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When
Street and Smith, a Depression era publisher of pulp fiction, decided to boost the
sagging sales of its flagship Detective Story Magazine
they took a flyer on radio, which
was just coming into its own as a platform for dramas. David Chrisman of the Ruthrauff
& Ryan advertising agency was hired to create a package that would
frame stories from the magazine adapted by editor/publisher
William Sweets. It was decided to
have the stories introduced by a
mysterious, nameless narrator. Several possibilities were tossed around
until writer Harry Engman Charlot
suggested the eerie and sinister sounding The
Shadow.
Detective Story Hour premiered on
Thursday July 31, 1930 on the CBS Radio
network. It was the first interaction of an American cultural phenomenon which would go on
to become one of the longest running an most popular radio dramas of all time,
a long running series of twice-a-month
pulp novel and spawn movie serials
and features, comic books, and a TV series. The character of The Shadow would help
inspire the superhero genre on in comic books, especially The BatMan and the Green Hornet on radio. The
Hornet was depicted as the modern nephew
of the Lone Ranger by as Detroit radio station desperate for a
mystery program to match The Shadow.
But
all of that was as yet in the future.
The character and the radio show both had some growing and adapting to
do.
In
those early broadcasts, the eerie
introduction that became famous was not yet in its full form. The Shadow did not yet have a secret identity and was not an active participant in the stories, just
a kind of omnipresent observer to
the unfolding yarn. But the narrator
voiced by James LaCurto and later Frank Readick uttered the now familiar
introduction “Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow
knows…”
Audiences were hooked from the beginning. Smith
and Street were gratified by the success of the show, but somewhat stunned by the audience reaction to The
Shadow. But being smart purveyors of popular culture, the
company wasted no time in cashing in. On April 1, 1931 the company launched a new
magazine, The Shadow, a quarterly
which featured a complete novel in
each issue plus additional detective short stories. The editors commissioned Walter B. Gibson, a prolific pulp writer and stage magician as the principal author of the novels which
were published under the name Maxwell
Grant.
Gibson
fleshed out the character and invented the mythos
surrounding him. The new book was
such a sensation that within months it went from a four times a year schedule
to twice a month—requiring the
hyperactive writer to churn out 75,000 word stories every two weeks in addition
to later contributing to the radio program, comic books, and a daily syndicated
comic strip. Although eventually other
writers were brought in to take up some of the slack, Gibson would go on to pen
282 of the 325 Shadow novels. And after
the pulp magazine folded he went on to write three additional longer form
novels under his own name in a new series issued by Belmont Books.
In
the Gibson stories The Shadow’s secret identity was Kent Allard, a World War I
air ace who flew for France and
was known as the Black Eagle. After the war, Allard turned to the challenge
in waging war on criminals. He faked
his death in the South American jungles, then returned
to the States. Back in New
York City, he adopted numerous
identities to conceal his existence, Lamont
Cranston, a “wealthy young man about town,” being just one of them. Alard blackmailed the real playboy into allowing him to assume his
identity while he traveled the world.
Assuming
the identity of Cranston and others the Shadow pursued villains relentlessly by
night employing the skills of a cat
burglar, hypnotist, magician, and master of disguise to seemingly be anywhere. He would often torment the men—and occasional woman—he stalked them with ominous
taunts from the darkness, often driving them to near insanity. In the end either
The Shadow would cut the bad guy down in a blaze
of gun fire or lead him into a police
trap, or even have him killed by his own accomplices or victims. For most of the duration of the pulp series
there was no hint that The Shadow
possessed any supernatural powers.
Lurid covers with endangered beauties and oriental villains sold magazines.
The
lurid pulp covers gripped readers
with an unforgettable image of the anti-hero.
He wore a large, wide brimmed black hat
pulled low over his face revealing only intense staring eyes. Over an
ordinary black business suit he wore
a crimson lined black cape pulled up
revealing only a hawk-like nose.
With
the magazine launched, the company was still a little unsure how to use the
character on the radio show. They even
tried to employ him as the narrator for another short lived series based on a
Smith and Street rag, Love Story Hour, which took over the
original Thursday night slot. Detective
Story Hour shifted to Sunday evenings.
In September, 1931 the program acquired a commercial sponsor and was re-named the Blue Coal Radio Revue but
it remained an hour long program with Frank Readick starring as The
Shadow.
