Our Black Year (21 page)

Then the Link machine broke—again.

When the Link machine breaks at a particular establishment, those cardholders go elsewhere. And if you're running a business teetering on the brink of insolvency, say, like a certain brave African American grocer on the South Side of Chicago, an untimely Link machine breakdown can shove you over the cliff.

On the morning of June 29, the day after my birthday, I speed-dialed Karriem's cell as I drove to the store to make sure he would be in when I got there. I had a bunch of shopping to do. The Fourth of July was around the corner, and Cara's birthday is four days after that. Then there was my best friend's bachelorette party that I was hosting later that week.

“You're coming now?” he said. He sounded exasperated, almost angry, as if I'd said something wrong. “To
day
?”

“Yep.”

“I thought you'd be tired,” he said. “Didn't you guys hang out late yesterday?”

“Yeah, but I'm fine. What's wrong, KB?”

He didn't answer for a few seconds. “Mag,” he finally said—I could barely hear him—“please don't come to the store.”

“What happened?” I said. “You get robbed?”

“No, nothing like that.”

“Vandalized? Someone try to torch the place?”

“No, no, sweetie,” he said. His voice sounded so defeated. “Everyone's okay. I just don't have everything. I couldn't make my orders and I told everyone to stay home. I don't want you to see the store like this.” He explained that he did not have the funds to pay for his meat and frozen
food orders. His suppliers would not let him pay on credit, so they would not deliver, and Karriem could not replenish his stock.

I hung up. Saying it was too painful for him, but I knew what had happened: He'd closed. It was over. How in the hell could we have let that happen? I pulled over. It was too much. I shut my eyes and shook my head. Then I pressed down on the accelerator and headed for the store. I had to see what was going on.

As I drove those fourteen miles through some of the most desirable and most forlorn neighborhoods in America, I kept replaying the events of the past few weeks. The brisk traffic at the store that we'd worked so hard to create had dissolved. Many folks who came for the promotions would buy only the items advertised or just redeem the $5-off coupons. Some showed up for the barbecues but never stepped foot inside the store. Or they came once and never returned.

When I arrived the parking lot was empty. I found Karriem sitting in his Excursion and I hopped in.

“Mag, I can't keep throwing money into a black hole,” he said. He looked drained, resigned. “I have to close down. I'm ordering some of those ‘Going Out Of Business Sale' signs, and I hope they'll clean me out. At least I won't have to throw away my inventory.”

I didn't know what to say. I looked at him and just started weeping. Karriem hugged me. After a few moments I calmed down.

“Where are you going to shop now?” he asked. “I can't believe I did this to you.”

I turned to him, wiped the tears away with the back of my hand. I was amazed at what I was hearing.

“
You?
Did something to
me
? KB, you are the project. I'm the failure, not you. Remember all that crap I told you about all those folks I'm going to bring in here? That you weren't going to be able to handle all the customers? Remember all that? Dammit, Karriem! Don't you see that we failed you and not the other way around?”

“Yeah, I remember,” he said, laughing ruefully. “You said we were going to have a ribbon-cutting ceremony for my second location as the EE Victory Party. That there was gonna be a flood. Black customers from
Oak Park, Bolingbrook, South Shore, Harvey flooding into the store. Big flood! Yeah, I remember.”

He laughed louder, holding his stomach. He wasn't being mean or insensitive. This was his way of maintaining sanity.

“And I believed it too. I was all in that Kool-Aid!”

I looked at that beautiful, empty store and was disgusted with myself. Then I started blubbering, and this time, a full-fledged weeping-Maggie avalanche erupted. John and I told Karriem we would change the world—one entrepreneur, one business, and one community at a time—starting with him, his store, and this community. The premise was simple and straightforward: Black entrepreneurs hire Black people and the dismal Black unemployment rate starts to drop. The neighborhood improves. People see what's happening in that store and other establishments take root and grow. Momentum builds from the sidewalk up. That was EE's promise—our promise to Karriem. I made him believe everything we'd told him. I poisoned him, his store, and his dream with our hopes and naiveté. I misled and let down this honorable man.

