erisa Apantaku Radio Producers Andrew Koski, Lewis Page Social Media Editors Bridget Newsham, Sam Stecklow Visuals Editor Ellen Hao Deputy Visuals Editor Jasmin Liang Photography Editor Jason Schumer Layout Editor Baci Weiler Staff Writers: Sara Cohen, Christopher Good, Rachel Kim, Ashvini Kartik-Narayan, Michal Kranz, Anne Li, Michael Wasney Fact Checkers: Eleanore Catolico, Sam Joyce, Rachel Kim, Adam Przybyl, Hafsa Razi, Carrie Smith, Tiffany Wang, Baci Weiler Staff Photographers: Denise Naim, Jason Schumer, Luke Sironski-White Staff Illustrators: Zelda Galewsky, Natalie Gonzalez, Courtney Kendrick, Turtel Onli, Raziel Puma, Lizzie Smith Data Visualization: Jasmine Mithani Webmaster

Sofia Wyetzner

Publisher

Harry Backlund

The paper is produced by an all-volunteer editorial staff and seeks contributions from across the city. We distribute each Wednesday in the fall, winter, and spring. Over the summer we publish every other week.

Send submissions, story ideas, comments, or questions to editor@southsideweekly.com or mail to: South Side Weekly 6100 S. Blackstone Ave. Chicago, IL 60637 For advertising inquiries, contact: (773) 234-5388 or advertising@southsideweekly.com

Cover photo by Jason Schumer, collage by Ellen Hao

The cover of our fourth annual Lit Issue offers a sort of visual game to its reader: can you reconstruct the original photo, before it became collage? Say, is that the cover of a book by Albert Camus? What’s with those books repeating in the top corner? It’s not really a game you’re meant to win: the artwork offers literature in motion, bringing history into our present—and onward, into our future.

From an evocation of Harold Washington’s election in 1983 to a tribute to Michael Jordan’s basketball-playing in 1998, from a portrayal of the South Side in the civil rights era to the memories of a beloved Englewood childhood, the poetry and prose featured in this issue root themselves in history with a wise urgency. These works show what an interview with children’s book author Senyah Haynes tells: that to know the past, whether it’s your people’s or your country’s or Chicago’s, is both a responsibility and a calling. To know the past is to know what’s happening now.

In this spirit, the zines and features later in the issue hone in on our futures: the kids who will grow up reading children’s books as diverse as their lives, the teens beginning to write and make literature for themselves, the retired bookstore owner with uncertainty ahead.

“Having shaken things up like this, my future life is not clear to me,” former Selected Works bookstore owner Keith Isenberg tells Malvika Jolly. He’s not the only one: it’s a question that rings out in the pages before and after.

For Selected Works itself, the future is clear—its space in the Fine Arts Building will soon turn into another bookstore, The Dial. The name hearkens back to a famous literary magazine that operated out of the building at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. It is the lightest of reminders that history is not just behind us, and that whatever happens next, literature is how we’ll understand it—and maybe how we’ll accomplish it, too.

POETRY & PROSE jerrie

diane o’neill...4 chicago spring,

1983

diane o’neill...5

the end of chicago’s best bookstore with cat

malvika jolly...12 the take back

paris clark...13

ZINES

at the storefront

tucker kelly...5 casesensitive

nicole bond...6 three poems

chirskira caillouet...6 michael jordan

jack murphy...7 dodging...and dodging some more

cedric williams...8 lula mae

o.a. fraser...9 country club

paris smith...10

let it sink

#6:

dreamtigers

jim joyce...14

all the white boys that broke my heart

kawtar azzouzi...15

home zine:

“casa. casa. casita” & “bringing out the home in me”

daisy zamora & luz magdaleno flores...16 sonic meditations

10 deep listeners...17 kanye stops kanye from interrupting taylor swift: a time travel adventure

cameron del rosario & javier suárez...18

FEATURES black authors speak beyond the page

“Once it’s not a trend any more, we will still be here focusing on diverse books.” ellen hao...22 you can always count on me

The candor is at times shocking. elaine chen...24 they’re all around us

“If anything, one thing they will for sure leave with is a really good, deep history lesson.” ashvini kartik-narayan...26 a calling and a responsibility

The African footprint has been everywhere they visit. nicole bond...27 in city summers

The South Side itself is an important character in the poet’s cast. lois biggs...28

the illustrated biography of mishima dear englewood

reginald rice...11

mario bellatin...20

the last empty bottle on the road less traveled

o.a. fraser

AUGUST 2, 2017 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 3

PROSE

Jerrie DIANE O’NEILL

“M

an can go to the moon, but a person who is DeafBlind drinks a glass of water, and people say it’s ‘Amazing’!”

Jerrie would proclaim this at meetings in ringing voice that probably echoed performances she’d given at Carnegie Hall back in the day.

So I learned to never call Jerrie amazing, and I cringe when others do. That exalted status denies her humanity, changes her into an icon that can’t be touched, not someone you’d laugh with, or drink birthday champagne with. And aren’t you hinting that not much can be expected of a person with DeafBlindness?

I definitely flinched, interpreting during a television interview at her home. The young reporter, after asking Jerrie questions about her life, wanted a demonstration of how she handled everyday tasks.

“Maybe—pour a glass of water?” His eyes lit up.

But Jerrie was gracious and gave a tour of her kitchen, subtly letting him know that her culinary abilities extended beyond enjoying water.

Of course, I think back to younger days, before I knew people with disabilities, before I was hit by a car and spent a year on crutches, before I started volunteering for disability rights organizations. One time, coming home from night school the summer after graduating high school, a blind couple boarded the bus. The husband and wife laughed and chatted, but I felt panic. What if I had to help them? What would I say? What would I do?

If I’d had a different life, I’d be just like that young reporter. I’d probably suggest that Jerrie have a glass of water, too.

Many television and newspaper stories highlighted Jerrie’s accomplishments: • Geraldine ( Jerrie) Lawhorn had been completely deaf and blind since her teens.

• After graduating high school, she studied drama at the American Conservatory of Music in New York.

• She wrote one-woman plays and performed them at Carnegie Hall.

• She taught poetry for the Hadley School for the Blind (now the Hadley Institute for the Blind and Visually Impaired) until in her mid-nineties.

• When her mother became sick with cancer, Jerrie was the one who took care of her.

• After her mother died, Jerrie lived alone until in her mid-nineties.

• Jerrie was the first African American DeafBlind person to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree.

• She served as treasurer for a DeafBlind social club for decades.

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• She instigated DeafBlind regional conferences.

• She wrote an autobiography, On Different Roads.

But Jerrie was modest. When a reporter compared her to Helen Keller, she demurred, “No, no.” She enjoyed honorary luncheons and dinners, but, I think, more for the chance to socialize and connect with others. DeafBlindness is at its core the height of isolation, and Jerrie was gregarious. She liked people.

On my refrigerator is a Christmas card containing a picture of Jerrie and Chicago journalist Harry Porterfield.

The day of the interview at Hadley, before Mr. Porterfield arrived, Jerrie bought a set of Christmas cards that had a place for inserting photos. Although she couldn’t see them herself, she liked showing photos to her sighted friends.

“Maybe you could get your picture taken with Harry Porterfield,” someone suggested.

“Ask him,” I urged Jerrie.

“No! You ask him!” said my not-normally-shy friend.

The admiration was not one-sided. Mr. Porterfield once said, in an aside, that every time he went to do any interview, he always brought along Jerrie’s autobiography for inspiration.

I treasure my copy, too; she signed the inside cover: “To our Diane.” I love reading about the roads she traveled.

She was born in Dayton, Ohio, and then her family moved to Chicago, Illinois. She lost vision when she was about eight.

She was hard of hearing but enjoyed listening to radio: jazz or shows like “Little Orphan Annie.”

One teenage day, a horrible ringing began in her ears.

When her mother spoke, Jerrie couldn’t make out the words.

She went to bed, hoping she’d wake up and hear Chicago sparrows chirping in their back yard, her brothers’ bickering, the crackling of her mom frying breakfast in the kitchen.

She heard nothing.

Jerrie wrote about the experience in her novella, The Needle Swingers Baby, published right before she graduated high school. There’s a fun fictional plot about an abandoned baby rescued by the school sewing club (the “needle swingers”). But the book also deals with Jerrie’s loss of hearing. How, the morning of the day the terrible ringing began, she’d confided to friends that she sensed something dreadful was about to happen.

Jerrie stopped going to school. Her mom learned the manual sign language alphabet and taught it to Jerrie and the entire family. They spelled words into Jerrie’s hand, and Jerrie replied, using her voice.

One day, Jerrie’s teacher wrote, saying she thought they could help Jerrie.

Jerrie did not want to go back: “How can I go to school like this?”

But her mom made her go, and Jerrie came home gushing about her day. All her classmates had been taught the manual alphabet: “I guess they like me better than I thought.”

Jerrie writes that her mother kissed “her child who had learned that day that nothing is impossible to love.”

The power of friendship remained with Jerrie her entire life; she valued friendship more than almost anything else.

Friendship gave her life joy.

When I first met Jerrie, she was in her late seventies. I was a single mom and had just started as manager of the DeafBlind program. My boss said it was fine to bring my two-year-old son to social club meetings: “They like children.”

Still, I was nervous; my son was a typical toddler who ran about merrily during meeting announcements. But when I introduced my wiggly little offspring, Jerrie reached out, touched his curls, and smiled. “It’s good to have young blood here.”

Years later, I would work for Hadley, too, and a few years ago, a friend and I began visiting Jerrie every other month or so.

Marchae and I became writing buddies after meeting at a class, and when she mentioned that her mother was dealing with vision loss, I told her about Jerrie. Marchae and I met regularly to write and chat. What if we wrote at the Starbucks by the 35th Street Red Line stop and then visited Jerrie, who lived nearby?

A ritual began.

After creativity at Starbucks, we’d take the 35th Street bus to Jerrie’s apartment building, first stopping at the Dunkin’ Donuts across the street. We’d pick out something for Jerrie as different from Meals on Wheels as possible-maybe tuna salad on a croissant, maybe a caramel latte with whipped cream.

Jerrie had a knocker outside her apartment’s door, as well as a special doorbell that connected with a device that vibrated, letting her know you’d rung the doorbell. She’d open the door, the bar latch still in place, and she’d reach out her hand.

I’d sign my name into her hand, or Marchae would sign hers.

Jerrie would repeat the letters, joy in her voice: “D-i-an-e! M-a-r-c-h-a-e!” (Before meeting Marchae, Jerrie took care to ask how to pronounce “Marchae”—”Mar-shay.”)

POETRY

Jerrie’d make sure to offer us goodies from her kitchen, too; one time she made us a fruit salad. She’d tell us to get pop from the refrigerator. After she died, Charita, an interpreter who was like a daughter to her, told me how Jerrie had anticipated our visits and would always remark, “I’ve got to get some ice cream for the girls.”

We’d talk about everything: our families, the DeafBlind community, politics, and religion. In between visits, we’d email her, sending her articles we thought she’d find interesting, and I’d try to find transcripts of President Obama’s speeches. She’d read emails on a computer equipped with refreshable braille device—the metal dots would go up and down to make the shapes of the braille letters.

In the nursing home, at the end of her life, Jerrie’s mind would drift back to those days; she’d tell us to go get pop from the refrigerator, still wanting to be a host to her friends. Her interest in others did not fade. How were people in the DeafBlind social club? What was going on in the world? Were things getting better for DeafBlind kids?

Jerrie lived at the nursing home about nine months.

At first we were able to bring her chocolate treats, but then she was connected to a feeding tube. Before, she’d been able to email her friends, but her fingers became too weak to press the keys of the braille device. We brought her poems, but her fingers became too tired to feel the braille. Few staff at the nursing home signed, despite the sign language alphabet posters that we pasted on the wall.

What was the isolation like for Jerrie, not just at the nursing home, but her whole life? When I was awaiting knee surgery a couple of years ago and couldn’t leave the house for days, I thought of Jerrie. How had she remained such a joy to be around, when I had instead rediscovered a vocabulary of curses worthy of a salty sailor? But another friend reminded me of how Jerrie had in fact often talked of the isolation and loneliness of DeafBlindness.

Jerrie died six months shy of her one-hundredth birthday.

A group of us friends were there with her when hospice staff disconnected life support. Our love contrasted with the sterile setting, where we had to wear gowns and sign to her through latex, were told that Jerrie could still “hear” us, and a staff member carted in a stereo player and blasted religious music full volume: “It’s too quiet!”

But maybe Jerrie “heard” our signs through the gloves, maybe she felt our love.

I keep one of her poems by my desk always. The last lines celebrate friendship: “There is progress and beauty where good friends abound.”

Chicago Spring, 1983 DIANE O’NEILL How the royal sunrise buttons gleamed: Harold Washington for mayor!

Voting in Logan Square church basement, the line surged out the door.

On St. Patrick’s Day, after the parade I got my button.

Pinned the blue endorsement next to my emerald shamrock; the campaign worker chuckled.

One time I passed Roosevelt University, and two silver-haired professors high-fived my button— strangers unified by hope—white but wanting to make amends for our color, acknowledge segregation injustice, embrace Harold’s vision of fairness, from Englewood and Chatham to Rogers Park, from Austin and Uptown to Lake Shore Drive, from garden apartments to bungalows and Gold Coast mansions.

Morning rush hour after the primary, our sardine-packed subway car stalled, and a rich baritone voice rang out in the tunnel.

The CTA worker proclaimed Sun-Times and Tribune headlines: “Harold Washington has won the primary! We have overcome!”

