In West Pullman, leveled homes left in their wake grass tall enough to tickle knees. Slabs of particle board or perforated metal covered the entrances of what was abandoned but not yet flattened to nothing. Those with support beams too brittle to hold additional weight were plastered with a red “X,” a warning to the Chicago Fire Department to take caution when entering. Homeowners living in this blight declared their structures safe with manicured lawns and power washed white siding — announcements that someone still lived there, someone still cared. The baby blue paint on my grandmother’s Dutch colonial on Yale Avenue never faded in the eleven years I lived with her, but I worried that ours might be the next home marked wrong with a red “X.” Let the city tell it, the “Xs” did not mark a structure for demolition, but in this neighborhood left to atrophy, no one could be sure. “X”s did not mark a structure for demolition, but in this neighborhood left to atrophy, no one could be sure. Soon before long, my grandmother, Mommy Mae, missed a mortgage payment so that I could move to the Iowa prairie for graduate school. It had been sixty years since Mommy Mae left Tchula, Mississippi for Chicago, and she still believed that education was a salve for the systemically bruised. I wasn’t as sure, but journeyed to Iowa City on the fuel of her faith.
The Iowa River bisected Iowa City into a transient college town, on the west, and, on the east, a home for folks who’d become so entranced by spring’s pink crab apple blossoms that they could not leave. On the eastside blocks around the university, generations-old homes with porches large enough for hosting were rented to graduate and undergraduate students on incomes fixed by stipends and financial aid. In my apartment hunt, I never saw an uninhabited home left to rot. For $500 per month a landlord would rent you anything, even as it crumbled before your eyes. The pride and fear that called West Pullman residents to upkeep seemed not to exist on Iowa City’s east side. There, I was offered a cinderblock half wall surrounding what the advertisement called the bathroom, or a basement hovel so thick with trash that the rental agent leaned her 110-pound body into the front door to force our way. On an island of cleared linoleum, I could see the peeling vinyl counter betwixt cookie and chip wrappers. If we could wade further inside, I knew we would drown in neglect. The rental agent met my shocked eyes as she said, “You know how college kids are,” with a nervous laugh. “They’ll be charged a cleaning fee,” she continued, “and everything will be good as new.” Her explanations were endless. In West Pullman, Black people had explanations too, but we were rarely allowed such compassionate witness of our messiness. My friends and family would disintegrate along with their homes before they would be called unkept by someone non-familial.
In the big, blue Yale Avenue house, we hid our mess with décor. The folding paper fan resting on the wall behind plastic-covered red sofas. Portraits of Barack Obama, John F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, Jr., hanging like deities over stains too set in to scrub away. Venetian carnival masks of unexplained origin resting on crumbing off-white walls. Friends were kept where the sofa-plastic shone under the light of a sparkling crystal lampshade, but the fear that Mommy Mae and I might be found out never left me. One tiptoe toward the kitchen and someone might be present when the leaky pipe just above the celling surged to a wave. One lapse in outside upkeep and we might be the next home marked with an “X.” We discussed repairs, but some other expense always pushed the possibility aside. I dreamt of a home that would allow me to surrender my defenses and protect me instead. The Iowa City apartments I’d seen thus far didn’t make me feel safe enough to relax. They simply would not do.
As I continued my apartment hunt the following day, I met a brassy-blonde-coiffed landlord and his Walmart Wranglers outside of what would, as the day went on, turn out to be variations on the same theme — single family homes chopped and screwed into shotgun apartments.
“I have one more I can show you,” he said after we exited the final home, “but I have too much stuff in my car to give you a ride. I can give you the address and you can meet me there.”
“Ok,” I responded, taking a piece of paper from his hands. As I began the mile-long walk, I saw only a litter of folders through the passenger-side window of his pickup trunk.
Walking down East Gilbert, I saw the same crab apple trees set alongside newly constructed university buildings and squat brick boutiques with high rises looming in the distance. Looking down nearby streets, thrifted couches rested on lawns while students, many of them underage, drank to three-year-old hip hop. The house on Jefferson was yet another single-family home concealing five apartments — one of them, a studio-plus on the second floor. The unit wasn’t perfect, but I was grateful for the separation of spaces. The hardwood floor’s scrapes and splinters hinted at past inhabitants, but I wouldn’t have to see or smell the stains of their vodka-soaked exploits on soiled carpet. The light casted the living room in a golden glow that made the unit feel larger than its meager square footage. Convinced that there was nothing better to be seen in my price range, I signed the lease.
A semester into my graduate career, I’d become accustomed to the hundreds of pages of reading, writing, teaching, and coursework I knew was standard. It was the “optional” visiting author readings, mixers, and volunteer work — a kind of labor rebranded as “rigor” — that I hadn’t prepared for. The artistic demand for prose structurally so new that few understood it but were wowed by its innovation none the less. The requirement for simultaneously protecting and offering your writing time. Adhering to this expectation was how you proved your gratitude.
