New work from Zoe: Please comment

Greetings fellow writers.  I"m finally getting past work deadlines and getting to writing.  I've reworked the piece I read in class, I trust having fixed things from your comments. And I've changed the end because I"m thinking I'd like to send it to Sun magazine under the topic 'security'.  Please do send comments.  Zoe

When our daughters were 4 and 2 we accepted a challenge to move to Chicago’s west side ghetto and join a community engaged in urban renewal. I struggled hard against such a choice. I could hear my parents’ voices: You are moving to a ghetto with our young grandchildren? I was terrified for our safety. When we were first married we had lived on the south side of Chicago and I taught at the Lab school. It was north of the Midway, we lived south – and until I made it across the Midway each morning I watched every person on the street and glanced behind every bush or tree. Cars were routinely stolen and apartments broken into – including ours. The nearest thorofare was 63^rd street. It ran under the EL, and had an active life of drugs, prostitutes, and gospel mission storefronts. But we could buy ground “meat” for 10 pounds for a dollar. Now I was going back to that life with two small children?

We packed up our belongings dog and all. This was the 60’s. It was a hot, tense summer in Chicago. It took four men to haul our nine foot sleeper sofa – with twin beds – to the attic of the old dormitory. There was no space for it in a dorm room. What were we thinking? The group had moved to a former seminary campus when the seminary fled to the suburbs. The first week there was an uprising on the block. Families housed in buildings off campus came to stay on campus until it blew over. It wasn’t as much for their safety as to protect the black neighborhood from being incited to riot if something could be blamed on a whitey. Our girls watched from the window as a man was shot on the street. Our 30 or so mostly white children walked to the public school down the block. We had them walk together and they were always accompanied by one or two adults. When there were rumors of trouble the neighborhood mothers would come by to ask if we were sending our children to school that day. If so, they would send theirs. Those 30 little white faces stand out in the class pictures, a few in each class. 

We arrived in 1966, in 1968 all hell broke out. Many in the neighborhood joined us for a horribly sad gathering the evening of King’s assassination. Then the fires began and moved west. Riots – sometimes urged on by the Black Panthers – started near the Loop and spread toward us. We watched from upper floor windows. Then we gathered everyone in the main building on campus. Our daughters watched the fires reach the building used for after school activities. When they came and set fires in our buildings, the Blacks among us refused to leave. The rioters left and we put out the fires. The local gang showed up ready to defend us, they said, but an altercation between them and the more organized of the perpetrators could only come to grief. The next day Mayor Dailey moved the National Guard in; we relocated the children to friends in the suburbs and settled in to help the neighborhood recover. All the convenience stores had been burned. Cars were trashed on the street and we all - white and black - felt violated.

From then on security had to be tightened. No one walked alone. We closed the campus except for the main entrance and hired a guard to sit at the door with the receptionist. He wanted a gun. But the gun was a high level commodity in the area and was a frequent target for a quick snatch. What to do? It was decided to keep the gun inside where it could be brought to the guard when needed but wouldn’t be there for easy picking.  Somehow my husband was chosen to keep the gun. After a few middle of the night calls for the gun, the absurdity of this means of security became clear. Was he, whose only experience with guns was hunting rabbits on the farm, to come blazing into the reception room to defend the guard? Should he toss the gun to the guard and dash back inside? The gun was the attraction. Better to forego security on these terms.