Hard to know how to write this. Immigrants to the U.S. are
not supposed to tell stories like mine. At least that's what I've been told. But all I can write is what I have
known.
Imagine November 1964 in Chicago, a dry afternoon with a
steely sky overhead and jets of a cold, wet wind worming their way under your
stocking cap and into your ears. See Montrose Avenue on the north side, its
broad sidewalks cracked with age. And then look down the block and see where I
am straggling up the street. Behind me comes my mother, a little silk kerchief
tied under her chin. Each of her hands is occupied. My sister Lena grasps
mom’s left hand even as both of mom’s hands push a little stroller in which my
sister Anna rides. The stroller shudders and jolts over the cracked walk, but Anna doesn’t seem to mind.
We’re out shopping. Ahead of us about a block down the
street sits the neighborhood market where mom will buy groceries for tonight’s
supper. But before we can get there, we walk past a set of red neon letters
flashing away. “Good Food,” the sign announces. The restaurant window is
streaked with dirt. It’s impossible to tell if the café curtains were once very
white or a buttercup yellow. On this afternoon in 1964 the fabric in the window seems unable to choose between grayish white and dust. The closer we get
to the restaurant window, the stronger the smell of old grease becomes.
I turn to my mother, point at the sign, and ask, “What does
the sign mean?”
She answers, “God mat.”
My eyebrows shoot up. “In there?” I say.
“Oh, this is what they do in America,” mom says. “They use
words to tell you what they want to be true. It is called advertising. We would
never eat in there.” As she talks, she expertly avoids an especially big crack
in the sidewalk, sparing Anna a good jounce.
“Why would a restaurant that looked so dirty put a flashing
red sign in its window that promised good food? Wouldn’t anybody walking by see
how scary the place looks and laugh?” The whole set-up was clearly inexplicable
to my 8-year-old brain.
In Swedish my mom replies, “In America there are people who
pay more attention to the words than to what they actually see or hear or
smell. Or taste. I don’t really understand it, but they do.”
“So people eat in there?”
“I think they do,” mom says. “It’s open,” she says with a
shrug. And by that time we have made it past the café.
Of all the ways Chicago was different than the beautiful
little town of Laholm where my family and I lived for a while, this memory of
the neon sign contains within it the essence of what made me most sad about
living in America. Often Americans offered me lofty words when all I wanted was
the smell of good food and clean curtains in the window. In public school the
teachers extolled the virtues of democracy even as they clearly treated
different races and different ethnicities of children with differing degrees of
harshness. Over and over again I heard Americans speak with pride about the
great values of their country even as I saw terrible inequalities within its
communities, inequalities that those with more seemed content to leave in place
even when many in their town were going without.
I started to understand the realities of Chicago by walking
its streets. We lived in a neighborhood called Ravenswood. It was said that
there were more races and nationalities in our little neighborhood than in any
other part of the city. At least this is what I heard while living there in the
1960’s. And I was one of the kids whose parents were from another country.
When we moved into our Chicago apartment after living in
Sweden for about eighteen months, I had become more comfortable with Swedish
than with English. It’s a complicated story that I’ve alluded to in other blog
posts, but my parents emigrated to America in the 1950’s only to return to
Sweden in the 1960’s, a move that proved unsustainable, and so they immigrated
permanently to America after only a short attempt to resettle in the country
where they were born.
Realizing Chicago was now my home, I tried to reconstitute
my ability to speak English. I struggled to figure out how to make friends in
the city school where I heard so many languages. And—perhaps one of the reasons
I came to teach dialects to theatre majors many years later—I listened in
fascination to all the ways that different groups of Americans pronounced the
same English words.
One little girl who seemed as shy as me seemed to make every
word she said sound like a soft song that slid from consonant to consonant with
a flow of vowels in between. After a few weeks I learned that Debbie was
originally from Appalachia. The Chicago born and bred kids said she spoke
English with a southern accent. To my ear the way Debbie sang her words sounded
a lot like the way my dad’s friend, Thomas, spoke his Swedish. Thomas was
from a province in Sweden called Skåne and he could drawl and growl out his
words with a drama and sense of laughter that made me want him to tell stories
forever.
But though I tried to get Debbie to talk with me a little
bit at school, she’d give me a smile and a word or two, but that was about it.
She said she couldn’t come to my house to play after school and that I couldn’t
come to hers. The other kids in our third-grade class avoided her, or seemed
to look right through her. I didn’t know why. Sure her clothes weren’t as new
as some of the other girls’, but she was kind to kids and seemed to like school
and books, like me.
