South Side Community Art Center
Chicago, Illinois

By Angie Chatman

4724 South Evans Avenue was located a block south of Cottage Grove, one of the main thoroughfares through the Bronzeville neighborhood of Chicago. The three-flat building, now demolished, initially housed four generations of my family. The oldest generation — my great-grandfather Ernest Hezekiah Fambro, along with his two sons, Curtis and Timothy, his wife, Nellie, and her mother, Amelia Beasley Ball — had moved to Chicago from DeKalb County, Georgia, in 1916. This was early in the Great Migration of African Americans from the agrarian South to the industrial North of the United States, which continued through the 1960s.

My relatives weren’t the only Negroes to settle in Bronzeville. Gwendolyn Brooks and her family also migrated to Chicago, in response to lynchings and other forms of racial unrest in Topeka, Kansas, as well as for economic opportunities. Brooks lived in other places after her literary successes brought more lucrative teaching assignments, but those were temporary addresses. Chicago was home. This is obvious from the title of her first book of poetry, A Street in Bronzeville, published in 1945, as well as Bronzeville Boys and Girls, published in 1956.

Due to national and local laws mandating segregated housing, at its peak 300,000 Negroes lived in Bronzeville, in the area between 39th and 51st from Cottage Grove to Halsted (until the Dan Ryan Expressway was built in 1961 and cut the western boundary line of the neighborhood to State Street). Dr. Daniel Hale Williams performed the first open-heart surgery at Provident Hospital, the first African American owned and operated hospital in the country. Loraine Hansberry’s 1959 stage play, A Raisin in the Sun, was based on her family’s experience living in and attempting to move away from Bronzeville.

Once, on a Saturday morning my mother took us to the South Side Community Art Center, a three-story brick building on Michigan Avenue. We were going to hear Mrs. Brooks, who was then the first African American Poet Laureate of the State of Illinois, read her poems. My younger siblings and I sat on the linoleum floor on mats of woven fabric, fans moving the air like a barge on the Chicago River. Mrs. Brooks’ voice rose above the hum, like that of the soloist in the choir. I don’t remember what poems she read, only that I recognized the tenor of the words. Her poetry had the same rhythm and cadence of conversations among my relatives during a backyard cookout in the sunshine.

My mother had promised we’d stop for ice cream after the reading. She took a detour on the way and pulled over in front of 4724 South Evans. Stairs led up to the entrance. Every apartment had the same layout: an open living room, three bedrooms, one bathroom, and a kitchen. There was a small yard in the back. My siblings and I were dismayed that a family of six shared one bathroom.

I never lived in that building on 47th and Evans; it’s now an empty lot. For my mother, though, it was the telescope she used to focus on fond memories of carefree days with her three older sisters: days full of hopscotch, double-dutch jump rope, roller skating to the Hall Branch library — a mile and a half away — and movies at the Regal Theater. Ms. Brooks’ also uses her experiences in Bronzeville as a lens with which she can zoom in and out to comment not only on the quotidian activities of Black folk, but also display how dysfunctional racist practices are for both Black people and white people.

I have not lived in Chicago for over 25 years. Yet, as the Black Lives Matter movement grew from Minneapolis, to Chicago, to cover the globe, I turned my telescope towards home. It occurs to me — each time there’s another murder of a Black man/woman/child by police, and as people of color face a disproportionate impact from COVID-19 — that “We die soon.” Too soon.

I turn also to Brooks’ Annie Allen, published in 1949, especially a poem entitled “Beverly Hills, Chicago,” about a drive through Beverly, a then all-white neighborhood on the South Side:

Nobody is furious. Nobody hates these people.

At least nobody driving by in this car.

It is only natural, however, that it should occur to us

How much more fortunate they are than we are.

Angie Chatman is a native of Chicago. Her short stories and essays have appeared in Pangyrus, The Rumpus, Blood Orange Review, and Hippocampus Magazine. Her essay, “Ode to Poundcake,” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She won a WEBBY award for her performance in the “Growing Up Black” episode of the World Channel’s Stories from the Stage. Angie can also be heard on The Moth Radio Hour’s podcast in the episode titled “Help Me.” Angie now lives in Boston’s Dorchester neighborhood with her family and rescue dog, Lizzie.

