Life through the eyes of Edith Renfrow Smith

 

Edith Renfrow Smith receives her honorary doctorate from Grinnell College in 2019.

     A big part of my job is brevity. To take a story, sift it down to its essentials, and tell the tale in 719 words. But that seemed a crime with a life as long and interesting as Edith Renfrow Smith's, even running at more than twice the length, as my first column on her did Monday. So I divided out a second part, and still had to overlook important aspects to her life.

     “There is no message!” objected Edith Renfrow Smith, when I suggested that readers will expect her to share wisdom gleaned over her long life — she turns 107 on Wednesday. “People worked hard! And didn’t let the kids run the street. They always kept their children busy doing something and they were always looking to the future.”
     I’d call that wisdom aplenty.
     On Monday, Sun-Times readers were introduced to Smith, and learned about her extraordinary life: how her grandparents were born into slavery, how she became the first Black graduate of Grinnell College and came to Chicago to work in 1937. Though we never even got to the bulk of her career, from 1954 to 1976, as a Chicago Public Schools teacher.
     That’s how I met her; thanks to a CPS colleague and reader, George Lopatka.
     “I was just out of college when Beethoven school opened,” said Lopatka, 81. “I was a 22-year-old. She was 47, a master teacher.”
     For years, he’d phone her. Recently Lopatka decided to visit, and asked if I wanted to come along. I went, knowing absolutely nothing of the marvelous person who awaited me. Just the opposite: expecting every cliche of old age that I’d be embarrassed to articulate here. Imagine my surprise.

George Lopatka and Edith Renfrow Smith

     

     Lopatka told the story of Muhammad Ali coming to their school.
     “He was telling the kids, ‘Black is beautiful,’” Lopatka remembered. “Before that, you’d never say somebody was ‘Black.’ ... ‘Black’ was an insult. I would break up a fight, and ask the kids, ‘What are you fighting for?’ and one would say, ‘He said my mother was Black.’”
     One moment in a whirl of history Smith has seen. Yet she seems a person who seemingly glided untouched through a century of struggle. She doesn’t present herself as someone who had to overcome anything, but rather as someone blessed.

To continue reading, click here.

Not everyone is dug in all the time

"Progress of the American Negro," by Charles White (Howard University Gallery of Art)

     The days when I happily crossed swords with any reader who could flop his fingers onto a keyboard are long past. That just leads to quick deterioration into insults, and the aggressor running off to complain to my boss—nobody cries like a bully—wasting his time and mine.

     So I rarely answer emails from two groups of people—Trump supporters and haters. Were they open to reason, they wouldn't hold the opinions they have.
     But occasionally an email will have something so patently false that I'll be lured in, such as this one, which postulated the notion that you never see stories about gang violence. That drew a reply, against my better judgment. I also used the email in my column about the strange ritual of tallying shooting deaths in Chicago, "We keep track of shootings like a box score." Which lead to an exchange out of the ordinary, as you will see. The initial email read:

Biden is here to talk about the violence in Chicago. Everyone knows what the problem is. Why is there never a story about the low life, scum bag gang bangers who have absolutely no respect for human life. I'll tell you why. Because people are afraid of the gangs. Your never going to submit an article calling out the gangs for their killing of innocent people. I'll tell you a little secret. I'm a 58 year old white male. So everything i say is wrong. But i do not understand the BLM movement. 60 to a 100 people shot a week. Most of them black. Do these people not matter? I'm extremely happy with the sentence that Chauvin got for killing George Floyd. I have a question for you. Would it be racist to write an article saying that the shootings in the news every week are all from black gang bangers. Put the faces of the leaders of these gangs on the front page. I'm tired of blaming these shootings on Republicans and democrats. The blame lies with the black gang bangers. Their spineless leaders have names.

     I considered remarking on the "Oh poor me!" quality to the "everything i say is wrong" line, but resisted, instead writing back with a link:

That story you say you never see runs all the time. I would speculate about why it always eludes you, but then you would start crying about THAT, and frankly, I've had enough for one day. Thanks for writing.

    I never expected to hear back. So imagine my surprise when I got this:

Thank you for your article today. That was a good explanation of the BLM movement. And i needed to hear that. I wish the BLM would talk more about the violence in Chicago and what they think should be done to help stop the violence. Sometimes i need to be hit over the head to see things. Going forward i will give my little speech i sent you the other day a rest. And try to be more understanding. Not that it matters but i do care about the people being shot every day in Chicago. I cant imagine the pain of going through something like that. I'm like the police chief you mentioned in your article, I lash out because i really don't have an answer. I'll try and stay open, helpful and hopeful. Have a good weekend.