So I came up with a plan. I would hand-deliver a birthday
invitation to Debbie’s apartment. Then she’d have to see that I really wanted
to be her friend.
Now to understand this next part of the story, I have to
explain that both of my parents came from very rural communities. They grew up
walking everywhere, and from a young age they made their way to friends’
houses, or to a local shop, all on their own. Sweden when they were growing up
was a very safe place for kids to explore. They had never known anything else. When
we moved to Chicago, I was allowed to move about our Chicago neighborhood on my
own at a pretty young age, which is why I managed to get permission from my
mother to hand-deliver Debbie’s birthday invitation on my own.
“How far are you going?” my mom asked me, worried a little
that she didn’t know exactly where I was headed.
“Just two blocks, mom. It’s just two blocks,” I answered
with the impatience of a ten-year-old anticipating an adventure.
And so mom said, “O.K., but if you’re not back in fifteen
minutes, I’m coming after you.” I shot out the front door before she could
change her mind.
Debbie had given me a rough idea where she lived. I had the
street and the apartment building number, but I’d actually never been to that
block before. I set off on a warm and sunny October afternoon, invitation in
hand, but nothing would have prepared me for what I found.
Chicago remains a city where a block of buildings inhabited
by people with the means to keep them in decent repair will be located right
next to a city block where unscrupulous landlords put no money at all into
their buildings and yet see fit to charge tenants city prices for rent. Our
family lived on a block where people were, as it was said then, keeping up.
Homes were pretty much taken care of, and lots of yards had a few flowers in
the front. But when I turned onto Debbie’s block I immediately felt how the
entire environment was different for the people who lived there. For one thing,
all the large, old trees had been chopped down and at the end of the summer and
autumn the front yards were a uniform dried brown as grass starved of water
went dormant. Lots of the buildings had broken windows. Some of the apartment
buildings had no door protecting the building’s vestibule. I saw young kids
looking out windows on the second floor that had no screens. Everywhere I
looked I saw peeling paint on the buildings and broken glass on the sidewalks.
I had crossed some sort of a line and felt it instantly.
But I was a stubborn cuss at that age, still am, so I kept
walking until I found the brown brick apartment building with Debbie’s number
on it. I looked up at it and thought I understood why I couldn’t play at her
house. I thought I understood why she seemed so uncomfortable in front of the
girls at school who wore those cute pleated skirts and the socks with lace at
the ankles. Debbie’s building was missing entire windows in places. The front
door hung from one hinge. There was no grass in the front yard, just dirt.
I didn’t know what apartment she lived in, so I just called
out her name in the hope that she would hear and see me. I called and called
until someone stuck a head out a window and gave me a look and I decided it was
time for me to go home. If Debbie heard me, she gave no sign.
I never got to give Debbie that invitation. She avoided me
at school for the next few days and then, mysteriously, disappeared. I never
saw her again.
So now, at the age of 57, I think about Debbie every time I
hear someone brag—and there’s really no other word for it—about how great our
country is. I think about that little girl trying to get along in the public
school having come from that apartment building every morning, and knowing
that’s where she was going when school got out. How in the world was she to be
expected to manage well at school with that kind of environment for her home?
And at school both teachers and students looked at the edges of her, almost as
if they were hoping she would just go away, which is exactly what she did.
Perhaps her family was temporarily living with relatives in Chicago until the
mom or dad could find some work. Perhaps she disappeared because the family
moved on in pursuit of that next job. I will never know.
I do know that gross differences in
how people live in our country have yet to be addressed. These inequities are everywhere, but the country seems fixated on the neon signs that proclaim how lucky we are to live here. Some communities may
offer breakfast, lunch and a snack to kids at school who need that, but those kids need more than school meals five days a week. In some parts of the
country the gulf between those who struggle and those who don't is worse than it has ever been. Those who are part of the 1% have little
chance to meet someone like Debbie and, even if they did, they might attribute
her unfortunate circumstances to the sloth of her parents. The Puritan work
ethic is alive and well in the U.S. today.
Now I could have done a little research and cited pundit
after pundit, statistic after statistic, to document the iniquitous economic
system of countries such as the United States of America that still believe
capitalism just needs to be free in order to make us all happy. But I’m a
writer setting down what I know, and what I have experienced first hand. Here’s
hoping that my little story furthers the discussion of a punishing economic
system that we could change, if we shared a common commitment to do so. In my
opinion, an economic system that leaves so many struggling or suffering is not
a success.
And Debbie, I wish I had been able to deliver that
invitation. I wonder what became of you.
