Specifically, I wanted to know why residents spoke of her with a mixture of reverence and fear, much as they spoke of J.T. “Oh, you don’t want to mess with Ms. Bailey,” they’d say. Or, “Yeah, Ms. Bailey can tell you a lot about what’s happening, but make sure you have five dollars with you.” Even J.T., who agreed that I should spend some time with Ms. Bailey, vaguely hinted that I ought to be careful around her.
Part of my motivation to observe Ms. Bailey came from my advisersat the University of Chicago. Jean Comaroff, an accomplished ethnographer, said that I was spending too much time with men. Since two-thirds of the community were women raising children, she suggested that I try to better understand how women managed households, secured services from the CHA, and otherwise helped families get by. Bill Wilson told me that poverty scholars knew little about the role women played in community affairs, and he encouraged me to spend time with household leaders like Ms. Mae but also tenant leaders like Ms. Bailey. Wilson and Comaroff both advised me to exercise the same sort of caution with Ms. Bailey as I would with other powerful people, never taking what they told me at face value.
Ms. Bailey was of average height and stout. Because of arthritis in her knees, she walked slowly, but always looking straight ahead with great focus, like Washington crossing the Delaware. She had a tattoo on her right arm that read MO-JO—the nickname, Ms. Mae told me, of a son who’d passed away. Ms. Bailey had pudgy fingers and, when she shook your hand, the tightest grip I’ve ever felt.
Her title was building president of the Local Advisory Council (LAC). This was an elected position that paid a part-time wage of a few hundred dollars a month. The official duties of a building president included lobbying the CHA for better building maintenance, obtaining funds for tenant activities, and so on. Elections were held every four years, and incumbents were rarely deposed. Some LAC presidents were much more powerful than others, and from what I’d heard, Ms. Bailey was on the upper end of the power scale. She had actually fought for the creation of the LAC many years ago, and she kept her fighting spirit. I’d heard stories about Ms. Bailey getting medical clinics to give free checkups to the children in her building and local stores to donate food.
I witnessed this fighting spirit firsthand when I visited her small, decrepit office one day. I wanted to explain why I’d been hanging around her building and also explain my research. I began by discussing the prevailing academic wisdom about urban poverty and the factors that contributed to it.
“You planning on talking with white people in your study?” she snapped, waving her hand at me as if she’d heard my spiel a hundred times already.
I was confused. “This is a study of the Robert Taylor Homes, and I suppose that most of the people I’ll be talking to are black. Unless there are whites who live here that I’m not aware of.”
“If I gave you only
one
piece of bread to eat each day and asked why you’re starving, what would you say?”
I was thrown off by this seeming non sequitur. I thought for a minute. “I guess I would say I’m starving because I’m not eating enough,” I answered.
“You got a lot to learn, Mr. Professor,” she said. “Again,
if I gave you
one piece of bread to eat each day and asked why you’re starving, what would you say?”
I was getting even more confused. I took a chance. “Because you’re not feeding me?”
“Yes! Very good!”
I felt relieved. I hoped no more tests were coming my way, but Ms. Bailey kept going. “Let’s say I took away your house key and you had to sleep outside,” she said. “A man from the city comes over and counts you as ‘homeless.’ What would you say?”
“Umm.” This one seemed even harder. “I’d say you’re wrong. I
have
a place to stay, so . . . no! I’m not homeless!” I thought I had nailed this one.
But she looked exasperated at my answer. “Wow, have you ever had to do
anything
for yourself?” she said.
I was at least smart enough to know that she wasn’t literally asking me to reply.
“If I took your house key away,”
she barked, “what does that make you?” She leaned across the desk, and I could feel her breath on my face.
“Well, I guess you robbed me. So I’m not homeless, I’m a victim.”
“Okay, we’re getting somewhere. Now let’s say I tell the police to stop coming to
your
block and to go only where
I
live. And then I write that you live in a crime-infested neighborhood, that there’s more crime on your block than mine. What would you say?”