     At the risk of overstating the case, I don't believe I get one email a year showing that sort of re-evaluation. Frankly, I might have never gotten one. But one is enough. Perhaps there's hope for our country. I wrote back:

     That's an encouraging email. Thank you. Seriously—and since sarcasm is the water we swim in lately, I feel the need to say that. People are so dug in. Your email helped me to address a topic that puts me in a bind. To me, it's cowardice to say nothing, but as a white guy living snugly in hyper-safe Northbrook, what can I possibly add that is of any use to anyone? We all need to be open to suasion, to change, to evaluating our beliefs in light of the evidence before us.

‘Nobody’s better than you’

Edith Renfrow Smith

     On those long ago Sundays in Iowa, Edith Renfrow Smith’s mother Eva Pearl made Jell-O with black walnuts in it. Her older sister Helen would play the piano at their house on 1st Avenue, and the young men from Grinnell College would gather around. This was in the 1920s.
     “They would come, sing songs — not all of them, the ones that liked to sing,” said Smith, 106. “There were 10 of them.”
     Those details — the walnuts, that some guests sang, some didn’t, and exactly how many came nearly 100 years ago — are typical of the sharp, specific memories of Smith, who turns 107 on July 14.
     She recalls how these visitors were not just any Grinnell undergraduates, but the 10 Black students given scholarships by Julius Rosenwald, the Chicago Sears executive who donated millions of dollars to promote Black education.
     They frequented the Renfrow house on Sundays because it was one of the few Black homes in town, and their example inspired Smith to later attend Grinnell herself — Class of ’37, the first African American woman to graduate there. 

     That might sound impressive. But if one quality stands out when visiting Smith at her tidy apartment at the Bethany Retirement Community on North Ashland Avenue, it is that she is never overly impressed with herself or anybody else.
     “When my nephew heard that I had met Amelia Earhart, he had a fit,” she recalled. “I said, ‘She’s just like everybody else.’ She came to Grinnell. Everybody who was famous came to Grinnell.”
     Shaking Renfrow’s hand, it is impossible not to reflect that you are shaking hands with a woman whose grandparents were born in slavery. She remembers them, too.
     “My grandfather came from Virginia. His father was a white owner. My grandmother was born in South Carolina. Her father was a Frenchman, and her mother was a slave, but she wasn’t all slave. They wouldn’t put a dark slave in the house. Both of them were part white, so consequently, you know they already mixed with whites. It made no difference. You could look white; you were slaves.”
     Edith Renfrow was born in 1914 in Grinnell, where her father Lee was a chef at the Monroe Hotel. Her earliest memories involve the end of World War I.

To continue reading, click here.

Flashback 2007: "Feast of fools"

     The Bristol Renaissance Faire opened Saturday, and I had to resist the urge to rush away and enjoy a journey back in time. I had fun when I first went, 14 years ago, and more fun every time I've gone back. I realized I've never posted the report on that initial experience, and thought I'd celebrate the Wisconsin treasure's return by doing so today. If you've never been, you don't now what you're missing.

     Before this past Sunday, I had never gone to the Bristol Renaissance Faire, though the good people there always invite me, and my wife visited when she was a mere slip of a girl and harbors happy memories of turkey legs and merry times.
     But Wisconsin seemed a long way to go for a turkey leg and a guy strumming a lute, so we never went.
     Until Sunday, when recognition of the dying summer snapped me out of my torpor. Bristol is exactly 30 miles from Northbrook—the first pleasant epiphany—45 minutes from driveway to parking lot.
     The Renaissance Faire is magical—and I use that word reluctantly, knowing regular readers will fret that my cynical blade has rusted.
     I know I should have scorned the place. But what the fair offers—a sprawling, daylong performance piece built around the romance of Elizabethan England—struck me as immensely charming, without question more pleasant than any theme park I've ever visited. Better than Disneyland. Better than Great America. Better than Dollywood.
     There were ladies dancing around a maypole, knights on horseback jousting, musketeers and pirates, wenches, rogues and a lovely forest sprite lost in reverie.
     We ate turkey legs and quaffed sarsaparilla (at $1 a glass, practically free on the theme park scale).