I ended up shopping that day anyway in a nearly dark store. I felt like I was grocery shopping after a nuclear apocalypse, as if I was rummaging through the lone food store on earth.

Karriem did order the signs, and he let everyone go except two employees he needed to help break down shelves, coolers, and other equipment to liquidate assets as part of the bankruptcy. In those few weeks after he closed I stocked up on whatever I could store in my house and whatever I could give to John's brother and sister-in-law. Karriem would bring cartons of dry goods like chips, pasta, condiments, peanut butter, soda, and beans. It got to the point where he was stopping by almost every day on the way to his home, just to bring over some of the inventory he could not liquidate.

And the produce! We gave away cases of mangoes, oranges, and pineapples to family and friends. We spent an entire weekend peeling, cutting, bagging, freezing, and juicing. We had fruit smoothies for weeks. We tried to make the most of a depressing situation.

What was most agonizing about Karriem's closing was the realization that no one but Black folks was to blame—Not
'da man
, not
'da gub-ment
. Us—the customer base that should have flocked to his place was apathetic, cynical, and otherwise missing in action. How much effort we as a people invest in denying the possibility of a successful Black-owned grocer was amazing.

My encounter with a lady in the store's parking lot was typical. One summer afternoon prior to the store's closing a pretty woman wearing a sundress and floppy hat approached me. She was holding a bag from the dollar store next to Farmers Best.

“Do you shop here a lot?” she asked. I was ready to give her the whole Farmers Best–EE story. I was already digging for my card.

“Yes! And I love it . . . ”

“You know that place ain't Black-owned,” she said. “No way is that big store Black. I ain't stupid. Did you hear that on the radio? That it's Black?”

I couldn't believe it. Although I wanted to scream at her, I took a breath and launched into the details about Farmers Best and EE—our pledge, the businesses, Northwestern's study. She listened to all of it and then, in a staggering display of ignorance, said, “I'm not giving them crackuhs a dime of my money.”

It was maddening.

“Alright,” I said, feeling exasperated. “I don't want to argue with you about this. I'll pray for ya.”

Sometimes I wonder whether something in our DNA prevents us from working together, whether the cultural liabilities we've experienced and, yes, cultivated over the decades have become the essence of who we are.

One of my favorite examples is the bullshit hoax of glorifying the ghetto. We love to do that—to boast about “keeping it real.” It makes me roll my eyes and want to stick a finger down my throat. The truth—and we all know it—is that ignorant perspectives like the hollow “keeping it real” refrain guarantee that our neighborhoods will stay chaotic, impoverished, dilapidated, violent, and hopeless. But those neighborhoods are ours, baby. They're all ours, glory hallelujah, and as long they're ours, we've got something.
Da hood is ugly, broke down, and scary, but it's all mine!
Now isn't that something to crow about? If it weren't so painful
and embarrassing, it'd be funny. Well, here's something else to consider: We never talk about
why
it's ours. Pretty simple, really: The ghetto is ours because no one else wants it. Who would?

Then there's the ridiculous line of thought used to justify our complacency—a forced, slightly twisted logic that links our inertia with our spirituality. You know the phrases: “Blessed be the meek” and “The more we suffer here, the greater our reward in heaven.”

In her book
Talking Dollars and Making Sense: A Wealth Building Guide for African-Americans,
Wall Street veteran Brooke Stephens comments, “From the days of slavery, African-Americans have bought into this bizarre fallacy that there was something noble about poverty and suffering, and that the only comfort we should expect will be in an afterlife.” In other words, be proud to be poor. We are not supposed to prosper: Our honor is in our exploitation and suffering.