“Well, I guess I’d say that it’s not really fair because you have all the police, so—”
“Mr. Professor, we’re really getting moving now!” Ms. Bailey threw up her hands in mock celebration. “Okay, so let’s go back to the original question. You want to understand how black folks live in the projects. Why we are poor. Why we have so much crime. Why we can’t feed our families. Why our kids can’t get work when they grow up. So will you be studying white people?”
“Yes,” I said. I understood, finally, that she also wanted me to focus on the people outside Robert Taylor who determined how the tenants lived day to day.
“But don’t make us the victim,” she said. “We’ll take responsibility for what we can control. It’s just that not everything is in our hands.”
Our subsequent meetings were much the same. I would walk in to discuss an issue—the 60 percent dropout rate, for instance, among the project’s high-school kids. “Research today says that if kids can get through high school, they have a twenty-five percent greater likelihood of escaping poverty,” I said, as if giving a lecture. “So
early
education—keeping them in school—is the key. Also—”
Ms. Bailey interrupted. “If your family is starving and I tell you that I’ll give you a chance to make some money, what are you going to do?”
“Make the money. I have to help my family.”
“But what about school?” she said.
“I guess it will have to wait.”
“Until what?”
“Until my family gets enough to eat.”
“But you should stay in school, right?” she said, sarcasm rising in her voice. “That’s what will help you leave poverty.” She paused. Then she smiled triumphantly and made no effort to hide her patronizing tone. “So . . . you said you wanted to talk with me about high-school dropouts?”
It took a while, but I eventually realized there was no point in trying to act even remotely authoritative around Ms. Bailey. There was part of me that felt like the expert researcher, but only a very small part. Once I learned that there was no way around Ms. Bailey’s Socratic browbeating, I decided to give in and just let her teach me.
I usually dropped by her office during the hours she reserved for open visitation from tenants; otherwise it could be hard to track her down. When a tenant came by, Ms. Bailey would ask me to step out. Our longest conversations, therefore, rarely lasted beyond fifteen minutes. Ms. Bailey remained formal with me, as if she were keeping her guard up. She never shared details about specific tenants; instead she spoke in generalities about “families who live around here.”
After a few months of this, I told J.T. that I was frustrated by my interactions with Ms. Bailey. I couldn’t tell if she trusted me.
J.T. enjoyed seeing me struggle. He had warned me that getting to know her wouldn’t be easy and perhaps wasn’t even worth trying. “It took a while before I let you talk with my boys,” he said.
“What makes you think she’ll just walk you around and show you everybody? Things don’t go so fast around here.”
He had a point. If Ms. Bailey needed time to feel comfortable with me, then I would just have to wait.
As the Chicago winter began to settle in, Ms. Bailey asked me to help her with a clothing drive. Tenants and squatters in her building needed winter coats, she said, as well as blankets and portable heaters. She wanted me to collect donations with her from several stores that had agreed to contribute.
A friend of mine let me borrow his car, a battered yellow and brown station wagon. When I went to collect Ms. Bailey at her building, she was carrying a large plastic bag. She grunted as she bent over to pick it up and again as she set it down on the floor of the car. With labored breaths, she directed me to our first stop: a liquor store a few blocks from her building.
She instructed me to drive around the back. She told me she didn’t want the manager to see me, but she didn’t explain why.
I parked in the alley as Ms. Bailey went inside. Five minutes later a few employees came out the back door and began loading the station wagon with cases of beer and bottles of liquor. Nothing expressly for winter, I noted, although a stiff bourbon could certainly help take the sting off the Chicago cold. Ms. Bailey climbed into the car. This donation, she told me, was made with the understanding that she would direct her tenants to visit this liquor store exclusively when they needed booze.
We drove a few miles to a grocery store on Stony Island Avenue. We went in the back way and met with a man who appeared to be the manager.
“Hey, sweetheart,” Ms. Bailey said. She introduced me to Mr.
Baldwin, a large, pear-shaped black man with a round face and a wide grin. He had a clipboard in his hand, marking off the sides of beef hanging from a ceiling rack.
