I have to stop now. I have a meeting with my Viral Particle Team now. Their job is to attempt to find a viral disease vector for NSD, but so far nothing has turned up.
INTERVIEW
Rita Mack, Professional Rememberer
[THE ABSENT. We met Rita Mack on a street-corner. If there is a truism about life in our times, it is that the poor die first. And in America that means, for the most part, the black.
In 1987 there were approximately thirty million black people in the United States.
I can remember walking the streets of Chicago a little earlier, in the autumn of 1983, and seeing black faces everywhere.
And now? The Loop is not empty of people, but blacks are rare.
There are stories of whole neighborhoods starving, and there are long, blank streets.
We have no idea how many blacks remain alive in our country now. Their world was fragile because it was poor, and it obviously has not fared well. The loss of life among blacks must be much higher than among the rest of the population.
We saw very few black people on our journey. Certainly not in California, where Hispanics and Asians represent the major visible minorities. And on the road, the absence of black people was eerie at first, and finally terrifying.
By the time we reached Chicago we had come to feel an urgent need to seek out and interview someone who could effectively represent black experience.
Seeing Rita Mack, I experienced a kind of loneliness for the past. A black woman was partner in my raising. My earliest memory is of her face, peering down into my crib. There is thus some deep solace for me in the presence of black people. And their absence is fearful. These streets and buildings, this country, belonged to them just as certainly as it did to the wealthier elements of the society. When I saw Rita Mack hurrying toward me I wanted to embrace her, to greet her and hear her tell me that all was well, that black Chicago, once so powerful, had emigrated en masse to Atlanta or Birmingham or Mobile.
But she did not tell me that.]
I wouldn’t say we were extinct. I wouldn’t say that. But you look around this town and you see the worst emptiness in the black neighborhoods. There was a whole world here that is gone now. I mean, a way of thinking and being alive that you would call the black way. There was a certain way of talking, a way of acting, a special kind of love. And violence, there was that too—kids running around with the guns and the knives and whatnot. But the drugs were made in white factories—I refer here to the pills—and it was white capital in the form of Mafia money that brought in heroin from Asia. The black was the consumer. The black kid was the one they paid a dollar to let them mainline him out behind the school when he was fourteen years old. And why do they do this?
They know that the black kid is strong, so the smack won’t kill him before they get the profit, and the black kid is brave and smart, so he will be a good and cunning thief, and he is sad, wrapped up in that black skin of his, and he does not much like himself, so he will not be able to resist the smooth things the smack does to his body and mind.
But that’s over, that’s all gone. You had them dying in the millions, weakest first, step right up, and they just piled them up and they put up ropes around the worst neighborhoods like the air itself had the infection, which I suppose it did. I looked at the way they treated the dead and I thought, “They act like these are cardboard people, but they aren’t, so show some respect, show some grief. They might be cardboard to you, but they had long histories in their minds, just like you do.”
I am referring to the flu now. These are my subjective impressions, you see. I consider myself a poet. I am not educated in the sense of having degrees, but in life, boy, am I educated. I have a Ph.D. in starvation and an M.D. in Cinci Flu. I know how to sing. I am a rememberer of the old songs. I remember all the old blues, the songs of black people getting along somehow in the hot sun, the backs bent beneath the weight of work and the minds flashing with music, and also the songs of the urban street world, the songs that were like knives or like molten happiness. I want to say to you, we never had a chance. We were at the bottom of the list. The thirties saw a hell of a lot of black people starve. So did the forties and the fifties. We came out of the Depression only in the sixties.
Then Martin Luther King said what was in our hearts. We knew how much we were worth, that we were sacred as all men of the earth are sacred, that we had in us the same spark of God any human being had, and we could lift up our hearts on high.
I was raised in Gulfport, Mississippi, and I remember the color line very damn well. I’m fifty-six. They pulled down the color lines in the sixties. I am stained by those memories, though, and I’ll never really believe that anybody who lived under segregation is truly free. We cooperated, black and white, in mutual humiliation. They imposed it and we endured it. Separate water fountains in the bus stations, and separate lunch counters and sitting in the back of the bus and the top of the movie theater. A thing like that stays with you. Sometimes I see lines where there aren’t any lines. Sometimes I think it’s still then. I could let it lie, but I owe this remembering to all black people who remain alive, and all human beings worth the title.
We moved to Chicago in ’63, me and Henry. Let’s see—’63 to ’73, that’s ten years. To ’83 is another ten. Eighty-four, eighty-five… we lived together in this city for twenty-eight years. Lord, I was twenty-six when I came here with that man. Lord, I was a girl!
My Henry was a fine and loyal man and he made a good living.
He was a baker. But big time, a factory baker. Sure, there was trouble. Some people didn’t like a black man in that job. Naturally—it was a good job! But Henry, he knew what he was doing, how to bake ten dozen loaves of bread in those giant ovens and never burn a one. He also knew how to hold a good job and not let it go.
As a kid he was on the migrant circuit, this and that, digging beets here and peanuts there, and picking cotton. He knew the difference between a good job and a bad job.
He got the flu, that man. He had lost forty pounds. We were living off roots and stuff. We would get some bread now and again from the city delivery. Bread and whatever else they had. Spinach one day. Collard greens another. Fried pork rind another. Then peas. You never knew. But thank the Lord for those trucks. There are good people in the world, black or white or you name it.
I spend my time working to preserve black culture. You have to hold on to things these days. The little details, they’re important. I don’t have any numbers to back me up, but I’ll bet way more than half the black people are dead and gone. Right here in Chicago, you see all these empty black neighborhoods. So many! Where are those people? They sure as hell didn’t retire to the country!
We were the poorest, we starved first and worst. Because we starved the worst, we were the weakest, so the flu hit us the hardest. Look, I lost my husband. I lost my children. But a lot of whites had the same thing happen. The difference is, I also lost everybody I knew, and everybody at work, and all but a few of the people who lived around me. So now my life is full of new faces, and not a lot of them are black. And that is certainly not the white experience.
Whites, you talk to them, and they lost a family member here, a friend there. I’m talking about loss on a different scale. The church I belonged to, for example—there are just thirty of us left, out of a congregation of a couple of hundred. Not to say they all died, but half of them did. The rest, they moved away, most of them looking for work or relatives or just a better color of sky.