No more than five years ago, St. Jude, patron of lost causes, met every north-bound driver entering the center of Chicago via the Dan Ryan Expressway. As I-90-94 swerved west to meet the interstate exchanges around the Loop, St. Jude’s mournful mien gazed down the passing traffic. Beneath his beatific head, under the concrete and steel pillars of the overpass, sit a few blocks seemingly lost to progress. These three-odd blocks are surrounded on all sides by major transportation arteries: To the immediate north, the gully of the Stevenson Expressway, wider than the Chicago River at its fullest. To the east, the chasm of the Dan Ryan—the world’s busiest expressway—flows south from its headwaters. West, an embankment of freight train lines 70-yards-wide block this area off and are only transversable by dank, dark viaduct passages. The expressway ramps soar above, residents hunker underneath, and in the soot and debris, St. Jude was wrapped in a blue cloak both brilliant and stern, with the words “Pray for Us” painted on a golden background.
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| Most of the homes in this residential triangle seem even more misplaced than their neighborhood. The majority are built in a sort-of 1970s near-suburbs style, as though they were intended for Hickory Hills or Schiller Park but fell off a flatbed transporting them on the expressway. Even though front stoops are shaded by the expressway and backyard decks seem to slide into the Stevenson on-ramp, this neighborhood features broad driveways; sculpted ornamental evergreen shrubs; rusty, inoperative security cameras. Almost all of these homes—and the blocks they inhabit—are festooned with Italian-American markers. Plastic picnic flags in Italian colors are strung between the trees, and the trees themselves—along with basketball poles, benches, and even fire hydrants—are painted red, white and green. It seems the Italian inhabitants here want to make it clear they are holding firm to their tiny homeland. Certainly there is an element of “preserving the old neighborhood” involved in these streets off 26th Street (mentioned so prominently during the Family Secrets trial), especially since discarded packs of cigarettes with Mandarin characters clutter the gutters. Under the layers of proud paint, however, is the sense that these hidden blocks have been choked off by the transportation arteries on all sides, and the dwindling residents are desperate to maintain their besieged keep. |
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In addition to the proud flags, most homes on the street also feature melancholy votives shrines in the front yards—some to the Virgin Mary, or the nativity—but also to St. Jude, Patron Saint of Hopeless Causes. More than even the Italian colors, these tiny devotionals evoke the people who, according to Virgil, supposedly established the Roman line—the Trojans. In Virgil’s Aeneid, Aeneas flees Troy with his father and son and eventually lands in Italy to found “the Latin race and the ramparts of high Rome.” During his travels to Italy, Aeneas rests in Carthage, where, during Book II, he recounts the fall of his city to the Carthaginian Queen Dido. Aeneas tells how, after the Greeks have emerged from their treacherous horse and are laying waste to the city, he flew home from the slaughter to carry his father and lead his family from the burning city:
‘Come then, dear father, mount upon my neck;
I’ll bear you on my shoulders. That is not
too much for me. Whatever waits for us,
we both shall share one danger, one salvation….
My father, you will carry
the household vessels and our homeland’s gods.’
The Latin phrase is “carpe sacra manu patriosque penatis,” literally: “seize in your hand the sacred things of the fatherland and the Penates.” In Roman cosmology, the Penates are the hearth gods, older than the imported Greek pantheon we are familiar with. Edith Hamilton, in her Mythology, makes clear their use:
Every Roman had a Lar, who was the spirit of an ancestor, and several Penates, gods of the hearth and guardians of the storehouse. They were the family’s own gods, belonging only to it, really the most important part of it, protectors and defenders of the entire household. They were never worshipped in temples, but only in the home, where some of the food of each meal was offered to them. There were also public Lares and Penates, who did for the city what the others did for the family.
It is the pater familias, the head of the house and clan, who has charge of these gods. The Lar and Penates held the father’s– and the family’s– guiding spirit and wisdom, its “genius.” It’s telling that, amid the flames of ransacked Troy, the Prince Aeneas makes certain that his father carries the genius of his family and of his city.
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| Penates appear again in another heart-wrenching scene from Aeneas’s recount of the sack of Troy. The Trojan king Priam sees his terrified family huddled around their altar in the Trojan citadel, and the elderly king begins to arm himself before his wife Hecuba dissuades him. Since the Renaissance, the altar has been depicted as an altar to Zeus, the king of the Greek gods, and—as god of the sky and judgment—a apt pagan approximation of the Christian “God Almighty.” But Virgil, coupling his description with a metaphor that is both apt and heart-imploding, describes the altar differently:
‘Beneath the naked round of heaven, at
the center of the palace, stood a giant shrine;
at its side an ancient laurel leaned
across the altar stone, and it embraced
the household gods within its shadow. Here,
around that useless altar, Hecuba
together with her daughters—just like pigeons
when driven headlong by a dark storm—huddled;
and they held fast the statues of the gods.
But when she saw her Priam putting on
the armor he had worn when he was young,
she cried: ‘Poor husband, what wild thought drives you
to wear these weapons now? Where would you rush?
This is no time for such defense and help,
not even were my Hector here himself.
come near and pray: this altar shall yet save
us all, or you shall die together with us.’
When this was said she took the old man to her
and drew him down up on the sacred seat.’
‘ingens ara fuit iuxtaque ueterrima laurus
incumbens arae atque umbra complexa penatis.
hic Hecuba et natae nequiquam altaria circum,
praecipites atra ceu tempestate columbae,
condensae et diuum amplexae simulacra sedebant.’
Under the “dark shade” (umbra complexa) rest the Penates, around which Hecuba and her children cluster like pigeons (ceu columbae condensae) hiding from a storm (tempestate). Priam is finally moved to fight when his son, fleeing the battle, falls dead at his feet. The murderer is Pyrrhus, son of Achilles, and his taunts prompt Priam to fight. The elderly Priam’s skirmish against Achilles’ son is pathetic—his “feeble spear”(telum imbelle) clangs harmlessly off Pyrrus’s shield before the Greek drags the king (slipping in his son’s blood) to the shaded altar of the Penates and beheads him in the center of the citadel, at the seat of the genius of his family, city, and nation. |
| Oddly enough, the world-renown shrine to St. Jude Thaddeus at St. Pius Church on 19th and Ashland Ave., features a similar pigeon-like arrangement. In the Cathedral, penitents and sufferers without hope are cluttered like cold doves around St. Jude’s feet. The mural at 26th and Princeton, according to priests at St. Pius, was likely completed in the 1960s, at the behest of a St. Pius parish rector with close connections to the Bridgeport politicians and power-brokers, most of whom have since moved away.
I think again of this three-block stretch of north Bridgeport, surrounded by the expressways, and the Penates of St. Jude and Italy herself that are so prominent in these odd front yards. Here too—in gardens girded against exit ramps, on green and red capitols on the top of a 26th Street storefront—real pigeons huddle metaphorically under the shade of the traffic to escape the winter and forage on tossed-out car trash. Despite the tenacity of the residents of this Bridgeport citadel, though, the sternly sympathetic mural of St. Jude, patron of the hopeless cause, was whitewashed so an advertisement for a taco stand could be painted in its place. While the fierce and compassionate hero of the hopeless is gone, his genius yet animates these odd blocks—the abandoned city park under the Dan Ryan, the homes that seem like they will crumble down the banks of the Stevenson and be swept away with the current, the pigeons who huddle here away from winter storms. |