His words, a prayer, cast light through belowground darkness.

At the Storefront TUCKER KELLY

TUCKER KELLY

I eyed widely things I couldn’t buy.

“Nice!” and “New!” nosed, but no.

Posted: MISSING PEOPLE. People-missing.

Below something, behind peepholes.

I would too. I have to. I have two.

I know.

Flipped sign. Closing time.

“Goodbye.”

“Have a good one.”

“I’ll try.”

AUGUST 2, 2017 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 5

POETRY

THREE POEMS BY CHIRSKIRA CAILLOUET

CaseSensitive NICOLE BOND Unapologetically for everything in print I am the uppercase sensitive B in your Black.

I am not the death or the plague, I am not The sheep or the shirt.

I am not the mail, nor the market.

I am the melanin.

I am the majesty.

I am the origin of everything.

Yes, I am the magic; But not the way you mean it.

I am the melody, the march and the movement.

I am; The message and the messenger.

I am the Martin and the Malcolm, The Mandela and the Makeba.

I am the strap molasses, Thick sweet.

I am the crude oil, Fuel deep.

I am the coal mined, Diamond earth.

I am the cargo from ship’s berth.

I am the culmination of all colors Not the presence of none.

DuSable’s Home Organ pipes tower over the city like a cathedral Humming through with the click clack of El tracks Whistling winds whisper through, Wabash Spilling secrets like Goose Island root beer overflowing in Buckingham Fountain Flooding the streets like flames from the Fire Worshipping gangsters and making disciples on Kostner and Karlov like Jesus at the sea of Galilee Burning into the water tower exposing Mrs. O’Leary cow’s skeleton Branches spine out purple, pink, and brown, red bleeding into seams of the Windy City Singing praises.

What it’s like being a daughter of a father with MS for those who aren’t It’s like watching someone you love grow stronger every day, seeing his anger grow like an stubborn flower, turning green in a fit of rage because he can’t find his dysfunctional back brace, throwing it across the room, it’s hiding and never being found in a game of hide and go seek, it’s like wishing you had been there when he got the diagnosis and seeing the hope in his eyes when he knew he can do something about it, it’s like walking through Beverly on a sunny day and hearing him talk about his Vietnam experience or tenants in our building, watching him catch his fall over that Sunday sidewalk lift, it’s like writing a poem about your father you thought you never could.

I am hidden figures climbing fences in the moonlight.

The Return of Shafro

Please don’t EVER spell my Black with a lowercase b.

I’m case sensitive like that.

Leaving

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(after Terrance Hayes)

bits of my self-esteem on the tile sweeping away my courage (like Samson’s strength into a dustpan) Cornrows flake Twists locked away like a jailer watching from the window God shaking dandruff from his head

PROSE

Michael Jordan JACK MURPHY i.

The night Michael Jordan scored over Bryon Russell, clinching our sixth championship, defeating the Utah Jazz for the second consecutive year, burying the final shot he’d ever take for my favorite team, I thought it was impossible for the Chicago Bulls to ever lose. I was ten years old then, wearing a huge old T-shirt of my dad’s the color of a blue highlighter as pajamas, jumping up and down in our TV room, beside myself that the greatest thing that could possibly happen had happened again.

Michael Jordan was the odd phenomenon that belonged to everyone, absolutely everyone in the world, but belonged to me most of all. I spent most of my waking hours thinking about MJ, recreating dunks on my basement Jordan Jammer, sticking out my tongue while doing math homework, reading his official Matt Christopher biography so many times that I inadvertently memorized large chunks of it—a trick that both amazed and horrified my parents and friends (“Michael Jordan defies the laws of gravity,” I’d rattle off. “At least that’s what fans, opponents, and teammates have been saying for years...”).

I got a hoop in my driveway that summer, the only birthday gift I could imagine wanting. We’d spent the last six months in a rental house, the first block I lived on with kids my age, and I’d played basketball in our neighbor’s driveway every single day. “Jack always uses our hoop,” I remember the sister complaining to her mom when she knew I was close enough to hear. “Well that’s okay,” her mom said, louder.

“That’s the beauty of it—you can never run out of basketball.”

The hoop in the driveway of our new house was cemented into the ground. My dad had my sister and I sign our initials and the date—7/4/98—into the cast using the handle of a fork. Our younger neighbor, Timmy, was over to watch the installation, and my dad had him sign his initials, too. While the cement hardened, we drew elaborate court designs onto the slanted, narrow driveway with chalk—an unbalanced three point line, a misshapen Bulls logo that resembled a pug, a name near the sidewalk in uneven capital letters: FIREWORKS STADIUM. Even then, I knew all courts deserved a name.

The night Michael Jordan scored over Byron Russell, I was watching with my mother, a Cubs fan at heart, who

believed disaster was lingering at every moment. Despite the many heroics, despite the stats and achievements I could, and did, announce during each commercial break, she always covered her eyes during the final moments, content to let my crazed screaming reveal the outcome.

The night Michael Jordan scored over Byron Russell, the final shot he’d ever take for my favorite team, her eyes were closed. I couldn’t understand it. Of course it was going in. ii.

Lately, I’ve been playing basketball again. There are courts on the third floor of my gym that almost always have games going on and so I wander in and start asking around: You got next? You got five? You need one? Can I run with you?

I’m not quite washed-up, can still score enough to keep my pride. Basketball is not a game of size and strength, I whisper, but timing, skill, and positioning. I cannot shake the feeling I was better when I was twelve, was sharper, faster, a better shooter. Maybe it’s true. Certainly I’m less competitive.

No longer am I willing to dive into a pile of folding chairs to keep a ball inbounds, am now willing to slap five with players from the opposing team after a game. The goal as I see it now is to have fun, where once it was only to win. I’d disgust my twelve-year-old self.

Games on these courts are played to 15, by ones and twos. This is a bad way of playing but this is how games are played. It is not up for discussion. You play straight up, which means teams do not need to win by two points. If your team wins, you get to stay on the court for the next game; if you lose, you have to sit. Players call their own fouls. There are no backcourt violations. None of these rules are written. You just have to know. It is not up for discussion.

The game teaches you something about every person playing: who’s selfish and who’s kind, who’d loan you six bucks if you were a little short in line at the grocery store, who’d lie and tell you a bad haircut looks good; who’d tell you the truth. Personally, I’m the type to lie. iii.

The night Michael Jordan scored over Bryon Russell, I was wearing the Air Jordans I got for Christmas for good luck. I’d

found them in my mother’s closet two weeks early. I knew I shouldn’t look but did it anyway. It felt almost sacred, opening that box alone in the dark.

The night Michael Jordan scored over Byron Russell, my cousins and aunts and uncles called to congratulate me, as though I’d personally achieved something, as though I’d directly influenced the outcome, which I in some small strange way felt was true.

The night Michael Jordan scored over Bryon Russell, I use an old broom to lower the hoop in my driveway as low as it goes, drag the blue recycling bin beside it, and launch myself off it towards the rim, tongue hanging out, stuffing the ball over and over.

The night Michael Jordan scored over Bryon Russell, I cry after my grade school team loses games, scream at teammates for dropping passes until my coach makes me sit out to prove a point about sportsmanship—a ridiculous point, I am convinced.

The night Michael Jordan scored over Bryon Russell, my three college roommates and I bring up all of our old memorabilia—posters, magazines, the full-size cut out like the one in Home Alone—and create the Michael Jordan room, show it off to friends, avoid hanging out in it to make sure it remains pristine.

The night Michael Jordan scored over Byron Russell, I wander down to the park late summer nights, too drunk to play, to watch the kids who’ve been there since noon play full court games under a floodlight and the moon. And I’m struck by the total lack of supervision—no coaches, no refs, no league officials, no uniforms, no plays aside from those the natural geometry of the game suggest—and by how much better the game is for their absence. I watch these players— some eleven and too scared to shoot, some thirteen and decked out in gear, the rest at some point in their post-high school career where the only place they can play and feel like they’re really playing is here—and remember the sounds once so important to me: swish, swoosh, rattle, squeak. How odd that the pros play in winter, I think, when the game is so clearly meant to be played in humid summer darkness.

I stayed up late, the night in June Michael Jordan scored over Bryon Russell—in fact, I haven’t fallen asleep since.

AUGUST 2, 2017 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 7

PROSE

Dodging...and Dodging Some More CEDRIC WILLIAMS This is an excerpt from a longer short story, to be published on our website in full.

T

here were gunshots that night between 1am and 3am—heard them, usually looked at the clock, but instead turned over and fell back into a deep sleep until the prostate told me I had to get up. Found out this morning that there was a shooting and a killing— two brothers in their teens worth something to someone.

When the sun broke, I walked up to the corner to get a bunch of those free newspapers that don’t have anything in them—they’re down to about eight pages and it’s mainly stuff that was on a computer screen two days ago. Got a bunch of papers because I use it mostly to wrap up the uneaten food that I throw out into the garbage. Grabbed about twenty of them.

Bumblebee Head approached me as I was pivoting back to the path back home.

“Two punks,” said Bumblebee Head, as he pointed across the street at the filling station. It was at this point where I noticed all the yellow police tape stretching all along and across the station. Why I hadn’t noticed the halfdozen police cars, news vans and amateur photographers, I couldn’t tell you. Maybe it had something to do with the relative calm at the scene.

“Two punks,” Bumblebee Head repeated. Never knew why they called him Bumblebee Head—he had the clearest skin I’ve ever seen.

“Somebody loved them,” I said.

Bumblebee Head laughed. “Make sure you say that to the reporter across the street over there.”

He pointed to a sharp-dressed woman in her twenties with perfect makeup and even more perfect hair. She gave me a quick glance and turned instead to a woman holding at least three babies in her arms.

“They didn’t used to shoot much when it rained, snowed, or even when it was cold out,” Bumblebee Head said. “Now it’s all night, any night.”

“Winter, summer, or fall,” said a butting-in woman, twice as old as me and even older than Bumblebee Head.

She had that look of nonstop complaining that was easy to recognize. I left her in mid-complaining sentence and went to grab some more free newspapers. The woman followed me.

“They shoot in the morning now too,” said the buttingin woman.

I wasn’t into it. I knew if you parsed what she was saying in the right way, she would be one hundred percent correct. But I wasn’t parsing well at this point. They truly never did used to shoot in the morning—the first shots

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used to be well past 9pm, but I couldn’t convey that assessment to the woman.

“They used to wait until late to start shooting,” she said.

“But they shoot anytime now, which includes morning, afternoon, evening, and night.”

I thought “morning, noon, and night” would have been more poetic, but she walked back across the street before I could give her a piece of my mind.

It didn’t stop Bumblebee, however. “At least they don’t do any stabbing anymore,” he said, almost out of breath.

“Stabbing has gone way down.” He handed me one of those sausage and eggs on a huge biscuit sandwich. He had one too.

“More of the community on the decline talk?”

Bumblebee Head asked, nodding toward the old woman.

“That old woman was here at the beginning. Saw the neighborhood change three or four separate times, if not more.”

“I was here at the beginning too,” I said. “I got hit in the mouth by this thug back then. We weren’t calling them thugs back then. Got hit in the mouth because I refused to hand over a quarter that was going to let us get that toy soldier set that Jonathan Tyson and I had been looking at over at the Woolworth for months.”

“Did he hit Jonathan Tyson in the mouth too?” asked Bumblebee Head.

“Jonathan Tyson had already handed over his seventyfive cents, so he was spared.”

“Left quite a lasting impression,” Bumblebee Head volunteered.

“It was twenty, thirty, maybe forty toy soldiers – made out of plastic,” I said. “Cost about a dollar then.”

“They had a hobby shop in this neighborhood?”

Bumblebee Head asked.

“Yeah, lasted well into the change over,” I said. “That hobby shop lasted, I believe, into the seventies.”

“White flight?” asked Bumblebee Head.

“Yeah, but they weren’t calling it that back then,” I said. “Plus, white flight occurred years earlier than the confrontation with the thug.”

“Do you think part of the problem is what they call things?” asked Bumblebee Head. “Too many ways to describe too many things.”

I didn’t have a qualified answer. I kept looking down the street—specifically, a couple of blocks south where the hobby store once stood, though you wouldn’t have been able to see it from our vantage point—it was tucked in deep in a little shopping area off the main street.

“Did they play their music loud back then?” Bumblebee Head asked. “I mean with their cars?”

“Didn’t have FM back then in the car and they didn’t have the speakers these . . . people have now,” I said.

“Blasting wasn’t a word back then, unless you were talking about dynamite or something.”

A loud ambulance blew past us, then a fire truck, then two squad cars—all heading in the direction of where that boy slugged me in the mouth fifty-five years ago.

“Do you think he’s dead?” Bumblebee Head asked.

“Think who’s dead?” I asked.

“The boy who hit you in the mouth?” Bumblebee Head asked.

I shrugged. “I don’t know, but I would have still had those toy soldiers either way.”

“Twenty-five, seventy-five?” asked Bumblebee Head.

“Twenty-five, seventy-five what?”

“What percent of the toy soldiers were you going to keep if you all had bought them toy soldiers?

“Twenty-five percent of them,” I said. “I was fair back then.” ”You still remember that hit in the mouth . . . like it was yesterday?”

I nodded. “Bad things stay with you. It’s the good things that you forget.”

“Why didn’t you get the toy soldiers later?” asked Bumblebee Head.

“First of all, seventy-five cents was hard to come by back then. And even if we had the money, we had lost the drive. I had a piece of my childhood robbed that day.”

