I remember when I used to drink Maxwell House coffee with
grandma and granddad early in the morning as the birds chirped and the sun
licked its rays over the skies of the ghetto known as Austin. Grandma’s long
black hair tucked under a scarf, granddad in pajamas and a holey-white T-shirt,
sitting at the brown kitchen table with a scruffy beard reading the Chicago
Sun Times and me in some shorts and a T-shirt. Sometimes we would go
outside to the orange-painted back porch and sit in silence. I treasured those
mornings when nothing said was everything understood. I sipped from a mug and
not a cup. They made me feel as if I mattered. I had enough cream in my coffee
to turn it a pecan complexion and sweet enough to tint the bitter taste. It was
those mornings that led me to fall in love with the quaint hues of day
overlapping night, absent from gunshots, from the arguing of my parents’
post-divorce. It’s why I enjoy sitting in silence and watching people at the
local café. My sense of peace is derived from numerous cups o’ Joe at the windowsill
of our back porch. That’s what my grandparents were known for, creating a
certain tranquility that my parents couldn’t replicate. That was their way of
loving me.
The way Robert “Bob” and Catherine “Cat” Brookins expressed
love couldn’t be put into words, all of it was based on action. They showed
that money, education and social status would never trump the importance of
quality time with family. Even though I disappointed them during my rebellious
stages of adolescence, they never had to bail me out of jail or worry that one
day I would not have a college education. They encouraged schooling in the same
way my father unknowingly embedded in me the desire to become a journalist. My
grandfather used to wake me up to accompany him in taking my grandmother to
O’hare Airport when she worked for Sky Chefs. She prepared food and stocked the
planes for the flights. We dropped her off and went to my granddad’s early
morning hangout. The diner was on Chicago Avenue and Cicero. It sat across the
street from a motel whose clientele consisted of crack addicts and hookers with
their John’s. I can still smell the ham
sizzling on the grill and taste the cheese and eggs amid the cigarette smoke.
Granddad ordered me food after I decided what I wanted to eat and sat me at a
table from earshot of his buddies. He left me with the Chicago Sun Times
as they joked and laughed. “You gone need an education,” he would tell me in
our grandfather and grandson talks. He talked to me in ways that he never
talked to my other male cousins or at least from what I saw.
The days grew dark after the summer of 1990, but there were
always mornings with grandma and granddad. Austin was a war zone. Gunshots and
homicides were in abundance. My dad came around with some
scary statistic that he dug up as a crime reporter at the Chicago Tribune. Most of my male cousins were in separate
gangs, but our area was known for fighting over turf. Interstate 290 is a main
expressway that leads from the western suburbs into Downtown Chicago. The easy
access makes for a fertile ground in drug trafficking. Most of the murders in
and around my block were about someone over stepping a boundary and selling
something that they shouldn’t have. Sometimes it was over a dice game. Around 8a.m.
in the morning Lavergne Street at Chicago Avenue would seem like a gaper’s
delay with the men and women buying crack or heroin on their way to work.
“Rocks, blows, park,” they yelled. Small circular red lights flashed on and off
as the customers traded cash for drugs before pulling off. To warn of police
almost every block had a different code word. On Lavergne and Chicago Avenue
the word went from “5-0” to “dem peoples” to “Lil Ron.” With “Lil Ron” an hour
on the clock was used to denote the location similar to fighter pilots in
dogfights. Drug dealing was an around the clock occurrence, but there was a
window of tranquility between the hours of 4 and 6:30 am.
On school mornings my grandma would “fix breakfast,” as we
called it, that consisted of either cereal or eggs and bacon. She also ironed
any wrinkles from clothes if we were running late. My mother worked two jobs
and dealt with the depression of 11 years of marriage gone down the drain. So,
I understood why mornings were hard for her. She was used to the two-bedroom
apartment in Urbana, IL. She longed for the diversity that a small university
town could afford. She was happier then. I felt her heartache. Ultimately, it was that
orange-painted house that gave me a peek into how the other part of the world
lived. It also provided me with a deeper insight into humanity. It gave me a
story. I am proud of that house, of my
grandfather providing for his family, of my grandmother’s God-given gift of
nurturing. There was never a time when I picked up the phone and they never
answered, never a time when they were alive that I felt alone. When the trauma
of life in the ‘hood allowed me to believe that I could go to college, my
grandfather drove me to take the GED test and the entrance exam at Malcolm X
College. It was my grandmother who cried with me when I received my acceptance
letter to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I tell this account as an
example of the power of family, of what little moments can inspire in a young
boy who has lost hope in heroes and fairy tales. I was given words of
encouragement from the most obscure places—drug dealers, gang bangers,
prostitutes and police officers. It always seemed as though they saw something
in me that I could not.
Whatever happened during the rest of the day was of very
little consequence. There was politics and Michael Jordan and coffee with my
grandparents. 5010, for all it was
negative was just as positive. Sure, there was Keisha, Antwon, Baldy and
Michael’s teasing to contend with. It really bothered me. It made me feel like
I was not part of their family. But there was the reputation of them that
sheltered me from getting picked on or bothered by drug dealers on Huron or
Ohio Streets. I could walk to Henry H. Nash Elementary School without fear for
safety. Antwon ducked into my classroom on my first day of public declaring,
“That’s my cousin, y’all,” as if to give off a warning to anyone who dared
taunt me for my proper use of English or lack of ghetto swagger. Most of the kids in Ms. McDonald’s
classroom were really illiterate, stumbling over passages at group readings.
Me and my cousins all shared a common anger for
what went on in that neighborhood and in some ways we banned together, but in
the end we all had a home in 5010. That’s what my grandmother would always say, “Y’all are
my kids and as long as I am alive y’all always have a place to come to.” She
made good on her promise until her very dying day. And with each cup of morning
coffee I smile in remembrance of all my grandparents were.
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