A Reason to Believe_ Lessons From an Improbable Life - Deval Patrick [2]
Scowling down on us were the infamous Robert Taylor Homes, a miles-long stretch of identical seventeen-story “projects,” which would become synonymous with the public housing woes of urban America. But most people I knew lived in two- and three-story tenements, with an apartment or two on each floor. There was block after block of these squat, solid-looking brick or frame buildings, with rickety railings, chipped concrete steps, and porches whose boards needed replacing. Clotheslines were strung across postage-stamp backyards or connected to back porches from separate buildings. A few families kept chickens in a backyard coop for eggs and meat. The front stoops, with their folding lawn chairs, drew neighbors outside on summer evenings. Churches and schools provided stability.
The stockyards, where cattle and pigs were brought from the Great Plains for slaughter, were a short bus ride away. You could smell the stench in our neighborhood when the wind was right. In the summer, a horse-drawn wagon cruised our streets, the fresh fruit arrayed on a bed of hay and the driver yodeling “Watermelons!” to attract his customers. On those same roads limped a menacing man with a misaligned eye who pushed a crude wooden cart on bicycle tires, offering to sharpen knives on a stone that screeched when it spun.
Much of life seemed to center on food—getting it, preparing it, doing without it. Tiny, makeshift gardens miraculously yielded collard greens, tomatoes, and pole beans. Great pots of greens with ham hocks or fatback simmered all day long on small apartment ranges. Black cast-iron skillets sizzled with porgies or fish that were caught in Lake Michigan or even the Washington Park lagoons, gutted and scaled, rolled in cornmeal, and fried in bacon fat, the latter rendered from many a breakfast and kept in an old coffee can on the stove. Cornbread, easy, cheap, and filling, was served with everything. Whatever was for dinner, it was considered bad form not to offer something to a neighborhood kid who was hungry. And in that neighborhood, someone was always hungry. The smells were full of flavor and anticipation with one outstanding exception. When someone was cooking chitterlings—pig intestines stewed for hours in broth—the stink drove out all bystanders.
My earliest impressions of my parents were of a stern father who always seemed to be observing us critically, and from a distance, and a brooding mother who would lie in bed for hours, smoking silently and staring off in dark, deep thought. They seemed to have negotiated their way into their marriage. In an exchange of letters within days in 1954, they communicated both a hunger for and skepticism about each other and their future. He wrote: “If your choice matches mine, we match. I can show you but don’t intend to make you see it if you don’t want to. On the other hand, if you do agree, you’ve got a mate.”
She replied, “I have a great affection for you, and feel we could make it together. I hope and will do the best I can not to be selfish as far as this is concerned. I want to give as much to you as you have given to me.”
My father, Pat, was a jazz musician, and as this letter suggests, he seemed to have a take-it-or-leave-it attitude about their relationship. It would be on his terms, period. His greatest and first love was music. My mother, Emily, appears to have felt chronically misunderstood and responded favorably to his insights about her. An ardent romance it wasn’t.
But they tied the knot, and soon afterward, in August 1955, my sister, Rhonda, was born. I followed a short eleven months later, in July 1956. When I was born, the four of us lived in a basement apartment at 79th and Calumet, and there’s a favorite family photograph of me sitting on my father’s shoulders outside that apartment when I was two or three years old. I have vague recollections