Mr. Baldwin gave Ms. Bailey a hug. “I got what you want, babe,” he said. “All in the back. I got them ready for you yesterday.”
He pointed us toward a younger man, who led us over to a few big garbage bags filled with puffy black jackets. At first glance they looked exactly like the jacket the young man was wearing, which had the name of the grocery store prominently displayed on the sleeves and chest.
Were
they the same jackets? I wondered if Ms. Bailey’s tenants would wear clothing with a grocery store’s name on it.
As I hauled the bags to the car, Ms. Bailey shouted at me. “And bring three cases of beer in here, Sudhir!”
I did as I was told. Even I, middle-class naïf that I was, could sense a horse trade.
Back in the car, Ms. Bailey anticipated my question. “I know you’re wondering what we were doing at the food store,” she said. “Take a look at the jackets.” I reached into the backseat and grabbed one. It smelled distinctly of bleach, as if it had been disinfected. The store’s patch had been either removed or covered up with another, even larger patch. It read ROBERT TAYLOR PRIDE.
Ms. Bailey smiled. “Those jackets are warmer than what most families can buy in the stores. These workers are sitting in a meat locker all day, so you know they have to stay warm. The manager donates about twenty to me each Christmas.”
“And the patches?” I asked.
“The guy who makes the jackets for him does it for free—for us.”
“And the beer?”
Ms. Bailey just smiled and told me where to drive next.
We hit several more stores that day. At Sears, Ms. Bailey exchanged pleasantries with the manager, and they asked about each other’s families. Then he handed over a few boxes of children’s coats; Ms. Bailey directed me to put the rest of the beer in his car. At a dollar store, Ms. Bailey traded some of the liquor for a bundle of blankets. At a hardware store, Ms. Bailey gave the manager the heavy plastic bag she’d brought along, and he gave her three portable heaters.
“Don’t ask what’s in the bag,” she told me as I carried the heaters back to the car. “When I know you better, I’ll tell you.”
Only once did Ms. Bailey receive a donation that was actually a donation—that is, something for free. At one grocery store, she got some canned food without having to exchange any beer or liquor.
By the time we finished, we were on the far southern edge of the city. We hit traffic on the drive back to Robert Taylor, which gave me the opportunity to pepper Ms. Bailey with questions.
“When did you start doing this?” I asked.
Ms. Bailey told me that she had grown up in public housing herself. Back then, charities, churches, city agencies, and individual volunteers all helped out in the projects. “But the volunteers don’t come around anymore,” she said wistfully. “Have you seen any of those nice white people since you’ve been around? I didn’t think so. Nobody gives us money, nobody runs programs. Not a lot of people are doing the free-food thing anymore. Even the churches really don’t do what they did in the past.”
“But I don’t understand why the people we saw today want to give you things. I mean, how did you get to know them?”
“Well, first of all, most of them grew up in Robert Taylor or they have family in the projects. Lots of middle-class people don’t like to talk about it, but they came from the projects. It’s easy to forget where you came from. But I try and remind these people that they were once like us. And a few times a year, they do the right thing.”
“So why give them beer and liquor?” I asked. “If it’s a donation, it should be for free, no?”
“Well, things ain’t always that simple,” Ms. Bailey said. She brought up the incident I’d seen some months back, when the woman named Boo-Boo wanted to kill the Middle Eastern shopkeeper who’d slept with her teenage daughter. “That’s what a
lot
of women have to do around here to get some free food,” she said. “I don’t want to see it come to that. So if I have to give away a few bottles of gin, that’s fine with me.”
Back at her office, Ms. Bailey organized the winter gear and prepared large baskets filled with canned food and meat. Word spread quickly, and families from her building soon began to drop by. Some were shy, others excited. But everyone seemed happy, and I watched as children smiled when they tried on a new coat or a warm sweater.
I noticed that some people received food but no clothing. Others got a jacket but no food. And some people just stood around until Ms. Bailey told them, “We don’t have anything for you today.” She said this even though the food baskets and clothing were in plain view, so I didn’t know why she was withholding the gifts from them. Did she play favorites with some families?