To cope, every Saturday, as soon as I opened my eyes to no rigorous tasks and before Mommy Mae left home for church, I called her from bed — checking on the house’s stability as much as her wellbeing. On one such Saturday, after our pleasantries and safeties were accounted for, I read aloud a short passage from The Warmth of Other Suns as she “mmhmm”-ed. It was one of my course texts, but years earlier, when it was the public library’s One Book, One Chicago selection, I read Isabelle Wilkerson’s rendering of Ida Mae’s journey from northern Mississippi to Chicago in hopes of learning more about Mommy Mae’s own Great Migration–era exodus. I thought revisiting the text would ignite memories about how we came to the big, blue Yale Avenue house, soothing my craving for home. With nothing to add but, “That’s an interesting story,” she ended the call with a confession.
“Baby, the cancer came back,” she said apologetically.
“It’s okay,” I replied, though it wasn’t.
“I’mma live long enough to see you graduate,” she said, before we ended the call. Five years ago, when the cancer first appeared, I would’ve believed this, but I knew the time we’d borrowed from modern medicine was expiring. I was awash in the urgency to memorialize us in case my memory was, too, on borrowed time. I moved from my bed to my desk and began to research and write.
With a baby in her belly and one on her hip, 17-year-old Mary Ellen Harris left Tchula, Mississippi by train and arrived in Chicago in 1945 to reunite with her then-husband, McNeal. The Tuckers didn’t enter her life until the 1960s. By then, she’d become Mae Ella Tucker after her marriage to James “Larry” Tucker. Now, the couple and their seven children lived in a three-bedroom townhome in Altgeld Gardens — a housing project that, unbeknownst to them, sat at the center of a donut of toxic-waste dumps. Inside, the homes bore the unfeeling marks of industrialization. Yellow paint masked concrete walls in the kitchen and living room, while floral contact paper covered metal countertops as Mae Ella attempted to decorate the cool space warm. At its center, an electric blue sofa covered in plastic to preserve its cleanliness — an honor to the property that, as a former tenement resident on Chicago’s Northside, Mae Ella felt lucky to live in.
After the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Amiri Baraka’s Black Arts Movement inspired poets like Larry Neal and Haki Madhubuti to write about how lovely Blackness was. Nina Simone sang of how precious it was to be “Young, Gifted, and Black.” On “Cash in Your Face,” Stevie Wonder sang of money’s inability to shield you from discrimination. Baraka called for a solvent Black nation, and with this art as a backdrop, The Gardens felt like its own Black island. As the Tucker/McNeals lived, worked, and attended schools in The Gardens, there was a sense that, with the support of your community, you could fulfill your most ambitious desires in ways before unseen, that eclipsed any danger.
No one seems to remember the 1970s move to West Pullman, when the European immigrants once crowding its shopping district on weekends were thinning in response to their new Black neighbors. West Pullman, too, would soon be its own Black island. Federally-backed loans to low-income Americans made homeownership accessible, and my grandfather Larry wanted to take advantage of the opportunity before the possibility evaporated in dry air. No one considered how hard white residents in other Chicago neighborhoods fought the disruption of their insular streets, running their new Black neighbors out with fist and flame to maintain order. One day they just simply left The Gardens and appeared on Yale Avenue.
A cousin says a slick-talking white contractor never offered the Tucker/McNeals the earth-toned siding of Yale Avenue’s other homes to replace their damaged exterior. Or perhaps, this cousin says, baby blue was cheaper for a family already cash-strapped after purchasing their new home. There are other possibilities. During enslavement, in a practice that originated with the Gullah in Georgia and South Carolina, African descendents across the American South painted their ceilings haint blue to ward off an evil witch with an intent on murder by exhaustion. Haints were defenseless against water, so the oceanic blue was also placed at entrance points like porches and shutters as a form of protection. Mommy Mae, by Seventh-Day-Adventist decree, did not believe in spirits, but in my fantasies, I imagine her Mississippi home with these accents — a kind of tradition folks may have kept up without questioning its origin. That without even knowing its protective power, she held it in her heart and chose a version of it as her townhome’s sofa color, and later, for our family’s home. Maybe electric and baby blue had always been haint blue, a subtle rebuke of the dangers surrounding her. Haint blue may’ve kept the big, blue Yale Avenue house as white flight shuttered businesses in the ’70s, as Black Arts era possibility finally evaporated a few years later, as the Tucker/McNeals found repair unaffordable in the ’80s and ’90s, and as white landlords abandoned homes they couldn’t rent in the 2000s.
Though this story, so common that it was easily corroborated by history, lacked the innovation of “rigor,” it was the kind I felt most compelled to tell.
