Dawn Turner - Three Girls from Bronzeville: A Uniquely American Memoir of Race, Fate, and Sisterhood

Three Girls from Bronzeville

A Uniquely American Memoir of Race, Fate, and Sisterhood

Dawn Turner

For Mom, Kim, and Debra

We shape our buildings and afterwards our buildings shape us.

Winston Churchill

Kick a man when hes down because thats when his head is closest to your foot.

My mother

During the course of writing this book, I conducted hundreds of hours of interviews and pored over hundreds of pages of court documents. In addition, I have relied on three decades worth of correspondence in the form of letters and telephone conversations as well as diary and journal entries. The following names are pseudonyms: Henry, Loretta Tyson, Sam, Sadie, Betty, Andrew, Pamela, Carl, Hayes, Keesha, Bunny, Lila, Jack, Greta, Jodie, Tate, Jerry, Ronnie Matthews, Lance Matthews, Ted, Brittany, and Frank. Lastly, some of the stories here were first chronicled in the Chicago Tribune and on National Public Radio, and one was included in the anthology Rise Up Singing: Black Women Writers on Motherhood.

I often think about my sister and my best friend. Not every minute. Not even every day. I mostly think of them when I am experiencing something I would have wanted to share. Some moment that would allow us to tug on a line, thin as a filament, that begins Remember when and draws a seemingly ever-present past nearer.

When I imagine us, we come into focus at our beginningthree young girls walking through our neighborhood under a prickly summer sun. I am nine years old, tall and lanky with long, ropy braids. Debra, my best friend, is shorter than me and, at eight and a half, is already prom-queen pretty. And then theres my sister, Kim, three years my junior. Shes stealthily trailing us, even though Ive bribed her with our mothers secret stash of lemon drops to stay away.

Mom is watching us from our eleventh-floor apartment window. She has told us to go outside and play.

You two are the nosiest children God ever gave breath to, she always says. Get out from under grown folks business.

Later, she will ask me why I didnt hold Kims hand, why I allowed her to hang so far behind. But right now, Debra and I are walking through our apartment complex on our way to our special place. We are Thing-Finders, two Black girls who have little in common with the popular childrens book character Pippi Longstocking, an orphaned white girl with red hair and freckles. But we admire the way she spends her day collecting castoffs for her Thing-Finders Club. We live in a neighborhood that has specialized in the broken, the halvedso in the tradition of this little white girl, we traverse our community, sifting through the past, searching for discarded items that we believe can be made new again. We call our hideout our love spot, and its a couple of blocks away. Its where weve stashed a rusty metal tin we stole from the janitors closet. Weve seeded it with the artifacts of our lives: my fathers fake gold cuff link and a knob from her fathers CB radio; a couple of dried pomegranate seeds; the obituary of our third-grade teachers daughter; a scarred flashcube from an Instamatic; the shoehorn we lifted off the grocery store bagger who has gnarled hands and likes to pat us kids on our heads. We allow him when were trying to show how brave we are.

To understand Debra, Kim, and meto understand what will happen to usyou have to know the place that has begun to shape us. We live in Chicagos historic Bronzeville community. At three square miles, its the cradle of the citys Great Migration, the epicenter of Black business and culture. Over the decades, its been home to some of the countrys most esteemed Black folks: journalist and antilynching activist Ida B. Wells, cardiac surgeon Daniel Hale Williams, jazz trumpeter Louis Armstrong, novelist Richard Wright, Pulitzer Prizewinning poet Gwendolyn Brooks. Kim and I are beginning to understand Bronzevilles storied past because our mother, grandmother, and aunt grew up here in this corner of Bronzeville that hugs the lakefront. Kim and I are the fourth generation of our family to live here. Anything you can imagine, or want, or hope for is here. The good life, made evident by Black politicians, doctors, lawyers, judges, and professors. A good time, as offered by prostitutes, street vendors, and drug dealers. Its all here, not on the other side of the tracks or the other side of a river or even the next L stop. Its just across the street. For generations, Bronzeville has been a place where all that was good and bad is simultaneously at your fingertips yet a walled-off world away.

We girls are coming of age at a time when the country is just beyond the civil rights movement and at the threshold of what our parents hope is a new, postracial era for Blacks. A country that finally seems amenable to giving us the opportunities it has denied generations. But that dream will soon be dashed.

Debras family and mine have just moved into the privately owned Theodore K. Lawless Gardens apartment complex. Like us, it is still young and unblemished, brimming with promise. The twenty-four-story buildings, three of them in a row, are gleaming concrete monuments to upward mobility and are still pristine. A tall chain-link fence encases the property, forming a barrier along Rhodes Avenue from the Ida B. Wells Homes, a once-idyllic public housing project where my mother grew up. But by the 1970s its crumbling from misbegotten policies and abandonment, the despair of drugs and gangs. Two decades later, an adjacent housing project will draw national attention after two boys, ages ten and eleven, dangle and then drop five-year-old Eric Morse from a fourteenth-floor window for refusing to steal candy. The country will think it knows everything about our neighborhood and us, but it wont. It cant possibly know.

On this summer afternoon, all of that is far in the distance. As we walksometimes skipping, sometimes joggingI am acutely aware that my sister is gaining on us. I can feel Kim without even turning around. That will never change. But Debra is unaware. Shes too busy talking, planning todays adventure, gesturing vigorously. We reach the main street and wait for an opening in the traffic. When the coast is clear, Debra grabs my hand and we run as fast as we can across four lanes to the other side.

No, Don. No! my sister yells.

Mom says Kim sometimes speaks out of spite. Calls me Don instead of Dawn, says Duperman instead of Superman. Shes little and scrappy, scuffed about the knees like a footstool and unafraid of most thingsexcept speeding cars. Ever since she almost got hit by one. Dont leave me!

I pretend not to hear her. I pretend not to know that she will cross if I go back and hold her hand. Im tired of being the big sister. Im tired of her always sidling so close to me. Im tired of sharing.

Let her come, please, Debra says, clasping her hands. Im not surprised by her insistence. Like Kim, Debra is the younger of two siblings, two sisters. Though Debra and I are best friends, she and Kim are the true soul mates. Both hear but dont hear. Both see the world through their wants. Mom says, Kind takes to kind.

No, I say. And now Im the one walking ahead. Maybe tomorrow.

Reluctantly, Debra gives in. We leave Kim behind and continue to walk about a block. Im thinking,