Welcome to the South Side

By "Random White Lady" May 8, 2007

“I might as well move to Mars as Pullman!” I protested to the Realtor, clicking on the e-mail with the photo of a charming little brick home, maroon-painted with white arcing ‘eyebrows’ over the windows. A scraggly pine tree stood in the front lot, a postage-stamp-sized patch of thin grass. I considered it because I wanted to get back in a building. Preliminary research revealed that real estate in my range confined me to a questionable condo in Rogers Park, or a studio in a high rise in Uptown. But I have a dog, so I wanted a bit of grass for him to crap on, space for a pot of tomato plants, room for tulips and daffodils in the spring. I also have always preferred ‘vintage’ to new construction. I don’t mind exposed plumbing and bare brick walls, but granite countertops cause me to free-associate to the possibility of performing surgery on robots.

After twelve years in the city, to me the perimeters of Chicago were the lake to the east, Evanston to the north, Kedzie to the west, and Hyde Park to the south. Anything outside of those bounds, I didn’t have to know about.

Regarding housing, Rogers Park has much to recommend it – I’m up there occasionally for the Heartland or No Exit – but my friend Manicella swears that it was built on an Indian Burial Ground, and that visitors to the Curious Theater Branch had been attacked. Not an encouraging omen.

Not that I could afford new construction, anyway, but I really cannot connect with any of those cinder block and Blue Tyvek tarp bunkers now polluting Chicago’s architectural landscape.My life improves the more open-minded I become, however, so I went down to Pullman on the Metra with Manicella and we checked out the building.

On the train platform, she plays ‘count the Caucasians.’ “Three,” she announces.

“Do Latinos count?” I ask. Race is too sensitive for drollery, but that’s the only way I can handle any aspect of reality.

“That’s what everyone wants to know,” Manicella answers.

It was deemed habitable, and we sat on the back stoop smoking her Parliament lights, or ‘P-Funks.’ I have smoked only ‘O.P.s’ – other people’s – for the last several years. Some nosy neighbors come out on the porch to gawk at us, and I assume that their concern is that we might be gay.  Manicella suspects that they’re more concerned with having interracial lesbian neighbors: “…and one’s one of them.” “Oh, honey!” she declares. “We’ll have room for the cats!”

People considering Pullman ask me if I think it’s ‘safe.’ I interpret this to mean, ‘Are you comfortable living in an integrated neighborhood?’ and dust off my copy of “Sister Outsider” with Audre Lorde’s commendable essay on how she’s sick of having to explain racism to white people. Senior attorneys at my place of employment volunteer opinions regarding the area, and claim that Pullman has the highest concentration of sex offenders of anywhere in the city. I don’t bother to investigate, suspecting that even if the statistic is true, it’s probably due to the fact that an ‘economically challenged’ neighborhood is more likely to be assigned a halfway house.

After a protracted saga involving six buildings, three Realtors, a member of the Revolutionary Communist Party, faulty electricity, toxic levels of cat urine, an incompetent psychic, and extensive support and suggestions from loved ones, virtual strangers, friends, parents, and friends’ parents, I finally close, and celebrate the event by getting a six-inch at Subway and then going to the Lyric . All my commitment issues came out during the closing: I freaked and walked away from the table three times, and my lawyer had to follow me into the hall and talk me back into it.

The times I visited Pullman – with Manicella, with the Southside-savvy older work-friend, Margaret (Manicella called her ‘the Lady from Beverly’), and again, with Rhea , and solo, with my Doberman mutt as an escort, day and night – Pullman seemed like ‘Sesame Street.’ I kept waiting for Snuffleupagus to stagger out of an alley. Shortly upon moving there, a young woman says, “You’re walking your dog?” to me with surprise as we’re both walking after dark in the neighborhood. “Yes,” I respond. I tell Rhea that I walk the dog in Palmer Park at 9 a.m. on Sundays, and she gently suggests that I postpone it until 11 a.m. I pause. “People are up and going to church?” I ask.

“That’s right,” she says. Rhea is ‘from the Southside’ a phrase that appears to mean ‘African-American’ in particular contexts. Margaret takes me to a community organizing event months later, and the organizer – a relation of Malcolm’s, the three degrees, of course, makes my inner and omnipresent Guilty White Liberal momentarily quite giddy–notes afterwards that she’s meeting more “Northside folks” moving to the area, and I deduce that “Northside” is a polite word for ‘honky.’ 

You don’t get much more honky than me. The comedienne Reno once described her adoptive family as “Post-Modern white” (“It was like ‘white – half-frame – white -- half-frame – white’”) and I related to this sentiment. My paternal grandmother prepared only white food: unsalted turkey, instant mashed potatoes, milk. The Jewel on Blue Island has Sylvia’s canned goods on sale, and I stock up on assorted greens and black-eyed peas and sweet potatoes, but cannot revisit the deliciousness because the salt content is too high. Quite recently, I received one of the biggest compliments of my life. A woman asked me, “So, what are you? Italian or Jewish?”

“Neither.” 

“You’re kidding. So, what are you?”

I spill the beans.

(Pause) “You’d never guess.”

“Thank you! Thank you!” I respond. 

Pullman does have a significant portion of elderly Italians. However, seeing that my primary obsession remains my non-existent romantic life, I was amused by the following exchange with a quite elderly lady named Marie. Marie wore a floral head scarf and spoke little English. I speak no Italian, so we stood in the back alley by my garage and shrugged and smiled at one another. “You single?” she asks.

“Yes.” I say.

“No kids?” she asks, brightening considerably.

“That’s right,” I say, a bit chagrined. I’d associated Italians with a very pro-family culture, but apparently Marie values her peace and quiet more. “I’m single.”

“That’s OK,” Marie opines. “Maybe you have special friend, that’s good.” I laugh. Later, I share the exchange with my mother, and she laughs. “Well, if you have Marie’s blessing…” she observes.

“Indeed,” I respond.

The worldliness of Pullman.