I suddenly see the good kid running toward the oncoming bus. He timed it perfectly. He always timed the bus perfectly. He had no choice. The good kid hopped on the bus and the bus took off. Safe for another day—or at least until school was out and he headed back home.

“What’s safer, the street corners this time of day or later, when it gets dark?” Bumblebee Head asked.

“I don’t see the difference anymore.”

It suddenly flashed in my mind. The difference between what was reality and how reality was perceived fifty-five years ago. A time when getting shot on the corner was in no one’s thoughts; but back then, getting nuked ran the gambit of all kinds of thoughts.

I don’t remember the nuclear war drills in schools as they were portrayed in civil defense films on television. No one hid under their desk in my school. We all just quietly went out in the hallway and leaned up against the walls.

Somehow, we were supposed to believe that we would survive a nuclear bomb if all we did was lean against the walls in a hallway of the thirty-year-old school, named after an Irish politician with an all people-of-color student body.

POETRY

“How long ago has it been since you lost your boy?”

Bumblebee Head asked.

“Been a long while. A very long while,” I said. “I really miss him.”

“I miss him too,” Bumblebee Head said. “He was a good kid.”

“Yeah,” I responded.

I woke up the following morning thinking about those toy soldiers. Had the regular coffee and granola and then went out to get some more free newspapers. On my way through the alley, I saw my first rat in years darting from residential to commercial property in the blink of an eye.

The new crowd of people who had arrived at the turn of the century were not like those who had moved out before the turn of the century. Garbage and where it lay had become less a thinking man’s game and more of a succumbing to laziness theme. The next-door neighbors had it particularly bad.

Their garbage cans were filled up in strict relationship to their closeness to the gate. The garbage can closest to the gate had waste tossed all on top of it—piled two or three feet high, much of which tumbled to the ground until Streets and Sanitation came by and picked it all up each week. The second or next can closest to the gate didn’t have a lid and it was piled up over its capacity, with raw food and plastic bottles falling to the ground. Garbage cans furthest from the gate were always empty. Always.

Rats aside, I got to the corner and collected more eight-page newspapers. No Bumblebee Head this time, but there was the good kid, checking his watch, holding his book bag tightly, wearing those nerdy glasses and heading to catch that bus.

The bus was crowded and I felt for him, though I knew he didn’t have any real problems dealing with it. I tried hard to catch a smile, but I lost him as he maneuvered his way toward the back of the bus.

I started trying to remember when, where, and how I got stuck in all of this, and trying to remember if I had a chance to get out and didn’t take advantage of it.

I tried to conceal this one tear escaping from my right eye. Couldn’t.

It’s been a long time, but it still hurts. I’ve tried a bunch of ways to conceal it, but the notion that time heals all wounds is only for the rich in spirit. My spirit vanished on the streets fifteen years ago. Empty then; empty now.

Suddenly, Bumblebee Head appeared and handed me a biscuit with the sausage and egg. I ate it like the good soldier that I was. I walked over to the free paper box and it was gone. Uprooted or displaced or both.

Lula Mae O.A. FRASER They are fixing up the neighborhood without you, belle of my boulevard, Lula Mae: I hoped you would come again today wearing your favorite black shoe.

Oh you, mother to the street corner child who knew their names, cried for the nameless too.

“Oh, these no good men and their sugary lies.

Pimps and their wandering eyes.”

It is cold. Ice rain bullets the storefront sidewalk this somber April day.

And the scent and sound of you are gunned away.

You could do Broadway with your caravan of twenty shopping bags.

The back and forth along the backstreets, ferrying your world from way station to way station, two at a time in each hand.

Up ahead a supine pigeon lays sorrowfully dead amid the swerving traffic of the busy street.

The stoplight solemnly soldiers yellow to red.

No Samaritan will lift the rigid bird, feather the alley garden with its shallow grave.

Jackhammers shrapnel the chilly air instead.

A broken line of helmeted white men march upon the widowed and the weak.

Their pink lips hard, their legs long and lean.

How they spit rough words, cold and mean!

They want the conquered cowed; command them not to speak.

Their regiment bunkers the embattled land in the belligerent wind, indifferent to the saintly and the sinned.

I look, and swivel about for you, bag lady, I cannot live without.

Your ten hats layered high, a colorful tall cake for a Cleopatra crown leaning like the tower of Pisa.

And your mad wig-Queen look, and madder parrot talk:

The unlit streets, dead ends you have known when your voice still sang so lovely a tune that Saturn turned and stared, disbelieving at the dumbstruck moon.

More than half your lifetime cruelly spent looking for home.

On a blue park bench, under the Lake Park viaduct, sleeping besides the lake in the company of geese.

I hear the youthful glee in the invading voices floating skywards to the talons of the light pole crows.

They are rolling through the rubble now in the dilapidated southern lands: Opening boutique pet stores.

Such food they have for dogs rescued from no-kill shelters: organic, dried buffalo tails to chew on.

And you, my lovely Lula Mae arthritic now and old, hauling cans of expired Campbell’s chicken soup to suck on in the dark and cold.

So much we have, yet much more has gone away.

I’ve lost, I’ve lost the haunting song, Oh sweet symphony of you, Lula Mae.

AUGUST 2, 2017 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 9

PROSE

Country Club PARIS SMITH

T

he delivery work was kind of hard on me. Those sacks of rice and potatoes could get pretty heavy.

Most times there was another boy on the truck to help out. On this particular day Micah Lieberman worked with me. He was a couple of years older than me, and bigger.

Had dark, curly hair and seemed to be smiling all the time.

He lived several blocks from me. We saw each other mostly at school, but we weren’t really close friends.

The Saturday morning in question started out routinely.

Warm, damp air settled in a wispy fog over everything.

I showed up at the store a few minutes before my seven o’clock starting time. Mr. Minelli was standing next to his red truck making notations in his important black book. He smiled when he saw me strolling up to the truck. I thought he was a very nice man, and so did my father. “Joe Minelli is a good guy,” my dad had told me. “He’ll treat you fair and look out for you.” I think my father had some other kind of side business going with Mr. Minelli, and I’m pretty sure it had something to do with the funny-smelling stuff my parents liked to roll up in cigarette paper and smoke together on the weekends.

“You and Micah can finish loading the truck,” Mr. Minelli instructed.

I nodded and climbed up on the dock. Several sacks and baskets full of produce were sitting at the back of the truck. I didn’t see Micah, so I started the loading by myself. But just then Micah showed up wearing a White Sox baseball cap and patched blue jeans.

“I’m not late,” he said to me, jovially. “You’re early.”

“Sox will win the pennant this year,” Micah said as we loaded the truck. “Billy Pierce and Early Wynn are the best pitchers in the American League.”

“You betting on it?” I asked.

“Yeah. If I can get somebody to bet against me.”

“Well, it can’t be me because I think the Sox will win it, too.”

“Huh. I know if my brother, Jacob, was here he’d bet against me. He thinks the Yankees can’t be beat. And everybody knows they’re out of it this year. He’d figure they were going to come from behind and win it all.”

“Where’s your brother? I haven’t seen him for a long time.”

Micah glanced around nervously and lowered his voice. “He’s in Mississippi working with freedom fighters.

They’re doing sit-ins on buses, and at lunch counters like in Woolworth’s. They’re trying to help your people so they don’t keep on being treated bad.”

I’d seen things on the TV news and heard my parents and their friends discussing what was going on down South.

“The Civil War was never really over in this country,” I’d heard my father say just the other night. “The Confederacy still wants to have its way. The organizers of this civil rights movement preach non-violence, but there’s going to be 10 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

¬ AUGUST 2, 2017

plenty blood shed before it’s all over.”

“Why does your brother want to help Negro people?

You all are white people.”

Micah shrugged. “He believes in doing what’s right.

My father is like that, too. He’s a union organizer.”

“What’s that?”

Micah laughed. “I see you’ve got lots to learn about the world. A union organizer brings working people together on their jobs, so things can be better for them.”

I realized there was a right and wrong side to these grown-up situations, and I belonged on the side with my parents. I didn’t really know all that much about what was going on down south, or with union organizing. I was still more interested in things like comic books and baseball.

Mr. Minelli made a noisy entrance, coughing and slamming the door, when he climbed into the truck cab behind the wheel. Micah cut his sarcastic eye at me, and I grinned.

Traffic was light on the South Side streets that Saturday morning as the vegetable truck rumbled along its route.

Light drizzle came down out of the fog. The windshield wipers made a rhythmic squeaking noise sweeping the glass.

We made a couple of deliveries before Mr. Minelli stopped and parked the truck. He got out and went into a restaurant and came back a few minutes later with doughnuts and coffee—milk for us youngsters.

We wolfed down our snacks and resumed the morning deliveries while it rained harder. Although the atmosphere was murky I felt a glow inside knowing that when the work was done I would receive my five dollars pay and most likely something more. There were comics I wanted to buy. An old neighborhood man named Mr. Gault kept some rarities, in a box inside his newspaper stand a couple of blocks from my house. He’d shown me an old Batman comic that I wanted real bad. He contended that collectors would pay him good money for it, but he’d let me have it instead for just a dollar because he knew my parents, and he figured I was an ace student in school, which I suppose I was.

Micah knew how to work. He knew the right way to lift heavy loads, and Mr. Minelli didn’t have to give him much direction. I carried my weight, but needed Micah’s help sometimes when things got too heavy. We were making a delivery at a church where I made a misstep while carrying a load and fell against a kitchen counter. A bottle of ketchup got knocked onto the floor and broke, spilling and splattering. The lady that let us in to drop off the produce was a tall woman with skin the color of maple syrup and thick lenses in heavy black frames, making her look like she was wearing goggles. “You clumsy boy,” she snapped at me.

“Look at the mess you’ve made. Where’s Mr. Minelli?”

Micah rushed in to my defense. “It was just an accident, m’am. We’ll clean it up for you.”

She showed us where the mop and bucket were kept,

and we quickly took care of the mess. When we were done she stood over the clean spot and frowned. “Very well. But be careful, you hear, young man?” She gave me a little squeeze on the shoulder.

We hurried back to the truck. Mr. Minelli was about to come looking for us.

“Lady in there loves to chat,” Micah said.

“Yeah,” Mr. Minelli agreed. “I know how she is. But don’t let the customers tie you up for too long. We’ve got more stops on the route.”

“Yes, Mr. Minelli,” we replied, almost in tandem.

Micah leaned over and whispered to me as the truck eased away from the church. “I thought the old dame was going to make us pay for the ketchup.”

The rain had stopped by the time we reached our next drop-off point at the Lake Shore Country Club. I’d never made this stop before. Mr. Minelli had to show something to a guard at the front gate, which was like the entryway to some regal castle. Once past the entrance, the truck lumbered along a gravel roadway past rows of colorful flowers. To our left lay an expansive golf course, mostly obscured by the eerie, low-hanging fog. To the right were horse stables where little pennants flew from the rooftops. Beyond that was the lakefront sandy beach, and directly ahead was our destination, a grand three-story building with a driveway which swung in an arc past the front doors.

Mr. Minelli took a cut off from the roadway, ended up at the rear of the building and told us to start unloading. He went up to a door and pressed the bell.

A heavyset man wearing a white short-sleeved shirt and a red necktie opened the door. Wore his silver hair slicked back into a ducktail. Mr. Minelli handed over a sheet of paper.

The man gave the paper a quick scrutiny and said, “Bring it on in.”

Micah and I were unloading quickly and getting ready to start taking the stuff inside when the man wearing the red necktie came over to us. He pointed at me and said, “You can take those bags and baskets right on in,” then pointed at Micah and told him in a gruff voice, “You can’t set foot inside there, understand?”

I didn’t know what was happening. I hadn’t seen Micah do anything wrong, like I’d done earlier with the ketchup at the church.

Just then Mr. Minelli walked up. The man in the necktie rushed over to him. I heard him say in a coarse whisper, “No damned Hebrews allowed in here, no kind of way. Don’t you know that?”

Mr. Minelli dropped his head, like a little boy being chastised. “Yeah, yeah. I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.”

The necktie man glowered at Micah. I thought he was going to say more, but he didn’t.

Mr. Minelli and I carried on with the work while Micah

POETRY

waited in the truck.

When we finished taking in the load, the necktie man handed Mr. Minelli an envelope, which I’m sure contained a check. The two men exchanged farewells. Mr. Minelli and I returned to the truck.

A Gothic silence held sway after we got rolling again.

Micah sat with his hands folded in his lap, staring out at the bleary fog. I didn’t know what to say, so I just kept quiet.

“Micah, I’m really sorry about what happened,” Mr. Minelli finally piped up. “That guy was a first-class jerk.

But let me tell you. There was a time when my people were discriminated against, and still are. And look what’s happening right now in the south.” He stared directly at me when he said that. “So, I guess all of us have to take a turn at being picked on in this world.”

We finished the route, almost in silence. Mr. Minelli tried to strike up conversation a few times, but Micah chilled things out with a seething vibration and rolling eyes. I talked to Mr. Minelli, if he directed his attention specifically at me, but I preferred to not say anything. I understood what had happened to Micah at the country club in an intuitive sense, but I didn’t understand the nitty gritty of it. But I knew Micah’s feelings were hurt real bad.

When we were back at the store, Mr. Minelli took us into his office and paid us. Apologized again for what had happened at the country club. He doubled our pay, and I think he gave Micah some extra money on the side.

That evening I got a chance to tell my father about what happened and how Mr. Minelli had tried to apologize afterward. Dad looked at me with a very sad expression on his face. “I feel so sorry for Micah. And I feel sorry for you, too, son. And for Mr. Minelli. You all were exposed to a strong dose of human ugliness. White folks are real strong on that in this country. This time it was directed against the Jewish boy. I suppose Joe could’ve spoke up, but I know he’s out there struggling to make a living like all the rest of us.”

