Going Down Fast (27 page)

Monday, the hearings started.

They had a good turnout from the neighborhood. The hearings room downtown was rapidly filled. Harlan argued with the officials to move it to a bigger room, but he was told that would be impossible, and some of their people who had not signed up in time to testify but who wanted to be present were not allowed to stand inside and had to leave. Shirley, with Tommy squirming on her lap, sat between Harlan and him, with Blanche on Harlan's left side. Blanche was being very circumspect. She was wearing a black wool dress with white collar and cuffs and gloves and only two bracelets. She sat there clutching her purse and looked straight ahead. J.J. had parked his burly self on a folding chair just behind them, and he was leaning forward to talk in Harlan's ear. Beside him was the little man whose name Rowley had never learned, but who had brought his soft mild insistence on justice to every meeting and every strategy session. Mrs. Samson, the widow with six kids who'd been relocated twice already, was present with the three oldest wearing somebody else's suits. They all leaked nervousness, they all had little bits of paper with what they wanted to say written down, they all kept looking anxiously around to try to judge the enemy.

First came the Corporation testimony. The chairman of the division of social sciences of the University was called first. This was not the announced order, but Lederman hopped up to explain that Chairman Wangler had flown in especially to testify and he was needed back in Washington where he was working very hard on the President's committee on crime in the streets. He shook hands with the commissioners, beamed around and launched, into a smooth exposition. He was followed by a demography expert from ISS.

The experts proved by census data and their own surveys that population density in the area under consideration was greater than in white middle-class areas to the east. Ages of structures were higher (smartly printed up comparative tables were distributed), and their potential obsolescence militated against soundly financed renovation. The area showed the perfect type of a sector in transition. Most inhabitants had arrived recently: such high transience destroyed stability.

“How'd they enjoy it if we talked about them that way? Those professors always picking up and going where they make more!” Blanche was prickling with anger. Harlan reached over to quiet her, then pulled his hand off her arm as if he'd been stung. Tommy was whining and Shirley was trying ineffectually to quiet him.

Blight was widespread, the experts reported. Inspectors working under Corporation auspices had found violations in building after building. In its racial composition the area resembled other districts of blight. Conversions by use were common. Let alone, the area could only hasten downhill, infecting property values in adjacent areas and further depressing the urban tax base.

The Corporation testimony was clear, vigorous and backed up by table after table of statistics (Table I through VIII). When the hearings broke for lunch, nobody in their group was feeling lively. Their mood was not improved by watching Lederman and Wangler go off with the commissioners to lunch. The Defense Committee people ate in a $1.39 steak place down the block, pulling three of the formica tables together. Tommy collected the foil from everybody's baked potatoes and made a big ball of it.

“Maybe we made a mistake not finding out more who these commissioners are. Rowley, think you could check them out tonight?” Harlan had eaten quickly and shoved his plate away, sat tracing figures in spilled salt.

“The business library's closed tonight, and besides, I have to be at the studio by six.”

“Okay, get what you can this afternoon.”

“Come on, man, I want to be at those hearings as much as you do.”

“I don't want to be there at all. We need some discipline. Blanche, you go with him. He'll show you what to do.”

“What's come over you, Harlan? You know I got to testify.”

“We aren't getting a chance to testify today. Can't you see that?”

Testy and insistent Harlan sent them off. “You give in to a man one way, and pretty soon he's bossing you all around the map,” Blanche said. She was as pissed off as he was at being exiled. They played round robin all afternoon through the library shelves:
Polk's Directory, Poor's Register, Who's Who in Illinois
. One of the commissioners was a member of the real estate board. He had his offices in the Midwestern Title and Trust's building, but they could not figure out his connection with the bank. The other white commissioner was a middle-level executive of a world agribusiness corporation, active in his church. His wife had furniture store money (People's Friend Discount, active in the ghettoes). The black commissioner owned a small paper box plant.

They could make some connections between men who sat on the board of directors of Title and Trust and the agribusiness corporation and some of the central corporate kings they knew were behind renewal, but no more than they would turn up out of almost any business in the city that dealt with banks and interconnected with other corporations. The men serving as commissioners were not big shots—they weren't the mayor's favorite giants for committees with real power—just middle echelon men anxious to please and do their civic duty with distinction in the eyes of their superiors. It meant everything and nothing.

Tuesday the University administrators took the stand to state the needs of a great institution. A color film was shown depicting the contribution of the several institutions of the area to its economic viability. A vice-president reminded the commissioners how Inland served the community, the city and the nation. He cited potent federal officials and senators on the need for student housing and the expansion of educational and research facilities, the importance of advanced technology to our national defense.

“We have to shift our emphasis from the elimination of already existing slum jungles to something far more important, the use of urban renewal to develop our urban economy itself, to support our critical institutions and attract vital new industries and to create attractive neighborhoods in our city in which solid and civic-minded men and women can live safely and raise their children, neighborhoods in which normal cleanliving families want to settle and go to school and work. Inland University is ready to face its responsibility to its city and its neighborhood.”

On Wednesday the Corporation finished its exposition. Attendance from the neighborhood had fallen. “What can I say?” Harlan counted his flock. “A lot of them are just clerks and domestics. They took off the time they could, but they're afraid they'll get fired if they stay out longer.” Harlan had had enough trouble getting a leave of absence, while Rowley continued to work the late shift. He slept odd hours and never felt rested. Sometimes he fed Yente several cans of catfood and sometimes he didn't get back to feed him for a whole day. Shirley was back home with the kids, and he hoped she would remember the cat with an occasional handout.

The last witness called by the Corporation was a spokesman for UNA. Rowley winced and shifted in his seat. Old Asher.

