On Being Haunted by Carson McCullers/ The Black Experience as the Origin of Southern Gothic

"Lou'siana, Lou'siana
Mama's got the low down blues
Lou'siana, Lou'siana
Moma's going on a cruise"

-Bessie Smith
Lou'siana Low Down Blues

I keep trying to figure out, some clever way to explain how I stumbled upon Carson McCullers, a mostly obscure southern female blues writer born into the world with a rapidly deteriorating body and a May Fly's life span, but with a fire raging inside her.

But there is no literary flourish to make a wanna be writer sound profound. The simple fact is, it's been less than three months since I've learned of her work and I can't recall how.


The only straw I can grasps at, is that she came through the doorway created long ago when an ex lover dragged me to New Orleans, kicking and screaming.  I returned permanently altered. Yet I isolated New Orleans/Louisiana completely outside the south because I was uncomfortable feeling so at home in the south.

Of course this was immature. New Orleans/Louisiana exist in dual worlds, one physical, out of which the name "The Big Easy" arises. The other, is darker more ethereal with porous boarders between past, present, and future, sensed only by those with developed "antennae".  The American South is are far more in New Orleans/ Louisiana's gravitational pull than the midwest, especially for Black people. 

Creole Gumbo on my kitchen table                                                                                                                                              Note the authentic Cajun  Gumbo Spoon  made  from  an
Oyster shell

I cook and eat gumbo, chitlins, and greens, not just because of my connections to Nola, but because of my connections to the whole south including Mississippi. I can no longer ignore, the south's history, because like an insane mad scientist, it made me.  For most of America's history, It kidnapped, in-slaved beat, chiseled, carved, raped, murdered, hung, burned, garroted, drowned, etc., the flesh of the African  painfully reconstructing it into the Black race. And here I am. 

Mr. Rubin Stacy

Ms. Laura Nelson. wife and mother of two 

There is also no place in the south where the soil was not completely drench by the juice of the Strange Fruit who are my ancestors, which is the foundation of Southern Gothic. 

The doorway that now connects me with Nola also connects me- as my ancestors did- with all parts and spirits of the south, good and bad.  This is a haunting

I'm working my way through four of Carson McCuller's novels and just finished her biographical novel "The Heart is a Lonely Hunter".  

Below is my from Goodreads review, which is the FaceBook for readers.

In this southern town, a deep and toxic main of desperation, regret, and terror, runs through it.  
Most have succumbed under it’s putrid influence.  But brief glimmers of innocents, hope, and, dreams, still exists, and though often mislaid, there is love. 

A small band of social and cultural outcasts sense the darkness, but know not enough to identify it.  

They're only three who can.

 Jake Blount, a wandering itinerant worker, angry drunk, and communist sympathizer, trying to figure out the secret to getting the masses to rise up against oppression.  

Antonapoulos, an obese mute, thought dimwitted, for years lived placidly and seemingly content, with his best friend John Singer. One day he rebels, going from kind and gentle, to brazen acts of petty thievery and minor public violence, that get him committed -by his uncle- to an insane asylum, in a far away town.   

Dr. Benedict Mady Copeland, a Black doctor who allows  (to borrow the term from Samuel Beckett) “the mess”, to pull his family apart.  Years later he rebels by simple acts of personal dignity and humanity as a Black man, and professionalism as a doctor, to educate the Black community.

At the center of “the mess” connecting and fortifying these renegades, which includes, Mick Kelly, (who a character Carson McCullers based off herself), is John Singers.  Singer is a gentle and deeply empathetic mute who keeps the door of his boarding house rental room, always open even when he leaves (in which case he leaves a note on the table) to visit Antonapoulos, who’s well being is connected with Singer’s ability to sustain the outcasts and himself. 

McCullers, does what many white writers attempt, to give real and original voice to Black characters. While most fail miserably, she connects.  In fact, her use of Black southern vernacular actually give their words more power, as opposed to sacrificing their dignity, which is the problem with Zorna Neal Hurston’s work, including “Their Eyes Were Watching God” and “Mules and Men”. 

Zora Neal Hurston

Charlotte Osgood Mason

 Hurston, unlike the rest of the Harlem Renaissance writers, wrote primarily for her white patron, Charlotte Osgood Mason, who called those she assisted financially, her "God Children", and demanded that they at all times call her “Godmother”.  Their God Mother also shackled their artistic freedom, demanding they fixate their artistic work in the primitive speak and child like behavior that represented one of the common Black stereotypes of the time. 
Mason also demanded to approve all work before it was published and made "corrections".
This caused Langston Hughes to leave the financial comfort Osgood provided and strike out on his own during, The Great Depression.