By the beginning of the next school year, I’d filled my schedule with simultaneous internships, fellowships, and side hustles across Iowa City. Since my graduate program offered little engagement with Black American authors beyond Baldwin and Rankine, I began a certificate in African American studies, which meant I was taking four classes a semester instead of the customary three; two of my three Black colleagues did this as well, though the classes did not count toward credits needed for graduation. While I thought the certificate would allow me to further explore the subjects of my writing, I also wanted this new work to lay so heavy atop my usual obligations that I was numb to the reality of Mommy Mae’s impending death.
In that state, I began to notice things about my apartment I’d previously ignored. The drywall in the closets fell to the floor in large chunks. The double hung windows were fragile. Lifting the sash required I stick a metal pin into a hole drilled into the rail. When I forgot, the window would come crashing down moments after lifting, nearly crushing my fingers. Chief among my complaints were the off-white walls worn lifeless. It was near identical to what we hid in the big, blue Yale Avenue house. I assumed they would be repainted in the original off-white upon move-in, but I was mistaken. In Iowa City, nothing standard — professional cleaning and painting between tenants — happened if you didn’t demand it. Even if you did complain about the constant invasive apartment showings after declining to sign a new lease only three months into the current contract, it wasn’t enough for Iowa City’s government to regulate the market. The mostly undergrad clientele didn’t care, and if they did, they revered older adults too fiercely to ask or complain. A rental company billed students for unperformed carpet cleanings and minor damage for years before someone thought to sue. I, like the undergrads, did not dare to ask or complain directly. The landlords had us by the neck, our bank accounts and mouths begging for mercy.
Each of the apartment’s flaws taunted me as I attended to my responsibilities. I soothed, not by continuing to write and research, but by exhaustively decorating with revolving lines of credit. I decided on a teal, pink, and yellow color palette to hide the walls. A brown-skinned woman on a flamingo obscured one wall in the living room. A framed map of Chicago with each of its seventy-seven neighborhoods, shaded in pastels that matched my color scheme, hung over crumbling drywall in the bedroom. Each of these purchases came with a dopamine reward that duplicated when the item jumped off my computer screen and into my home. Dopamine, again, when friends ate cheap appetizers around an overpriced bistro table stuffed into an already-overstuffed apartment, nearly crowding us out. Their faces flushed pink with satisfaction at seeing the disparate pieces together after months of group trips to Target and my exhaustive descriptions of my online orders. “It was on sale,” I’d often say. But a sale is not a boon when a bank is your benefactor. Still, though the walls weren’t freshly painted off- or bright white, not a room in my home was off limits to anyone I loved. When I mentioned these gatherings to Mommy Mae, in a voice made wobbly by cancer, she said, “You’re doing so good for yourself now, baby.” I wouldn’t dare tell her of the scheme supporting my home and graduate career, and how thoroughly all of it was wearing me out. Rigor had set the haint of exhaustion on me before I’d realized it.
“You need to make your way back to Chicago,” my cousin said over the phone. “It’s time to say goodbye.” Immediately after our call, I emailed an administrator that I needed to return home and offered, of course, to find a substitute for the last week of instruction. They responded quickly to inform me that as a student-teacher, I was afforded only three sick days. Any subsequent day missed would result in a reduction of my stipend, even though it was finals week and traditionally student-teachers dipped out the Friday instruction ended. Colleagues informed me that nothing could be done. My mistake, I was told, was sending the email instead of leaving with no notice. I’d followed the rules to closely, been too rigorous.
Every death is significant, but selfishly I felt like no one understood the significance of this event. Classes should be canceled; a chyron announcing this news should’ve run across the bottom of every broadcast television station. She was not a grandmother who’d pinched my cheeks on weekends and special occasions. This was the woman who’d taught me how to be a person in the world when I’d shown up to the big, blue Yale Avenue house abandoned as a teenager. This was the woman I lived with for eleven years; I needed stay with her in our home until she took her final breath.
I was ready to make a run for it, but Mommy Mae said, “Don’t you get kicked outta that school now,” when I called to determine how much of her voice remained. It was a gravel-strewn whisper, but I could still hear her. I was assured by the single faculty member advocating on my behalf that I was not at risk of losing my spot if I left. Still, I felt like leaving would cross some invisible boundary that might make my life more difficult there than it already had been. In graduate school, where gratitude is currency, my inability to follow the rules and complete every assigned or implied task might signal not only that I was not a rigorous student, but that I was ungrateful. Ungrateful rule-breakers and those who complained risked accusations of jealousy, untrustworthiness, and bullying. Mommy Mae seemed to understand how tenuous the relationship with the benevolent could be, though I was never truthful with her about how exhausted I was by labor and longing in Iowa City. My gratitude to her betrayed my desire to leave, as I thought back to the missed mortgage payment that financed my move there. I decided to stay, hoping that Mommy Mae could see my face as I told her I loved her and that she’d have enough of her voice to say it back to me a final time.
