ANEW: Halloween in the Projects
When fear was only decoration and “no” was love
Nobody decorated their homes for Halloween near where we lived. Okay, not nobody, but our family would end up putting a plastic flat skeleton on our front door. One in the front and the other in the space between the living room and the kitchen. We would hang it with heavy box tape; the one inside our place always came down whenever a strong breeze flowed through our unit. It was not scary at all, the skeleton, and neither were our costumes. Inside the Projects, we didn’t think about being other than what we were. It wasn’t about making people afraid or putting on airs. Our lives were surprisingly uncomplicated.
Sure, our aunt and grandmother, my father’s mother, had their own homes, even though it was not long ago that they had indoor plumbing. At least that’s what my brother told me recently. How could that be? Like Halloween itself, our minds did a number on us, playing tricks with time. I guess some remnants of moving up from down South remained.
We heard the stories about razor blades in apples, and little girls and boys getting “snatched” off the streets, but we moved in packs. And who were these kids we never knew getting taken away from their parents, never to return? I suppose it happened somewhere, but no one in our neighborhood disappeared, though I wished a few people would be taken, which never happened. The older folks never talked about those times when they were down South. They just kept a watchful eye, remembering they could trust no one but themselves, especially when it came to children. That internal worry was baked into us.
The Halloween I remember most vividly happened the fall they commemorated the one-hundredth anniversary of Mrs. O’Leary’s cow kicking the lantern over in her barn and burning down most of Chicago. Even back then, those stories seemed too cartoon-y to be true, but that is what we always heard. The only thing left standing in the City that grew up in the wake of all that early industrialization was the old Water Tower, which didn’t look much like the gigantic water tank we had in our town. Our water tower in the village of Robbins was shaped like an oversized flattened egg that carried all the town’s drinking water on the north end, or so we were told.
Even the manufactured fear that came with our scant decorations, even the distant memory of the region’s past, made our lives seem like we were living in the aftermath of some mythic time where people left home never to return. Maybe one day they would, like they always seemed to do in the stories—like the Prodigal son, or on one of those Late, Late Show movies, like The Best Years of Our Lives with Dana Andrews.
Halloween had its purpose besides making us competitive: counting the real pieces of candy, not those fake Tootsie Rolls that so many people who hated children seemed to give out. Those and the Necco Wafers, which were like discs of chalk that could probably be used to write on the blackboards at school, if you held them sideways like a half-dollar. You put one in your mouth, and it felt like you had just finished a math problem.
Many of the supermarkets and a few of the department stores had costumes you could buy. More skeletons. Casper the Friendly Ghost. Mighty Mouse. Cartoons of the times and of our parents’ time. When you’re a kid, you don’t ever remember the cost of a thing. It just was what it cost, and you begged until you got what you wanted. Or, we were told, “Shut up, boy, and go sit down and don’t ask me again. Hear?!” That nailed the coffin on the finality of a thing, especially when it came without the question mark, “HEAR!”
We did beg, though.
“Mama…,” we would sing, getting her ready for our request with the rise in our voices at the end of her name. “Can we get the…”
“I told you don’t ask me! Again. Hear!”
We were good at asking, but what buttered her up were the stories of school.
“Mrs. Billheimer, my second-grade teacher, said that her husband, before he got sick, would take her and her kids over to the fancy neighborhoods in Chicago, and they gave them full-sized Milky Way Bars. Can you believe it, Mama?”
“We not going to Chicago to get no fancy candy bars. Hear!”
With that the case was closed. We never saw ourselves as dependent on anyone for candy bars nor for anything else. Our lives were like that. No matter how much we begged about a thing, hearing “no” meant you could stop asking and move on to something else.
Perhaps that is what Halloween was back when we were growing up. It prepared us for the stories and the scary times to come. Those times when we hung fake skeletons and nothing else. Those times when we went out and our parents feared the worst, but we came back anyway. And those times we were told “Hear!” that meant no and you learned to stop asking.
“No” was the word of the season. We learned to survive a whole season or more of that, and we survived. No one starved. No one went hungry. Or, so it seemed. People wouldn’t allow that where we grew up.
We survived by remembering that they were just words—decorations, stories of resilience, and ways to advance into the future. Toughening us up. No big candy bars. We would make do with what we had, with who we were, with the single skeleton that never stayed up and the Necco Wafers that tasted like something you might write with on a blackboard. More than anything else, we made our way into the world with watchful skeletons, a neighborhood that cared,and “hearing” about what we needed to do to survive into adulthood, and then doing it.
May it always be so.
Curated Listening:
No song captures the moment of these days better than Stevie Wonder’s I Wish. Hear! I Wish HERE.
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