Never a City So Real - Alex Kotlowitz [16]
The restaurant is located on Madison Street, the main route through the West Side, which is a collection of pawn shops, currency exchanges, small clothing stores, storefront churches, and liquor stores (I once counted seventeen in a twelve-block stretch). Immediately following the death of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., this stretch of land went up in flames, and nearly four decades later it’s still trying to recover. (Edna’s, not surprisingly, was spared by arsonists during the riots.) The restaurant is sandwiched between the offices of a family doctor and a small pharmacy on the corner, and it stands across the street from a vacant lot that extends nearly an entire block. Down the street is Marshall High School, which has one of the best girls’ basketball teams in the city (they have an astonishing record over the past twenty-five years of 766 games won and 84 lost, which makes it worthwhile to attend one of their games). A few blocks beyond that is Providence–St. Mel, an inner-city college prep school founded by a no-nonsense, former guidance counselor Paul Adams, who saved the school after the Archdiocese closed it in 1978, virtually abandoning the West Side.
My first visit to Edna’s was on a hot summer day in 1991, and accompanying Brenda, Millie, and me was a playwright from New York who had been assigned to write the television script based on my book There Are No Children Here. He was a gentle, softspoken man, but after we had spent a few days together I began to get uneasy; I began to think that he didn’t believe all that I’d written. So I took him to the most decrepit of the high-rises, introduced him to the meanest of the gang members, pointed out the wealthiest of the drug dealers. And on this, his last day, I thought I’d introduce him to Brenda and Millie who, I’d hoped, would affirm all that I’d written. At first, however, the lunch didn’t go exactly as I’d anticipated—because Brenda and Millie, while they’re realists, are also almost inexplicably upbeat. I say inexplicably, because given where they’re from and what they do, they have every reason to be cynical, if not outright pessimistic. So over our lunch of fried chicken and liver, collard greens, and candied yams, Brenda and Millie filled the screenwriter not with horror stories but with tales of people who were managing, who were getting by despite all that bore down on them. Then, just as they were regaling him with inspirational tales, a young boy maybe fourteen or fifteen years old ran into the restaurant and ducked behind the heating grille. A gaggle of boys suddenly appeared outside, and one of them pulled a pistol out of a brown paper bag and started shooting. Needless to say, we feared for our lives, and we ducked under the table. As we lay there, one on top of the other, all I could think was, Now the screenwriter will believe me.
Then, we heard an enraged voice shouting, “What do you think you’re doing? Shoo. Get away from here.”
Shoo? I peered out, and there was Edna in her apron, her arms flapping, heading straight at the boy with the pistol. He didn’t run, or shout, or strike back: He was too stupefied. As Edna started lecturing him, the gun dropped to his side, and while I couldn’t hear what she was saying, it was clear that the shooter and his friends were hearing every word. She threw her hands up and reentered the restaurant, muttering something about “these kids should know better.” As for the boys, they skulked away.
I know this is probably not the best way to lure people to Edna’s. But, trust me, such an incident has never happened there since. Everyone knows Edna. “I’ve been here so long, my name rocks,” she said, by which she means people respect her. It’s the African-American equivalent of Manny’s, having fed such visiting luminaries as Dick Gregory and Al Sharpton, and musicians like Flava Flav and R. Kelly. The local congressman, Danny Davis, used Edna’s to announce his reelection campaign. And Jimmy Carter lunched