I went to Minelli’s to work just two more Saturdays, then I stopped going. I think I came to dislike Mr. Minelli.

I’d lost respect for him.

The extra money from Mr. Minelli evidently did nothing to appease Micah. He never came back, and he stopped speaking to me at school and on the street. I think he might’ve felt more embarrassed than angry with me.

The friendship between Mr. Minelli and my dad got strained, too. My parents continued to buy fruits and vegetables from him, but also took more of their business elsewhere.

Many years later, I happened to cross paths again with Micah. He was working at a downtown jewelry store where I’d stopped in to look. Our gazes locked and we stared at each other for a long moment. I’m sure he recognized me.

But he said nothing.

Dear Englewood REGINALD RICE Only those of us who come from you understand. Even within the inner core of your madness there is beauty. This is the side of you that has never been seen.

Today they say bad things about you, their reports are short-sighted, good to suit the taste of today’s sensations.

But I still love you Englewood. Your harsh realities became the chisel that shaped my soul. I didn’t forget about you Englewood, Dear Englewood We made your vacant lots playgrounds Milk crates were carved and cut for full court Old sneakers became street ornaments that dangle From your power lines Your fire hydrants transformed our corners into water parks at dawn we pitched pennies along the cracks of your concrete Dear Englewood… your blocks were our universities Your corners became the designated location for our panel discussions your night-time skies were our philosophers, your alcoholics were our poets, but only those of us who come from you would understand. In the spring your rain drops became our libations, the rain water that accumulated in your potholes became our wishing wells. I often think of you Englewood…Dear Englewood what would our lives have been like if you weren’t economically deprived? Would I have had fewer friends who lost their lives? Would there have been better schools and parks?

Would I have seen fewer lives fall apart?

The Last Empty Bottle on The Road Less Travelled O.A. FRASER I am standing like the last, lone tooth in the rum breath of an old Black man, crooked and alone.

I am watching Donnie go to the gums, tooth by tooth: branding his puckered lips with the bottle’s searing arc.

I am standing motherless now handing Donnie bread on the sunless sidewalk where he gulped gin

I am standing on the shiny glass shards of a thousand green bottles that fell at Donnie’s feet

ten thousand times for the red eyed pain that is his illiterate life, losing his street tough to the sadness of the gun filled years.

after leaving a pink ring in the brown and purple pigment of his wasted mouth. (for Donnie)

AUGUST 2, 2017 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 11

ESSAY

the towering, slightly off-kilter bookshelves.

Ever-present, Hodge lurks atop the labyrinth of shelves, sprawls over the owner’s desk, naps on the rungs of a stepladder—and darts out the door if you aren’t looking as you enter.

The bookstore has the intimate DIY vibe of an apartment museum, like if it weren’t a bookstore it might’ve been a kitchen, a clubhouse, a salon-style café—or just the exquisitely cozy home of someone you were very fortunate to meet. Being there has the feel of perusing through someone’s personal collection or life’s library, brimming with stuff: art, posters, photographs, inside jokes, memorabilia, and ephemera of all kinds. A massive North Broadway street sign hangs overhead. An enormous iron candelabra rests against a window. A gargoyle shrugs under the weight of The Practical Gardener. Behind the desk is a snapshot of Keith’s wife, Gail Isenberg, flanked by two dear friends, now deceased. He keeps it as a reminder, both “of a joyous moment, and how fleeting everything is.” In the photograph, it is his wedding day.

A

The End of Chicago’s Best Bookstore With Cat

MALVIKA JOLLY

Saying goodbye to Selected Works

BY MALVIKA JOLLY

W

ith its collection of musicians, murals, theaters, artists’ studios, violin-makers, corsetieres; with its open-air courtyard that appears sudden as a breeze from the hollow of the fourth floor; with its streams of children hurrying to and from lessons—with all this strung together via a vintage elevator with operator, the Fine Arts Building on Michigan Avenue is one of the best places in the city to peer into windows in order to catch glimpses of the curious lives within. It’s the kind of place that seems, at times, to contain every imaginable thing or 12 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

¬ AUGUST 2, 2017

person you could ever wish to meet. But its most tempting window—the eye of the Fine Arts Building—belongs to the second-floor storefront, which was, until recently, home to the Selected Works Used Books and Sheet Music bookstore.

Colloquially referred to as “Chicago’s Best Bookstore With Cat,” Selected Works is the creation of Hyde Park resident Keith Peterson and has been a Chicago institution for the past thirty-three years. And although it was located on the North Side before moving to its home in the Fine Arts Building

downtown, Selected Works was a satellite South Side haunt through and through.

I

t all starts with the pearl-grey cat. Hodge, named after Samuel Johnson’s muchbeloved cat, is the bookstore’s permanent resident—and somewhat famous, as the star of a series of books written by Hyde Park writer Suzanne Erfurth and illustrated by Beatriz E. Ledesma. (The first two can be found at 57th Street Books and the Sprocket & Stone pet shop, with a third upcoming.)

The cat occupies a delicate symbiosis with

stomping ground for countless Hyde Park patrons, the bookstore closed its doors in June due to a decline in print book sales. “It’s no secret that the culture is drifting in the direction of digital media, entertainment, online merchandising,” explained Keith.

“Having shaken things up like this, my future life is not clear to me—which is an exciting thing, the sort of anxious excitement I’ve felt only a few times in my life—going off to college for the first time, starting my first store back in 1984, getting married,” he told me. “I didn’t really know how any of those big decisions were going to play out. So—I’m actually sort of tingling with excitement as well as anxiety.”

D

espite being a frequent visitor, I cannot tell you how many rooms the bookstore contained. Nor can I hazard any guess as to how the original floorplan might’ve looked (so liberal was Keith’s creative license when putting the place together that his patrons were directed through various book-lined and cozy hideaways). But I can tell you with confidence that, from the single chair in the tiny southernmost room, in the worst of winter, you could sit cozily drying your boots on the radiator, gazing out onto the churning grey lake. I can tell you that it was the place I found my favorite play (Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood), in a slender New Directions printing, tucked between

POETRY

a Chaucer and I forget what, priced at three dollars. I can tell you that Selected Works was an easy place to strike up a conversation. And that it was even easier to echolocate to, exhibiting the same psychological magnetism usually reserved for one’s grammar schools and former apartments, and that you were prone to turn up there when getting off the northbound 6 bus, after a play at DePaul, or just bicycling through downtown on the way to someplace else.

And I can tell you that you were always greeted by just the right sort of party— whether on Second Fridays at the Fine Arts Building, when Keith would put out wine and potato chips, or right after closing up on a weekday, when you were all off to an old Italian dive nearby. These are the same kinds of gatherings you still can find in Hyde Park at Jimmy’s or the Cove, or in various Victorian homes and shotgun apartments scattered throughout the South Side, but the bookstore will be dearly missed. It is a reminder that you can live elsewhere for a long time, but you are still always leaving something behind. Selected Works felt like home, because it was.

The Take Back PARIS CLARK I can’t relate to hip hop anymore Instrumentals and old samples of R&B and Hip Hop songs are haunting It tells of a time when a man wore his heart on his sleeve to honor the love of his life A time when you learned how to accept heartache and pain A time when intentions were honest and true Catchy beats and lyrics move us to dance our way into a lifestyle of, “I don’t know how to value my heart and body, so I’ll give it to you to value for me”

T

he Selected Works space will be taken over by Mary Gibbons and Aaron Lippelt, cofounders of Pilsen Community Books. They will be opening a new bookstore called The Dial (a nod to the famous literary magazine published in the Fine Arts Building from 1896 to 1916), due to open in early October. Keith has encouraged them to acquire a cat of their own, as, in his words, “A day will not go by without someone coming in looking for Hodge. Another cat might ease the distress of not finding him.” ¬

Self- wrapped into timelines Self- found through double taps Purpose found through a virtual “revolution” We have evolution ourselves to document everything We pride ourselves to post our highs, but secretly die inside about our lows Take back Let’s take back our minds, bodies, and spirits Take back Let’s take back living intentionally MALVIKA JOLLY

Take back To a time where we slow down A time to reflect A time to heal Take back Our time to read, To learn, To get a revelation, To start a revolution AUGUST 2, 2017 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 13

From the Mixed-Up Zine Shelves of Build Coffee Build Coffee—opened this summer by two former South Side Weekly editors—is a coffee shop and bookstore directly next door to the Weekly office in the Experimental Station. They stock a mix of used and new books, including a wall of mostly-local zines, chapbooks, comics, and artist books. The following pages, chosen with great neighborly affection, are excerpts from some of their favorite Chicago presses and artists on those shelves: Bigmouth Comix, Let It Sink, 7Vientos, Half Letter Press, Low Key Label, and Brown & Proud Press.

Let It Sink Let It Sink is a long-running zine by Jim Joyce, a writer from Morgan Park. These pages are excerpted from Let It Sink #6: dreamtigers.

YAHOO QUESTIONS There is some confusion on the web as to Tigers and their distribution in the Americas. We turn to Yahoo Questions for the big answers. Tigerfan2379 writes, “Are there Tigers in the Americas.” Answers appear as follows.

1.) “No, but the Spanish name for the jaguar is ‘el tigre’.

Maybe that’s what you are thinking of.”

2.) “No! All tigers are in Asia.”

3.) “No there aren’t, answer mine please!” Asks Amy V, who is trying to find a good name for her baby.

1 14 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

WE ARE HERE BECAUSE THE ARSONIST FAILED Mark is my landlord and he and his friends slink around this thin building and sweep their hands through sheets of spider webs like it’s nothing.

At the apartment 2021 S. Halsted, Mark and us are all leaning against unworkable radiators and getting antsy in the unheatable rooms we occupy. Now that it’s winter weathery, the building’s people traffic has paused.

Mark’s friend, The Shirtless Man, disappears from the kitchen. The spiders have withdrawn to their corners, the moths are nowhere to be seen. The fleas, soaked in lavender & sliced in diatomaceous earth & clouded with poison are gone now, too.

“I don’t drink,” Mark says, looking at a sizeable pile of beer cans near my trashbin. “And I don’t smoke weed, either.”

I nod.

“You might smell it sometimes,” he says, “and I might smoke a little for my achy joints – because I’m getting older – but I don’t smoke that stuff. Not really ever.”

About once a week he catches me by the door with my groceries, tells me a story. All I can do is set down my bags and drink his coffee, which he scoops from an uncapped Alto Grande tin. Sugar cubes are in an ashtray. Ants bivouacs the counter. Mark drops a sugar cube into a mug and we discuss the alderman.

“I’ve got enemies, Jim,” he tells me. “You know somebody tried to burn this place down in the 90s. Rear of the building,” he says, gesturing with a cigarette. “They slipped lit papers under the door. Oh yeah. That was a big fire,” he says, and his eyes travel far, far away.

2 ¬ AUGUST 2, 2017

Bigmouth Comix is a distro featuring the work of femme and gender non-conforming artists from African, Middle East, Muslim, South Asian countries and their diaspora(s).

These pages are excerpted from Kawtar Azzouzi’s All The White Boys That Broke My Heart. Azzouzi is a first-generation Moroccan artist living in Chicago.

Bigmouth Comix

ZINES

AUGUST 2, 2017 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 15

Brown & Proud Press Brown and Proud Press is a collective of people of color with the intent of sharing personal narratives of struggle through the medium of zines as a catalyst for collective healing and social change. These pages are excerpted from their Home Zine— “Casa. Casa. casita” by Daisy Zamora and “Bringing Out the Home in Me” by Luz Magdaleno Flores.

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ZINES

Half Letter Press Half Letter Press is a publishing imprint run by Brett Bloom and Marc Fischer, who have been publishing booklets together since 1998. These pages are excerpted from Sonic Meditations by 10 Deep Listeners, a tribute to Pauline Oliveros.

AUGUST 2, 2017 ÂŹ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 17

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ยฌ AUGUST 2, 2017

Low Key Label is a new experimental brand of DIY arts events, comics, apparel, and music. These pages are excerpted from Kanye Stops Kanye from Interrupting Taylor Swift: A Time Travel Adventure, a comic written by Cameron Del Rosario and illustrated by Javier Suรกrez.

Low Key Label

ZINES

AUGUST 2, 2017 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 19

from The Illustrated Biography of Mishima MARIO BELLATIN

Mishima’s childhood camera

7Vientos 7Vientos is a bilingual publishing house based in Chicago. These pages are excerpted from Mario Bellatin’s novellas Flowers & Mishima’s Illustrated Biography, which have been printed together in both Spanish and English.

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¬ AUGUST 2, 2017

They give the impression of being content. Some seem to have reached a certain state of ecstasy, which Mishima suspects may be due to consuming some particular substance.

He gathers that in order to reach it, they must have completed a series of spiritual exercises.

Shinto rituals, specifically. There are people of different ages. Old women. German children.

Two of Mishima’s friends can be found standing on the balcony. From there they take in a wide maritime panorama. Mishima is standing next to a boy. Minutes later, the two leave the terrace. While they walk they come across a man, in front of whom the boy falls to his knees. It bothers Mishima to see him in that position. He returns alone. He sees the shoes that belong to his friends who just seconds before had been contemplating the sea. They have been left abandoned at the edge of the abyss.