     If theme parks, with their pasteboard main streets, reek of a bland, safe, homogenized, whitebread America, the Renaissance Faire is at the other end of the social spectrum, a whiff of the occult, a flash of danger and a hint of the erotic. Here, they let you throw axes. Here are more beer and bosoms than you'll find in all of Disney World.
     The fair draws 15,000 customers on a good day, maybe 1,000 of them in costume themselves, some barely clothed, some draped in yards of velvet, even furs, which on a hot summer's day shows a true devotion to one's predilection. They, too, are in character, and it can be tough to tell who is working and who is merely lost in private phantasm.
     "This is like the soundstage of an action/adventure/comedy taking place in Elizabethan England," said artistic director Ron Scot Fry. "An almost cinematic world where you can walk right through it and be whoever you want to be and everybody in that world will treat you that way."
     I have to mention the artisans with shops there. This isn't your standard carnival crap—goods have to be approved to get in, which means there are no plastic swords or Mary Queen of Scots Barbies. Browsing is half the fun—custom-made boots and hand-stitched capes. I never felt the slightest urge to own a sword before, but hefting a finely balanced, well-crafted blade, I thought it a shame I neither had a use for it nor the $545 price.

     You might not like the fair—a colleague who also went dismissed it as "strange." It costs $19 to get in, half that for kids, and expect to pay twice that on rides, games and grub.
      But if you like strange—to me, strange is good—if you are intrigued by hundreds of people acting out some kind of mass summertime fever dream, then this is the place for you. An engaging blend of low and high—to turn sociological—"The Idiots of Drumming" and a bookstore brimming with Shakespeare, people eating mud over here and playing the harpsichord over there.
     The most astounding fact, I saved for last: When the park closed at 7 p.m., I was sorry to go.

'Hail to purple, hail to white . . . '
     Eating mud takes only a moment, and it is a tribute to the showman's art that the three performers who present the Renaissance Faire's Mud Show manage to build 35 minutes of entertainment around it, dividing the audience into competing Trojans and Spartans, challenging each other to various mud-centric stunts, delivering an endless patter of ribald jokes, heading out into the audience, faces caked with ooze, to kiss surprisingly compliant men and women.
     The ringleader, his voice hoarse from overuse, cut a compact, bearded figure that seemed vaguely familiar. I knew a guy, once, who did this kind of thing. But that was years ago. Could he still. . . . I leaned forward and watched closely.
     After the show, I went up to him. 
   "You're Rush Pearson, aren't you?" 

Rush Pearson

     He smiled at being remembered. When I went to Northwestern, 25 years ago, Rush was the leader of the Practical Theater Company, a troupe of very funny actors that included future stars such as Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Gary Kroeger.
     In a tale that I've often told to illustrate the capriciousness of fate, the summer I graduated, the producer of Saturday Night Live swept into town and plucked away four Practical Theater members. But not Rush—he was off at another Renaissance Faire, eating mud. The four went on to big careers—particularly Louis-Dreyfus, who played Elaine on "Seinfeld"—while Rush remained a maestro of mud.
     The good news is he has no regrets, views his missed chance philosophically, and seems to have a very, very good time putting on his show at the Renaissance Faire, which runs weekends through Labor Day.
           —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Aug. 15, 2007

Notes from Limbo: Serenity Now

     Honesty is easy when the sun is shining.  When you're abstractly picking apart the challenges facing others in between sips of tea. A different matter when the storm grabs you yourself and won't let go. I'll be honest too: when I read Caren Jeskey's essay for today, I phoned her and asked: Do you really want to say this? Because I was worried, as a friend. But she's a hard ass, and she does indeed knows what she's writing, and wants it read by others, because it expresses where she's at and might, we both hope, help others in the same storm-tossed boat. It probably will. Her Saturday report:

