You Make Us Proud of Our Legs

When the protagonist of Richard Wright’s autobiography, Black Boy, steps off the train in Chicago, he describes a dismal city: “My first glimpse of the flat black stretch of Chicago depressed and dismayed me, mocked all my fantasies. Chicago seemed an unreal city whose mythical houses were built of slabs of black coal wreathed in palls of gray smoke, houses whose foundations were sinking slowly into the dank prairie. . . . I looked northward at towering buildings of steel and stone. There were no curves here, no trees; only angles, lines, squares, bricks and copper wires.”Wright, like many participants of the Great Migration, sought Chicago as refuge. In this million-times-repeated ritual, Chicago is mythologized as the object of pilgrimage—until the pilgrims arrive here and are confronted by more trains, more movement, thousands more pilgrims who are now done with being on the way and now have to find a way. Wright’s shock is that there’s nothing to pilgrimage to. In Chicago, consequently, it’s the act of movement itself that becomes the ritualistic act.Carl Sandburg’s Chicago Poems are blurry with such movement. It’s impossible to miss the ritual of pilgrimage in lines such as:Passers by,
I remember lean ones among you,
Throats in the clutch of a hope,
Lips written over with strivings,
Mouths that kiss only for love,
Records of great wishes slept with
Held long
And prayed and toiled for.

Or a later poem that commemorates the intersection of Blue Island, 18th Street, and Loomis:

Six Street ends come together here.
They feed people and wagons into the center.
In and out all day horses with thoughts of nose-bags.
Men with shovels, women with baskets and baby buggies.
Six ends of streets and no sleep for them all day.
The people and wagons come and go, out and in.
Triangles of banks and drug stores watch.
The policemen whistle, the trolley cars bump.
Wheels, wheels, feet, feet, all day.

The triangles of banks and drug stores certainly presage the “angles, lines, squares, bricks” that overwhelmed immigrant Richard Wright. And Wright, like Sandburg, was fascinated by the peripatetic populace of this “machine city”: “Streetcars screeched past over steel tracks. Cars honked their horns. Clipped speech sounded about me. . . . The car swept past soot-blackened buildings, stopping at each block, jerking again into motion. . . . People got on and off the car, but they never glanced at each other. Each person seemed to regard each other as a part of the city landscape.”

For Wright, who completed a long pilgrimage from backwoods Mississippi through Memphis to the North, the city he first encounters seems a dizzying acceleration of his own itinerant past. Only now, that movement seems imperiously complex, without the simple goal of “escape” or “opportunity” as its end: “I knew that this machine-city was governed by strange laws,” he writes, “and I wondered if I would ever learn them.” Eventually, Wright finds work in Chicago, becomes a writer in Chicago, becomes political in Chicago, and then is disappointed by the Byzantine structure of such associations. On the last page of Black Boy, Wright is “restless”—he puts on his hat to leave, and sits back down. He walks outside, half a block down, and then returns to his study. He’s sparked with vision and enthusiasm but can settle on neither destination nor direction. Finally, he hears “the trolley lumbering past over steel tracks in the early dusk,” and, reminded of his own pilgrimage, sets himself to write, to “build a bridge between himself and the outside world.” Black Boy ends there, but the real Richard Wright, having realized that pilgrimage is a ritual of movement, not destination, soon left Chicago—first to New York, then to Paris. Wheels, wheels, feet, feet, all day.

Sandburg found an apt emblem for the Chicago’s itinerant ritual in the creation of another Parisian, Auguste Rodin. A tiny ode in the Chicago Poems celebrates Rodin’s Walking Man, an arm-less, head-less trunk and legs that is forever striding through the Art Institute’s impressionist galleries. Sandburg the troubadour recognizes Rodin’s sculpture as a companion-spirit in a sparse couplet: “You make us/ Proud of our legs, old man.”

