The House of Blues: A Tale of the Arts Department

June 17, 2015

Thea noted it straight away, even as Earl continued to greedily explore the depths of his second bowl of she-crab soup.

Earl Mason was a down-home Central Illinois downstater whose marine appetite generally had ended at Long John Silver’s. But roughly 45 years after falling hard for the University Arts Department’s Chicago firebrand, the college bean-counter plummeted headlong into Lowcountry cuisine. The Charleston trolley guide had insisted on what had persisted as a working neighborhood soul kitchen even after Southern Living and James Beard got their spoons in the roux. As Thea trenched into her oxtails and hoppin john, she was grateful she’d bypassed last-night white linen for glaring fluorescents and formica.

The aging owner worked the front with the same boisterous familiarity, while his wife and daughter and teen granddaughter kept the kitchen hopping. But a pall emanated from the pickup window. You can take the activist off the street, but Thea’d lost few of her radical faculties in the years since the ’68 Democrat Convention. Even if she now flashed on Buffalo Springfield’s whitebread ode to The Struggle: There's somethin' happenin' here/But what it is ain't exactly clear…

“Brother,” the owner clapped Earl’s shoulder. “Best slow down – ocean’s only so big.”

“What’s up?” Thea asked quietly, and everything bolstering the man’s grin fell away. “What’s going on?”

“Look, I know it’s you folks’ anniversary and all,” the hefty restaurateur whispered. “Hey, since we got no cake, how ‘bout some bread pudding? My treat.”

Thea’s silence told the man he’d picked the wrong tourist. He sighed. “Wife just heard something’s goin’ on at her sister’s church. Cops all over the place, maybe some shots. Everything’s all right. I hope. Bring you that pudding now.”

It was an early Thursday coming – 9 a.m. departure at Charleston International. But Earl settled in with his James Patterson as Thea planted herself at the foot of the queen before the Radisson’s flat-panel. When his wife announced she wasn’t going to be making the morning flight, he crimped the page, stared at the screen over her narrow shoulder, and, at Thea’s insistence, packed silently for one. 

June 17, 2024

Dylann Roof resided at the Terre Haute federal pen, perhaps hoping the craziness that had retrenched the year before he’d been convicted for executing nine black Bible study partners might swoop back in and save him a terminal cocktail. Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church Pastor and State Sen. Clementa Carlos Pinckney never got to witness the fruits of his efforts to fit Carolina cops with body cams, nor the removal of the Confederate flag from the South Carolina statehouse several weeks after he’d prayed with the lost boy with the bad bowl cut.

Professor Thea Mason’d endured a 50-year University anniversary that culminated in a retirement offer she’d addressed as she had a Chicago cop in a lip-synched moment captured by Time back in ‘68. Then COVID, then the Administration’s carefully contorted response to her vivid response to the George Floyd murder. Earl was lobbying Maui and Thea Mali for their forthcoming 50th. And Safiya Smalls popped by three weeks into Thea’s summer sabbatical.

“Gran’pa was thinking I’d take over the place someday, but then COVID.” Earl was deep into his pre-mowing ritual, the women had the sunroom to themselves, and the girl who’d conjured magic from rice and beans and grits a decade before gazed off toward the dorms to the north. “Developer paid us a fortune for the restaurant, I finished up at the Culinary Institute last fall, and thought I might bring some Lowcountry flavor to the Windy City. Drove up myself. Thought about bringing Gran’pa’s old Green Book, but I kept the tank full and the cruise on all the way up.”

“I assume you didn’t come to Millington to scout strip plaza space. What’s up?”

They’d kept up sporadically in the years after Thea’d pitched in to help deliver food and comfort to those mourning and nursing pain and fury in the wake of the Emanuel AME Massacre, but the last email had been about the time a Kenosha jury had sent Kyle Rittenhouse home to a future as rightwing mascot. And about the time long-haul COVID caught up to Leon Smalls.