“On behalf of UNA I would like to state our reservations about the plan,” Asher said and did at length, dwelling especially on the lack of provisions for good relocation for those who would be displaced. Studies using the city's own statistics showed that the relocated ended up in overcrowded, deteriorating neighborhoods and usually paid far more than they had. “However, we feel in the absence of any genuine alternative plan for preventing further decay, we can not do otherwise than to offer our support to the Corporation proposal. I don't know how representative this Defense Committee claims to be—how many of them are here? fifteen?—but I would like to enter in the record that UNA has made repeated attempts to organize this area without finding interest on the part of the residents. Repeated attempts,” Asher said again as Harlan rose protesting.

Asher had documents too, results of surveys and studies and projections carried out by UNA. He had a trim helper bustling about him producing each document as he cited it, fluttering, perky, with a silken efficiency: “Scalpel!” “Scalpel!” There was Asher slitting their throats, droning on in his colorless but crushingly authoritative way while his wee houri danced around him. It made Rowley squirm to recall how Anna had ministered to Asher: Asher had a knack for getting women to wait on him. “Where's my pipe, Anna?” “What did I do with that report?” “Did you get those films developed?” “I wonder if you could stop at the library and check a reference for me.” Nice legs. They were always something special, Asher's women. Asher appeared not to see him.

Mrs. Samson's three kids had had to give back the suits to whoever they'd borrowed them from. They were bored and angry and started horsing around till one of the guards reprimanded them and said they would have to leave if they didn't know how to behave at an official city hearing.

On Thursday Vera came. She sat at the back sketching while her brother lolled beside her. She sketched with a spidery line, steel wire, and would not sit with him or let him sit beside her. Paul looked all legs in the narrow seat. He listened with his forehead frowning and his hands playing with his pen, his hair, his buttons. Their side-by-side heads balanced. He did not see them speak. When Vera looked at Paul her face tightened. She sat watching him, remapping, judging; while Paul stared at the hearings, hurt, obsessed, confused, during noon recess full of questions. There was plenty to react to.

One by one homeowners from the area got up to speak. “He can't call my house decrepit,” piped a gnarled little man who worked for sanitation. “Why, I painted that house top and bottom, inside and out. Every inch two coats of good paint.”

Mrs. Samson with her six kids: “What have we done? What's wrong with us? We bought homes here and fixed them up. I spent my life's saving and my poor man's insurance money on this house. We love this neighborhood with the grass and trees and flowers. It's not overcrowded. Before we found this house we lived in two rooms. We had to look for months. Why can't the University just buy a couple of apartment buildings? Why do we have to keep moving? Mr. Judges, why don't you come home with me and visit my livingroom, and see if we live like animals the way they say. See for yourself.”

Finally Harlan took the stand with questions of his own: When would the University integrate the buildings it owned? When would their real estate combine allow black people to move into the area around the campus? If the Corporation really wanted to promote stability, why hadn't the residents been allowed to participate in planning for their own area? The way he saw it, the whole urban renewal thing was a way to use public money, the taxes that sat so heavy on people like the ones in this room, to make life easier for those who had it easy already. It was a sort of socialism for the rich, to insure their investments and get them land cheap to make profits on. “When will the University and the redevelopers take the same chances I have to, of buying what they want openly?”

The Corporation lawyer had only a few questions. “Mr. Williams, you've stated your objections to our term ‘conversion by use.' You've stated that housing in the demolition area is sound and is being increased in value by its present occupants. Mr. Williams, do you own property in the area under discussion?”

Harlan gave his address and described his house briefly.

“A single-family cottage. Now, Mr. Williams, how many families reside in your house?”

“Just mine. And a friend who rents the downstairs.”

“Mr. Williams, isn't it true that you have rented the cellar as an apartment? Isn't it also true that you rented the unfinished attic as another, to another family with children?”

“That's my wife's brother. It's not unfinished.”

“Have you put in a bathroom?”

“There is a bathroom.”

“For your tenants? Or is the bath shared?”

“It's my brother and sister-in-law and their baby. We have relatives staying with us because it's a lot better for them upstairs then where they were. It wasn't safe there. It's not a permanent arrangement, and in fact I plan for my own kids to take over that floor when they're older.”

“Three families occupying a structure intended to house one none-too-large family is exactly what we mean by conversion by use. Thank you, Mr. Williams.” The lawyer smiled.

When he brought the car around, Paul half shoved Vera into the back, leaping into the front.

He turned his head at the address Paul gave him. “Leon's? So he's the toad.”

“Vera likes people for strange reasons and dislikes them for plain bad ones … Is it true you used to go with Anna?”

Something in the kid's tone made him bristle. “Yeah.”

“Yeah?” Paul turned limpid eyes on him. “Guess it's a stage girls go through.”

“While Leon is a very young man's disease.”

Vera laughed sharply from the backseat.

“Leon is about the most generous person I ever met,” Paul said with hauteur and a slight whine. “It's not just big liberal talk with him. Knowing him is an education in how people can exist with each other in a nonrotten way …”

Was Anna eating this up too? Leon always had a swinging line, that he swung till he tripped. Like saying he got married to save Joye from her home environment, to educate her. He married Joye because he'd been in the sack with her on and off for months and her family was fussing. A nice piece, maybe a little thin upstairs, but nothing to make up an ideology about. Bitter now.

“You disgust me,” Vera lilted. “Foul abstract words filling your mouth. Once you knew what it meant to talk. Don't you spill over me the leavings of some fat fake's lectures.”

“Talk? You mean we made up our own language. Any two kids can play games, Vera. What were we risking?”