The Art Institute acts both as a pilgrimage-end for visitors to Chicago and as an off-day destination for natives. While recent rises in admission fees might keep some Chicagoans (including your unemployed, humble narrator) away from the museum, the Art Institute was imagined as a people’s museum. In the words of founder and 43-year-president Charles Hutchinson, the goal of the Art Institute is to counteract the compulsion to movement encountered by Wright and celebrated by Sandburg. The modern urban resident, Hutchinson said in an 1888 speech, is “a mere machine devoted to business.” “In the midst of this busy material life of our day,” he stated, “art may call upon us to halt.”

A chapter called “Walks” from sociological study of Chicago neighborhoods called Street Signs Chicago: Neighborhood and Other Illusions about Big City Life, Charles Bowden and Lew Kreinberg details the ritual northward procession of an unnamed old recluse from 79th and Ashland—11 or so miles to the Loop and into the Art Institute:This was all part of his walk as he passed small factories, big factories, stood on the balcony of the Loop downtown and watched the orderly ferocity of the grain exchange. His treks took him past garden after garden as people struggled to raise memories from the sooty air and clay soil. Tomatoes at the start, then into a black belt of okra, snow peas among the Chinese, chilies in the Mexican stretch, ending in eggplant and plum tomatoes among the Italians and Greeks. All this in his city….Things were possible here, he thought. Things got made here. In the end, he went off to the Sunbelt. He’d say, I never said anything against Chicago. I always like Chicago. He read the Chicago papers every day. “Walks” demonstrates—in experiential and lyrical fashion— the thesis of Kreinberg and Bowden’s book—that concept of the modern city as an affiliation of distinct neighborhoods, principalities of ethnic populations (a thesis that usually cites 1950′s Chicago as its foremost example) is essentially myth. The ethnically-distinct neighborhoods that arose in Chicago and other major heartland metropolitan areas, Street Signs argues, developed as a result of 20-year lull in motion initiated by the Great Depression and prolonged by World War II. In Kreinberg and Bowden’s thinking, the dug-in gardens are merely toe-holds for itinerant populations who move in, put down literal and metaphorical roots, and then gather their harvest before moving on.

An oft-cited example of Chicago’s intricate neighborhood alignments are the blocks underneath and around the current University of Illinois-Chicago campus. These areas are now memorialized as “Greek Town,” “Little Italy,” “Maxwell Street, ” and—in a recent awkward appellation—”University Village.” Vast “old neighborhoods” were razed to free land for the campus in the 1960s, and the bulldozers roll to this day. Much of Maxwell Street, site of city’s famed open-air market, was more or less leveled (and the market moved) in the late 1990s to make room for a mix of campus buildings, condos, and retail development.

At the turn of the century, in 1895, Hull House had commissioned an ethnic map of the surrounding blocks. The map disintegrates the myth of the American rust belt’s unified urban ethnic enclaves, of the “little Europe” of Chicago. Scores of distinct ethnic groups find themselves piled in these few blocks. The map is spattered with squares that represent Irish, German, Dutch, Russian, Polish, Swiss, French, French Canadian, Bohemian, Scandinavian, Chinese, Black and English Speaking White (Non-Irish), all in an area roughly three blocks by three blocks. And while the neighborhoods near these blocks now present themselves as unified retail and entertainment entities—Little Italy, Greek Town, Maxwell Street Market—they are no more unified ethnic communities now than they were then. Maxwell Street, for instance, gained fame as the heart of black Chicago in movies like The Blues Brothers, and memorial photo exhibits in campus buildings and on street banners, but it formed as “Jew Town” at the turn of the 19th Century and these days (relegated to Sunday mornings and shuffled around the near west side) sends the scents of Mexican grills over the stalls of Chinese-American peddlers. Our cities aren’t stagnant centers of distinct groups clustered around their rituals, but way-stations along continuous myriad pilgrimages.