Really? So why didn't Rosa just stay in the back of the bus and suffer proudly? Why didn't our mothers and fathers in Selma quit at the Edmund Pettus Bridge? You know why? Because they understood that the time to act had come. They knew they had been denied basic human rights for too long and that the only course to take was to dig in their heels and say,
Enough
.
No more will we take this humiliation and denial. We must stand—whether it's claiming a place on the bus or marching to guarantee safe entry into the voting booth—and seize our God-given rights.

Since then things have gotten a little complicated. We've allowed ourselves to compromise. We've been seduced—maybe sedated is a better word—and we've lost focus. The humiliation endures, but it's more nuanced, more insidious, and the big difference is we've perpetrated it. We've betrayed ourselves and then directed our bitterness at everyone else. Time to take ownership, folks. Time to take action—again.

I also hear this crap about “them”—White America—stepping on us because they want to be us. We get all righteous about how they exploit us and condemn us but never will be able to be us.
Let them have all the prosperity and power,
this ludicrous riff goes.
They can't take our soul. We've got our soul power!
Translation: You're lazy and don't care anymore. You don't believe we can make things better, and you've found a way to contort
that into some kind of warped pride—the triumph of failure. How whacked out is that?

“To go on blaming society, the white man, recent immigrants, Congress, the ‘establishment' for one's lack of prosperity is good for venting one's frustration,” Stephens writes, “but what are you going to do about the situation once you get past the talking stage?” This line of thought is just “another category of Black paranoia and a set of excuses not to make any effort to change and stop being a willing victim,” she continues. “Our ancestors bought and paid for our success—it is time to claim it as being long past due.”

Fear—not all that different from the fear in the White community and fear among Prominent Black Folks—is a powerful, hope-killing force in the African American psyche. “The bottom line is that most Black folks are scared to talk about money,” Stephens notes. “Scared to admit they've made dumb choices with it. Scared to take risks as entrepreneurs. Scared to trust and respect each other as professionals in business deals.... Scared to challenge outdated beliefs about prosperity and economic well-being. Scared to stop blaming racism for all the financial problems that exist in the Black community.”

Amen, sister.

Stephens' words made me think about all the Prominent Black Folks who took a pass on supporting EE. Were they afraid of taking a bold step that somehow might offend Whites? Were they cynics who believed that most Blacks were incapable of running successful businesses? Regardless, their sense that their position is precarious seems to motivate their behavior. Dr. Walker told me, “I have found that the most wealthy and most prominent blacks achieved their wealth and power by placing themselves in the mainstream of American life and, for the most part will stay away from anything that can be considered racially divisive.” They flourish as long as they succeed in treading lightly—acknowledging they're Black but not so Black that they jeopardize business relationships with well-heeled Whites.

By way of example, Walker pointed to the rushed firing in 2010 of US Department of Agriculture employee Shirley Sherrod, an African
American woman whose out-of-context remarks at a speech twenty years ago depicted her as unfairly dealing with a White farmer. The Obama administration couldn't get rid of her fast enough, but then they were embarrassed when the media revealed that, in fact, Sherrod had treated the man with dignity, had actually helped save the man's farm, and had become friends with him.

According to Clarence Jones, no empirical data exist to show that the Black power-elite is lagging in its support of impoverished Blacks, but he thought that this lack of support might exist, and it might be generational.

“My gut feeling, strangely enough,” he said, “is that . . . except for Bill Cosby and Oprah—I don't think [it is] on [the older Black elite's] radar. I really think that the predominant mindset is that ‘I did it so anybody can do it.' And . . . there may be a sense of not wanting to put what they have at risk.”

However, according to Jones, the new generation of African American sports personalities “really have a sense that, ‘I want to give something back.' They feel much more of a connection and they're more proud from whence they came. In many ways, they're much more secure in what they've acquired than some of the older ones.”

With all due respect to Clarence Jones, given our experience I believe that part of the reason Black people can never earn their rightful place in society is because we do not support each other. This failure does not have to do with our history in this country, racism, or discrimination. This failure is about whom we have chosen to be.