Mishima isn’t present at the balcony now. He can be found on a school’s campus where he’s going to give a presentation about Yukio Mishima. At the entrance a series of books are handed out. Translations published in impeccable editions. Suddenly a professor, who looks Japanese, enters the room. Mishima notices that the professor has brought an apparatus that, once it’s set up, will begin to show a film about reality. We are fixated on the screen. The first image shows the quad of a very prestigious institution. It’s the school where we are all gathered. We suddenly discover the shield that serves as its emblem. We think that perhaps the teacher has devised a new teaching method, with the help of the apparatus that he had set up in the middle of the room.

Mishima stays in the room with his air of superiority. He looks like a man in his forties.

He dresses in a military uniform and is missing his head. He is a renowned writer and knows that we in the room are merely people with limited cultural knowledge. Among those in attendance, he discovers a woman with whom he had gone to university. Almost without speaking to each other, they engage in a strange exchange of shoes. It’s an ancient custom, but some of the people gathered there seem surprised. Still, a man in the front row applauds the initiative. Mishima then tells us he has imperial status, and that makes almost any of his actions valid. He adds that the lecture will surely begin when the professor asks about Yukio Mishima. He is sure he knows more than anyone else. He tries to remember passages from his own life. All he can think about is the suicide. And the scandal that followed.

The memory of his wife hearing the news on her car’s radio. He starts to become delirious, imagining himself as an old man. He sees himself telling a series of classic anecdotes— parables featuring a mouse. All of a sudden his friend from the university—the one with whom he’d performed the odd shoe exchange—presents him with a book that has water and sand trapped in the cover. Inside, embedded in the pages, are splinters and miniscule specks that could be bamboo. Mishima opens the book and is astonished.

In its pages is a photo of an object with a short caption next to it. Just an object. In the middle of a void. And a sentence of three or four words. Something delicate. Mishima plans to create something similar. He wants to put together a book like this one, with some text and an object. First he thinks maybe he’ll use elementary school picture flashcards to put it together. Then he feels it should be something cleaner. He decides that he’ll take pictures of objects with a camera given to him as a child. He’ll find an empty space, just white, and there begin to place, one by one, the chosen elements.

Mishima knows that the images taken with the camera given to him as a child would never be seen by anyone. In a way, those figures never existed. It was so difficult to work that instrument, so hard to find a good darkroom in those days, that for Mishima the act of taking pictures was more like a simulation. The result of the process never seemed important. The rolls of film from that time remained completely forgotten.

ZINES

An example of the “ghost pictures” Mishima took

Top: A character Morita invented: a father who abandons his family’s home Bottom: A pair of analysts that worked on Mishima’s case

AUGUST 2, 2017 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 21

Black Authors Speak Beyond the Page The Weekly talked to four authors and publishers at Soulful Chicago Book Fair, a one-day, four-block event that highlights independent Black authors

BY ELLEN HAO

Joy Triche, Tiger Stripe Publishing Joy Triche stands behind a table strewn with books. One of the picture books has pages covered in purple space dust and aqua stars. On one page, a nine-year-old boy called Q is tucked into bed, as his father tasks him with an important mission with solar stakes.

Turn the page over, and Q transforms into Super-Q, a dreamscape hero complete with electric blue gloves and a gleaming violet helmet.

But when Q isn’t zipping around space and dashing between galaxies, you can find him and his dad, an “L” train driver, on the South Side. Q, short for Qadeer, is AfricanAmerican. The book, Q Saves the Sun, is a South Side production. Written by Isaac Perry and illustrated by Shomari Harrington, Q Saves the Sun is one of Tiger Stripe Publishing’s main titles.

Tiger Stripe Publishing takes its name from Sam and the Tigers, a children’s book that retells the racist story Little Black Sambo.

Triche founded the independent publishing company in 2014 with the mission of increasing the number of books that feature underrepresented characters. She had wanted to start her own publishing company since she was in high school, but figuring out the mission of her company came from her experiences as a mother. Looking for books that her son could connect with, Triche realized that today, the offerings are still slim.

“I knew that if I was having a problem, that it was probably an issue that other people were dealing with.”

Searching for the right children’s book is about more than just choosing the right message. Books and characters often stay with you on a fundamental level of relation. “One of my favorite children’s books growing up was The Snowy Day, and I grew up in Arizona, and I realized that I had nothing in common with Peter except that he was Black,” Triche recounted. “And so I think it’s important for 22 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

¬ AUGUST 2, 2017

children to see themselves reflected in books, whether we are cognizant of that or not as children.”

For a few years, Q Saves the Sun was Tiger Stripe Publishing’s only offering, but today at the Soulful Chicago Book Fair, Q is just one of Tiger Stripe’s many diverse characters.

YAWN! The Yawn that Went ’Round the World travels the globe, while How I Became We features a purple gender-neutral character.

Looking ahead, Triche hopes to publish books with Native American characters, and characters whose parents are in prison.

At American Library Association (ALA) panels, Triche, who has worked on the ALA advisory board for the past three years, always finds interest in diverse books. “There’s always someone, a librarian especially, who comes up and says, ‘We need a book about this,’ ‘We need a book about this.’”

Diverse representation can be as simple as a child who wears glasses, Triche tells me.

“It’s almost overwhelming to think about the number of ways that you can hit the different people who are in need of something that reflects them.” While conversation about diverse books has been increasing, and many big publishers have started filling the gap, Triche has reservations. “It’s trendy right now,” Triche explained, “[but] once it’s not a trend anymore, we will still be here focusing on diverse books.”

Publishers don’t usually get the opportunity to see and meet their readers, so book fairs like Soulful Chicago are rare glimpses for Triche to see Tiger Stripe’s impact. Recalling one experience at a book fair, Triche tells me how one boy grabbed a copy of Q Saves the Sun and dashed off. One hour later, he came back with his mother after grudgingly sifting through the fair’s other offerings, bought the book, sat right down on the tarmac, and finished it from cover to cover.

“And he was Caucasian as a matter of fact.”

Paris Clark, The Take Back “Self- wrapped into timelines / Self-

found through double taps / Purpose found through a virtual ‘revolution’ / We have evolution ourselves / to document everything,” Paris Clark reads the first eponymous poem in her collection of poetry, The Take Back. She takes care to pause for beats and crafts rhythm with each syllable.

The Take Back is Clark’s first book. A recent graduate of Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia, Clark grew up on the West Side in Austin.

It’s Clark’s second book fair. Her first was the Black History Month Book Fair in February, also organized by Asadah Kirkland, the founder of the Soulful Chicago Book Fair. When I first come across Clark’s stall, she is standing in front of her table, adjusting copies of her book into precise cascades. Her grandmother sits on the other side. “Normally I’m a big extrovert, love socializing, but for some reason, I felt kind of shy to just sell my own book,” Clark said. “But I thought about it, and I’m going to be my biggest seller, so I need to get up and advocate and sell.”

Many of the poems in The Take Back are deeply personal. After college, Clark returned to the West Side, and worked as an employment specialist at the nonprofit New Moms. “I worked with young women that were of my age, but the difference was, some of them were young mothers, some of them experienced homelessness or traumatic events that put them in our care, to need our services.”

“At that time, I would come home, and [poetry] was really my outlet,” Clark continued. “There were a lot of emotional days, and this was my self-care.” While Clark wrote many of the poems as a teenager, in 2015 and early 2016, she would write poems as a method of reflection and “finding out what was the difference between me and these young women, what led me down my path of ‘success,’ and then them struggling to find ways to make ends meet.” Collecting new and old pieces together, Clark hopes to highlight the black woman’s experience in The Take Back and examine how environments

shape people’s identities. Topics like faith, family, food deserts, and technology come up throughout the book.

For Clark, the poems are an exercise in reclaiming identity. The title of her debut book comes from this idea of ownership and self-possession. “You’re kind of taking back your self-identity, taking back your healing, taking back faith, regardless of where you may have dropped those off or along the path.”

Clark is hoping that through The Take Back, she can increase awareness of social injustices, and encourage other people to read, write, and reflect. One poem, titled “Catch-22,” is Clark’s rumination on violence within communities and violence acted upon communities. Another called “Sitting at Your Elder’s Feet” is a reminder to listen to others.

Using poetry, Clark wants to send out a callto-action.

As one of the youngest at the book fair, Clark knows she has a ways to go. What’s next for Clark? Her upcoming book, Where the Soulless Live, will be a break from poetry, as she explores today’s society through short stories that play on the seven deadly sins. Oh, and she’s possibly going to graduate school for an MBA; she sees her future in sustainable, community-focused entrepreneurship. “I need to continue on,” Clark said. “I need to just push forward. There’s no need for me to wait, because if this is my passion, then I should make time to do it.”

Eddie Rogers II “There’s ten bullet points, pick one.”

Eddie Rogers II opens his book, Relationship Starts with “Relate,” to a random page. He has just grabbed from a wooden heart-shaped shelf that doubles as a podium. The text on the page is entirely written in bullet points. A quick flip-through of the book shows that this is true for the book as a whole.

“Relationship should be an adventure, not torture,” I read. As I finish the sentence, Rogers has already begun expounding on the seven words, what they mean for relationships,

PROFILES

how provocative they can be. “I didn’t tell you what to do, but that’s something to think about,” he finishes.

Bullet points and line breaks, bolded titles and emphatic punctuation (“!!!”), Relationship Starts with “Relate” is not organized by themes or steps. Rogers started writing two years ago.

“I had a mess of notes everywhere. I had them on those thin pieces of paper straws come in, napkins, paper plates, real paper, all kinds of stuff, and I said, I can’t keep this mess anymore,” Rogers said. He typed his notes in bullet points, thinking that one day he would come back and rewrite them. “But when it came time to finish the book, I had over twenty pages of bullet points, and I thought, I’m just going to leave it in this order.” The final product is thirty-seven pages.

The book is a starting point. Filled with aphorisms and underlines, Relationship Starts with “Relate” is a slapdash, quick-start way to generate discussion about relationships. “This book is just full of bait,” says Rogers. The first time Rogers gave a talk on his book, what was a one-way speech to a crowd quickly became an active discussion. “It just started popping like popcorn. The conversation, I thought, was getting out of control,” Rogers recalled.

“I thought, you know, I’m the speaker here, you guys should be listening to me. But then I realized, wait a minute, this is great!” Rogers begins snapping his fingers, and tells me, “Everybody has some feedback, everybody is involved, and I sat back and thought, ‘Yes, this is what I wanted.’ It’s generating conversation and changing the texture of relationship talks.”

Rogers’s philosophy, at its core, is simple.

You already know what you want. You are your own relationship expert. “When you go out to eat, you know what’s going to make you sick; what tastes nasty to you; you know what was great to you last time,” he explained. “You know yourself in that way so you can eliminate eighty percent of the menu already…because you know yourself in that dietary way.”

Relationship Starts with “Relate” is just the first of Rogers’s three books. In the past two years, Rogers has also written Some Afterthoughts and AfterSHOCKS, a sequel to his first book, and YOUR CAREER HERO, a professional self-help book. Rogers currently works in social services for the state of Illinois (“I might write a book about that because I have a lot to say about that”), but hopes to become a full-time writer and speaker. Most of his writing has been motivated by one idea: “Don’t be late to your future.”

“I thought for a while that I was off

BRIDGET VAUGHN

AUGUST 2, 2017 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 23

schedule in getting to my future,” Rogers explained. “Once time is gone or misused, we can’t get it back and it’s a terrible thing.

It’s almost like dropping a cellphone in Lake Michigan, and you just have to watch it go down. And unless you have scuba gear and plan on going to get it, it’s gone. And that feeling of ‘Oh no,’ I don’t want people to go through that.”

But Rogers doesn’t want any credit for his readers’ relationship or career successes and failures. His project is trying to get his readers to take charge over their own lives, and claim responsibility for their actions.

“Just give me that peace sign or that ‘Hey, you gave me a lot to think about,’ but whatever you do after that is your business.”

Bernard Turner “I think they taught more history when I was a kid,” says Bernard Turner. At sixty-nine years old, Turner is an author, historian, and tour guide, with seventeen years of docent experience at the Chicago History Museum under his belt. At Soulful Chicago Book Fair, Turner shows one facet of his experiences through his the children’s books and neighborhood tour guides.

They’re informative and educational, with titles like Tate and His Historic Dream and Chicago Neighborhoods with Flavor: Getting Out of the Loop.

Turner founded Highlights of Chicago Press in 2002. His first book, A View of Bronzeville, is homage to the neighborhood he was born in. “That’s where I was born, and my father owned a gas station there,” Turner said. “And I wanted to be an expert in something. So I decided, that’s what I’m going to be an expert on.”

Turner’s work focuses on Black history, filling in the gaps left out in school curriculums. Stories that were once common knowledge, like that of Bud Billiken, are no longer familiar tales for today’s children. Recording these histories in digestible formats, finding traces of history in these neighborhoods today, Turner works to preserve culture. “Now they don’t get a chance to teach people about their culture and so forth, and I think that’s important,” Turner said. “There are kids out there who have never been to other neighborhoods, that’s a problem. That’s why we’re so fractured in this country.”

Turner himself enjoyed a crossboundary upbringing. He was born in

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Bronzeville in 1948, when the racial covenants that prevented people from moving to other neighborhoods were overturned. He moved to Chatham, attended Hirsch High School, and through the Permissive Transfer Plan was able to attend Senn High School on the North Side. “Just imagine what an education that was, to go to another neighborhood, another school, where there [felt like] two hundred languages spoken in that school.”

At last year’s inaugural Soulful Chicago Book Fair, Turner found a warm reception to his books. People came to the book fair from as far as Evanston, and asked Turner to visit their schools. But bureaucracy is often the key barrier Turner faces in getting his books to children. “The Chicago Public Library [has] such a rigid system of acquiring books that independent people like me, I have to go and beg them...and it shouldn’t be like that.”