“Near the end, he barely had the breath to utter a word. He had this legal pad, and he’d drive Mama nuts making sure we’d made arrangements for this or that, talked to the church about the hymn for the service, knew where all the insurance papers were. But right at the end, he started reminiscing, especially about an older brother who’d left Charleston for Chicago when they were young. Gran’pa never ventured further than the barrier islands.”

“The Great Migration,” Thea supplied. “Folks started coming north or west when World War I started creating industrial jobs. Papers like The Chicago Defender ran ads enticing young men to make a new life up here. Guess it looked good on paper, ‘cause about six million black Americans came up between 1916 and 1970. So, this brother. Your dad and him estranged?”

“Never even knew I had an Uncle Samuel. They’d had a big fight right before Samuel took off in 1950, and never talked again. Only time Gran’pa ever heard from him was a Christmas card with a photo of Samuel with some woman in front of a house. We never found any trace of the card or that picture, but that wasn’t the weirdest part. He wanted me to find Uncle Samuel. I asked how was I supposed to do that when he didn’t have any address or nothing. Gran’pa was agitated, and he had the rattle, you know, the death rattle. May be why he said – wrote – what he did.”

“Which was?” Thea pushed.

“Uncle Samuel’s house was haunted.”

**

“Intriguing.” Saanvi said simply.

Earl and Anand were deep into interest rates – Thea wished for once it might have been the Cubs, and after Saanvi switched seats with her mate, two confluent streams parted into parallel conversations.

“One word for it,” Thea groused as she peered down the entrees for something that suited her particular tastes this evening. Professors Deshpande and Mason had negotiated the downtown nouveau Asian fusion joint for their weekly Wednesday supper. The fusion part consisted of eight or 10 hybridized phos and ramens and a selection of flatbread pizzas that seemed to serve the high-end function of chicken fingers for the kiddies or visiting redneck kin.

“Dug into some of those goofy-ass paranormal websites,” Thea continued. “All I could come up with was Bachelors Grove Cemetery in the southwest ‘burbs – mysterious lights and phantom cars and even some magic house that appears and disappears. Oh, and Monk’s Castle – old limestone church and graveyard at Sag Bridge with a phantom hearse and some dead monks. So I start looking into some pre-‘50s missing persons and unsolved murders in South Chicago. You might imagine, the Chicago PD didn’t keep a rich tally of dead or missing black people back then. Oh, well, one good thing’s come out of Safiya’s visit. Think I may do a course next spring on Gullah/Geechee art and design.”

Saanvi regarded the textile art prof over her Chardonnay. “Your dress – also a souvenir of your Carolina sojourn?”

Thea blinked down at the light aqua sundress that highlighted some still-impressive septuagenarian features. “Thought I was the fashion maven here. How’d you guess?”

“If you remember, I am the sociocultural maven here,” Professor Deshpande murmured. “Especially in matters of folkways and spiritual traditions. That’s a very unique shade, you know, with great significance to the Gullah community. You no doubt saw many examples of it in Charleston, on St. Simons and Jekyll Islands.”

“And how was everyone’s meal?”

Servers had suffered severe psychic damage derailing Professor Mason’s train of thought. “Exceptional,” Professor Deshpande intervened.

“So might I tempt you with dessert? Tonight’s offering is a bruleed miso bread pudding with locally curated currants, an artisan brandy sauce, hand-pralined organic pecans, and fresh Calhoun County peaches.”

Earl ordered for the table as his wife cackled…                                   

**   

The first faculty meeting of Thea’s summer sabbatical convened at the back booth of The Campus Coffee Commune, just beyond the Wall of a Thousand Flyers, under one of the dozens of oils and watercolors that bore yellowed price tags. Professor Melissa Urquardt eyed a floral study hatefully. Saanvi savored her chai.   

“Leon Smalls wasn’t pointing to a haunted house, though that’s what Safiya got out of his dying scrawl,” Thea explained. “Travel down to South Carolina, and you’ll see a common house color – a light, watery cyan called ‘haint blue.’ Gullah folk tradition holds it helps ward off evil spirits. Especially popular on porch ceilings, but you’ll see a lot of houses in Charleston in haint blue from foundation to roof.