The last week of instruction commenced with its usual procedural lull. In the empty time, my home taunted me once more. From my sofa, I did not recognize the face of the brown-skinned woman atop the flamingo anymore. She was a stranger to me now. I rose and unhooked the print from the wall, tossing it into a corner. The throw blankets and pillows covering my accent chairs looked less like décor and felt more like weights as I tossed them to the ground. None of these things was really mine. Some of it belonged to Iowa City, but most of it belonged to the bank that extended me the credit to purchase it. At the center of the undressed room, I saw the dingy, cracked walls return to view; when I looked down at the pile of décor next to me, I saw rigor resting right on top.
Somewhere past exhausted now, realizing that there were no rewards for playing someone else’s game by their rules, I could no longer perform composure while everything fell apart. Even the residents of The Garden’s most pristine homes developed cancer and respiratory illnesses from the toxic waste surrounding their island. Even the family inside the most well-kept West Pullman exterior watched as their neighborhood fell away, one demolished structure at a time. Even I couldn’t be by my grandmother’s side given my determination to complete every task my graduate program asked of me.
I dedicated myself then to a kind of emotional rigor that asked of me not labor, but feeling. It gave me the ability to tell the stories that were most important to me and the ability to be openly unhappy there no matter the consequences. The innovation of this rigor was emotional honesty: an ability to look back on an experience and, in memoir’s clear prose, express joy and hurt as complex emotions. An ability not to forsake feeling for aesthetics, in writing and in personal space. The haint of exhaustion was off of me as I returned to my sofa and rested for the first time in months.
Upon my arrival, I discovered that the big, blue Yale Avenue house had become an unwitting party host. Mommy Mae, in her bed at the center of the living room, could no longer keep guests from roaming, so our house opened itself up to the nonfamilial wherever their feet could carry them. I did not care as mice ran over toes, claiming the now-soiled carpet and sticky kitchen tiles for their own. The cracks in the ceiling where pipes had leaked were visible, but a potential flood was of no never mind in death. The chorus of family, friends, and church members negated the need for music; they were already as loud as a ticker-tape parade. Pans of chicken wings, Chicago style — fried hard, extra lemon pepper, and heavy mild sauce with white bread underneath — lined the dining room table. My uncle and cousins talked greasy in chess games oddly competitive, considering the lack of stakes. My aunts whispered hardly contained arguments in the kitchen. Church members held Mommy Mae’s hand in prayer at her bedside. A family member brushed what was left of her hair and lotioned her dehydrated skin with the concentration of a ritual. With no forewarning, I’d stepped into a homegoing, the laying of a soft pathway to heaven.
As I assumed a place by Mommy Mae’s bedside, I felt the hummingbird-flutter of her heartbeat as it struggled to compensate for her failing organs. Her cheeks sat higher now as cancer hollowed her face. She looked at me, tapping me softly on the back, inviting me to hug her. “You’re going to be ok, right?” she whispered in my ear.
I nodded, hovering just above her heart, my hand resting lightly over her shoulder. She looked too fragile to touch.
“I’ve never loved anyone more than I love you,” I told her, determined not to break the promise I’d just made with tears.
“Never forget how much I love you,” she returned.
Her resolve that I leave the big, blue Yale Avenue house came into clear view then. Everyone in our home seemed so content with what was to come that I knew she’d told them she was dying long before she confessed her body’s decline to me; she’d known it was time for us both to move on. Mommy Mae surrendered her defenses after laying eyes on me for the last time. Soon, she’d lose her voice to sleep as her failing body passed her home to heaven. I surrendered my own defenses, believing fully in haint blue’s power then, creating my own myth of protection, an attempt to make sense of all of this. Haint blue protected me against the threat of flood and other disrepair for eleven years, my family for nearly fifty.
After years of such little choice in where I dwelled, haint blue not only offers protection but reminds me that I have agency over my surroundings, just as I imagined Mommy Mae choose her blue exterior to protect us all those many years ago. In that agency too, is a reminder that I only have to hold myself to community’s standards and values — its vision for what is possible.
A few years after my Mommy Mae’s funeral, the big, blue Yale Avenue house appeared for sale by the mortgage lender. There was no red “X” on the siding, but someone crisscrossed tape in an “X” over the second-floor bathtub, sink, and toilet. On a tiled wall hung a red warning of danger, but our home was not demolished as I once feared. I imagine its renovators standing in wonder at how our house could’ve survived. Perhaps in that reverence they painted thick blue bands along the bottom half of the repaired white walls. The house’s siding, though darker now, kept blue in honor. Occasionally, I still find its pictures online and hope I’m saying “I love you, Mommy Mae” in every choice I make until my own homegoing carries me away.