The
following year the show and its sponsor jumped
to NBC on Tuesday and Wednesday
nights. Readick remained the star,
although LaCurto sometimes filled in.
And the program was now officially what audiences had called it all
along The Shadow.
As
the radio dramas began to integrate
the narrator into the story lines, some of them borrowed from and adapted from
the novels for the sake of simplicity
some elements of character as portrayed by Gibson were dropped or altered. First to
go was any mention of Kent Allard or other assumed identities. The Shadow was Lamont Cranston. To avoid bringing the action to a screeching
halt to explain in each episode how the Shadow seems to be everywhere, a key
part of the novels, it was said simply that he “had the power to cloud men’s minds.”
This was inferred to be a form of hypnotism mastered by The Shadow in
the Orient. Later in the series it he seemed to have
acquired a super power of invisibility.
Agness Morehead was The Shadow's accomplice on the radio show.
One
of the most important differences between the books and the show was the
introduction of a female accomplice,
Margo Lane, who learns Cranston’s
secret, becomes his companion, possible lover, and abets him in his crusade. The part was added
to give a feminine voice to the
series, and Lane sometimes stepped in as narrator explaining her part in the
unfolding drama. Gibson was resentful of
this change and refused for quite a while to include Lane in his novels,
finally giving in to public pressure after 1940. In 1937 the program moved to the Mutual Network and Sunday nights where
it became an institution. And with a new Shadow, youthful wiz kid Orson Welles and Agnes Morehead as Margo Lane the program took on the form that is
most remembered, and which is still heard on old time radio programs and available in CD collections. Although the
famous introduction and the closing sinister laugh were still provided by
recording of Readick, Welles’s deep rich voice and nuanced performance
built tension as never before.
Orson Welles became the most famous voice of The Shadow.
Welles
only stayed with the show for two seasons, moving on to his own ambitious
Mercury Theater of the Air and Hollywood,
taking Morehead with him on both adventures, but his stamp remained on the
program through the several other actors called upon to portray the mysterious
crime fighter including Bill Johnstone
(1938-1943), John Archer
(1944-1945), and Bret Morrison (1943-1944,
1945-1954). Lane was portrayed by
Morehead through 1940 then by Majorie
Anderson (1940-1944), Grace Matthews
(1946-1949), and Gertrude Warner
(1949-1954).
Bret Morison and Marjorie Anderson were a '40's pairing as The Shadow and Margo Lane.
The
show remained popular and Blue Coal remained the usual sponsor on the East Coast until replaced by the U.S. Army and Air Force, and later by Wildroot
Cream Oil. After 1953 no regular
single sponsor could be found and the program was sustained by the network with spot
advertising. That was writing on the wall, listeners and
advertisers were abandoning long form
drama radio for the glamor of television. The
Shadow aired its last original
episode on December 26, 1954.
The
Shadow also lived across multiple other media.
There were several film versions, mostly by minor studios, beginning with a series of two reel shorts produced by Universal
Pictures during the first flush of success on the radio in 1930-31. The first entry in the series, A
Burglar to the Rescue, was filmed in New York City with the voice of The Shadow on radio, Frank
Readick. Subsequent instalments were
filmed cheaply in Hollywood with different actors. In 1937 and ’38 Rod La Rocque starred in two Grand
National Pictures releases.
Victor Jory played The Shadow in a Columbia Pictures serial. Poverty Row B-movie studios churned out cheep bottom-of-the-Double feature films.
The Shadow was a 15
episode cliff hanging serial
starring Victor Jory in probably the most memorable
cinematic portrayal for Columbia in
1940. Poverty row Monogram Pictures, best known for their westerns, made three super-low budget entries in the post
war years.
In
the 1958 two pilot episodes of a
failed TV series were slapped together
and released to theaters as Invisible Avenger.
The
character did not get a first class
film presentation until 1994 when Alec
Baldwin and Penelope Ann Miller appeared in The Shadow in what Universal
Pictures hoped would be a blockbuster. The film feature John Lone as an Asian
supervillain working to develop an atomic
bomb, and a supporting cast of Peter Boyle, Jonathon Winters, Ian
McKellan, and Tim Curry. Although the film made money, it was not warmly greeted by critics and failed to become a mega-hit.