The walking man from Street Signs concludes his daily pilgrimage at the end of the chapter, when he strides past the lions at the door of the Art Institute. He passes Van Gogh and Picasso (and their Rodin-crafted attendant), to make a ritual visit to “his” two paintings—Hopper’s Nighthawks and Delacroix’s Lion Hunt. The two paintings seem in stark contrast. Delacroix’s lions are tortured twisting forms with bright blue eyes that “bite right off the canvas”. They battle a group of nomad hunters on horseback. The entire scene—rearing and collapsing horses, fallen and leaping bedouin, writhing and roaring lions—is a scene of powerful dynamism in an otherwise nondescript desert landscape. There is no sense of place, only a sense of movement. These two itinerant groups—hunters and lions—have encountered each other in the middle of this unadorned land, and there engage in a sort of athletic embodiment of movement, hurly-burly and perpetual struggle.

For me, the painting evokes a scene in the Stuart Dybek story, “The Long Thoughts.” That story depicts a ritualistic walk of sorts through the near southwest side. It begins, interestingly, with two high school friends, Specter and the Vulk, looking at a book of Goya etchings borrowed from the Art Institute library, where the Vulk is taking night classes in drawing. The pair then spend a snowy night aimlessly wandering through the neighborhood, trying to make sense of the fact that The Vulk was just expelled from their Catholic high school. The pair of free-spirits–who seem to indulge in poetry, music and being general fuck-ups– get chased by cops, run though alleys, start a fire or two, make a why-the-hell-not mission toward their friend Harry’s house, 15 blocks away. In the middle of their walk, they make a stop at a place strikingly similar to Hopper’s diner: “We passed an all-night Laundromat, cleanly lit in white neon and empty. ‘Let’s sit in there a while before I die,’ I said. We went in. There was a red-lettered sign by the door that warned NO LOITERING. Vulk shook his fist at it. The pair sit inside, like the machine-men in Nighthawks, smoking cigarettes and passing time. Eventually, though, they’re chased from the laundromat by a police officer and they have to head home. The title of the story comes from an idiom the boys share, that whoever has the longer walk home has to spend more time alone with his thoughts. As the Specter takes a few short blocks back, he pictures the Vulk—who likes to imagine their blighted neighborhood as a section of Paris—as his friend meanders home.

The story is interesting as a sort of aborted pilgrimage. The destination—Harry’s place—is chosen seemingly at random, and what’s more, Specter and the The Vulk never arrive. Inspired, in some ways, by their own artistic heroes, they simply feel a need to move, to get out, to exercise their violence and their volition. Hutchinson’s Art Institute in some ways succeeds in its mission through these two characters—who have removed themselves so thoroughly from the “machine world” of Chicago. At the same time, Specter and the Vulk are compelled to move somewhere (they spend the night popping No-Doze), to do something—they simply can’t come up with a where or what. And the reader has to wonder what will become of them. In the last few lines of dialog, The Vulk realizes he has no place to go the next morning. He talks about taking the bus to his former school to sit in a nearby Walgreen’s. The Specter, the more grounded of the two, simply returns home to clean the dishes and head to sleep. The reader could speculate that the loneliness at the core orf Hopper’s Nighthawks springs from the same emotion. The businessmen, the blonde—they too will eventually have to leave the diner, head somewhere. They can’t loiter any more than Specter and the Vulk can.

This Chicago ritual of pilgrimage first inspires, then compels, then fatigues. The violent movement of Delacroix’s nomads—striving, writhing, competing—gives way to the sighed resignation of Hopper’s machine-men. Specter and the Vulk set out with purpose, find their energy in motion, and then have simply nowhere to go. If Chicago believes itself to be a city of the inspired pilgrimage, it must also recognize that it’s condemned to that movement without end.Sandburg surmised the sadness of that sentence by describing a street car like the one that pushed Richard Wright out from his autobiography and into the world, the very same line that delivered peddlers and hagglers to Maxwell Street for decades, the same line that ran right though the Hull House map, the “Halsted Street Car.” “After their night’s sleep/,” Sandburg concludes his little ode, In the moist dawn

And cool daybreak,

Faces,

tired of wishes

Empty of dreams.