70
DOTSON RADER
ders, in the Grant Park -disturbances, in a number
of
sit-ins and various
other protests.
I arrived at Thelma's home in the early evening, coming directly
from the bus depot . She lives with her mother in a one-bedroom apart–
ment with two small brothers and a sister. When I came in, Thelma
was sitting on the floor drinking a can of beer and watching television
while her brothers and sister played on the linoleum floOT, building
towers out of cans and knocking them to the ground. Thelma was
dressed in blue jeans, sandals and a white T-shirt (a radical's uniform).
She wore her hair naturally, combed in a huge moon-shaped crown.
We spoke fOT awhile, getting acquainted. Then Thelma asked to
show me the district.
We went down the stairs, the landings piled with uncollected gar–
bage, dark, smelling of urine and spilled booze and what else? Something
fetid and decaying. "The landlord, the city don't clean nothing. We has
a block party to clean things up nice, brought all the shit out to the
street and the Mayor Pig don't collect nothing. Sat there stinking for
weeks."
We walked for several blocks past abandoned buildings, boarded-up
windows, vacant 'lots piled with heaps of bricks and cement and garbage,
resembling haystacks on the land, ghetto sights and smells, Cleveland,
New York, Detroit.
It was dark, very dark, most of the street lamps shot out by the
kids; people were sitting outside on the stoops making conversation and,
on one street, a group of black boys played stickball, oblivious to the
traffic. Thelma said that the empty lots and the cellers were full of
rats, that derelicts were often bitten when they fell asleep inside. We
passed a public school. Thelma stopped and examined the building.
POWER TO THE PEOPLE and POWER TO THE PANTHERS was
scrawled in red paint on the stoop. "Watch, man," she said, and picked
up half a brick and hurled it through the window. I picked up another
and followed suit.
We went back.
It
was hot. Inside. Thelma made me a tuna fish
sandwich and we talked about my experiences on the left. Then we went
into the bedroom and climbed through the window and sat together on
the fire escape. One of her little brothers tagged after us and climbed
over the sill and sat himself beside me. And there I was, white, middle–
class, a writer from New York slumming, feeling guilty and, what was
worse, feeling out-of-place. Perhaps that is where our inexhaustible
racism lies, in the discomfort and the nagging suspicion that we are
out-of-place among the poor blacks that their experience i$ somehow