Chole Ardelia Wofford aka "Toni Morrison"

McCullers doesn’t stop there, treading further into the darkness, she takes the reader into Chole Ardelia Wofford aka Toni Morrison territory where few writers cross. I sensed the coming onslaught of literary cataclysmic violence that Wofford uses to painfully baptize the reader into her faith such as her
brilliant and classic tragi-comic novel, "The Bluest Eye" when Soaphead Church drives the sad and already traumatized, fragile child, Pecola Breedlove, insane 

At twenty-three-years of age, McCullers, was far more clumsily than Wofford, which induces a far more painfully and raw shock in the novel, such that my first visceral response was anger at this dead white southern women.  How dare she mutilate him that way!? Why did she do this!? What right did she have!?  Indignantly I thought , she only got away with this racist bullshit because she wrote this novel in 1940. 

And she's wasn't even finished with her trespass. 

McCullers brings "him" home from the hospital to haunt us with his unchanged simplicity and the simplicity of his yearnings.  His family and friends gather in the southern winter darkness, around the fire to welcome him home, passing around jars of fruit flavored moonshine that sympathetic neighbors leave at the front door in sympathy.  He, "feels the stumps of his legs with his strong dark hands" and says "I just wish I knowed where my f-f-feets be. That the main thing worries me. The doctor never give em back to me after what them men done did. I sure do wish I knowed where they at. I certainly will be glade to taste some of that boogie –woogie. To have something good to drink on, is the only thing m-make forget this misery. If I just wish I knowed where my f-feets are”

 When I got over the shock of the brutality, I knew why,  Carson McCullers “went there”. The same reason why "the caged bird sings" cause it has to.  The problem is more people can’t and don’t want too. And the fact that she did so in the 1940's in North Carolina is simply amazing. 

Gospel singer Ethel Waters and Carson McCullers

My favorite Bokowski poems is his ode to Carson McCullers below. Due note along with alcoholism she had numerous illnesses including various strokes starting in her early twenties. If any one deserved a good drink it was her.

she died of alcoholism


wrapped in a blanket 
on a deck chair


on an ocean 
steamer.

all her books of
 terrified loneliness

all her books about


the cruelty 
of loveless love

were all that was left 
of her

as the strolling vacationer


discovered her body

notified the captain

and she was quickly dispatched


to somewhere else
 on the ship

as everything
 continued

just 
as


she had written it"

From Black Moral Giants to Black Merchant Princes and Princesses

A few weeks ago, right before his election, The Honorable Illinois State Representative Derrick Smith was arrested for taking a seven-thousand dollar bribe in exchange, for a state grant to open a day-care- center in the impoverished district on the west side of Chicago that he represents.

Smith, was newly appointed to the seat by Cook County Committeemen  
( in a back room deal of musical chairs ) to fill a leadership void, left after The Honorable State Senator Ricky Hendon, - pre cursing The Honorable Congressman Jesse Jackson Jr’s "national depression saga"-, abruptly resigned due to "exhaustion" right before federal investigators arrested several of his legislative and campaign aids for bribery, whom are all singing to the Feds in exchange for leniency.  Cook County and State Democratic Party leaders privately and publicly asked Smith to resign. Upon his refusal, he was impeached. Already on the ballot for reelection, Smith continued to campaign and won in a landslide against both a white Republican who assumed the image of a Black construction worker on his campaign bill boards, and an insider lobbyist who didn't live in the district, yet was selected by the Democratic Party to run as an "independent" candidate. 

 

Two weeks ago,  The Honorable State Representative LaShawn Ford ( also representing the impoverished westside) was arrested for defrauding a bank out of half a million dollars. He also continues to serve. 

Four years ago then Congressmen Jackson posted these pictures on his congressional website 

Four weeks ago Congressman Jesse Jackson Jr. resigned from office, amid pending federal charges of campaign financial fraud, including buying his girlfriend a forty-thousand dollar Rolex watch. 

His wife, 7th Ward Chicago Alderperson Sandi Jackson is now under an ethical cloud after receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars as his campaign consultant based in D.C. She many not even live in her city as her children are enrolled in a D.C. School.

