Dreams from My Father

spent most of the evening directing this wayward traffic upstairs, while Ruby sat glumly onstage, listening to the policeman lecture about the need for parental discipline.
    About halfway through the meeting, Marty arrived.
    After it was over, he came up and put a hand on my shoulder.
    “Feels like shit, huh?”
    It did. He helped me clean up, then took me out for coffee and pointed out some of my mistakes. The problem of gangs was too general to make an impression on people—issues had to be made concrete, specific, and winnable. I should have prepared Ruby more carefully—and set out fewer chairs. Most important, I needed to spend more time getting to know the leaders in the community; flyers couldn’t pull people out on a rainy night.
    “That reminds me,” he said as we stood up to go. “Whatever happened to those pastors you were supposed to be meeting with?”
    I told him about Reverend Smalls. He started to laugh. “Guess it’s a good thing I didn’t tag along, huh?”
    I wasn’t amused. “Why didn’t you warn me about Smalls?”
    “I did warn you,” Marty said, opening the door to his car. “I told you Chicago’s polarized and that politicians use it to their own advantage. That’s all Smalls is—a politician who happens to wear a collar. Anyway, it’s not the end of the world. You should just be glad you learned your lesson early.”
    Yes, but which lesson? Watching Marty drive away, I thought back to the day of the rally: the sound of Smitty’s voice in the barbershop; the rows of black and white faces in the school auditorium, there because of the factory’s desolation and Marty’s own sense of betrayal; the cardinal, a small, pale, unassuming man in a black robe and glasses, smiling onstage as Will swallowed him up in a big bear hug; Will, so certain that the two men understood each other.
    Each image carried its own lesson, each was subject to differing interpretations. For there were many churches, many faiths. There were times, perhaps, when those faiths seemed to converge—the crowd in front of the Lincoln Memorial, the Freedom Riders at the lunch counter. But such moments were partial, fragmentary. With our eyes closed, we uttered the same words, but in our hearts we each prayed to our own masters; we each remained locked in our own memories; we all clung to our own foolish magic.
    A man like Smalls understood that, I thought. He understood that the men in the barbershop didn’t want the victory of Harold’s election—their victory—qualified. They wouldn’t want to hear that their problems were more complicated than a group of devious white aldermen, or that their redemption was incomplete. Both Marty and Smalls knew that in politics, like religion, power lay in certainty—and that one man’s certainty always threatened another’s.
    I realized then, standing in an empty McDonald’s parking lot in the South Side of Chicago, that I was a heretic. Or worse—for even a heretic must believe in something, if nothing more than the truth of his own doubt.

CHAPTER NINE

    T HE A LTGELD G ARDENS PUBLIC housing project sat at Chicago’s southernmost edge: two thousand apartments arranged in a series of two-story brick buildings with army-green doors and grimy mock shutters. Everybody in the area referred to Altgeld as “the Gardens” for short, although it wasn’t until later that I considered the irony of the name, its evocation of something fresh and well tended—a sanctified earth.
    True, there was a grove of trees just south of the project, and running south and west of that was the Calumet River, where you could sometimes see men flick fishing lines lazily into darkening waters. But the fish that swam those waters were often strangely discolored, with cataract eyes and lumps behind their gills. People ate their catch only if they had to.
    To the east, on the other side of the expressway, was the Lake Calumet landfill, the largest in the Midwest.
    And to the north, directly across the street, was the Metropolitan Sanitary District’s sewage treatment plant. The people of Altgeld couldn’t see the plant or the open-air vats that went on for close to a mile; as part of a recent beautification effort, the district maintained a long wall of earth in front of the facility, dotted with hastily planted saplings that refused to grow month after month, like hairs swept across a bald man’s head. But officials could do nothing to hide the smell—a heavy, putrid odor that