Dreams from My Father

hung on the wall, with certain areas marked off in red ink—“is the long term. It’s all about ownership. A comprehensive plan for the area. Black businesses, community centers—the whole nine yards. Some of the properties, we’ve already started negotiating with the white owners to sell them to us at a fair price. So if y’all are interested in jobs, then you can help by spreading the message about this here plan. The problem we got right now is not enough support from the folks in Roseland. Instead of taking a stand, they’d rather follow white folks out into the suburbs. But see, white folks ain’t stupid. They just waiting for us to move out of the city so they can come back, ’cause they know that the value of the property we sitting on right now is worth a mint.”
    One of the burly men reentered Rafiq’s office, and Rafiq stood up. “I gotta get going,” he said abruptly. “But hey, we’ll talk again.” He shook all our hands before his assistant led us to the door.
    “Sounds like you knew him, Shirley,” I said once we were out of the building.
    “Yeah, before he got that fancy name of his, he was plain old Wally Thompson. He can change his name but he can’t hide them ears he’s got. He grew up in Altgeld—in fact, I think him and Will used to be in school together. Wally was a big-time gang-banger before he became a Muslim.”
    “Once a thug, always a thug,” Angela said.
    Our next stop was the local Chamber of Commerce, located on the second floor of what looked like a pawnshop. Inside, we found a plump black man who was busy packing boxes.
    “We’re looking for Mr. Foster,” I said to the man.
    “I’m Foster,” he said, not looking up.
    “We were told that you were the president of the Chamber—”
    “Well, you right about that. I
was
the president. Just resigned last week.”
    He offered us three chairs and talked as he worked. He explained that he had owned the stationery store down the street for fifteen years now, had been the president of the Chamber for the last five. He had done his best to organize the local merchants, but lack of support had finally left him discouraged.
    “You won’t hear me complaining about the Koreans,” he said, stacking a few boxes by the door. “They’re the only ones that pay their dues into the Chamber. They understand business, what it means to cooperate. They pool their money. Make each other loans. We don’t do that, see. The black merchants around here, we’re all like crabs in a bucket.” He straightened up and wiped his brow with a handkerchief. “I don’t know. Maybe you can’t blame us for being the way we are. All those years without opportunity, you have to figure it took something out of us. And it’s tougher now than it was for the Italian or the Jew thirty years ago. These days, a small store like mine has to compete against the big chains. It’s a losing battle unless you do like these Koreans—work your family sixteen hours a day, seven days a week. As a people, we’re not willing to do that anymore. I guess we worked so long for nothing, we feel like we shouldn’t have to break our backs just to survive. That’s what we tell our children anyway. I can’t say I’m any different. I tell my sons I don’t want them taking over the business. I want them to go work for some big company where they can be comfortable….”
    Before we left, Angela asked about the possibility of part-time work for the youth in Altgeld. Mr. Foster looked up at her like she was crazy.
    “Every merchant around here turns down thirty applications a day,” he said. “Adults. Senior citizens. Experienced workers willing to take whatever they can get. I’m sorry.”
    As we walked back to the car, we passed a small clothing store full of cheap dresses and brightly colored sweaters, two aging white mannequins now painted black in the window. The store was poorly lit, but toward the back I could make out the figure of a young Korean woman sewing by hand as a child slept beside her. The scene took me back to my childhood, back to the markets of Indonesia: the hawkers, the leather workers, the old women chewing betelnut and swatting flies off their fruit with whisk brooms.
    I’d always taken such markets for granted, part of the natural order of things. Now, though, as I thought about Altgeld and Rose-land, Rafiq and Mr. Foster, I saw those Djakarta markets for what they were: fragile, precious things. The people who sold their goods