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Redlined: A Memoir of Race, Change, and Fractured Community in 1960s Chicago
Linda Gartz
By
Published: Jul 05, 2020
Category:
Memoir
How many rotten novels and memoirs begin like this:
Mom had died, just five years after Dad’s death in 1989. Readying our former home for sale, my two brothers and I scoured the house, separating trash from treasure. In the attic, we found our gold.
Standing under naked beams in the dim light, we discovered a large box labeled in my mother’s neat printing: “Lil and Fred’s Letters and Diaries.” I ripped off the packing tape and folded back four cardboard flaps. A misty spray of dust and the odor of old paper wafted up. Peering in, I dug out several small books, the oldest dating to 1927—a diary Mom had started at age ten. Flipping through the pages, I recognized in her youthful handwriting the fledgling swoops and curves of the adult script I knew so well.
Oh, boy, secrets will be revealed. Generally in the family’s summer house in Maine. Zzzz.
But… wait! That is not how Linda Gartz’s book begins. This is the actual first paragraph:
On the night of August 14, 1965, my nineteen-year-old brother, Paul, walked toward flames on Chicago’s deserted Madison Street. He couldn’t reconcile the West Side he’d known since birth with the mayhem unfolding just ahead, where crashing glass and the sucking whoosh of Molotov cocktails played against a smoky red sky. As Paul headed east toward Pulaski Road, a scrum of black men turned a corner and came into view. In moments, they surrounded Paul. One said to him, “What you doin’ here, white boy? Don’t you know they killin’ your kind?”
Linda Gartz started thinking about her book almost thirty years after those race riots had wrecked her family’s Chicago neighborhood — a neighborhood that had been their home for half a century, a neighborhood that has once been 100% white and then, with the arrival of the first black family, suddenly tilted black. Linda Gartz is now a significant person in Chicago: to six Emmys, educational videos hosted by Oprah Winfrey and Maya Angelou. This is not a documentarian who would be content to excavate her family’s history. She knows context is everything, and here the context is real estate and who gets to own it.
There are many ways to tell the story of redlining, especially as it played out in Chicago. They are mostly academic. Yes, they are infuriating, and they explain much about the rage of people who are poor because they were legally denied the right to accumulate wealth. I doubt you’ve read any of them. And as much as you may want to educate yourself about the history of American racism, you won’t. But this book? Compelling. Compelling in the way that Between the World and Me, by Ta-Nehisi Coates, is compelling. Seriously: “Redlined” has won so many awards that if there any more stickers on the cover you couldn’t see the title. [To buy the paperback from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here.]
The story in two minutes:
The mystery to be solved here: “the unraveling” of her parents’ marriage. Fred and Lil Gartz were good people, intent on betterment. Their lives were far from easy — Fred’s job would require weeks of travel, Lil would have to be the caretaker for both her unbalanced mother and the houses they converted to apartments — but their biggest challenge wasn’t of their making. In the 1930s, the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation and the Federal Housing Administration began ranking communities to assess their creditworthiness. If a neighborhood had black residents, it got a D. Each year in the 1950s, 30,000 black Southerners migrated to Chicago, where they were funneled into substandard housing. Eventually a black family moved two houses from the Gartz’s house. And, as they say, “there goes the neighborhood.”
Fred Gartz was a bright man, but not about real estate. The smart move was to sell and flee; he doubled down on the only home he knew, West Garfield Park, on the west side of Chicago. He owned a six-flat. He rented bedrooms in the family home. The goal was one inherited from his parents: Selbststandig, the German term for self-sufficiency. Meanwhile Linda and her brother are, like kids everywhere, going to school and trying to figure out their places in the world.
Linda was born in 1949. Her childhood was a fast-action movie of changing colors. Her teen years were about assassinations. In her college years sorority girls discovered the pill. Linda was conscientious, studious, virginal — and attacked by her mother for her ambition and independence. To read the story of Lil’s escalating misery and Fred’s refusal to deal with it is wrenching. We have seen this story before — one life gets bigger, one life gets smaller — but the diaries make it especially sad.
Linda Gartz married her high school sweetheart. They have two sons. Half a century later they’re still together. They have a house and a garden. It’s clear on every page of this book that she knows how lucky she is.