Current Congressional Candidate Reynolds 

Congressmen Jesse Jackson's former 2nd District Congressional Seat if infamous. The last Congressmen, Mel Reynolds ( a Harvard and Oxford Man) went to jail for sexually abusing a troubled fourteen year old. After Reynolds's was released from prison he went to work for the Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr who also helped engineer a pardon for Reynolds from then President Bill Clinton. Which means he no longer has to register as a child sex offender.

Mel Reynolds's is now a candidate for his former office running on a platform of personal "redemption" and to "finish the job he started"    

The Congressman before him, Gus Savage, lost the 2nd District seat after being censured by Congress for trying to force himself on a female Peace Corps worker in Zaire.

A April 28th Special Election has been set to fill the seat.

State Senator Donnie Trotter

The strongest candidate  is the powerful and long time State Senator Donnie Trotter who announced he was running last week then promptly got arrested on a felony gun charge.

The second strongest candidate, Alderman Anthony Beale represents one of the poorest and isolated districts on southside where only one out of ten residents even walks though the doors of a college, let alone graduates. Yet Alderman Beale arranged for his daughter a free four year state legislative scholarship from one of Illinois's more unsavory white state representatives, Bob Rita, who also employes Alderman Beale's wife's. The Alderman's wife, was also an employee of the secretary of state's office, until she resigned when it was revealed that she falsified her own time and milage sheets for a state vehicle she was allowed to keep at her home. She reimbursing the state16,000 dollars.   

Cornel West talks about Black people having always been the strongest moral force in America, starting with the Abolitionist Movement that then the Civil Rights Movement which in turned sparked the Women's, Latino, Indian, and the Anti War Movements.

These morals forces where lead by individuals like Harriet Tubman, Fredrick Douglas, Booker T. Washington, W.E.B DuBois, Martin King, Malcolm X,  Fanie Lou Hamer, etc., who transcended their mortal coil to reach the highest peaks, expanding and extending humanity that also forged a tradition of moral greatness and depth in the the foundation of America that is still admired through out the world.

But traditions die unless they are constantly reinvigorated and replenished. I think we are precariously  close to the death of this tradition. The Black community has transitioned, gone from creating Black moral giants to producing Black merchant princes and princesses who mostly inherit modern day political plantations of poor and working class Black people. These people  are more modern selfs than constituents,  to be traded and leveraged for political and material gain.

The merchant political class therefore does not empower, but continues a tradition of political and social stasis and controlled chaos in the Black community, that benefits as a poverty shock doctrine 

This condition thrives and grows stronger in combination with hyper and unfettered capitalism that creates mechanisms, characteristic of a supernova and a typhoon the sweeps from American industries which once created unparalleled American economic well being and success, and indiscriminately vacuums up and strips away every source of wealth, leaving nothing behind but devastation. The Military Industrial Complex was the first example of this. Then came the outsourcing of industries like the Steele industry, leaving urban wastelands like Gary Indiana, and Detroit, Michigan. 

Gary Indian 

Detroit 

Now mechanisms have been created directly targeting American citizens.  The Prison Industrial and Non Profit Industrial Complexes targets poor and working class Black people who resided in those very urban wastelands. And venture capital investment finance guised under the American banking system targets every body else except the One Percent and the rest of the small elite class who drives these mechanisms. Of course the Black community, which has always been the proverbial canaries in the coal mines, are the first and hardest hit.

But what is to be done?

Right now,  I'm reading,  a southern write, Carson McCuller's "The Heart Is A Lonely  Hunter".
In it are two deeply wounded and dispirited men. One, white  who works at a carnival and drinks heavily to ease his pain about American injustice and the inability of those most affected to respond in a meaningfully way.  The other is a formerly well mannered Black doctor who was just released, having been beaten and jailed for attempting to get recourse for his son's permanent disfigurement and mutilation at the hands of the authorities.  Both men discuss the deep issue of injustice and  "what can be done". The Black character , says "the only solution is for the people to know. Once they know the truth, they can be oppressed no longer."

Both characters agree upon the "knowing" but disagree violently and part company on "how to share the truth" with others.

I'm not done reading, but I find the story deeply compelling, especially in these times, when so many people know the truth, but will not share it in a meaningful way"

Being Human/ Being Black/ Experimental Essay

This is an experimental essay and is still under works. Or maybe not.

My cousin,  five-years younger,  always knew what buttons to push to irritate folks, especially mine as we lived in the same building until I was thirteen.  He was like water, searching for a minute crack to settle, awaiting a freeze, to expand, causing the concrete to crack. Coming up he had it rough but grew into a good man.

