The Grapes of Wrath Are Fomenting, Part 2
Writing by treason on Tuesday, 28 of February , 2006 at 8:06 am
“Of course, he has a knife. He always has a knife. We all have knives. It is eleven eighty-three and we’re barbarians.”
– Eleanor of Aquitaine to her sons Richard, Geoffrey, and John in James Goldman’s “The Lion In Winter”
As I’ve said before, I attended a public elementary school in Chicago. When I say North Side, not South Side, people make assumptions. Even today when I meet a Chicagoan and I’m asked where I lived, the response is different if I’m asked by a South Sider. The perception has been that the North Side is made up of rich whites and only poor blacks live on the South Side. White Sox fans are blue collar, Cubs fans are yuppies. This isn’t accurate now and it wasn’t accurate then. I meet transplanted South Siders all the time (I can hear it in their dialect - it’s a tad harder than on the North Side), and there’s plenty of diversity.
My North Side neighborhood was just as diverse. What I’m trying to do here is look at my own school experience and find racism in it to explain why there are these “ethnic tensions” at local schools today. At that time, there was a broad mix of kids - there should have been conflict. I recall that a lot of the students were Jewish but they were too busy excelling to beat up anyone. Same with the Asian students. Now someone can point to that and call it racism. Oh, so you’re assuming that if a student is Asian they’re automatically superior? And if I say it depends on which part of Asia, that could be racist, too. All I’m saying is that in that particular system at that particular time, the smart kids weren’t picking fights. And not all the smart kids were Jewish or Asian.
A lot of Irish kids there - all Catholic. English, Scottish, German, Polish, French, Japanese, Korean, Russian, Lebanese. No problems between Jewish kids and Christians. The only tension was that the Jewish kids had so many days off for holidays and the rest of us were a little jealous. The upside is that teachers took off, too, so those days were spent watching movies and working on art projects. Fun stuff.
A lot of foreign kids from Eastern European countries would show up. Sometimes they’d be treated badly because they were different, but eventually they fit in. The kids who were picked on the most, I felt, were the ones from poor Southern families. The kids who wore the same clothes all the time and didn’t have the box of 64 crayons.
I lived in a good neighborhood but we weren’t rich. A lot of my friends were, but just as many were not. My siblings and I always collected a variety of friends - people who got along with us, but wouldn’t necessarily get along with each other. I’ve written about my sister’s friend Sharon before, but she had another friend who had the most foul mouth I’d ever known. I loved to be around her just so I could increase my vocabulary. Words I’d never repeat, but at least I had them.
When her mother would walk into the restaurant where my mother worked, no one would wait on her. The owner didn’t want her anywhere near his business. She had a reputation for sitting on gum, then making the restaurant owner pay for all her dry cleaning; and she complained about everything and didn’t tip. But my mother would serve her and was always friendly. “She’s my daughter’s friend’s mother,” she’d tell her boss. And there was never a problem.
My brother collected his own assortment. Since he lived his life as if they’d made a terrible error at the hospital, and that he’d been born into a wealthy family but a mix-up resulted in a life with us, he sought friends who had cash. Since he’d sell his toys for spare change, he couldn’t afford to waste his time on ones with empty pockets. As a teenager he hung out with kids who “dressed sharp” and formed a band. They looked like, but didn’t sound like, The Beatles. As he got older his taste in friends changed. One day my sister walked past his room and looked inside. When I saw her she was peeved.
“What’s wrong?”
“It appears our illustrious brother is bringing home heroin addicts.”
“Frank Sinatra?” (Apparently I’d just seen The Man With the Golden Arm.)
“No, not Frank Sinatra. Those hoodlums he hangs around with. The ones who wear sunglasses at night.”
You just knew that anyone who wore sunglasses in the dark had to be up to no good. One night my brother came home with a broken jaw. My mother insisted that if he hadn’t been with that “Jose,” he wouldn’t have gotten into trouble. My mother didn’t dislike him because he was Mexican, she disliked him because she knew he was a bad influence. On some level we knew our brother wouldn’t mess with needles - he was much too fastidious - but we suspected he probably thought it was cool to rub elbows with “bohemians.” We always hoped that the hospital would realize their mistake and his rich family would come and collect him. (The Air Force was kind enough to take him off our hands.)
I had a few hooligan friends myself. They saw me as a shy, introverted goody-two-shoes who needed to be corrupted. In turn, I would find even more introverted kids and drag them out of their shells and into trouble, so their parents thought that I was a bad influence. It was that way with Marina. She looked just like the Italian doll my mother bought for me but wouldn’t let me touch. She had shiny black hair, chin length with bangs and huge brown eyes. She wore the most beautiful clothes - a lot of them custom made. She’d take me to her family’s apartment but her parents were never there. An older woman cleaned, cooked, and took care of her. She had an accent and baked the most amazing banana bread for us. Marina always said her mother was a model and her father was a businessman. We’d spend hours looking at her mother’s things and touching her fur coats.
One day Marina was at my house and said she needed to go home. I ignored her. The doorbell rang. There stood a good-looking but nervous man with dark hair and eyes, a suit, dark overcoat and hat. “Is my daughter here?”
He took Marina and left. My mother looked at me. “What did you say her last name was?” I’d told my mother before that Marina was Greek, but her last name was unusually un-Greek. It almost sounded “too American.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Her father.”
“What about him?”
“What did you say he did for a living?”
“He’s a businessman.”
“He’s Mafia.”
I was confused. “But they’re Greek.” She said they weren’t, they had a made-up last name, and now she knew why her parents were so strict and never wanted that kid out of their sight. Maybe she was right. Marina was never allowed to come over again. She barely talked to me at school.
That’s one thing my mother could spot. When she first came to Chicago and waited tables, there was a group of men who’d come into the restaurant and look her up and down, discussing her “attributes.” It was like that seen in The Godfather when Michael first sees Apollonia. Anyway, they started talking about her in Italian. Then, like in the movies, she “accidentally” dropped a plate of pasta on one of them. They knew she did it on purpose when she said: “Oh, and by the way, I’m Italian.” My mother was the only one in her family who never learned Italian, but she was familiar with enough of the choice words to know that what they were saying wasn’t appropriate.
The blue-eyes must have fooled them - they didn’t know she’d know what they were saying about her. But she got by with it. “They were crude. No good Mafia.” She said they still came into the restaurant after that, but they never talked about her in any language again and they were polite. She suspected they liked her because it didn’t faze her to wait on them and their wives one night, then wait on them and their mistresses the next. “As long as they tip, I don’t care who they bring into the place.”
But it was normal for my mother to be suspicious about everyone and she’d make assumptions about the people we dragged home. She even had suspicions about my best friend Vanessa.
To be continued…
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