Never a City So Real - Alex Kotlowitz [17]
Edna grew up on the city’s South Side, and her home was a gathering place for neighborhood children, especially when they were hungry; her father, a former sharecropper, believed in a simple equation: “If someone came by, they got to eat.” And so Edna and her sisters’ friends ate sweet potato pie, or fried chicken, or her mother’s specialty, rainbow cake. If friends stopped by on Sunday mornings, they could share in her father’s pork brains and eggs, a dish that Edna serves at her restaurant.
Edna got pregnant in her sophomore year, and never finished school. She soon married, not her son’s father, and they lasted eight years together. And though it’s been more than forty years, her ex-husband still comes by the restaurant regularly. “He brings a container and wants his dumplings,” Edna says. “He doesn’t think he needs to pay. He must think we’re still married.”
With seven hundred dollars from her father, Edna bought the restaurant in 1966, and soon after, a mixed-race couple began frequenting the place. “They’d just come into the restaurant, sit for an hour, maybe have some cornbread and syrup,” Edna recalls. “One day they said, ‘Would you like some customers?’ And I’m looking at ’em like, how you gonna bring me some customers?” Turns out, they were part of the advance team for Martin Luther King, Jr., who was about to come to the city, purchase a home on the West Side, and run a campaign for open housing (which is what ultimately led to my father-in-law getting involved in testing). Edna’s became the gathering spot for the civil rights workers, including Jesse Jackson and Dr. King, and she would often stay open late so they would have a place to eat after their marches.
Edna’s has become a destination for European tourists looking for authentic soul food. And now business is hopping on Sundays with white folks who visit the nearby Garfield Park Conservatory, one of the nation’s botanical treasures: four and a half acres of flowers and plants under one roof. The cornbread and peach cobbler are Edna’s own recipes, and her favorite dish is the fried catfish. But it’s her macaroni and cheese, the simplest of dishes, that may be her most popular. “No cream,” she tells me. “But I’m not going to give you my recipe.”
Edna doesn’t know how much longer she’ll keep her restaurant open. She had inquired about the vacant property across the street, and learned that the owner was asking six hundred fifty thousand, an indication that speculators have begun looking this far west. Edna told me that not long ago, on a Saturday afternoon, Wallace Davis, who owns a catfish joint down the street, called her and asked her to come down to his place.
“I’m too busy,” Edna told him.
“You got to see this,” Davis said.
“Maybe later,” Edna replied.
“No, now. I tell you, you got to see this,” Davis insisted.
So Edna took off her apron and walked the two blocks to Wallace’s Catfish Corner (where on summer weekend nights, blues musicians give concerts in the adjacent parking lot). Davis took her back outside and pointed across the street. Edna saw an elderly white woman and her grown daughter tending a garden outside a brownstone. It was clear they’d just moved in.
“They’re coming,” Davis said.
One day, Brenda suggested we try a new place she’d discovered, so I picked her and Millie up at work, and we drove three miles west of Edna’s, on Madison Street, past the blue mosquito-zapper-like lights posted high on the lampposts (they’re police-run video cameras, installed to deter street crime), past the grocery store Moo and Oink, past the New World Hatter hat store, to Mac Arthur’s, which may well be the West Side’s most popular restaurant. On Sundays, Mac Arthur’s, which serves its soul food cafeteria style, periodically has to lock its doors because the line has doubled back on itself twice. Weekdays, the wait is more reasonable, usually fifteen minutes at most. Brenda and Millie so like the food here—especially the