The Shadow finally got a big budget production in 1994 when Alec Baldwin played the lead and Penelope Ann Miller played Margo Lane. It was supposed to set up a movie franchise for Universal Pictures, but failed to become a blockbuster.
The Shadow fared better in
illustrated print. Walter Gibson participated in a daily strip drawn by Vernon Greene which ran for two years,
1940-42 and covered six adventures adapted from his novels until it was cancelled along with many other strips
to preserve paper during the war years. The strips were assembled and released as two
comic books.
Publishers
Street and Smith published their own comic book series, Shadow Comics for 101
issues between 1940 and 1949 based on the magazine version of the hero. Archie Comics tried to cash in on
the super hero craze in 1964 with a new series based on the radio show. In the second issue of an eight book arc, a blond Lamont Cranston
and The Shadow was transformed into a muscular
superhero in green and blue tights. Loyal Shadow fans were not amused and neither was the intended teen age audience.
Street and Smith issued the first comic book which ran for 101 issues through the 1940.s.
D.C. Comics produced four
Shadow series—a 12-issue series (Nov. 1973 - Sept. 1975) drawing heavily on the
atmosphere of the novels and the graphic
content of their covers; a 1986 mini-series,
Shadow: Blood and Judgment that
brought the old hero to modern New York; and in 1987 a new a monthly series by writer
Andy Helfer and drawn primarily by
artists Bill Sienkiewicz and Kyle Baker continuing the modern
universe of the mini-series. During this
period The Shadow also made cross
appearances in other DC Comics, particularly Detective Comics where Batman acknowledges the now elderly Shadow as his inspiration and we learn that the
character had once saved the lives
of Bruce Wayne’s parents.
At DC Comics The Shadow had his own book and showed up with the company's superheroes, notably Batman in other books.
From
1989 to 1992, DC published a new Shadow series, The Shadow Strikes,
written by Gerard Jones and Eduardo Barreto set in the ‘30s and
returning The Shadow to his pulp origins.
Marvel Comics also had a
crack at The Shadow with a graphic novel,
The
Shadow 1941: Hitler’s Astrologer by writer Dennis O’Neil and artist Michael
Kaluta who had worked together on D.C.’s first series.
Dark Horse Comics acquired the
rights to The Shadow and published
the mini-series In The Coils of Leviathan in 1993, Hell’s Heat Wave, and The
Shadow and Doc Savage both in 1995 as well as two single issue specials.
In
2012 Dynamite Entertainment began
yet another new series written by Garth
Ennis and illustrated by Aaron
Campbell and a mini-series Masks, teaming the 1930 era Shadow with
the Spider, The Green Hornet and Kato,
and a 1930s version of Zorro.
It
seems that after all of these years pop culture fans still can’t get enough of
The Shadow.
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Wednesday, July 31, 2019
What Evil Lurks in the Hearts of Men—The Shadow Knows
Tuesday, July 30, 2019
Visiting Big Boy—A Blast from a Cheyenne Past
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The Union Pacific's Big Boy 4014 engine in West Chicago.
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Last
Sunday afternoon my wife Kathy
Brady-Murfin indulged the sentimental
Old Man and drove down to West Chicago to visit an old friend.
Union Pacific 4014, a massive Big
Boy steam locomotive was on display at the Larry S. Provo Union Pacific Training Center there. The great beast roared into the town on
Friday as part of 150th Anniversary of
the Transcontinental Railroad Tour.
Ol’
4014 was built in 1941 at the American
Locomotive Company shops in Schenectady,
New York. Of the 25 Big Boy engines built all but
eight have long ago been sent to scrap. Seven are in railroad museums or otherwise on static display. Only 4014 is
operable and once again rolling.
The
Big Boy engines were specifically designed to haul exceptionally long trains—up
to three miles long—over the Wasatch
mountains between Ogden, Utah, and Green River, Wyoming. In 1947 they were reassigned to run from Nebraska over the hump of Sherman Hill between
Cheyenne and Laramie, Wyoming—the highest
elevation on the UP route and
were based in Cheyenne.
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A Big Boy engine hauling freight through Echo Canyon, Utah.