“Not unlikely a family of Gullah lineage would have settled in South Chicago during the Great Migration – Michelle Obama and Michael Jordan claim Gullah ancestry. A Gullah home might have stood out if nothing else but for the color palette.

“Now, here’s the catch: A well-maintained South Side home may have been repainted 14 times over the past 70 years. But look at community economics, and assume folks repainted maybe once every 10 years. That’s still a lot of layers to get to the original blue. And we aren’t even factoring in house fires, tornadoes, rezoning for retail or industry, or gentrification.” Professor Mason’s lip curled slightly. “The South Loop has seen the biggest boom, or infestation, if you’d like -- some lower-income neighborhoods are seeing high property values and displacement from the influx of outside money. Suppose I digress, but you get the idea.”

“So we go to the archives,” Professor Urquardt interpolated, restless amid the history and commentary. “We have to find a black-and-white photo of the house from the era, one with enough context to get an accurate color read. Variations in film quality, ambient lighting, print quality, storage conditions – it’s hard to get a baseline for colorizing grayscale images without a sky, a lawn, a landmark that hasn’t changed too much in 70 or 80 years.”

“And in that community, that more than likely would be a church,” Thea maintained. “Preferably unpainted brick or stone. Brick was affordable in the late 19^th and early 20^th Century, and more prominent churches like St. Martin de Tours in Engelwood used Indiana limestone. Still, some of the older, smaller neighborhood churches still standing might be wood.”

“So I focus on natural features and surrounding homes,” Melissa melodized. “Not a big fan of colorization, but I have used ColorSurprise when the need arose – pretty high accuracy. The new AI-powered apps are even better, but since I kinda hate robots, I’d probably go to DeOldify, which uses deep learning and is open-source, so fuck The Man, right?”

Thea rolled her eyes and raised a satirical fist.

**

“May have a possible.” Melissa’s tone was matter-of-fact, almost blasé.

It had been nearly a week, and drawing on the Southeast Chicago Historical Society online archive and her South Shore Historical Society and community contacts, Professor Mason had shuttled Melissa 450-plus predominantly black-and-white images from more than a half-century of deprivation, celebration, tragedy, triumph, strife, and struggle.

“Ever heard of St. Marcus African Methodist Episcopal Church, North Lawndale area?” Melissa continued. “Got it up on Google Streetview right now.”

“Me too,” Thea reported after a beat. Tiny OG white wood-frame church with steep concrete steps.

“One of the shots from the SSHS collection, 1954. Some kind of congregation picnic or barbecue. Check two doors to the west. Single-story wood frame house, like a little box.”

“White,” Thea noted. “Or something near it.”

“Not back then. Luckily, the St. Marcus folks were big on maintenance, so I have a pretty pure white benchmark, along with a cloudless summer sky, green grass, a standard red fire hydrant in front of the church, and, miracle of miracles, one of the neighbors must have been a cabbie, a Yellow cabbie.”

“Must have been a fare, a fairly rare fare,” Thea grunted. “Yellow Cab had a pretty solid color line in those days. But I get the point. So this some sort of elimination process?”

“Hardly. I’m assigning grayscale values to known colors, then mapping the gradations and using GIMP – another open-source app – to analyze and convert. Wanna know what GIMP stands for?”

“Fuck no. Just gimme an address.”

**

“Yes, Samuel was our sexton five, no, six years.” Sister Maybelle tugged at the cuff of the crisp floral dress she’d no doubt exhumed for the occasion. “We had a couple Gullah members back then, lookin’ for plant or construction work. They didn’t always fit in, but Pastor Johnson was what you college folks call ‘inclusive,’ and so Samuel made himself to home pretty quick. Always the first to volunteer when something needed fixing or a dish needed delivered to a grieving parishioner. More times than not, he’d fix that meal himself – the young man could cook. So when the regular sexton ran off with one of the deacon’s wives – now, hear, can we cut that out? – we didn’t hesitate to ask Samuel. Brick plant where he worked shut down, and, well, he just lived two doors down. Fact, house sat vacant several years ‘til we bought it for our neighborhood outreach mission…”