    Family can be intense. Interactions might range from a bit stressful to (spoiler alert for the Stuart Smalley 1995 movie) a family member accidentally shooting another in the Al Franken movie "Stuart Saves His Family."
     Now that I am back home after seven years away, I have managed to regress to the maturity level of a 12 year old more than once. I am not proud of this, and it saddens me. I thought I’d be able to show up, enjoy them, and part after magical, long overdue visits after a bellyful of laughs. Thankfully, we’ve had many laughs, but the little girl in me has acting up. She wants to be seen with unconditional positive regard! Heard! Understood! In other words she wants the impossible.
     Oftentimes, family members inherently lack the ability to see each other clearly instead of seeing them as abstractions we’ve created in our minds about who each other is. We don’t give each other room to evolve. The moments where we step out of painting each other into boxes, and enjoy cultural events and passionate discussions about things we agree about are the salve, but not the norm. As my therapist says, we tend to project all over each other. We take things personally that have nothing to do with us and argue from the back seat of the car like George Costanza.
     One of my missions in life is to see my parents and siblings as people outside of the role that includes me. To see their wit, intelligence, and talent and to move away from the triggers that perpetuate endless, tiring loops. It’s called individuation. (https://www.thesap.org.uk/resources/articles-on-jungian-psychology-2/about-analysis-and-therapy/individuation/). It’s much easier when life is good, when I am happy and peaceful.
     These days I have a handful of peaceful hours each day—with clients, when walking, at the beach immersed in the impossible blue and the sound of waves of Chicago’s ocean, Lake Michigan. Fear and frustration melt away standing before frothy peaks and pink sunsets. My goal is to bring that inner peace into all of my interactions. I’ve succeeded at times, but with multiple challenges that seem comedic at this point, my resistance is down.
     I’ve bloodied my knee and scratched my glasses in a fall. I have yet to sleep since I am living under the Final Approach Fix of the O’Hare flight path. A decent, reasonably priced rental in the expensive city is a needle in a haystack. The suitcase full of my best clothes and perhaps a family heirloom (not sure yet) was stolen from my car. I smashed my finger and might lose the nail. I think my fall clothes are in the storage unit and it’s getting chilly. My broken toe is still healing. This on top of a tragic year where I felt terrified and alone at times, and was isolated from my loved ones. Now that I am back in Chicago where I wanted to be I am too stressed out to enjoy this gorgeous summer.
     Today I listened to Glennon Doyle’s podcast We Can Do Hard Things. (https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/we-can-do-hard-things-with-glennon-doyle/id1564530722). Her sister was her guest, and the topic was “ANXIETY: Is it just love holding its breath?” I was struck at the grace Doyle’s sister gives to her. Doyle experiences debilitating, clinical anxiety that she is doing an impressive job of taking care of. Her sister holds her when she’s falling apart, and speaks lovingly and tenderly about Doyle. She doesn’t judge her sister when she melts down due to being neuro-atypical. The podcast brought tears to my eyes, and made me long for a world where we treated our vulnerable family members and friends with support rather than judgment. Where we treated everyone that way.
     It makes sense to shun a difficult family member or friend. They can be a lot of work. I think the biggest problem is that we don’t know how to deal with them, and so we become frustrated and angry. We want them to be different. But they can’t be. Doyle so beautifully describes her clinical anxiety as a deficit that will never be cured, and instead something that she’ll have to learn to cope with one step at a time. She describes her anxiety as preventing her from looking at her life one day at a time, since days can seem endless. Instead she uses techniques to eke out one hour at a time some days, doing her best to survive her inner turmoil.
     Her children can also see when she’s falling apart, and have learned to empathize in those moments. Is that ideal? No. Ideally a parent is balanced and giving and the roles are not reversed. How many of us in this world have an ideal life?
     You will not find it surprising that I have dealt—with varying degrees of success—with debilitating anxiety and depression in my life, since I was a child. I wish this was not so, but wishing it away will not make it disappear. I am not as courageous as Neil or Glennon. I am scared to share the real story. That’s OK though. I am fine keeping it under wraps for now, though I hope one day I can stand tall and proud even with my dark corners exposed. For now I’ll rely on them to speak their truth so I feel less alone.
Podcasts like Glennon’s and The Hilarious World of Depression (https://www.hilariousworld.org/episodes) keep me company. Mike Birbiglia, Darryl “DMC” McDaniels, Chris Gethard (the host of the podcast Beautiful Stories by Anonymous People), Neko Case (one of my favorite musicians who I get to see in Evanston in September), Jeff Tweedy, Aimee Mann, Margaret Cho, Peter Sagal, Billy Joel, Dick Cavett and others share their survival stories there. Some of the most talented folks who show us their best in their public faces have to overcome one demon at a time in their personal lives.
     I am fortunate to have a great therapist, I keep myself pretty fit, eat well, do not have an active substance use problem (I take a medication to stave off cravings), I have a lot of love and support in my life (even though sometimes my mind tells me I don’t), and I have a lot to live for. Still, some days feel like everything is broken and nothing will be ok again.
     As I sit here on a patio on Wilson and Ravenswood eating curry fries and basking in the dusk of the day, life feels just right. For now I will take the good moments when I can and cope as well as possible. I’ll hold on to what my friends keep telling me, and my inner self knows: a brighter day is coming. I hope you are living in the light of a good day, and if not I hope you can find the help that you need.