Photo courtesy of the South Side Community Art Center.

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JAMES EMANUEL

Alliance Public Library
Alliance, Nebraska

By Sean Stewart

Alliance, Nebraska, does not remember James Emanuel. There is no plaque, no statue. His poetry is not assigned to high school students. Despite the lofty architecture of the public library and museum, there is no display, no exhibit. Just two or three dusty books kept in the staff room of the library alongside genealogy tomes, protected behind glass cases. Protected from being discovered.

I grew up craving art in a town that didn’t have any. I read about other places—any other place I could—and the figures who put those places on the map. I decried the emptiness of the prairie I found myself in. I was scared the small world of my beginning had set the limits for all I could be.

Alliance had no bookstore, no venue for musical or theatrical performances to speak of, no university. In this town of 8,000, I gravitated to the place stories could be found. The public library was a lifeline. Everywhere else my world felt small, but when I stepped inside the library it became limitless. The old library building, built in 1912 with a Carnegie grant, boasts classical columns and resilient stone. The current library is equally grand: skylight windows fifty feet up seem to usher the world in. The place grabbed me. I got a job as a library page, and as I shelved books a new geography imprinted itself on my mind. Even if no section of the library was especially thorough, I could see the hints of everything not present. And I wanted to learn it all.

I’d been working there for years before I discovered James Emanuel. His faded books were kept with the archives in the staff room. When I was tasked with rearranging the archival shelves I was, as far as I could tell, the first to look at them in decades.

What I found left me breathless. James Emanuel was a poet pushing against the very bounds of what it’s possible for one life to contain.

He was born in Alliance in 1921 and grew up with the same quiet streets that I did, the same railroad engines droning in the distance, the same treeless sandhills stretching to every horizon. He read his first poem at Alliance Junior High. As a teenager, he worked on a cattle ranch before leaving the area and moving East.

Emanuel attended Howard, Northwestern, and Columbia universities. He was mentored by Langston Hughes, on whom Emanuel went on to write an influential book-length analysis. Emanuel then cemented his own scholarly reputation with Dark Symphony: Negro Literature in America, a groundbreaking anthology of African American literature.

From the relatively pastoral beginning of early poems, Emanuel’s later began to focalize in his writing around racial injustice. Their topical change is matched by their uptick in rhythm. Poems like “Panther Man,” his scorching condemnation of the murder of Fred Hampton, are marvels of energy and anger. Emanuel later disavowed America entirely. His son was brutalized by police and took his own life in the aftermath. James Emanuel renounced the United States and spent the rest of his life an expatriate in France, pioneering a new form he called the jazz haiku.

I have to think that Emanuel’s artistic and personal evolution in a direction his country was unwilling to follow is at least partly responsible for his anonymity in Alliance. When he died in 2013, the Alliance Times Herald ran one of his early poems called “Poet as Fisherman,” sidestepping his real legacy as a poet of startling rhythm, fierce critiques, and unfettered experimentation. I’m proud, now, to be from the home of the blistering jazz haiku king, James Emanuel—the town whose streets and surrounding oceans of dry tallgrass shaped his early world. When I began looking for traces of him in Alliance, I learned that Emanuel said of the public library—the 1912 iteration—“the Alliance town library was in biblical terms ‘my truth and my refuge.’” I wish I could tell him that it was for me, too. I wish I could tell him that his own books I discovered there are no small part of why.

Sean Theodore Stewart received his MFA from the University of Idaho, where he served as the fiction editor of Fugue. The Arkansas International selected one of his stories as a finalist for the 2019 Emerging Writer’s Prize and his work has appeared in Salt Hill, The New Territory, and Guesthouse. Originally from the Sandhills of Nebraska, he now lives in Brooklyn with his wife, Samantha, and their pups, Ramona and Molly.

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