Dreams from My Father

there might have been poor, poorer even than folks out in Altgeld. They hauled fifty pounds of firewood on their backs every day, they ate little, they died young. And yet for all that poverty, there remained in their lives a discernible order, a tapestry of trading routes and middlemen, bribes to pay and customs to observe, the habits of a generation played out every day beneath the bargaining and the noise and the swirling dust.
    It was the absence of such coherence that made a place like Altgeld so desperate, I thought to myself; it was that loss of order that had made both Rafiq and Mr. Foster, in their own ways, so bitter. For how could we go about stitching a culture back together once it was torn? How long might it take in this land of dollars?
    Longer than it took a culture to unravel, I suspected. I tried to imagine the Indonesian workers who were now making their way to the sorts of factories that had once sat along the banks of the Calumet River, joining the ranks of wage labor to assemble the radios and sneakers that sold on Michigan Avenue. I imagined those same Indonesian workers ten, twenty years from now, when their factories would have closed down, a consequence of new technology or lower wages in some other part of the globe. And then the bitter discovery that their markets have vanished; that they no longer remember how to weave their own baskets or carve their own furniture or grow their own food; that even if they remember such craft, the forests that gave them wood are now owned by timber interests, the baskets they once wove have been replaced by more durable plastics. The very existence of the factories, the timber interests, the plastics manufacturer, will have rendered their culture obsolete; the values of hard work and individual initiative turn out to have depended on a system of belief that’s been scrambled by migration and urbanization and imported TV reruns. Some of them would prosper in this new order. Some would move to America. And the others, the millions left behind in Djakarta, or Lagos, or the West Bank, they would settle into their own Altgeld Gardens, into a deeper despair.
    We drove in silence to our final meeting, with the administrator of a local branch of the Mayor’s Office of Employment and Training, or MET, which helped refer the unemployed to training programs throughout the city. We had trouble finding the place—it turned out to be a forty-five-minute drive from Altgeld, on a back street in Vrdolyak’s ward—and by the time we arrived the administrator was gone. Her assistant didn’t know when she would be back but handed us a pile of glossy brochures.
    “This ain’t no help at all,” Shirley said as she started for the door. “We might as well have stayed home.”
    Mona noticed I was lingering in the office. “What’s he looking at?” she asked Angela.
    I showed them the back of one of the brochures. It contained a list of all the MET programs in the city. None of them were south of Ninety-fifth.
    “This is it,” I said.
    “What?”
    “We just found ourselves an issue.”
             
    As soon as we got back to the Gardens, we drafted a letter to Ms. Cynthia Alvarez, the city-wide director of MET. Two weeks later, she agreed to meet with us out in the Gardens. Determined not to repeat my mistakes, I drove both myself and the leadership to exhaustion: preparing a script for the meeting, pushing hard for the other churches to send their people, developing a clear demand—a job intake and training center in the Far South Side—that we thought MET could deliver.
    Two weeks of preparation and yet, the night of the meeting, my stomach was tied up in knots. At six forty-five only three people had shown up: a young woman with a baby who was drooling onto her tiny jumper, an older woman who carefully folded a stack of cookies into a napkin that she then stuffed into her purse, and a drunken man who immediately slouched into a light slumber in a back-row seat. As the minutes ticked away, I imagined once again the empty chairs, the official’s change of mind at the last minute, the look of disappointment on the leadership’s faces—the deathly smell of failure.
    Then, at two minutes before seven, people began to trickle in. Will and Mary brought a group from West Pullman; then Shirley’s children and grandchildren walked in, filling up an entire row of seats; then other Altgeld residents who owed Angela or Shirley or Mona a favor. There were close