My grammar school was mostly black. I still remember the children—kind, smart, and well behaved—my neighbors and friends, Monica, Clifton, and Annette with her curled bangs and starched dresses. A few went to Jane Addams’s Hull House after school, as I did. If our neighborhood hadn’t been torn down we would have grown up together. By the time I reached the fourth grade, my last year before the school was destroyed, however, I was taunted, beaten, bullied, and harassed daily by other kids who were not as welcoming of “the little white girl,” as I was labeled. The main bully was a boy named Odell. After one of his mean attacks, I was called to the principal’s office. Someone had reported the assault, but it was not me. There was no telling what might follow my snitching. A woman waiting in the office eyed me. It was Odell’s mother. Neither of my own parents was there. I can only guess that the school called them at their work, but maybe not. Neither parent ever mentioned anything to me.
“She’s such a pretty little girl,” Odell’s mother said. I was nine, but I couldn’t see what that had to do with her son’s abuse. How was she seeing me? My mother kept my long hair in braids entwined with red ribbons. I always wore gold post earrings and the practical shoes built to last until you outgrew them and homemade dresses below the knee—all emblematic of traditional Mexican girls. As a child, I was still between Spanish and English, speaking mostly Spanish at home.
I knew how to defend myself. I’d given poor Clifton a bloody nose in the school playground for bothering me too much. But Odell was something out of To Sir, with Love, with a motorcycle jacket and combat boots in the fourth grade. He waited one day behind the door of the classroom. When I came in he swung the leather jacket with its buckles and studs smack into my face and sent me reeling.
My family, whose experiences were distanced from that of a young girl in a city fraught with turmoil, didn’t get it. They didn’t want to do anything but go to work at the factory, collect a paycheck, and squeeze a tiny bit of life in on the weekends. My mother, by doing all the housework on Saturday, relaxed on Sundays by visiting her sister and, later, her oldest daughter, who had eloped. With the older half brother drafted and the older half sister married, I helped my mamá clean the flat. She taught me to iron. She did the important items, but it was left to me to press my father’s boxers, handkerchiefs, our sheets, and some of our clothes. This was before permanent-press fabric, which later cut the weekly labor time needed by my mamá and me to one day.
During the week, I was the household’s errand girl, going up and down Little Italy. By ten years old and throughout my teens, I was paying the bills at the currency exchange, mailing packages at the post office, picking up corn tortillas at a local grocer, dropping off my dad’s dress shirts at the cleaners, procuring cigarettes on the sly for an older sibling when one was around, picking up repaired soles from the shoemaker, buying bread from the Italian baker in our neighborhood on Taylor Street, and dropping off prescriptions at the pharmacy. In the evenings during the week, my mother mended what needed to be mended, and she taught me to use her Singer pedal sewing machine.
My father went out on weekends with friends. They put on suits and skinny ties, got in sparkling Cadillacs, and disappeared into the night. I’m not sure where he went on Sundays during the day, but I didn’t see him then, either. Sunday evenings my parents went to bed early in order to rise for work on Monday and start a new week. When they fixed their marriage I was fifteen. The weekend routine remained largely the same except that now my father spent time with my mother.
Now and then, Mamá mentioned the young white protesters outside the factory passing out leaflets as the workers flooded out of one shift and the next poured inside. The pamphlets urged them to join the Communist Party or some Marxist-Leninist branch and go to meetings about the people’s liberation—a liberation for which my mother had little use. One time, one of the pamphleteers got hired and it was Mamá’s duty to train her. At home one evening, as she warmed up our supper of daily frijoles, tortillas, and made some other thing (fideo or arroz or maybe neckbones en chile verde), my mamá shared with a little chuckle how the trainee had come in with dog flea collars around her ankles. The girl had a bedbug issue at home and that had been her unlikely solution. In other words, the idea of these revolutionaries leading any kind of charge was not to be taken seriously.
Racial tensions were high then. I didn’t want to attend a high school where I would be targeted as I was by Odell. The irony about not wanting to go to the local public school was that color and ethnicity were important to me, too, particularly in a white-dominated city. I wasn’t white. You had only to ask what any European-descended individual thought of me. With my reddish-brown hue, indigenous features, and dark hair I inherited mostly from my mother, the usual comment was that I couldn’t even be American.
I identified with popular black culture, though, like many teens of the time. At bedtime, tucked by my pillow was the transistor I got one Christmas. If I kept the volume up just enough, right at my ear so that my mother didn’t know I had it on, I could listen until I zonked out. Bedtime hours were strict since my parents were up by four or five in the morning. “¡Sopla la luz!” Mamá would call out from her room. Whether it was because they had no electricity in México or because she picked it up from her grandfather who came from the nineteenth-century rural world where candles or gaslights were used, my mother’s order was to “blow out the light.” WVON was an all-black radio station and, at night, South Side teens tuned in to hear the latest jams until the wee hours when broadcasting went dead.
Herb Kent the Cool Gent on WVON was a natural born fabulist. Every night he gave installments about metaphorical characters, the Wahoo Man, the Gym-Shoe Creeper (with stinky feet), and the little critters that populated his Afro. They were “green, purple, orange,” he said, and very soon you knew he was telling the story of the city’s current race relations. Herb Kent had the astuteness to make it not only about black and white but also brown—Latinos. He had a smooth voice, Herb did. I imagined a sculpted face like that of Seal or a green-eyed Smokey type but with a big Afro.
While the station played the Temptations or Diana Ross’s latest hits—everything from Motown—they gave shout-outs to mostly black high schools. On my own when it came to education, I ended up at a small girls’ Catholic school before transferring to a secretarial school. Both schools had mixed ethnic populations and girls from working-class families. Neither place had any of the exciting events or associations of big schools: no football or basketball heroes, no bands, no boys, no dressing up how you liked. Neither of my schools allowed teased hair or miniskirts, or slacks for that matter, even during the coldest of Chicago winter days.
On weekends I could dress how I wanted. (Well, not really, because then I was regulated by my mother.) Since I started working at fourteen, I made my own money and got away from my mother’s Salvation Army finds for me, her home-sewn skirts made of random fabric, the occasional store-bought dress on sale. Instead, I treated myself to a pretty empire-style dress or sling-back shoes with low pointed heels. I didn’t wear much makeup, but I applied eyeliner with wings at the ends à la Ronnie from the Ronettes, and I remember there was a time when my crowd thought smudging under-eye cover on your lips to give you a neutral lip color was the height of chic.
When I was fourteen and fifteen I danced at the YMCA Friday night socials to James Brown’s “Say It Loud,” but by 1970 the city was at a no-turning-back point for Black Power and social change. Not only had a Democratic president been assassinated but his brother, who would have likely run for president and was one of the greatest leaders for black civil rights the country had ever seen, was shot dead in broad daylight. That day everyone was sent home from school and told to lock their doors.
In this atmosphere—with mostly absent parents, an inner-city girl with inner-city tastes and dance moves, around inner-city boys who’d dropped out of high school and joined the army or were drafted—I came of age. I caught sight of Herb Kent on the TV console in our living room one afternoon, probably during the King riots when the city was again in an uproar. He turned out to be frog eyed and thin as a Popsicle stick. What a shock. But by then I was developing something of an identity, which comes part and parcel with being a teen. That identity was neither black