Sister Maybelle averted her eyes, and Thea caught a peek of the young woman who’d probably turned a few guilty heads in the pews 70 years ago. “See, Samuel was single, a gentleman who wasn’t any too hard to look at. But he’d talk about the one that got away, or maybe he ran from, and we all knew it was a lost cause. And sure enough, Samuel just vanished in the night round Christmas ‘57 – no notice, no note. Musta been sudden, cause he’d just repainted his place. Like the sky breaking through the winter gray. Say, Baby, think we might take a break? I made some sweet tea.”

“Sure,” Melissa beamed, lowering the Sony DSC-RX10 IV and throwing Thea a flash of exasperation. “Dr. Mason and I can bring it out, that’s OK?”

Maybelle Simpkins’ tiny kitchen was spotless as only the spinster church woman might keep it, and Melissa quickly located three pink aluminum tumblers. “I feel bad misleading her, too,” Thea whispered as Professor Urquardt dispensed syrupy Lipton.

“Who’s misleading anybody?” Melissa demanded. “I don’t shoot anything I don’t plan to use, and I think maybe I got something here for Sundance or Big Sky. Just kinda hangry is all, and I wish Grandma in there would have taken the chair without the sun right behind her.”

“Got some ginger snaps, too,” Sister Maybelle called.  

**  

 “OK, bear with me,” Thea sighed. “Your only brother leaves his family, his home behind. There’s bad blood, sure, and nobody hears a peep, not a conciliatory or ugly word for years. He could well be dead, and maybe that’s all right because that tainted blood stains everything.

“Then, out of the blue, you get a Christmas card. Proof of life, proof your brother has moved on, has found happiness, has healed and wants to heal. Maybe your hate’s so deep you shove it in a drawer and leave him a ghost. But would you just throw away something like that?

“My guess is neither that card or the photo ever existed. And if that’s true, how did Leon Smalls know about Samuel’s new life in Chicago, about the ‘haint house’? Only one way makes sense to me. You heard of the Green Book? Movie about it few years back. Safiya says her grandpa never left Charleston except to fish, but she finds a copy of the Green Book — an old directory of ‘safe’ hotels, cafes, garages; tips on how not to get found in a ditch or hanging from a tree or sitting in a county cell for the crime of driving while black. Why’d this man who’d never traveled beyond the Golden Isles need such a thing?”

Earl looked to Rev. Payton, who perched momentarily on the repurposed kitchen counter before nodding and leading the way to the basement door. The young pastor grinned as he pulled the light chain. “Don’t suppose you’re gonna just tell me what we’re looking for?”

“Tell you if I knew,” Thea muttered. The first step creaked alarmingly, but the professor descended on a mission. “I think Samuel Smalls did contact Leon, to tell him he was coming home. Sister Maybelle told me about Samuel’s lost love. I think that was the reason Samuel up and left nearly seven years before. Samuel made a supreme sacrifice to ensure his little brother could make a happy life with the woman they both loved. But the pull of home got to be too much. So Leon left his home for the first time, for the Windy City.”

As the trio reached the bottom of the cellar steps and the preacher pulled a second chain, Thea pulled up short with a single sharp breath. She leaned on the rail, and again waved Rev. Payton’s arm away.

“Samuel never came home,” Professor Mason said in a cold, final tone. “Earl, let’s leave these folks be — I’m in a mood for some good home cooking.”

Earl nodded and turned toward the light upstairs. Thea brushed past Rev. Payton, who stood befuddled above the cool expanse of aqua-blue cement.

Sexton Small had painted the basement that same outdated shade Johnson’s successor had had covered to match St. Marcus. The basement was for storage and was a low priority for the Maintenance Committee. But although it was peeling and splintered in places, he had to admit the hue brought some needed light to the chamber and did a nice job of disguising the poor patch job the supposedly skilled sexton had left in the center of the room. Like a submerged island in a tropical sea…