GRIT GLORY

A response to One Foot In — a complex tapestry of Chicago's South Side through Michael Broadway’s eyes.

By Erika Ray

Chicago is one of the greatest cities in the nation, and the South Side of our great city is filled with institutions like the DuSable Museum, cultural celebrations like the African Fest, and community centers like the Women's Justice & Institute. These institutions promote engagement with history and culture, while calling us to join in love with each other. This is the Chicago way.

However, as I read Michael Broadway's depiction of the experience of two Black teenage boys navigating the grit of the city, I am reminded that local residents have renamed some of the areas and neighborhoods to describe the violence within them: Terror Town, Moe-Town, Low End, and the Wild Hundreds (Roseland), where Broadway serves us a tale that unfolds all too often within big cities like Chicago.

Readers who suggest that communities are created solely on family values, gang culture, or cultural traditions would miss a key component in Broadway's book, which provides insight into the functioning of communities devoid of economic stability.

What allows this book—the description of the environment created by the characters Frank and Dupree—to be amazing is that these teenagers show us how often we forget about a young person’s inability to use reasoning and logic, how the police brutalize Black teens with the narratives law enforcement creates for them, and how the desire to have financial freedom in a capitalist market intersects with these realities.

Broadway highlights how the centering of drug use and selling, liquor stores, and community violence often exploit urban areas. Although this story is in part fictional, the realities lived by teenage boys who turn to gang culture are too often hyper-emphasized by media outlets, resulting in these communities being treated as ignoble by elected officials and law enforcement agents such as those Broadway describes.

Broadway’s writing reflects his experience of growing up on the South Side (Roseland Avenue). He intimately describes what real life is like for some youth in Chicago. Capitalism, consumerism, and the need for economic stability impact each character, whether it’s the validation and high expectations represented by a pair of Jordans given to Frank by his parents; the confidential informant Jay Dub’s ability to gain Frank’s trust through helping him make money by selling drugs; or the first robbery perpetrated by Dupree and Frank. The viscidity of capitalism adheres to each character, allowing them to have only one established identity if they engage in the construction of consumerism. Capitalism in Broadway’s story is distinctive due to the power and symbolism that transfers from an item (e.g. gym shoes, leather coats, or cars) into the visibility of one’s personhood.

These characters and their representation of hood entrepreneurship—through narcotics distribution and exploitation of addiction—while controversial, gives us a radical and transformative glimpse into the textured love affair between consumerism and fear of poverty. A desire to have a piece of the free market influences each character's actions. No matter the intention of the characters, the reality they live within, or the unconventional standards they have set for themselves, Broadway reveals through detailed iterations how they might disappear from the story if they lived in a world without financial insecurity. His brilliance allowed me to continually readjust my gaze into some of the dirty business of capitalism and consumerism.

The magnificence of this story pierced my heart because it is old and new. These two Black sons, Frank and Dupree, mirror stories like those of Larry Hoover and Jeff Ford or John Singleton's depiction of Franklin Saint and his uncle Jerome from the hit series “Snowfall.” I can see in Broadway’s writing each character’s inability to hold on to themselves, a creative vision that mirrors the likes of Ralph Ellison in Invisible Man and Richard Wright in Native Son. While these stories do not start or end with capitalism, we can see how economic instability severs each character from who, where and what they dream of being.

One Foot In, while loosely based on Broadway’s real life, is complete because it captures the mystification of capitalism and shares a portrayal of love and pain, loyalty and mistrust, power and violence, success and the fear of being erased by enforced poverty.

This story and its ability to make us anticipate the second book mirrors Future and Kanye West’s declaration of “city on fire” in their song “Keep it Burnin.” Broadway sets the city on fire with every page.

To truly know Chicago and the plight of Chicago youth we must examine how they are surviving—not only what capitalism and consumerism brings into the city but also what it removes.

Broadway’s writing is not a call for us to investigate these teens but to look upon them with fresh eyes. Through his story we should all be willing and able to give Frank and Dupree compassion and understanding, to see them as more than the subjective labels that have been placed upon them (e.g. superpredators).

This book is a gift to the young person surviving Chicago and a warning to those in power, saying that multidimensional change through economic and social equality will support success and victory for our malleable youth.