Dreams from My Father

understand that. I assumed, took for granted, that I could. Seeing me, these men had made the same assumption. Would they feel the same way if they knew more about me? I wondered. I tried to imagine what would happen if Gramps walked into the barbershop at that moment, how the talk would stop, how the spell would be broken; the different assumptions at work.
    Smitty handed me the mirror to check his handiwork, then pulled off my smock and brushed off the back of my shirt. “Thanks for the history lesson,” I said, standing up.
    “Hey, that part’s free. Haircut’s ten dollars. What’s your name, anyway?”
    “Barack.”
    “Barack, huh. You a Muslim?”
    “Grandfather was.”
    He took the money and shook my hand. “Well, Barack, you should come back a little sooner next time. Your hair was looking awful raggedy when you walked in.”
             
    Late that afternoon, Marty picked me up in front of my new address and we headed south on the Skyway. After several miles, we took an exit leading into the southeast side, past rows of small houses made of gray clapboard or brick, until we arrived at a massive old factory that stretched out over several blocks.
    “The old Wisconsin Steel plant.”
    We sat there in silence, studying the building. It expressed some of the robust, brutal spirit of Chicago’s industrial past, metal beams and concrete rammed together, without much attention to comfort or detail. Only now it was empty and rust-stained, like an abandoned wreck. On the other side of the chain-link fence, a spotted, mangy cat ran through the weeds.
    “All kinds of people used to work in the plant,” Marty said as he wheeled the car around and started back down the road. “Blacks. Whites. Hispanics. All working the same jobs. All living the same kind of lives. But outside the plant, most of them didn’t want anything to do with each other. And these are the church people I’m talking about. Brothers and sisters in Christ.”
    We came to a stoplight, and I noticed a group of young white men in their undershirts, drinking beer on a stoop. A Vrdolyak poster hung in one of the windows, and several of the men began to glare in my direction. I turned to Marty.
    “So what makes you think they can work together now?”
    “They don’t have any choice. Not if they want their jobs back.”
    As we reentered the highway, Marty began to tell me more about the organization he’d built. The idea had first come to him two years earlier, he said, when he’d read reports of the plant closings and layoffs then sweeping across South Chicago and the southern suburbs. With the help of a sympathetic Catholic auxiliary bishop, he’d gone to meet with pastors and church members in the area, and heard both blacks and whites talk about their shame of unemployment, their fear of losing a house or of being cheated out of a pension—their common sense of having been betrayed.
    Eventually over twenty suburban churches had agreed to form an organization, which they named the Calumet Community Religious Conference, or CCRC. Another eight churches had joined the city arm of the organization, called Developing Communities Project, or DCP. Things hadn’t moved quite as fast as Marty had hoped; the unions hadn’t yet signed on, and the political war in the city council had proven to be a major distraction. Still, CCRC had recently won its first significant victory: a $500,000 computerized job placement program that the Illinois legislature had agreed to fund. We were on our way to a rally to celebrate this new job bank, Marty explained, the opening shot in a long-term campaign.
    “It’s going to take a while to rebuild manufacturing out here,” he said. “Ten years, minimum. But once we get the unions involved, we’ll have a base to negotiate from. In the meantime, we just need to stop the hemorrhage and give people some short-term victories. Something to show people how much power they have once they stop fighting each other and start going after the real enemy.”
    “And who’s that?”
    Marty shrugged. “The investment bankers. The politicians. The fat cat lobbyists.”
    Marty nodded to himself, squinting at the road ahead. Looking at him, I began to suspect that he wasn’t as cynical as he liked to make out, that the plant we’d just left carried a larger meaning for him. Somewhere in his life, I thought, he, too, had been betrayed.
    It was twilight by the time we crossed the city line and pulled into the