I hadn't seen  him in years. As we sat around my dinner table, he surveyed the room and asked, as always  slightly mispronouncing my name, "Why you the only one in the family that lives up here on the north side?, raising an unspoken issue between my family.  My Mom always told them, I'd move back south once I settled down, like my older cousin who lived in Lake View for a year. 

Then I brought my home. 

My Front Room

Refusing the bait, I responded with the first thing that came to mind, “Because I’m a vampire”.  

My much younger cousin(A) whispered to her strict Christian mother, "is that why we hardly get to see cousin [me] ?"  Her twin, cousin(B) jumped in the fray, "don't you have to be the devil if you're a vampire!  Her mother, looking at me with rusty daggers said,  "Your cousin's just demonstrating that even in the eyes of the Lord, adults often behave as children”, while rolling her eyes like back-in-the-day, when she'd falsely accuse me of tracking dirt on her parents white carpeting. Their home had plastic coverings on the living room furniture.  

My mother excused herself, asking  if any one needed a Mimosa?" I said yes, knowing she wouldn't bring one back for me. Her "ask" singled to her brother and his wife to join her in the kitchen. None of them would drink in my dinning room in front of the Christian Moral Majority, after my Christian cousin -who asked her mother to say grace when I wouldn't- had left a message on my answering machine- one week ago-  hinting It would be appreciated by her,  her children, and her mother, if  I didn't serve wine or beer, so I served Mimosas.

Kitchen Window

"I was joking, I'm not a vampire” I said. Cousin A, didn't seem convinced as she stared at my African masks covering the dining room wall.  I turned to my cousin who started this mess and said "First of all this isn't the north side,  this is west. And I like Logan Square because it has more restaurants than out south.  My uncle, a retired cop, with a strong Black nationalist bent, excused himself, his wife had immediately followed my Mother, but not before lobbing a Molotov cocktail, not because he particularly cared, but because he's my late Grandfather's son.  "I patrolled  the west side for ten years and this aint the west side" he said innocently, as if we were arguing simply over geography.  But I understand you liking different restaurants, that's why I love visiting your momma in Hyde Park because they have all those restaurants, and it's only ten minutes from Englewood where every one from this table is from. My cousin (B), came to my defense by saying where is Englewood?   

Frustrated I said o.k. I'll sale my house tomorrow and move to Mississippi.  Cousin-B who's actually fascinated by my masks, she questioned me about each one, asked "what are you gonna do in Mississippi?" My favorite teacher is from Mississippi and she taught us how to spell it "M.i.s.s.i.s.s.i.p.p.i." I want to go there, but Mommy said they're ignorant down there and don't worship the Lord properly.  Mommy says you don't believe in god, is that why you're going to Mississippi? "  I heard my Uncle laughed in the kitchen and his wife "hushed" him.   Can you ask my Mommy if I can come visit you in Mississippi?" "I certainly will" I said "and you can help me pick cotton on a farm just like the good old days". "I can, she coed in delight, "can I Mommy, Can I go pick cotton in Mississippi? 




Tiss the season and thank god for alcohol.   
  

The real reason why I mentioned vampires is because I'm caught on a TV series called “Being Human”, which to me is a pop culture parable of myself and most Black Americans. 

"Being Human" is about three people fundamentally transformed by violence, into a ghost, a vampire, and a werewolf.  Considered monsters, particularly the vampire and werewolf, they're actually deeply humanistic because of what they've experienced, more so than the rest of the "normal" characters. 

Slavery and then Jim Crow racism was violence in it's purest form which transformed the Africans who survived the Trans Atlantic Slave Trade, into Black Americans who for the majority of our time in America, were considered subhumans and monsters.  Deep Humanism keep us going through the deepest depths of white supremacy and violence.  The three characters in various ways, resist their slated roles, arising from their violent histories, by separating themselves from their "tribes" in an attempt to fully explore their humanity by situating themselves outside the burdens which transformed them.

This is the tricky part. 

During Jim Crow Segregation, certain light skinned Blacks passed for white, not to explore who they were as humans, but to be released from the stifling and constantly oppression, and the violent burdens of Blackness. Then, when progressive Black activism significantly beat back legal segregation, too many Blacks with economic means abandoned their communities out of an inferiority complex, because living amongst whites was and still is a status symbol. This abandonment began the deterioration of the Black community.  My family know me as a long term activist and a radical "race man". But my leaving the south side, lingers in their minds as a betrayal, especially because I am a Black male.

