I know little about living in Chicago. I lived there as a little boy a little over a year. Hated it at five. The sun never came up and the mood of the city sat like a fat old man's weight over the food people need to live by. It was awful the feeling of the city. First time a knife was pulled on me was by a man who fell in step with me on my way home from kindergarten.
I have been back here and there over the years. I have relatives there. Some of my aunt's neighbors are famous. President Obama's family has a house nearby her house. I point that out because visiting there early this year I shook off the old lens I had as a child, and a young man to look at the city and saw more than one dark spirit entombed in the air above the city in each quartier I visited. Downtown Chicago has an interesting intent. It is redesigned, I caught quickly, to design the structure of poverty out of the area making it feel expensive and exclusive. You cannot park there if you are regular folks. Parking lots start at $68 underground at hotels.
The river water the city is influenced by one would believe has powers to quell or temper the fire of murder and rage in the city, but it ain't so. A young Black woman serving croissants, charm and bagel sandwiches in an upscale eatery told me, "Don't get it twisted! Everyday somebody gets killed in Chicago, even down here with all this money floating around!!"
There is something festering. It is and has been evil and murderous not only in Chicago, or Washington DC, and in particular New York city, but throughout the country. I know where it comes from and am not fond of pretending I don't. But, whites don't like to admit what they brought upon this land, and unleashed. Now, today Chicago is upset because evil and dark has shown itself spewing out of two young Black girls of a quartet of people who kidnapped and tortured a mentally unstable white man who could not defend himself. The photos I saw of the girls frightened common decency and drove home how dark a nation is when its women can kill with aplomb and disrespect Life, as if they have no wombs to connect to the pulse of Life to others! - Gregory E. Woods, Keeper of Stories 1/5/17
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