Chicago

A Rose for Rose

Colored pencil

I'm from Chicago.  I grew up on the west-side known as the best side and the worst side.  It all depends on who you talk to.  We grew up in an environment of extreme weather-- it was either very hot or very cold.  The sun relentlessly burned our already brown skin into red before fading to a slightly darker shade.  In autumn there was about a month of colorful leaves decorating the grass, streets, and sidewalks.  The colors reminded me of Thanksgiving.  Golden yellow, rusty brown, and apple colored red leaves helped foster a warm environment, but there's nothing like a Chicago winter to keep you barricaded in your home for the season.  The summer was both the most exciting and depressing.  The warm weather brought an infestation of people outside.  I lived on the boulevard, a true boulevard with trees on either side and separated by plenty grass and walkway.  The largest park on the west-side was just at the end of my block, and just across it laid a lagoon, an outdoor pool, and a beach.  The park was so enormous that you could walk for an hour and not have walked the entire park.  My grandmother told me it used to be a forest and that the lagoon was man-made; the city stocked the water with Blue Gills, crawfish, and Catfish. That news disappointed me.  In the summer the field-house was a haven of summer school recreation, during late October in celebration of Halloween the field-house was transformed into a super scary haunted house-- I have yet to be frightened to that degree.  It was the perfect neighborhood aside from the occasional robbery, rape or homicide. The summer weather brought sadness and tragedy for our community but there were beautiful things, the Douglas park area where I grew up fit perfectly into the image popularized by the late Tupac Shakur-- the rose growing out of concrete.

Void of the usual tell-tale signs of an impoverished neighborhood the towering buildings were no taller than three stories high, there were single family homes sprinkled about, a statue sat upon a circular sitting area at the tip of the middle-park separating the street, and a large Catholic church at the corner along with all the fixings of an upstanding Catholic congregation-- many neighborhood children attended the attached school of the church.  The boulevard bustled by evening, quieted during the night aside from neighborhood boys on dirt bikes trash-talking one another as they raced to the corner to decide who would be king for the day.  After school we played double-dutch with the neighbors, pity-pat with our friends, and Girl Talk with each other.  First there were three of us; myself being the oldest - of the girls, then came my mothers first and only son-- our baby brother Romeo-- who made four.  Unless you were privy to the fact that my two younger sisters and I did not share the same father, you would not have known it.  Their dad Michael was like a second father to me in every sense of the word.  I remember the three of us girls getting dressed to go over daddy’s house. I remember one time I was standing in the doorway of our rec-room when Michael was finished talking to my mom, my two cute little sisters were all dressed up and exciting to be leaving, holding their favorite teddy’s close, twirling their baby doll dresses.  As he and my mom made their way further into the kitchen I hurried away from the doorway and stood erect on the wall when I heard him call out to me.  "Kesha, where you at?"  he said in a booming manly voice.  My second dad Michael stood about 6'2 with broad shoulders and red skin; his long silky ponytail flipped to the left side of his shoulder as he walked through the doorway and turned his face toward me quickly.

   "I gotcha!" he said with a laugh tickling my boney tummy.  "Well come on, you going too-- you know you're my baby."

   I grabbed my overnight bag and hopped over to my mother hugging her shapely beautiful thighs.  "Can mommy come too?" I asked looking up at my mom.

   "No, no, no, no, its just daddy and the girls today," he said lightly.

   "I have to work baby," my mom said.

She always had to work or go to bible study, prayer circle, bingo, or to the step club. Those where the days.  Sensational summers filled with tons of kids off to the beach, and cold frosty winters were we canon-balled into the snow, laid out and make snow angels in our pink and blue snow-suits.  We loved Chicago, we loved the west-side, we loved our mommy, and we loved our daddy-- until Willy came. He was a tad bit smaller than my biological father, who I had become accused to seeing on a regular basis.  For some reason unbeknownst to me soon my father stopped visiting, I heard blips of conversation from my aunts and uncles who saw him here and there.  Years later I saw him, for probably the last time in my life, I had just boarded the bus three blocks from my house in route to school.  We kissed, chatted about my mom and he was gone, just like that.  My suave handsome father, the man who helped to give me life.  If it had not been for the fact that I was born a female - the man and I would probably look just alike.  I missed him then as I miss him now.

Michael was always around, we saw him often enough to not feel threatened by the presence of this new person in my mothers house, but soon Michael stopped coming by but my mother would drop us off over his house during the weekends and we would visit as usual.  Of course as life would have it, soon the visits became less frequent and I began to miss my second father.  Willy was a regular visitor to our house and soon he was no longer a visitor, he was the man of the house.  At first I thought him to be a good man, good for my mother and good for us, but soon time told a different story that resulted in years of abuse that ended in a homicide.

It was a few days before my first day of high school; I was even more excited than my brother who would be starting first grade.  I'm not sure if it was the idea of a new school (I had attended the same grammar school K-8th grade) or if it was the fact that I would no longer have to wear school uniforms.  (This didn’t last long due to the fact that I transferred after my sophomore year to a Catholic all-girls school where we had to wear plaid skirts.)  Yea, it was the fact that we didn’t have to wear uniforms, I was more than excited about having gone shopping with my mother, and she had allowed me to pick out colored jeans.  Growing up in a traditional Baptist household with a saint for a mother didn't allow for the type of clothing that our favorite TV show characters wore on Beverly Hills 90210, so naturally I, loving to shop and being a lover of clothes, would ecstatic about my colored jeans.  My mother bought me a rainbow of jeans, I had them in every imaginable color and I was looking forward to showing them off.

After returning from the clothing store I thanked my mom for the hundredth time and hurried into my room closing the door tightly.  I dropped the bags on my bed and plopped down on the white and gold trimmed pink canopy twin.  "Yes!" I said out-loud, jumping off the bed clapping my hands together, I shimmied out of my long blue-jean skirt and tugged at a sock.   Glancing at the door I went back to check it, wiggling the knob to make sure it was locked.  I returned to my new digs and pulled on a tapered rust colored pair, along with a tasteful blouse.  I opened my locked door and entered the hallway and tiptoed down to my mother’s room.  Placing my ear close enough to hear I waited a few moments and knocked.  I was greeted at the door by Willy.  He was wearing a questionable smile, a terribly stretched and worn pair of red shorts and a white tank that looked like it belonged to someone else.  His beer belly hung out like he was a few months away from giving birth to my mother’s fifth child.  I entered the room with him in tow.  I glanced back over my shoulder and shot him an evil look.  "Hey mommy," I said to my gorgeous African-American mother.  "I wanted to show you how it looks," I said with the same smile that she had shown me.

"I like it, I like it, very nice, you look like a teenager," my mother said.

Elated, I quickly hugged her and turned to leave.

Bohemian Woman
Colored pencil