We keep track of shootings like a box score

Vatican Museum

     Numbers deceive.
     Some are so big we can’t grasp them. Chicago is on the hook for $32.9 billion to its four biggest municipal pension funds. Does that number mean anything to you? Me either.
     Some purport to represent something concrete when in fact they only vaguely symbolize something unknowable. When we report that 104 people were shot in Chicago over the July 4 weekend and that 19 died, those numbers are offered as clear, understandable figures.
     Are they?
     We write the figures, pretend to grasp their significance. But do we? Do we even try to stretch our minds to consider the pain? The hospital hours, funeral home visits, cemetery services, the endless days of grief, the entire supernova of tragedy expanding from those digits? I don’t believe we do, which might be just as well, because we probably can’t.
     Alice Yin wrote a heartbreaking story in the Tribune Thursday about the family of Natalia Wallace, a 7-year-old girl shot and killed on July 4, 2020. While I’m not in the habit of plugging stories in the Trib, those considerations are insignificant compared with the matter at hand. Yin takes readers on a journey alongside the girl’s crushed family, her grief-stricken father (“When they killed her, they killed me too,” he told the Chicago Sun-Times’ Manny Ramos in a story for us last August), her traumatized siblings, hiding in the house, flinching at loud noises, struggling through therapy.
     Yet read those stories, and what have you accomplished? Spent 10 minutes sensing a flicker of the pain of one family after one death. Then you move on, the privilege of the untouched. It’s like scooping up a handful of salt water at the beach, and gazing as it runs through your fingers. Meanwhile, unseen, the ocean.

     Those who can’t shrug it off, because they’re supposed to be leaders, are unable to admit their own powerlessness. So they seek somebody to blame, and we’re left with sorry spectacles like CPD superintendent David Brown simultaneously blaming Chicago’s shootings on national trends and Kim Foxx letting violent criminals go. Which is it? Or is he suggesting that Foxx somehow sends ripples of violence across the nation?

     Brown is among many twisting the stats to their own purposes. My readers regularly paint Chicago crime as some kind of refutation to Black Lives Matter.

     “Biden is here to talk about the violence in Chicago,” one wrote Wednesday. “Everyone knows what the problem is. Why is there never a story about the low life, scum bag gang bangers who have absolutely no respect for human life. I’ll tell you why. Because people are afraid of the gangs. ... Your never going to submit an article calling out the gangs for their killing of innocent people. I’ll tell you a little secret. I’m a 58 year old white male. So everything i say is wrong. But i do not understand the BLM movement. 60 to a 100 people shot a week. Most of them black. Do these people not matter?”

     Call me a cynic, but I suspect this email isn’t from a person whose heart is breaking for the victims. He wants to use the killings to discredit the movement against police misconduct.

To continue reading, click here.

In praise of inattentive bartenders

     When you are drinking, it is a different matter. Then you want your bartender right away, Johnny-on-the-spot, greeting you brightly as you walk in, hands poised, ready to spring into action at your direction, pulling taps, scooping ice, upending bottles, mixing, serving.
     But I don't drink. Though a drink, in the form of a non-alcoholic beer or soda or coffee, was the price I was willing to pay to use their restroom. A lot of coffee, driving down to Logan Square. And just walking in, using their bathroom and leaving, well, that's against my moral code.
     After parking and talking to the union workers picketing the Dill Pickle Co-op—whose ownership never did get back to me with their side of things—I had an hour of parking left (I almost said "on the meter." Though there is no meter. Only an app, ParkChicago, and a good one). So I thought I would wander down Milwaukee Avenue a bit. Toward the Logan, where I took my younger son to his first movie.
     First things first. I slid into The Old Plank, a welcoming place, walls open to the perfect summer day outside. I took a seat at the bar, looked around, expectant. One patron, a woman at end, studying her phone. There was a bartender, six feet to my left, but he never looked at me. I checked my own cell phone, waiting, patient. He didn't come over. Maybe this is the invisibility of age. Everybody in the place was 30 years younger than me. A waitress came hurrying behind the bar. I sat up a little straighter. For a second, I thought she had noticed the bartender was asleep at the switch and was rushing into the breach to take my order. She wasn't. She just grabbed something from behind the bar and left again. I gave the bartender a last look, slid off the stool, and shambled back to find the rest room. It was where it was supposed to be. On my return, I snapped a photo of a mural claiming we were "In the Heart of Logan Square." I'd say the heart of Logan Square is the eagle-topped column up the street (honoring the centennial of Illinois in 1918, created by Henry Bacon, the designer of the Lincoln Memorial). But it's their wall, they can make whatever claim they like.
       Returning, I considered hopping back on a stool, ordering something, or trying to. I don't have many rigid moral rules, but I don't like to barge into a place, use the bathroom, and leave. That's something bums do. These are businesses. But the bartender still was gazing off in the middle distance as I passed, so I mentally shrugged, decided not to force my five dollars upon them, and just kept going, out the door and onto the street, where the day was unfolding beautifully.