When the four young African American men approached us on Chicago’s Red Line subway, feelings I had long forgotten came rushing back.
It was mid-afternoon on a weekday. We were checking off an item on my wife’s Chicago Bucket List: to ride the elevated train, aka the “L.”
My wife was raised on a farm in central Illinois. I was raised on the South Side of Chicago but left 40 years ago to live in much smaller towns in the West.
The group of men who approached us was raising money for its basketball team. Allegedly. If we could not donate cash, we were urged to sign our names on a blank sheet of paper — never a good idea.
Public Transit Roulette
Panhandling is illegal on the Chicago Transit Authority’s buses and subways, but the law is widely ignored. As is smoking in the cars. Security of any kind on the L is spotty at best. You are on your own each time you step into a subway car. I have always thought that entering that 48×9-foot space is like spinning a roulette wheel. You might break even, but the house always wins.
Such was the case when, in eighth grade, I was on the same Red Line, sandwiched in against a window during rush hour while a white businessman stroked the inside of my thigh, his clammy hand hidden beneath a briefcase.
Two of the guys that surrounded my wife and me were school-age boys; yet, here they were in the middle of a weekday involved in an obvious scam.
I was overcome with emotions — fear the most prevalent. Fear of becoming prey in a trapped environment. Fear of violence if I refused to give money.
But my main feeling was this: if any of these men laid one finger on my wife I would fight until my last breath defending her.
The Roots of Fear
Yes, I am white, but before you toss the “r” word my way, I want to share the roots of my apprehension.
I was in fifth grade living with my mom, a single mother, in Chicago’s integrated South Side Hyde Park neighborhood. Throughout my young life, my mother never said a discouraging word against any group. She called me to watch television when civil rights marches were on the evening news, explaining both the reasons for the protests and the addled reasoning for the subsequent violence against the demonstrators.
She also pointed with pride that my birthday, December 1, 1955, was the same day that Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white patron during that legendary bus ride in Montgomery, Alabama.
I had never been given a reason to fear anyone. And, because my mother wanted me to be confident and independent, I was, at the age of ten, a free-range child.
‘Why Did They Do This to Me?’
All that changed on a summer day at the stone field house at Promontory Point, a tiny peninsula on Lake Michigan in Hyde Park. I would go there often, borrow a ball from the park district and, using the gap between the protruding pipes in the windowless field house basement, shoot baskets.
That day half a dozen older Black teenagers came downstairs. I thought they were there to play but I was wrong. I became the game. They roughed me up, released me, turned off all the lights, hunted me down again, and started the game all over. A man from the park district office heard my screams and came to chase the teens away. Because I was terrified, he walked me to the entrance of our apartment building, his arm around my shoulders.
Between sobs I kept wondering “why did they do this to me?” I had no reference point for such violence. As with the groping businessman, I never told Mom what had happened.
That was the day everything changed. I still roamed through my neighborhood, but if I saw a group of Black youths coming toward me, I crossed the street or ducked down an alley. This escape strategy did not always work and, trust me, you do not want to ever be caught in a Chicago alley.
Sure, this is profiling on my part, but I wasn’t hateful. I was cautious. Once burned, twice shy. I quickly caught on that there were certain neighborhoods bordering ours that you never crossed into, and that the city of broad shoulders — and, indeed, the country — was divided by race.
Racial Anxiety
Today, at the age of 65, after decades away from the violence of Chicago and a career that includes working with and for African Americans, I thought I had left racial anxiety behind. But on that day with my wife on the subway I was that frightened South Side kid again.
However, it occurs to me that instead of this story being another example of how divided the races are, perhaps within my experience there is common ground, a place to begin a conversation.
Could it be that the fear I felt as a 10-year-old, and as a 65-year-old, is the same as African Americans feel at any age when a squad car approaches? The same horror George Floyd experienced in the excruciating moments before he died? The same terror Eric Garner suffered as the cop snuffed out his last breath all for the “crime” of selling loose cigarettes?
Is it true that my learned behavior of caution — OK, let’s call it what it is, prejudice — is also learned by African Americans each and every day on the streets of Chicago, Baltimore, Oakland, and Ferguson, Missouri?
I am not so arrogant as to say that I understand how African Americans feel. But I do know something about what it is to be frightened and how hard it is to overcome, if ever, a violent experience.
Nothing happened to us on the subway. A few passengers begrudgingly dug some change out of their pockets and the group grifted on to the next car. Still, my heart did not stop racing until we disembarked.
CODA
Two weeks later, on a Sunday afternoon, a man was beaten and robbed on the same Red Line train by four Black men who were not pleased with his five-dollar contribution to their “basketball fund.” After beating and robbing the man, the four got off the subway at the 55th Street station, in Hyde Park, where I grew up.
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of The Globe Post.
