Never a City So Real - Alex Kotlowitz [20]
We’re scooting past weed-choked vacant lots and aging wood-framed homes that lean in the wind like prairie grass. We pass a group of young African-American men, one of whom halfheartedly attempts to conceal the marijuana blunt they’re sharing. They turn away from us. Reed, who is also African-American, says to me, “You don’t have to worry out here. They look at you, and think one thing: There goes a cop.” He lets go with his signature laugh—an uninhibited cackle that comes in small, staccato bursts, and often in response to his own observations. This is less a sign of immodesty than an acknowledgment that it’s okay to laugh at his stories and perceptions, some of which can be discomfiting in their bluntness. The young men, who up to this point have been trying to deflect our notice, now turn to see what’s so funny.
Reed had invited me to join him at the Bud Billiken Day Parade. Each summer, this parade winds its way through the heart of Chicago’s South Side, a ribbon of predominately black neighborhoods, which runs from the Loop to Ed Sadlowski’s South Chicago. (Blacks and whites still live very separate lives here, as evidenced by the El platform in the Loop at the end of the business day: Those waiting for the northbound trains are virtually all white, those on the platform awaiting the southbound trains virtually all black.) Billiken, as far as I can make out, is the country’s largest parade. It lasts six hours and has fifty thousand participants. (By comparison, New York’s Thanksgiving Day Parade lasts three hours and has roughly five thousand participants.) Another million people line Martin Luther King, Jr., Boulevard, ten to twenty deep in places, and some spend the night in sleeping bags to secure a good viewing spot. Virtually everyone who attends the parade is African-American. In fact, an out-of-towner stumbling upon this hopping celebration might think that it was one of black Chicago’s best-kept secrets, except that it’s televised on two local stations. The truth is that the city’s imaginary borders can be as impenetrable as the Berlin Wall had been. A visiting friend once arrived at O’Hare airport and received a city map from a rental car agency; the map didn’t include the South Side.
The parade, which is held the second Saturday in August, originated in 1928 as a salute by the Chicago Defender to its paperboys. The Defender is one of the country’s oldest African-American newspapers, and though it’s lost much of its vigor, in the 1930s and 1940s it was considered essential reading in the black community. Pullman porters would distribute the paper in southern towns, where it helped lure victims of segregation northward. The parade’s name derived from a small statue—a “Billiken”—which sat on the editor’s desk and which parade organizers claim was a Chinese god who watched over children. But Billiken, it turns out, was neither a deity nor Chinese. Around 1910, a small Chicago firm, the Billiken company, produced small figurines—sometimes in the form of penny banks—of a bullet-headed creature with pixie ears, a grinning mouth, and a rotund belly. It was the Cabbage Patch Doll of its day, a passing craze, and undoubtedly one of these figurines made its way to the desk of the Defender’s editor, Lucius Harper, whose nickname was “Buddy.”
The parade’s path winds through a part of the South Side long known as Bronzeville, a neighborhood whose ups and downs have inversely reflected the nation’s mood on race. It was a thriving hub of black-owned businesses through the 1940s, the destination for blacks who fled the South in what has been hailed as one of the largest internal migrations in history. Bronzeville, where such writers as Ida B. Wells, Richard Wright, and Gwendolyn Brooks settled, was also home to Liberty Life Insurance, the first black-owned insurance company in the North, and Overton Hygienic Company,