With Chicago Public Schools, Turner’s vending license gets him through the door.

He fares better than other independent authors, but not because of the substance of his books. “They don’t look at the books before they give you a vending number,” Turner said. “They only look at your finances. That’s all they care about.”

Soulful Chicago Book Fair and its associated events, Black History Book Fair and Kwanzaa Book Fair, are an important step in opening up pathways for independent authors to get Black history books into children’s hands. These book fairs are some of the only Black-focused book fairs in the area. At Soulful Chicago Book Fair, Turner gets direct access to his readers. For independent authors, book fairs like these are opportunities to be visible to potential audiences, and get their books in readers’ hands with fewer barriers.

But progress is slow-going. “It’s coming along,” Turner said, “but not nearly quickly enough.” [1] Tiger Stripe Publishing. From $14.99. tigerstripepub.com [2] Paris Clark, The Take Back. $16.49.

Lulu Publishing Services. 87 pages. lulu.com [3] Eddie Rogers II, Relationship Starts With “Relate.” $10. Lulu Publishing Services. 37 pages. lulu.com [4] Bernard C. Turner and Michelle Duster, Tate and His Historic Dream. $14.95.

Highlights of Chicago Press. 40 pages. highlightsofchicago.com

¬ AUGUST 2, 2017

You Can Always Count On Me

Letters between CPS students challenge boundaries, barriers, and stereotypes

BY ELAINE CHEN

“O

ne of my uncle’s friends who is my friend too asked us to give him a kiss to the cheek...When I tried to do it, he turned his head and I kissed him on the lips instead of the cheek. That’s when I learned not to trust everyone.” Cung Lieu wrote this reply to Krystal Nambo after she asked him to share about a crazy memory he had.

Vanessa Cruz also wrote about trust.

At the end of her first letter to Jazmine Rodriguez, she added: “P.S. By the way, Jazmine, you sound like a person I can trust.”

This piercingly candid line ended up inspiring the title of the newest book published by youth writing nonprofit 826CHI, P.S. You Sound Like Someone I Can Trust.

826CHI, the local chapter of 826 National, fosters the writing skills of students ages six to eighteen through tutoring and workshops. As part of its Young Author’s Book Project, 826CHI coordinated a series of letter exchanges between eighth graders at Emiliano Zapata Academy in Little Village and tenth graders at Amundsen High School in Ravenswood. The organization paired students based on their answers to a survey asking about interests and hobbies, and then met up with the students once a week throughout the school year to workshop the letters. The product is a collection of twentynine pairs of letter exchanges.

Flipping through the pages, seeing only the words written by each student, the occasional doodles dotting the margins, feels similar to how the students must have felt when receiving the letters—consuming every bit of information about unfamiliar and faceless individuals—until the end of each exchange reveals pictures and biographies of the students involved.

The letters, in their youthful bluntness, are refreshingly amusing: “I’m going to ask

you only five questions since this is the last letter,” writes one student. Two questions later: “Okay, I know I said that I was going to ask you five questions, but my head is out of questions.”

The candor is at times shocking—the students’ word choices wonderfully conveying the complexities in their minds. “The first thing I remember remembering is my friend Jasmin. She died when I was in sixth grade,” one student wrote.

Another student, responding to an 826CHI writing prompt asking what hope is, answered, “The word hope to me is honestly just a word… My dad was desperate to stick by my side and be there for me as he was getting sicker. So, he hoped and prayed he’d get better, yet that got him nowhere. He hoped, but I guess it just wasn’t good enough.”

Maria Villarreal, Director of Programs at 826CHI, said that the mode of letter-writing prompted this openness. When 826CHI visited the students’ classrooms, its members organized activities in which they asked students, “Who are you?” The members tried to encourage the students to look at drafts of their letters and ask themselves, “Is this true of who you are?” By asking this of the students, the organizers pushed them to reflect further on their work and thoughts, allowing them to express themselves more easily to others.

Many students bonded over common music or reading interests, but of course the most memorable exchanges were those in which the students exposed their most vulnerable selves. Jazmine Rodriguez, one of the Amundsen tenth-graders, now interns at 826CHI after she met Villarreal through this project. Her exchange with Vanessa, the Zapata eighth-grader whose postscript gave the book its name, yielded an intimate and enriching relationship between the two.

The two have learned from one another

REVIEW

in unexpected ways, with Rodriguez and Cruz often sharing and receiving advice from one another. After seeing Cruz postscript at the end of the first letter, Rodriguez explained she “teared up a little bit.” Seeing how open Cruz was, Rodriguez thought, “You know what, let me put my guard down and tell her something about my personal life that I don’t normally tell people.” She opened-up about her father who abandoned her family, explaining that detail as “a dead rose in my heart.” And in her last letter to Cruz, Rodriguez wrote: “I wish someone would’ve told me this: be wise and always be as humble as you are now.”

While Rodriguez gave Cruz seasoned advice, Cruz incited Rodriguez to abandon barriers. “That’s one thing Vanessa did for me,” Rodriguez recalled. “Sometimes I would walk in on a Tuesday being like I really don’t wanna be doing this, but when I would sit down and space away from all my friends and not get distracted and actually wrote, amazing things happened from that.”

What Cruz did for Rodriguez, the students did for me. Reading through these honest stories, making me smile and sigh and pause, I was transported back to days where I don’t remember stopping myself before opening my mouth or replaying what I had just said after the words had escaped.

The honesty of the students provokes questioning the boundaries we put up between ourselves and the world—boundaries that affect how we present ourselves to others, but, more importantly, how we see others.

The students’ accounts add authentic perspectives to and challenge the narratives that people often hear about Chicago Public Schools (CPS). CPS has been called a failing school district, its students accused of lagging behind the “average” student (although in fact, CPS students score higher on standardized tests than comparable students statewide).

People often hear about Chicago schools and students in a negative light, said Eric Markowitz, one of the Amundsen students’ teachers for the project. The students have challenged this narrative in creating “such an entertaining and great book like this.” He would be surprised “if [people’s] opinions don’t change into something positive” after reading the book.

“These kids are CPS kids,” said Tanya Nguyen, the Amundsen students’ English teacher. “They have different experiences and challenges and even triumphs than kids that are in different districts.”

The letters don’t let you forget this.

One student from Amundsen talks about “dodging bullets on a day-to-day basis in

[their] neighborhood,” explaining it is like “playing a survival game.” Another student from Zapata writes in a different exchange, “In my neighborhood at 7 am it is quiet and normal. But at 7 pm it’s dark outside, the street lights don’t work, and you can hear cars firing because they go too fast on speed bumps.

Where I live, there is also lots of killing.”

However, the students also share anecdotes about kissing mishaps and the trust they feel for their friends. Regardless of the challenge, the student’s writing sets them apart from the stereotypes of the CPS label.

As Nguyen said, what’s “really powerful” is that “there is this publication that celebrates all of these things that make our kids unique and special and strong.”

The letters also challenge broader narratives of residents in Latinx communities.

“Students of color, students that are part of an immigrant community...have been vilified in different ways this year in the political climate that we’re in,” Eliza Ramirez, the Zapata students’ English language arts and writing teacher, said. The letters’ publication is so important, Ramirez said, because the students “got this chance to tell their stories and to talk about who they are.”

When recognition across shared humanity occurs, like Rodriguez had said of the writing process, “amazing things” can happen. The letters foster this recognition in the book’s readers, but also, in the first place, in the students who wrote the letters, who live in two different neighborhoods fourteen miles apart. Ultimately, the importance of the publication traces back to these students.

Rodriguez and Cruz, for example, sustained their exchanges after the project ended. At the book’s launch event, many students were shy to talk to their letter partners, as it was the first time they were allowed to meet. “It was hilarious,” Villarreal said, like a middle school dance except with eighth graders on one side and tenth graders on the other. Yet, when Rodriguez saw Cruz, “I just gave her a huge hug, I was like, ‘Hi! I’ve been waiting to meet you for so long.’”

Afterwards, they exchanged phone numbers. According to Rodriguez, some other students also connected on social media. Rodriguez promised Cruz that she would respond quickly, not “in three weeks,” which is how long the letters often took to be exchanged. “I told her: ‘I’m always here for you…. You can always count on me.’”

What she told Cruz in her last letter seems to be truly lasting: “P.S. You’ll always be my best friend.” ¬

826CHI and the students of the 2017 Young Authors Book Project, P.S. You Sound Like Someone I Can Trust. $20. All sales support 826CHI. secretagentsupply.com

AUGUST 2, 2017 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 25

PROFILE

They’re All Around Us

Chicago author partners with young illustrator to tell a story of joyful Black boys

BY ASHVINI KARTIK-NARAYAN

T

hree summers ago, Chicago writer Valerie Reynolds realized that she never saw smiling Black boys on television.

A few months later, Reynolds took a trip to Target looking for a book on Martin Luther King, Jr. for her young daughters.

“Not only were there no children’s books about Martin Luther King,” Reynolds said, “there were no books that represented little Black boys—none in Target [in] the South Loop.”

Instead, the media often portrays Black boys and men as angry, criminal, and dangerous.

Reynolds noted how the ramifications of these biases manifest in police brutality and mass incarceration. “Black men are suffering the consequences of death, from people having this fear that’s created for them by media outlets,” Reynolds said.

There are countless examples: in the case of seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin, George Zimmerman justified shooting Martin because his description—essentially, a tall Black male—fit that of burglars who had apparently recently hit a few of the homes in his neighborhood.

Reynolds decided to do something about it. She is now working on a children’s picture book showcasing the joy she knows and loves in little Black boys. Through The Joys of Being a Little Black Boy, which will be

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¬ AUGUST 2, 2017

available in late September in schools and bookstores across the country, Valerie hopes to educate and empower Black boys and men against negative media stereotypes.

“In the South Side, it’s just families— it’s families who are working every day, sending their kids to school, and raising their kids in the same way as families on the North Side of Chicago, in Wisconsin, or in Ohio. It’s very similar, but the media conveys it [differently],” Reynolds said.

“I wanted to create something that showed the little Black boys that I remember growing up with in my youth, because I know they’re all around us.”

One of these joyful boys that Reynolds has seen grow up is the book’s illustrator, Chris Turner. The two have known each other since Turner was born, which wasn’t all that long ago—Turner is now nineteen.

Reynolds approached Turner, whom she refers to as an “extended family member,” about doing the project’s artwork when he was seventeen.

“She just hit me up and sent me an email asking if I wanted to take the opportunity to do a professional job and be an illustrator for a published book,” Turner said. After taking some time to balance his commitments (at the time, he was still in the middle of a semester in school), he eagerly agreed.

“This is my first time being an illustrator for a book, so it was a learning process...it was

different, but it was very fun.”

The book centers on the main character, Roy, and opens in a class assembly. “He takes his classmates on what we call a journey of joy in Black men,” Reynolds said. Roy encounters and interacts with a variety of Black historical figures throughout the story; with each encounter, he learns more about African-American history and the amazing past of the people who came before him. “It’s sort of reminding his classmates that all these men we marvel at now as Black men were once Black boys,” Reynolds said.

The book was made for children. “It rhymes, it’s cute, it’s fun, so it’s very light,” Reynolds said. “If anything, one thing they will for sure leave with is a really good, deep history lesson.”

Reynolds took a unique route to publication, choosing to fund the book’s printing and distribution through a Kickstarter that people from around the country could donate to. “We figured this would be a really good platform for us to raise money to publish the book and to create a market name and buzz before the book actually hits retailers,” Reynolds said.

She published with the help of Hurston

Media Group, a boutique consulting firm focused on “urban” millennials.

“Black boy joy is something that every boy, every Black boy has,” Turner said. For Turner, “Black boy joy” involves overcoming the obstacles put in the way of Black boys and men throughout their lives. “The way to continue to do that is to do it with joy, and just to keep being happy and making sure that the people that slow you down don’t get the better of you,” he said.

Turner hopes that the book can really hit home for Black boys just like him, and that it will further the conversation that empowers little Black boys to dream big.

“I think a lot of people aren’t encouraged to do big things a lot of the time because they don’t see people that look like them doing those things,” Turner said. “So if a kid can learn this real early on, that the world is theirs and that they can be happy and be successful, I did my job as an illustrator and that’s a really big gift for me.” Valerie Reynolds, The Joys of Being a Little Black Boy. Illustrated by Chris Turner.

Hurston Media Group. Available September 2017. bit.ly/JoysOfBeingALittleBlackBoy

INTERVIEW

A Calling and a Responsibility Children’s author Senyah Haynes on teaching Black history through storybooks

BY NICOLE BOND

S

outh Side Weekly Stage & Screen Editor Nicole Bond recently had a chat with children’s author Senyah Haynes. Haynes has worked with the Gary Comer Youth Center for over ten years, and is the Founder and Executive Director of Diasporal Discoveries, a nonprofit that connects youth to the history and culture of the African diaspora. In this conversation, what started out as two old friends catching up over coffee turned into a discussion about the role and responsibility of literature to its youngest audience.

Okay, so speaking of ‘lit issues,’ first of all, what has always fascinated me about you is that your name is a palindrome! Did your parents do that on purpose? I mean, they had to know, right?

Ha! By the time I was thirty I could still count on one hand the number of people who came to that on their own. Anyway, yes, it’s a palindrome, which is a word, phrase, or series of numbers that can be read the same forward and backwards. And yes, my parents did it on purpose—though Mama said it was her genius and Daddy said it was his, you know how it is.

