I woke with a start. Footsteps on the stairs.
Why is my brother coming to visit us in the middle of the
night, I wondered. Then I was really awake.
My brother did not have a key to our new home.
Just four days prior my husband and I had moved into an old sprawling
Victorian house in the Austin neighborhood of Chicago. The year was 1975 and
for Austin, it was at the middle of a period of white flight, where white
homeowners sold their homes and rushed to the suburbs after blacks began buying
homes in the neighborhood. We were doing
the reverse, buying into the neighborhood, while other whites were rushing out.
The footsteps continued.
And then there were flashlights prying into our bedroom.
“Where’s your gun, man?” came a voice.
I couldn’t really see who was behind the flashlights, but I
determined there were two uninvited visitors. And they were black.
We started talking then. My now awake husband and I tried to
explain that we were opposed to guns and violence. That we valued human life
more than property.
The response? That we were lucky that they weren’t the bad
sort. Small comfort, however. There we
were, in bed, barely clothed. And there they were with flashlights and with—yes,
I could make it out in the dim light—there they were with knives. I recognized the knives. Our chef knives.
I knew they were very sharp. My husband sharpened them
himself. Regularly. Very appreciated in
the kitchen, but no comfort right now. With
the rush of clarity that adrenaline brings, I understood that these young men,
probably teenagers, had broken into the house, thinking it was empty. They were
as surprised as we were at this encounter. And I understood why. The people who
left had loaded up a large moving truck and taken off. We lived right next door in a second floor
apartment and had rigged up a ladder as a bridge between the two houses and many
of our possessions had been ferried from one house to the other over this
makeshift bridge. Our intruders had thought the house was empty.
“Where’s your money, your jewelry?” came the question.
I almost laughed. Jewelry?
It was 1975. I was still in my hippie phase. No jewelry other than some macramé
something or other, and a simple wedding band.
And money? We had no money. It was an unlikely story to tell
these robbers, but we told it. Just that day we had given the last of our cash
to Mrs. T_________, a lady with 11 children who lived on the next street over.
She was always struggling to feed the tribe. And we tried to help with our
little. I chose not to tell that story.
One of our intruders started to rummage through the house,
while the other continued to talk with us.
We really had nothing of value. No television. And the only
electronics we had were a stereo system, a clock radio, and my one prized
possession—an IBM Selectric typewriter. But what I was worried about was whether
they would slash the phone wires before they fled. I knew that the phone company, who had just
installed our phone lines, would then have to return and put in new wires—and charge
us again.
With that on my mind, I begged the young robber not to cut
the wires. I asked him to just unplug the phone we had in the upstairs hallway
and take it downstairs. And since he
wasn’t a bad sort, he did just that when he left.
The whole encounter took only a few minutes. He left and joined his accomplice downstairs.
Some more scuffling about, and then it was quiet. They were gone.
We huddled together in the bed shivering now, as our cat
stalked around, hissing. It seemed like
we stayed in bed for hours until we were brave enough to find robes and trudge
downstairs. (It was probably only a half hour.)
We inspected. Yes, they had taken the stereo system. And the radio. And . . . yes, they had gotten
my typewriter. I was crushed. Somehow I
had hoped that would skim over that. It
wasn’t a new one and it was heavy. But they’d found it and taken it. My typewriter. I was a young writer. It was everything to
me.
I ran to locate the telephone. Ah yes, there it was. I just
needed to plug it back in and then I could make a call.
“Wait a minute,” cautioned my husband. “Do you think we
should?”
I collapsed into a chair. There was no easy answer. This was
no easy question. Should we call the police? What would it mean, calling the
police? If, perchance, these two young men were apprehended by the police,
staffed mostly by white men, how would they be treated? If they were shoved into a holding cell in
the jail, what would happen? If they had
no one to pay for bail, how would they fare at Cook County Jail while they
waited for trial? And what would be the outcome, if their future was left up to
an overwhelmed court-appointed public defender? How would things turn out for
them?
It was 1975, and we didn’t talk about systemic racism then,
we called it institutional racism. Even
though we had been robbed, would involving the police department contribute to
these young men experiencing that racism that was ingrained in institutions?
There were a few more cups of tea we discussed this. No, we did
not want to see these young men treated poorly by the system. No, we didn’t want
to be part of that.
But I stared at my empty desk. How would I replace that electric typewriter? It was essential to my work. I was a freelance writer and my husband a
freelance illustrator and graphic designer.
We had just put everything we had into buying this house, we were
expecting a baby in four months, and I had no typewriter. Well, we would have to alert the company that
provided our homeowner’s insurance. That’s how I could replace my typewriter.
Only one problem. We’d need evidence of the break-in, and
the robbery. Well, we’d found the broken
window in the basement. But we needed
one more thing—a police report.
Now you see that I tricked you with my title. I did call the police pre-dawn that morning
in February 1975. I did call the police.
After I felt totally certain there was no way they would be able to apprehend
our intruders. Yes, I called the police.
And we were visited by two bulky avuncular white detectives.
Why, they wanted to know, did it take us more than two hours before we had
dialed the police department?
I don’t remember now, what excuse we gave for the time
lapse. I am pretty sure we didn’t venture into a diatribe about institutional
racism and the Chicago Police Department.
I think we knew enough not to do that.
They finished their report. Gave us a copy. And they strongly
recommended that we move. To a better neighborhood. We understood that meant a white neighborhood.
Some more cups of tea. Or maybe we graduated to coffee. And
breakfast. And then we made the call. The important call. The call to our
insurance company.
What had been taken, they wanted to know. We gave them the list with the details about
the brands, the models, if we knew them.
And receipts—they wanted receipts.
Well, we didn’t actually have receipts.
The stereo system—that my husband had traded for one of his
paintings. The typewriter. Same thing. A
barter system.
The insurance company was not impressed. If money hadn’t exchanged hands, then it had
no value, they determined.
I was crushed. I was
grieving the loss of the typewriter. I
was even more crushed when five days later, we got a notice in the mail that
our home owner’s insurance had been canceled.
Now I started to really wake up. This was redlining. Oh, we would be able to get insurance, all
right. Because we were thrown into a high-risk pool and ended up having to pay
three times as much for insurance.
Because we had filed a claim.
I did make a phone call that morning. Two phone calls. And
while trying to avoid pushing someone into a racist judicial system, I
encounter the racism that was marbled into the insurance system. How many other people in my neighborhood were
struggling to pay over-inflated insurance premiums? Just because they were black. Just because hey lived in a neighborhood that was predominately black.
That was the time I started to understand institutional
racism. And that is the time I made a
phone call I wished I hadn’t.
posted by Etta Worthington