 I was born and grew up in four different south side communities, which I still love. Some of the most majestic architecture is in the "hood". Also Chicago's history is far more palpable there because endemic poverty has left historical spaces visible as oppose to the white neighborhoods like Wicker Park, Wrigleyville, and the Gold Coast, where most of the "history" has been coated over by both consumerism and commercialism.  

But, the good and the bad must be equally measured. Much of my childhood was immersed in violence. Looking back now I was a south side child soldier.  My summers were defined largely by fights, as rights of passage,  tests, and entertainment.  I was a good fighter, so I established rank, but lots of kids were good fighters and wanted to move up. So we fought each other to maintain our precarious positions or move up the chain. The better fighters suffered far less abusive and generally no serious abuses came to us, unless we got caught outside our territory alone. During the school year the same held true, which made concentrating on academics difficult. 

It was only in college, on the east coast, that I experienced a nonviolent environment for the first time.
Physical safety allowed me to greatly expand emotionally and intellectually.
A few times, I did seek out trouble because of a bad bout of home sickness and alienation. I was real lucky that my dorm resident assistant looked the other way. But I knew, at this school, violence was considered aberrant behavior and would not be tolerated. Especially from a Black kid with no economic or political standing. 

The conflict of the show, centers on the appearances of the main character's supernatural tribe  
who pull them back ( often with violence) into violence,  preventing them from completely disconnecting, combined with their struggles to mitigate the damage of their original trauma that changed them. The ghost is visible only to other creatures that go, bump in the night, yet can make her presence felt to all humans. The vampire works as a hospital orderly, comforting patients in their last hours before death, to atone for his killing spree spanning over hundreds of years.  But he fights against drinking human blood ,stealing his nourishment from the hospital’s blood bank.  Yet the urge to kill for fresh blood shadows him always. On the monthly full moon, the other character’s body violently reshapes, his bones breaking and resetting, into a four legged beasts that indiscriminately destroys all in it’s path. They therefore live always on guard, prevents them from fully living “normal lives”. They managed to find each other and like post college roommates, set up house to balance each other in a semblance of normality, which includes helping the ghost pass on to were ever she’s suppose to go.    

I graduated, and after a while returned home, moving in with my aunt and uncle who helped raise me. They lived in a big corner house with an apartment for me in the attic. The neighborhood was always   
 hard and mostly poor, but when I previous lived there, it was stable. I had two good friends, one's brother was a governor in Black Gangster Disciples, the other's brother was a governor in the Black Stones. The brothers didn't associate, but they respected each other and my friends had been tight before I knew them. We all lived in a four blocks radius and our blocks were quite. Now the older brothers were in prison along with a lot of the gang leaders swept up in the war on drugs that was the response to the 1990's crack pandemic. The gang hierarchy crumbled and a new crop of "young-uns" lacking maturity and credibility in their organizations, rushed to fill the void. Soldiers basically became  free agents with out rules, selling dope on any territory they could claim with a gun. My precollege past combined with strong unresolved feelings, including cultural and intellectual vertigo I still experienced from my very tumultuousness years away at school, made the New Jack City lawlessness and depravity in my neighborhood, oddly welcoming. I felt like a prince returning home after a long battle and some of my older friends had situated themselves quite well in the neighborhood.     

A friend from college came to Chicago and greatly exaggerated his tour of my neighborhood and classmates began to call wanting to visit just me.  I bumped into one at the Artful Dodger in Wicker Park who was from North Shore. I only vaguely remembered her just because she was also from Illinois. She flirted and brought me drinks, and while we danced she hinted that she knew what I was up to.  Finally she said she heard I was part of a drug empire. That night I was with an acquaintance recently released from prison for violence and a petty drug dealer who actually lived in Hyde Park didn't help.  She said she had a lot of friends who would be interested in a steady line on coke and invited me out for drinks to talk.  I never took her up on it, but because I never categorically said no, the rumor continued.  

 I was both working with undeserved youths, while dancing around the edges of criminality. 
I occasionally carried, mostly unloaded, a small handgun to the neighborhood bars like the Tropical Den who's working class clientele was much older than I, yet coke was still sold in the bathroom. There the owner, a damaged Vietnam Vet who always wore dark sunglasses, buzzed you in the door,  
But other bars like the Bird Cage and Lou's were straight dangerous and I liked those best.  

