ONCE MORE TO THE LAKE
Excerpted from fall 2026 edition of The Iowa Review
My father set up assembly line machinery for a living, but he rarely spoke of that. The story he was more likely to tell, provided you were white, is that he spent his life escaping black people. He grew up in West Pullman, a closed loop on Chicago’s south side, where property was sold only to whites, rented only to whites, where at the time of his birth in 1941, the neighborhood’s largest employer hired only whites. International Harvester hired my father fresh out of the Navy in 1963, when he was twenty-two. By that time, the company had integrated. There was a job, it was said, for anybody of any color (but not every job), and within the space of my father’s young life, the face of the city changed. As the banks had prophesied in their annotated map at the time of his birth, the future of his neighborhood was poor.
So he moved. We all moved.
We merged with traffic and motored southward to Calumet City, a suburb on Chicago’s southeast edge. Calumet City was next to but didn’t quite touch the south shore of Lake Michigan, home to more heavy industry than anywhere on the North American continent. The miles-long swath of blast furnaces and crude boilers lit the sky orange at night, especially when it snowed. Somehow they made steel from train cars full of rocks, and from the waste slag they extruded more shoreline, which created more space for more windowless plants. Tractors, trucks, chemicals, power. They were building the next century on the lakeshore. They were building the end of the world. For my family, the end came in 1980 when my father was laid off. Everybody was laid off. In those days he came home wet-lipped, sometimes accompanied by strange animals.
. . .