1984 book, saved for now by its mostly reportage and commentarial author . . .

CHAPTER TWO

Tom Skelton, Ted and Mimi’s fifteen-year-old son, was a young man with a deep and abiding interest in the word “fuck.” At the public high school he attended, the black kids used it with abandon. Among the blacks were sharper social divisions than among the more pluralistic whites.

“If you’re black, stay back. If you’re brown, stick aroun’. If you’re white, all right” was the old Chicago saying. Shades made the difference. Things were different in the ‘80s. Black had become 0.K., if not beautiful, thanks partly to the slogans and racial cheerleading of the ‘sixties and ‘seventies. But a West Side ghetto black was still not the same as the son of a professional.

The situation was compounded at the high school, where tracking reigned supreme. The school’s constituencies ranged from million-dollar mansion-dwellers to welfare recipients. The vast assortment included educationally ambitious people who weren’t about to see their children lumped with the proletariat.

Neither were the school’s staff and administration about to ignore talent. The best of them figured that if the school could cheer on its jocks and rigidly exclude the untalented from varsity performance, it could do the same for its academic hotshots.

It did, and more whites ended up proportionately in the upper echelons than blacks. And the blacks were usually of a middle or professional class. Black professionals far outnumbered black businessmen.

The problem was further compounded by the fact that the two historic villages which fed students into the high school lay next or almost next to the West Side of Chicago, where a huge segregated black population made its daily way against high odds.

Then consider the Chicago aspect of it taken by itself, apart from black-white differences. The “big shoulders” city epitomized American expansion. It had grown amazingly fast, from fifty people to a million, and competition reigned brutally. Chicago had its track system from the start.

Tom Skelton inherited all that, though he didn’t know it. His mother was one to pooh-pooh the whole business. Your grandparents and your surroundings made the difference. She was especially hard on ancestry as determining anything. “Just because you’re Irish doesn’t mean you’re a cop or a streetcar conductor, does it?” she’d say.

She was less certain about the importance of history itself.

“Chicago is what it has become,” Carol Goodman would tell her. “The more we know about how it got that way, the better.”

“True, Carol, but I can’t get around the here-and-now problems, and I don’t want to get wound up in irrelevancies.”

“I do, of course. I love irrelevancies.”

“Carol, you know what I mean.”

“I do and I don’t.”

This sort of conversation Tom Skelton would overhear now and then while waiting for the two women to finish talking so he could hit his mother for a few dollars or find out what she wanted at the store.

He had only vague notions of it all. At the high school, he had discovered what he considered black bastards and white bastards. As soon as he was ready to write off blacks (or whites, though less often), he’d run into a good one who taught him a thing or two.

His friend Alex McGee, whose father had shot himself some months before when he’d been indicted for bribe-taking in the assessor’s office. “Don’t talk to me about it,” he’d tell Tom. “I don’t want to hear.”

His friend would casually drop “nigger” or “coon” when he knew he could get away with it. This included when talking to Tom, who overlooked it. He was, after all, attending an integrated (or at least desegregated) school.

But the distinction between field and house niggers — Tom had encountered the shocking terminology in reading about slavery days — escaped Alex. “Niggers are niggers,” he told Tom, calling on all his 15-plus years experience in the world.

Tom had overheard that expression from a friend of his father’s who had grown up in the South and had the sweetest, friendliest disposition of all his father’s friends. This Irishman, Andy Moran by name, showed Tom something else about history and ancestry.

He had a gentle, quiet manner, one that Tom was not used to. Tom puzzled about this until his father pointed out that Andy was from Memphis, where the style was different. The Irish whom Tom knew were from Chicago, Tom’s father pointed out.

But it was Andy who had said in his quiet way, “Niggers are niggers.” Tom, puzzling that too, had told Alex the phrase. It was just what Alex was looking for. It gave him his philosophical underpinning, one with to counter Tom’s black bastard-white bastard theme.

“They’ll get you every time,” he told Tom without emotion. “Those that don’t are just waiting for the chance.”

“You think Harold Williams is waiting for the chance to get you?” Tom asked.

“Harold Williams I’m suspicious of, to be truthful,” Alex said. “He’s exactly what I had in mind when I talked about waiting for the chance.”

“Alex, that’s dumb.”

“No it isn’t,” said Alex, sticking to his guns.

Harold Williams was the least objectionable person Tom Skelton knew.

They weren’t close friends; so Tom had to allow the possibility that down deep Harold was a bastard. But there was nothing to produce that that Tom knew of that would condemn the guy.

“Alex, you’re a bigot. You know that, don’t you?”

“So what?” said Alex.

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

The high school was tracked, and Harold Williams was in the top track. His father was a systems planner for a Cook County-federal board of some sort whose exact nature escaped Harold*s understanding. His mother was a school teacher. He had a younger brother and a younger sister who were packed off each day to the neighborhood elementary school while their mother got herself off to the school where she taught. The kids ate lunch at school, then came home to find Harold waiting for them. Or they went to a friend’s or a neighbor’s to wait the half hour or so before their mother came home

Harold took his life for granted. The Williams family had lived on Chicago’s far South Side when he was in grade school, in a black neighborhood where the other kids’ parents were planners and teachers too. When high-school time approached for Harold, bright and eager to learn, the parents looked at the public school and at the cost of a private one and decided to integrate.