So other than writing a palindrome every time you write your name, talk to me about what else you write.

Right now I write children’s adventure books that get young people moving across the map in their minds, and learning that as they travel across the map, the African footprint has been everywhere they visit. It’s a series called Jayla’s Jaunts, where a little girl and her magical auntie travel from state to state and learn about the Black history and culture in each place they visit.

How did you come up with this idea? Okay, wait—has anyone told you Jayla’s Jaunts feels a little like Octavia Butler’s Kindred?

I mean, if Kindred wasn’t a sci-fi thriller and scary as all get out. But it has that

mystical time travel thing happening. Say more about these characters, for people who didn’t get to read the books, like I did.

I think someone did mention that. And as much as I love Octavia Butler, do you know, I haven’t read Kindred, so I don’t get the connection, but I’ll take your word for it and I’ll add it to my reading list. So, in the first book, Jayla, the main character, meets her Auntie Yah-Yah and very quickly finds out she has magic powers—she has a “tiny glittered, purse” that holds anything imaginable, she switches between being a young woman and an elder depending on whether or not she’s teaching, and at the snap of her fingers she can transport them to another place or time. Anyway, Jayla spins a globe that has come from her auntie’s magical purse, and when it stops spinning her finger lands on the United States of America. So her auntie asks her what’s the first state that begins with the letter A, and then off they go, exploring Alabama! They magically time travel from Selma to Tuskegee and learn about Black pioneers such as Rosa Parks, Booker T. Washington, George Washington Carver, and the Tuskegee Airmen.

They also learn about the marches from Selma to Montgomery on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. In the second book, Adventures in Alaska, they travel through the great outdoors and learn about the Black soldiers who helped build the Alaskan highway—the road that finally connected Alaska to the lower forty-eight states, and they learn about the conditions those men lived in under in a segregated army.

These stories are so important for every child to learn, but for Black children especially, yet they are not always taught in schools. Was this just a creative calling for you, or did you feel some kind of responsibility to write this particular series?

It’s both, a calling to be sure, and absolutely

a responsibility. I am responsible for making sure there isn’t the information gap between my generation and the next, that there was between mine and the generation before me. Most of what I’ve learned about my culture and history, I’ve had to seek out. I didn’t have elders telling me anything. Black culture is so vibrant and varied, and has such a long history in these states—which is what I’m focusing on now.

You say in these states and your focus now; talk about some of your other work.

I also founded a nonprofit called Diasporal Discoveries, and we provide Black cultural studies programming and travel opportunities to teens during out-of-school time. We just took a group of young people to Detroit over Memorial Day weekend.

But regarding Jayla’s Jaunts, I think this is teaching the same lessons but via a different platform and to a different age group.

Sounds like you and your nonprofit are actually an Auntie Yah-Yah? Yes, I guess you could say that! And I want to show with Jayla’s Jaunts that little Black boys and girls can leave their communities, go off and explore, and see the evidence wherever they go—that those like them have been there before and changed the landscape, helped make it what it is. I really want to address the “whitewashing” that often happens when the subject of history comes up—or the “black-out,” whichever way you want to look at it.

I know, right. What I like about the series is that it tells stories that, if they get told at all, they usually only get told for the twenty-eight days in February, during Black History Month. Your stories expand beyond the Black History lesson. So hopefully people who wouldn’t necessarily choose a Black history book for their children will read the series.

The illustrations are beautiful. And you use such a kid-friendly voice, it feels like you have what I call the “mommy gene,” particularly when the stories explain sensitive subjects. To my point, you even include a controversial word in the book’s glossary.

Learning about slavery in February in the classroom has become a cliché, but learning in a pleasure read that Black people have built things, and done things worthy of praise and changed the world in very real and tangible ways—all while taking fun-filled journeys— that’s something that children of a variety of ethnicities and ages, as well as their parents, really sink their teeth into. And thank you— my illustrators were really great. My brother illustrated the first book, so he’s the creator of the characters visually and he really set the tone.

As for what you call the “mommy gene,” well, I’ve been doing it all my life, so I guess that helps. I was the sister-mama in my household—changing diapers since I was seven, nurturing, mentoring, had the babysitting jobs as a teenager. Youth have always just been there. It’s been in the past decade that I’ve become more involved with youth development on a professional level—trainings, workshops, certifications, and things like that. I also think it starts with love. You just love them as they are and see them as who they can and will be—and you then give as much of yourself and your strengths as you can to help them get there.

And as an educator, I firmly believe that anything can be explained to a child, it just has to be done in an age-appropriate manner—and that’s anything ranging from sex to quantum physics. But the topics I cover are mostly social, and let’s face it: they’re living in this society, so they really are no strangers to the material. I believe the word you’re talking about is the N-word.

The truth is, Black children hear that word all their lives. Unfortunately, we hear it in our own community and in our own homes AUGUST 2, 2017 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 27

REVIEW

often, and then when we leave our communities we often hear it in the way that it has been used throughout the centuries—to strictly dehumanize and degrade. While I don’t use the word in the actual text of the book, there are illustrations that are based on historic photographs, and the N-word was written on a Jim Crow–era sign that was depicted. So, since the word was illustrated, though not in the text, I didn’t feel it was appropriate to omit it from the glossary.

I applaud you for that, especially now during what I call the ‘Huck Finnization’ of the word. What’s been the response to the series?

The response so far has been great.

Folks love the concept, and like you said, the illustrations really pop. The parents have given me feedback that it’s really important work, and that the educational components are their biggest appeal. The children—and I’m talking from seven-year-olds to teenagers—think it’s fun. They like the illustrations, they like the motion as Jayla and her Auntie Yah-Yah zoom here and there, and they like the way Auntie Yah-Yah speaks in rhyme. Senyah Haynes, Jayla’s Jaunts. $14.95.

Discounts available for bulk orders.

Palindrome Global Publishing. palindromeglobal.com

28 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

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In City Summers

Vida Cross’s poetry collection paints Bronzeville in rich texture

BY LOIS BIGGS

V

ida Cross’s Bronzeville at Night: 1949 is full of spells—spells to protect children, spells to blind ignorant sociologists, spells to aid in grieving and remembrance. The poet, professor, and third-generation Chicagoan’s debut poetry collection is a web of stories that, like spells, are small in scope and broad in impact.

Cross’s stories move between living rooms, chicken shacks, and neighborhood churches, against the buzzing backdrop of the Great Migration and Harlem Renaissance.

Her poetry is largely ekphrastic—inspired by visual art—and focused on the work of Black Chicago artist Archibald Motley.

Motley’s bustling painting “Bronzeville at Night” serves as the collection’s titular inspiration, and this and many of his other pieces provide a basis for settings, characters, and tones.

Cross also cites the “poetic research” of Langston Hughes as a primary inspiration. In an interview with Awst Press, she described how Hughes centers his documentation of Black culture around blues music and blues humor. Like Motley and Hughes, Cross is a researcher as well as a poet, capturing a place in time and deftly weaving words with Black music and art.

Her redux of Langston Hughes’ “Dream Boogie,” for instance, describes the Chicago “boogie-woogie” and its dancers with an improvisational, rhythmic cadence.

The people of Bronzeville and their idiosyncrasies and interactions drive the collection. We meet Bodacious, a bold, redclad woman who lives in a greystone on St. Lawrence Avenue. We meet the witch doctor, who has no teeth but wears rosescented cologne from the five-and-dime.

We meet a drunken preacher and his wife, whose strained relationship breaks into blues melodies. Cross weaves despair and

laughter through these characters’ stories, detailing sorrowful wakes in one stanza and pet chickens in the next. While these images seem disparate, their coexistence creates a bittersweet yet lighthearted tone—humor, in these stories, is a means of coping and community building.

Despite this, despair swells to the forefront of middle section “The Children / The Chitlins,” where the speaker explores her relationship with her two younger sisters, Marlene and Asunda. In these poems, the siblings learn to understand one another as they learn to accept death, loss, and their parents’ estrangement. In the Awst Press interview Cross explained that she wanted ‘The Children / The Chitlins” to emphasize the disproportionate impact of tragedy on children, who have to “be wise beyond their years” and “endure things that they should not have to.” “Asunda’s Story,” one of the section’s most subtle, chilling poems, describes the crossroads of trauma and innocence in the lines “I feel like climbing under the bed / leaving parts of myself standing / so’s I can ease-drop on what I have said.” How, if possible, can we prevent this dissociation? “Let child bathe in blackberries,” Cross urges. “Let child play in blackberries.”

Cross makes sure to address the ambivalent relationships that Bronzeville residents have with the place they inhabit.

Some poems burst with fondness for the neighborhood while others express frustration with segregation and isolation, with “struggling to uproot / wanting to run.” Regardless, the South Side itself is an important character in the poet’s cast. The city juts into lonely moments and personal reflections, sometimes playfully, sometimes lyrically, but always sharply. In “Jitney on a Sunday Morning,” a church usher recalls

one of the local preacher’s “drunken yarns” along the route of the King Drive bus.

Announcements of “35th Street,” “43rd Street,” and finally, “47th Street” punctuate the yarn, a sad and surreal story of death, family, and memorial. Other poems equate urban noises with natural phenomena. “In city summers,” Cross begins in the titular poem “Bronzeville at Night,” “we wait for the breeze / from trains / rain / or slammed doors.”

Throughout the collection Cross positions observers as the observed and renders oppressors anonymous. In “The Witch Doctor,” Bronzeville residents curse and gawk at a “white social-science-social worker” studying the neighborhood. Later, in “A Story Told,” the quiltmaker omits the names of white townspeople from the tale of Leon, a Black man mistaken for a slave. The observed-observer dichotomy, however, also appears outside of discussions of institutional racism and provides insight into Cross’s authorial agency. In part two of “Bronzeville at Night,” “State Street,” the speaker watches Archibald Motley as he hovers under the blue lights of Jack’s Chicken Shack, sketching its patrons. She sits on the stoop, “hoping Mr. Mot would sketch [her] too.”

In Bronzeville at Night: 1949 Cross picks up the pen herself rather than waiting for Mr. Mot; she celebrates her artistic predecessors while building upon their work. The resulting sketch is an immersive and emotive portrait of a community—of its names, songs, and stories. Her words, like breezes from trains and rain and slammed doors, shake us into awareness of our surroundings. Vida Cross, Bronzeville at Night: 1949. $16.

Awst Press. awst-press.com

EVENTS

Meet the Authors Nicole Bond is the Stage & Screen Editor for the South Side Weekly and challenged the stylebook on production nights about that particular case sensitivity.

Chirskira Caillouet is a poet and spoken word artist who writes about love, life, and current events. In 2009, she published a chapbook entitled Honey Licorice, and in 2014 was a Gwendolyn Brooks Open Mic Awards semifinalist and received top honors for “Rock the Ballot” at Saint Sabina’s Rock the Mic Award. She is a lifetime Chicagoan and South Sider and a volunteer-activist. She is also a member of For the Love of Writing (FLOW), a South Side writers group.

Paris Clark is a twenty-four-year-old author from the West Side of Chicago. She self-published her first book, The Take Back, in 2016. The Take Back is a collection of poetry that highlights the black woman’s experience by exploring how different life events and environments impact their identities. defyinggravitymovement.com O.A. Fraser is a resident of Hyde Park. His current work examines the anguish of individuals whose lives are marginalized through the misfortune of poverty, and dislocated as a consequence of social change. He also explores mental illnesses as hidden disabilities: the constellation of anxiety disorders in general, as well as the experience, stigma, and quandary of agoraphobia in particular.

Malvika Jolly is from the South Side of Chicago. She lives in New York and tweets @ dinnertheatrics Tucker Kelly is a writer, inkist and recent transplant from small-town Oberlin, OH. Follow him at @tuckerwrites for articles, artwork, and artless jokes.

Jack Murphy lives in Chicago.

Diane O’Neill holds degrees in creative writing from Columbia College and National University, and she is a senior curriculum designer with the Hadley Institute for the Blind and Visually Impaired. Her works have appeared in the South Side Weekly, the Tribune, and Journal of Modern Poetry 20: The Poetry Writer’s Guide to the Galaxy, among others.

Reginald J. Rice is a emerging poet and filmmaker from the South Side of Chicago.

His writings are heavily influenced by life in the city, metaphysics, and the interaction between the guru and the pupil. During the time when hip-hop lyrics were printed inside of CD and cassette covers, Reginald would spend hours reading and comparing verses. Since that time, Reginald has been writing poetry and short stories that reflect his reality. Currently, Reginald is working on writing his first book and directing his first documentary, Tracing Our Path Through Bronzeville.

Paris Smith is a South Side writer with three published collections of short stories, and he is a member of one of Chicago’s longest active writers groups, The Perspectivists.

Much of his work has been described as if Black Stephen King moved to the South Side. His other works can be found at Penknife Press. He hopes you enjoy here one of his milder stories.

Cedric Williams is a storyteller and screenwriter, born, raised, and permanent fixture on the South Side of Chicago. He is currently filming a documentary about the first woman postmaster of the Chicago Post Office.

BULLETIN Growing Home’s Midsummer Mixer 6207 S. Throop St. Friday, August 4, 6pm–8pm. $15. Buy tickets online. (773) 549-1336. growinghomeinc.org Growing Home is hosting its first ever summer mixer complete with locally brewed beer from Back of the Yards brewery Whiner Beer Co., light refreshments, and music from DJ Kool Ant. A portion of the proceeds will support the building of a community garden in Englewood and Growing Home, a nonprofit that provides job training through urban farming. (Amy Qin)

#TheTakeBack Ellis Park, 3700 S. Cottage Grove Ave. Saturday, August 5, noon–5pm. Free. RSVP online to enter children in scholarship raffle. thetakebackchi.org.

