Déja Vû

In West Pullman, leveled homes left in their wake grass tall enough to tickle knees. Slabs of particle board or perforated metal covered the entrances of what was abandoned but not yet flattened to nothing. Those with support beams too brittle to hold additional weight were plastered with a red “X,” a warning to the Chicago Fire Department to take caution when entering. Homeowners living in this blight declared their structures safe with manicured lawns and power washed white siding — announcements that someone still lived there, someone still cared. The baby blue paint on my grandmother’s Dutch colonial on Yale Avenue never faded in the eleven years I lived with her, but I worried that ours might be the next home marked wrong with a red “X.” Let the city tell it, the “Xs” did not mark a structure for demolition, but in this neighborhood left to atrophy, no one could be sure. “X”s did not mark a structure for demolition, but in this neighborhood left to atrophy, no one could be sure. Soon before long, my grandmother, Mommy Mae, missed a mortgage payment so that I could move to the Iowa prairie for graduate school. It had been sixty years since Mommy Mae left Tchula, Mississippi for Chicago, and she still believed that education was a salve for the systemically bruised. I wasn’t as sure, but journeyed to Iowa City on the fuel of her faith.

The Iowa River bisected Iowa City into a transient college town, on the west, and, on the east, a home for folks who’d become so entranced by spring’s pink crab apple blossoms that they could not leave. On the eastside blocks around the university, generations-old homes with porches large enough for hosting were rented to graduate and undergraduate students on incomes fixed by stipends and financial aid. In my apartment hunt, I never saw an uninhabited home left to rot. For $500 per month a landlord would rent you anything, even as it crumbled before your eyes. The pride and fear that called West Pullman residents to upkeep seemed not to exist on Iowa City’s east side. There, I was offered a cinderblock half wall surrounding what the advertisement called the bathroom, or a basement hovel so thick with trash that the rental agent leaned her 110-pound body into the front door to force our way. On an island