Having marched and sung and picketed for the cause in the ‘60s, they decided to do some mild pioneering in the ‘80s. They would move to a suburb where whites predominated, and they would see what had been going on among their pale-skinned fellow citizens since civil-rights days.

Off they moved to the village where the Skeltons lived, with its fair degree of integration and its big, good high school. Without marching, singing or picketing, they bought an eight-room frame Victorian house on a tree-shaded cul-de-sac block and moved in.

Harold didn’t catch the irony of his parents’ “Thank God almighty, free at last” on moving day. He didn’t think they meant it as it sounded, but he didn’t know why they said it, chuckling as they unloaded suitcases while the movers went back and forth from the van.

“What’d you say?” Harold’s mother asked his father, her eyes lighting up. “What? What?” She had a chuckle brewing in her throat. “Free at last, you say?” she said and burst out laughing.

She and Harold’s father then put down the clothes they were emptying into drawers in the bedroom and, both laughing now, shooed Harold downstairs to make sure the younger ones were not getting into anything, shutting the bedroom door behind him.

He had half an idea what was going on and didn’t ask to verify the other half. He was thirteen going on fourteen. It was the summer before high school, and sex was an item with him. He assumed they were having a roll on the newly delivered mattress, but his brother and sister were emptying boxes that were supposed to stay unemptied, and with his hands full, he forgot about his parents and their ironical sayings and need for privacy.

Melissa Williams was the same milk chocolate color as her husband Arthur. They came from the same South Side neighborhood and had gone to school together, including college at Loyola in Chicago. When they got married, she got pregnant with Harold and then said “whoa” for a few years.

As Catholics they weren’t supposed to use birth control, but they did, mainly the pill. (She used the pill; he took the normal male route and didn’t use anything.) Five years later, they planned and had little Arthur, known as Artie, and two years after that, going for a girl, they hatched Missie. Friends of theirs named their last child Finee, for the end, there ain’t no more. Another friend of the Williamses suggested Caboose but was hooted down.

As Catholics born and bred, they were loyal, but not to a fault. There were things they just assumed priests and the pope couldn’t know, or if they did, shouldn’t. In either case they figured, without giving the matter a lot of thought, that the pope could could be safely ignored when he went on about birth control.

Other friends of theirs had gotten angry about it and gone Unitarian, where they found other disillusioned Catholics. Indeed, there was a wonderful Unitarian church near their new suburban house that they visited now and then for intellectual stimulation. But in general they went to the Catholic church, where Father Devlin was pastor.

Father Devlin they found to be somewhat different. He didn’t seem to have the assurance they had come to expect from priests, especially the Jesuits they knew at Loyola.

“Mrs. Williams, I presume,” he said as he came to the door on a weekday a week or so after they had arrived. He hadn’t been at the rectory when they had registered and so had come by to say hello.

He and she had hit it off, and he was to come for dinner the next week, meeting Arthur and having a grand old time.

“I welcome you city folks to the wilds of Oak Park,” he told her on the day of his visit.

“Well thank you,” said Melissa. She offered him coffee, which he drank with her in the dining room.

“Nice house,” he said.

“We mightily appreciate it,” she said, with a shadow of a grin.

He looked at her quickly, wondering if he was missing something, decided he was and lowered his head, looking up at her over his raised coffee cup.

She laughed in recognition. He’d caught the curve ball. Not bad for a white man.

He asked her what her husband did, she told him about his health systems planning work.

“Big hospital a few blocks over, as you surely know,” he said.

“Oh yes, Arthur helped them justify their latest expansion.”

“Counted sick people?”

“More or less,” she said, laughing.

“Well, the parish is a sort of hospital, when you get down to it,” he said.

“More a first-aid station?”

“No, no. Ambulatory care, emergency room, that sort of thing. Outpatient. That’s it, your neighborhood spiritual outpatient facility.”

“Drug store?” she said.

“My heavens,” he said. “What did those Jesuits teach you at Loyola, to make fun of your humble parish priest?”

She laughed. “No. Felt sorry for them. Working in the front lines and all that. Nothing malicious.”

“I hope not. For malice no absolution, you know. None at all. Dumb mistakes, even when frequently repeated, yes. But confession was not created to condone malice. People would begin to think they could get away with it.”

“Confession?” she said.

“Yes. You remember confession. The coffin-like, darkened compartment, swishing curtain, sliding panels, the voice from behind the little wooden trellis. Yes?”

“Of course,” she said, “and now it’s all gone. Very little confession, and what there is, is in an airy, well-lit room. What a mistake. Mystery all gone. Without mystery, where are you? Where are we?”

“Oak Park,” he said, smiling. “Safe from the mean city. It’s all been a bad dream, woken up in suburbia.” He waved an arm to take it all in.

“You don’t rush to defend your church,” she said laughing.

“My church? It needs no defense from the likes of me, a poor Irish hedge priest. What do I know anyway? Ask the holy and learned Jesuits to defend it, I mean her.”

He grinned and put down the coffee cup. “I must go.” He smiled. “I enjoyed it. You’re very smart.”

She relished the compliment. “I enjoyed it too. Come again.”

“Will do that. And will see you in church.” He left.

— end of chapter 2 —