Party in the park, stock up on free school supplies, and celebrate peace in the streets at this block party for the whole city. Join the push for gun prevention, and take back Chicago’s streets. (Anne Li)

The Boss Mom Life, Signed Standout Style Boutique, 3353 S. Morgan St. Thursday, August 10, 4:30pm–6:30pm. (773) 565-4885. facebook.com/bossmomlife1 Pick up working tips, cupcakes, connections, and a signed copy of Boss Mom Life by Ariel White when you come to this gathering for multitasking moms. Build your network and your wardrobe at Standout Style. (Anne Li)

Breaking The Chains: Workshop for Teen Girls CPL Brainerd Branch, 1350 W. 89th St. Saturday, August 12, 1:30pm–4pm. Free.

RSVP online at bit.ly/BreakingTheChains At this workshop for girls aged twelve to nineteen, teenage girls will learn about breaking “negative generational cycles.” The organizers promise to teach attendees about being leaders, thinking positive, and loving themselves. (Hafsa Razi)

AUGUST 2, 2017 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 29

BIBC Annual Conference: The Ballot and the Bullet

Young Run Chi, to name a few. Snacks will be provided, as will good times. (Rod Sawyer)

Chicago State University, 9501 S. King Dr. Saturday, August 12, 9am–Sunday, August 13, 9am. Free. RSVP online. (917) 818-0466. blackisbackcoalition.org

Visiting Artist Talk: Gabriel Martinez

In a time of constant political turmoil, 1960s revolutionary political rhetoric seems to be increasingly relevant. Indeed, the Black is Back Coalition (BIBC) will hold its annual conference this August with the theme: “The Ballot and the Bullet: Elections, War & Peace in the Era of Donald Trump.” The conference, named with a twist on Malcolm X’s famous speech, will attempt to develop a general strategy and political platform for their continued growth through the electoral process. (Clyde Schwab)

VISUAL ARTS Brown and Proud Press: Call for Submissions Bridgeport Coffeehouse, 3101 S. Morgan St. Wednesday, August 2, 7pm–9pm. Free. facebook.com/brownandproudpress Brown and Proud Press invites writers and artists of color to be a part of their “On Struggling” zine series, a collection of personal stories about race, identity, mental health, and self-care. All experience levels are welcomed.

(Hafsa Razi)

Arts Incubator Summer Teen Show Arts Incubator, 301 E. Garfield Blvd.

Wednesday, August 9, 6pm–8pm. Free. (773) 702-9724. facebook.com/APLeducation Celebrate the end of summer and the work of youth from the Arts Incubator’s summer programs and internships, at this onenight exhibition; the night will close with a performance from the acting program. (Hafsa Razi)

Summer 2017 Exhibition at Yollocalli Arts Reach Yollocalli Arts Reach, 2801 S. Ridgeway Ave. Friday, August 11th, 5:30pm–7pm. Free. facebook.com/yollocalli.arts.reach Check out the work of youth from a variety of programs under the Yollocalli umbrella: Camera Flux, Your Story Your Way, and 30 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

¬ AUGUST 2, 2017

Hyde Park Art Center, 5020 S. Cornell Ave. Wednesday, August 2, 6pm–7:30pm. Free. hydeparkart.org Join the Hyde Park Art Center for a talk with artist-in-residence Gabriel Martinez, a writer, performer, and artist based in Houston, Texas.

Martinez’s work explores history, spatial politics, and environmental issues in the city of Houston. Here in Chicago, he will explore his recent projects on DIY art spaces, music, comics, and atomic bomb research. (Rod Sawyer)

Hyde Park Handmade Bazaar The Promontory, 5311 S. Lake Park Ave. Sunday, August 13th, 12pm–3:30pm. bit.ly/HPHandmadeAugust The Hyde Park Handmade Bazaar is a monthly showcase of artisans from Hyde Park, Kenwood, Woodlawn, Bronzeville, and other communities. Join the Promontory on their second-floor music venue for a selection of handmade crafts and foods. DJ Sean Alvarez will be spinning tracks, and the bar will be open. Admission is free—the handmade goods, of course, aren’t. (Rod Sawyer)

MUSIC Jazz in the Courtyard Hyde Park Shopping Center, 55th St. and Lake Park Ave. Friday, August 4 and Friday, September 1. Noon–2pm. Free. hpjazz.com Nothing says summer in Hyde Park like the annual free live jazz concerts every first Friday at the Hyde Park Shopping Center.

Grab lunch from any of the many restaurants nearby, then sit outside to enjoy the sounds of the Chris Foreman Quintet on August 4, and the Chicago State University Community Jazz Band conducted by Roxanne Stevenson on September 1. (Nicole Bond)

Cloud Nothings and Oozing Wound Reggies, 2105 S. State St. Thursday, August 3, 10pm. $20, $25 day of show. 18+. (312) 9490120. reggieslive.com

Ditch the long lines and massive crowds of Lollapalooza for something a little more intimate: Reggies Rock Club. Cloud Nothings will be sure to bring their signature catchy hooks, as well as what Pitchfork calls “Screams, massive guitar tone, and a muscular performance.” But that’s just the half of it: catch Chicago’s own genre-bending metal darling Oozing Wound, an amalgam of thrash, sludge, and hardcore. Oozing Wound’s sardonic lyrics, whose themes range from anti-consumerism to post-apocalyptic sci-fi, feel ever more prescient in the current political era. (Andrew Koski)

Red Bull Sound Select Presents: Chicago curated by Fake Shore Drive Thalia Hall, 1807 S. Allport St. Thursday, August 10. 8pm doors, 9pm show. $5 with RSVP, $15 without. 18+. thaliahallchicago.com Smokepurpp, a part of Florida’s newly booming rap scene and XXXtentatcion’s associate, will join Chicago underground rappers Cdot Honcho and Valee at Thalia Hall. With his signature south Florida booming production and gurgled delivery, Smokepurpp has cemented himself as a SoundCloud giant. Cdot Honcho and Valee, while relatively new in the spotlight, have made waves with popular singles “02 Shit” and “Shell,” respectively. (Clyde Schwab)

Full 25th Anniversary Show Reggies, 2105 S. State St. Friday, August 11, 8pm. $5, $8 day of show. 17+. (312) 949-0120. reggieslive.com Full has been a “hyper melodic post punk power pop” Chicago staple since 1992—way before Googleability mattered in band name selection. (Don’t believe me? Try searching “Full” or “Full band” and see what it gives you). Regardless, they’re playing their twentyfifth anniversary show at Reggies, and it’s sure to be a punk show for the ages for all those ageless punks out there. (Andrew Koski)

Punk Rock & Donuts Richard J. Daley Library Branch, 3400 S. Halsted St. Saturday, August 26, 2pm–4pm.

Free. All ages. (312) 747-8990. bit.ly/PunkDonuts This punk and donuts—punkin’ donuts, if you will—show in Bridgeport features local punk

bands UDÜSIC, DECLINE, and Ozzuario, all playing their hearts out in what is usually a library branch dedicated largely to children’s books. As branch manager Jeremy Kitchen told the Weekly when we featured the Punkin’ Donuts series in last year’s Best of the South Side issue, “Like all library programs, it is for all walks of life, and we have had toddlers to seniors show up.” Expect a crowd.

(Sam Stecklow)

Kool Moe Dee The Promontory, 5311 S. Lake Park Ave. Thursday, August 31. 7pm doors, 8pm show.

Tables $35 per seat, $20 general admission. 21+.

(312) 801-2100. promontorychicago.com Even the Promontory admits on their website that Kool Moe Dee “began to fade by the early ’90s,” but if you want to relive (or live for the first time) hip-hop’s original spats dating back to the eighties, Dee—who was one of the first rappers to win a Grammy, but is perhaps now more famous for his feud with LL Cool J—is at the Promontory next month. ( Julia Aizuss)

STAGE & SCREEN Children’s Theater South Shore Cultural Center, 7059 South Shore Dr. Internet registration opens Tuesday, August 8, 9am; standard registration opens Saturday, August 12, for class each Saturday from September 9–November 18, 10:30am–12pm. $50 residents, $100 non-residents. (773) 2560149. bit.ly/SSChildrensTheater It might feel like the height of summer, but fall is around the corner, and so are kids’ fall programs. Children ages eight to eleven will learn the skills required to create and participate a theatrical performance by the end of class, using imaginative play, storytelling exercises and creative movement.

Openings are already limited—register your child promptly. (Nicole Bond)

Into the Woods Beverly Arts Center, 2407 W. 111th St. Friday, August 4–Sunday, August 6, 7pm; Monday, August 7, 2pm. $13–$15. (773) 445-3838. beverlyartcenter.org Directed by Tim Stompanato, for its summer production the BAC takes on James Lapine and Stephen Sondheim’s timeless, award-

EVENTS winning theater classic, where wishes come true but at a steep price. (Nicole Bond)

Movies in the Parks: The Wiz South Shore Cultural Center, 7059 South Shore Dr. Monday, August 7, 8:15pm. Free. (773) 256-0149. chicagoparkdistrict.com Under the stars, behind the beautiful South Shore Cultural Center, in Movies in the Parks’s seventeenth season, come watch stars Diana Ross as Dorothy, Michael Jackson as the Scarecrow, and Lena Horne as Glenda the Good Witch move the classic Wizard of Oz tale from Kansas to Harlem. (Nicole Bond)

The Brain That Wouldn’t Die – LIVE! Beverly Arts Center, 2407 W. 111th St. Wednesday, August 9, 7:30pm. $5. (773) 4453838. beverlyartcenter.org A tale about a doctor keeping his girlfriend’s head alive after a decapitating car crash is B-movie classic horror, but when the BACinema comedy team The NERD Mob

takes to the stage to make fun alongside the movie, horror becomes hilarious. (Nicole Bond)

Floating Museum: Salty Dog Blues Park 571 Riverwalk, 2754 S. Eleanor St. Saturday, August 12, 7pm. Free. southsideprojections.org As the Floating Museum barge floats down the Chicago River, South Side Projections has rightly decided there’s no better way to contribute to its programming during its stop in Bridgeport than by screening “a movie about people on boats.” This 1982 film navigates (ha) the experiences of a group of people of color who served in the U.S. Merchant Marines from the thirties to the eighties. ( Julia Aizuss)

Side by Side with the Chicago Philharmonic South Shore Cultural Center, 7059 South Shore Dr. Sunday, August 13, 3:30pm–7pm. Free.

(312) 957-0000. chicagophilharmonic.org

As part of the Chicago Park District’s Night Out in the Park events, the Chicago Philharmonic Orchestra will join with student and community musicians from around the city, to invite audiences to listen in during a rehearsal as well as their free performance immediately following. Pairs well with lawn chairs and a picnic. (Nicole Bond)

Summer Jazz Night Gary Comer Youth Center, 7200 S. Ingleside Ave. Wednesday, August 16, 6:30pm–8pm.

Youth under the age of eighteen must be accompanied by an adult. Free. (773) 358-4100. garycomeryouthcenter.org As part of the GCYC Uplift adult community programming, this night of jazz will feature live music from The DOT and “GIT down” —a musical experience described as “a warm hug that ends with a static shock.” Refreshments will also be served

by GCYC’s culinary team. (Nicole Bond)

Southside With You DuSable Museum, 740 E. 56th Pl.. Saturday,

August 19, 7:30pm. Free. (773) 947-0600. dusablemuseum.org If you missed it when it came out last year— or want to see it again—head to DuSable’s outdoor Sunken Garden to watch first-time director Richard Tanne recreate the love story of Barack and Michelle Obama, featuring Parker Sawyers as the rookie lawyer wooing the more experienced lawyer Michelle Robinson, played by Tika Sumpter, on a daydate around Chicago. I wonder how the story ends. (Nicole Bond)

2nd Annual Full Moon Fire Cypher Promontory Point, 5491 S. Shore Dr. Monday, August 7, 6pm–10pm. Free. (312) 869-9546. facebook.com/sacredkeepersorg It’s going to actually be “lit”—Sacred Keepers Sustainability Lab and Art is Bonfire invite you to a bonfire cypher. A “fire-inspired community ritual,” the cypher brings together performance (spoken word, singing, rapping) and pyro. Bring friends, family, s’mores ingredients, ‘Something to share,” and “SOMETHING TO BURN!” (Hafsa Razi)

AUGUST 2, 2017 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 31

FREE COLLEGE COURSE THIS PROGRAM IS FOR YOU IF: • You are 18 years of age or older • You are income eligible (living at or below 150% of the Federal Poverty Guidelines) • You can commit to doing the assignments and completing the course • You can read a newspaper in English • You do not currently have a four-year college degree (B.A.)

The Odyssey Project is a free, 32-week, college-credit granting humanities program for income-eligible adults with limited to no access to a college education. Course materials are provided.

Transportation assistance is also provided in cases of demonstrated need.

We offer classes at locations in Woodlawn, Albany Park, and Downtown (in Spanish).

Classes meet twice a week from 6:00–8:00 p.m., September through April.

Apply online at www.ilhumanities.org/ odysseyproject OR by contacting Illinois Humanities at chris.guzaitis@ilhumanities.org

IN THE ODYSSEY PROJECT YOU WILL: • Explore five different subject areas: Literature, Philosophy, Art History, U.S. History, and Critical Thinking & Writing • Study with professors from local universities • Work with like-minded adult students in a supportive environment • Earn 6 transferable college credits from Bard College upon completion of the course

APPLICATIONS DUE AUGUST 15