Two other school friends visited and got the full treatment by staying with me. I generally refrained from drugs but could easily get weed from an assortment of contacts and friends.  
For them I used my older friend who always looked after me, but didn't mind playing the part of hard drug dealer for my out of town female guests. One of my visitors was Palestinian who's famous father had been my professor. She got the full treatment. My older drug dealing friend took us to a reggae club owned by his more powerful supplierm for the VIP treatment. 

At some point,  my uncle ( who attended my dinner party got warning (probably from a Black cop who worked internal affairs and hung out at the Tropical Den) that I was crossing the line. Over beers he convinced me to move to Hyde Park. All it took was for him to tell me " If something ever happened to you, your Mom would never smile again" And some of the things I was doing started to scare me 

In Hyde Park, I felt like a Black South African from the Bantu areas crossing into the prime segregated land of the elite whites. Politically and socially Hyde Park is first and foremost designed for the University of Chicago which is more of an all white colonial occupying power.   I still have problems with this and the fact that  it goes largely unchallenged by Black people. 

The Point

That summer my best friend from grammar school who still lived in Hyde Park with his parents got shot (I bumped into him at a liquor store moments before), over a gold chain, at a popular Hyde Park gathering place on Lake Michigan called The Point.  He died in the ambulance racing to Northwestern Hospital's Trauma Center on the other side of town, because the University of Chicago keeps contacts with the Black natives to a minimal, by refusing to build a trauma center.  I moved to Wicker Park and never looked back. Finally I was free to able to explore my humanity outside the hyper segregation and violence of the south side and out of the context of an elite bastion of white wealth and power where I attended college.   

Lit X, Tina, spoken word artists, Kendal( owner) "Mario", spoken word artist  

Unlike Hyde Park, Wicker park in the 1990's was gritty, artistic, and culturally diverse in an organic and unplanned/ unsupervised way, which reminded me of New York.  I felt lighter. I discovered a Polish bar on Division Street that not only didn't mind me as a Black man, but the owner sold me  bundles of thick wool socks for cheap. The best part of Wicker Park was unlike college there was a radical Black Hip Hop culture centered around an Afro-Centric book store named "Another Level  Literary X" ( Lit X) in the center of Wicker Park, located in a windowless basement where now a Starbucks sits. Several nationally renowned poets like Chuck Perkins regularly preformed there along with some local legends like Marvin Tate who's then widely popular funk band played across the street at the Hot House. The Hot House was an international music space with a bar in the front. There was no cover to sit at the bar and it was always packed with radical activist drinking. 

There was also a professionally crafted zine published by a Black women named Kellie Curry called The Freedom Rag. All of these people were my age and this culture was equally embraced by the whole community. I remember giving my gun back to my older friend who loaned it to me and changed my personal narrative fixating myself deep inside Chicago's Hip Hop/ radical Black Intellectual Movement. I also became a lot more open minded.

In Being Human, the werewolf and vampire are white. But the show is filmed in Canada and the writing is strong so they don't come off as silly white dudes, but characters that Carson McCullers would have dreamed up. They wear a melancholy shroud, bearing it with stoic gallows humor,  while walking on unsound ground that might give way at any moment, looking around every corner for impending disaster. They talk about scar tissue and often lose those who become close to them. They are not dressed in ways to create American fashion trends.

 In fact, it seems their wardrobe was an after though gathered up at the last minute from a clothing bin at a church in a poor neighborhood. The ghost ( a Black women) is trapped in warm up cloths for eternity. They often make vicious jokes at each other's expense. Yet they cling to each other because their dreams of community are so fragile as to where victory is shared delivered pizza (only the werewolf can eat it, but it's about the ritual ) on the floor of their inherited house, that the ghost was murdered in at the hands of her abusive boyfriend who the three of them drove insane to where he confessed to her murder just to "escape" to prison. 


Wicker Park has throughly gentrified now and the old landmarks that embraced me are long gone
 And after bouncing around the area. I know reside in Logan. I'm much older now and find myself, because of home ownership, more involved in my community than I'd ever expected and sometimes I'm conflicted about this. But home ownership has always had special meaning for  a people who often wear easily erased from the American land scape. Be it the Rosewood Massacre in 1923, the ethnic cleansing of whole swarths of Black housing, under The Chicago Housing Authorities "Plan for Transformation 2000" to the Financial elites looting of the economy, that caused the current economic collapse. 90 precent of Black wealth was in home ownership, which is now significantly reduced.  But I'm still here. And me living in Logan Square and being involved, I think is a small step in Black folks expanding our boundaries as a people.  And frankly the more boundaries and cultures I've crossed, the more insight and love that I have for the Black Diaspora as a whole.