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In
the special nomenclature of steam engines they were articulated 4-8-8-4 steam locomotives—a
four-wheel leading truck for stability entering curves, two sets of
eight driving wheels and a
four-wheel trailing truck to support
the large firebox. The engines were 85 feet long and with the
firebox were a total of just under 133 feet.
The engine weighed 762,000 lbs. and with the addition of the firebox a
total of 1,250,000 lbs. In every aspect
they were the biggest, heaviest, and most powerful steam engines ever built.
They
were originally designed to haul 3,600-ton trains over steep grades. In
operation they proved capable of
much more and load limits were
raised several time finally running at 4,200 tons. They were capable of speeds in excess of 80 miles an hour over level ground and
routinely operated at 60 mph. The engines were efficient money makers for the UP eliminating the need add extra
engines—double head—to get over
steep grades which required making up and breaking up trains on each side of
the grade. Engine crews admired them for being sure-footed and easy to handle
despite the rugged terrain it covered.
The
Big Boys were well maintained and had years of service ahead when the UP
decided to remove them from service only because the railroad wanted close their
Wyoming mines which provided the bituminous soft coal they used for fuel. They were last run in regular revenue service on July 21, 1959 and
officially retired them all by 1962.
They
were replaced by diesel and gas turbine-electric locomotives. Several locomotive units had to be attached
at each end of a long train in a push-pull
operation to duplicate a single Big Boy.
Enough
of the train geek stuff. My connection to the mighty behemoths was much more personal. Stop me if you have heard the tale before.
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When we first moved to Cheyenne we stayed at the Lincoln Court Motel. Across Highway 30 I could see the Union Pacific yards.
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We
moved to Cheyenne in 1953 from Canyon
City, Colorado when my father, W. M.
Murfin got a new job as Secretary of
the Cheyenne Chamber of Commerce. We move temporarily into the Lincoln Court Motel by the Hitching Post Inn on U.S. 30 while my folks searched for a
house. It was only supposed to be a few
days, but my twin brother Tim and I
came down with a virulent case of the measles—so
serious that there was evidently fear for our four-year old lives. We were quarantined
in the tight motel room for several days.
After
the fever broke I spent long hours
in my bed looking out the window across the highway to the busy UP humping yards. I was fascinated by the trains and what
seemed like constant bustle. My favorites were the little steam switch engines busily moved cars in the
yards making and unmaking trains. I
called them baby trains. But more impressive was the mighty rumble
of the Big Boy engines and the blasts from their horns as the came in from
Sherman hill or gathered steam for the push to the summit going the other way.
By
the late ‘50’s we were settled into a house on Cheshire Drive by the long
runway of the airport. In the summertime
in those long-gone days a boy
was free to roam anywhere his legs or bicycle could take him as long as he was home when Mom rang the dinner bell. Sometimes I
would go all the way across town and sneak
in the rail yards. Well, maybe not
sneak. Most of the switchmen and other yard workers ignored a curious boy and I was
only once in a while yelled at or shooed
by a conductor or yard bull.
Engineers high up in their cabs
in striped overalls, puffy topped
caps, and impressive gauntlets would
wave and sometime toot whistles.
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Watching a Big Boy take water was an awesome sight.
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If
a Big Boy was making up, I made for the water
tower and watched the crews swing the boom
and let loose Niagaras of water down
the top hatch to the insatiable boilers. It seemed that the huge tank could not
hold enough water to satisfy the thirsty beast.
On
some cool summer nights Tim and I would sleep out in the back yard in our father’s World
War II Army mummy bags under the spectacular array of the Milky Way. On still nights we could hear the freight
trains crest the high plateau at Pine Bluffs and hear it until it went over Sherman Hill. It was a lovely, lonesome sound sometimes punctuated by the distant howl of a coyote.
Cheyenne
was still as much a railroad town as
anything our next door neighbor on
Cheshire was a U.P. fireman and the father of my brother’s best friend Aubrey Mumpower was an engineer on the Big Boys.
In
1962 the UP gifted Big Boy 4004 to
the city of Cheyenne for display in Holliday
Park. We gathered one day to what
the huge engine being moved from the yards down Lincolnway—U.S. 30—to its new home.
The busy highway was closed. Workmen carefully laid rails in front of the engine which crept forward under its own power. They picked up the rails left behind and
moved them to the front in a slow leapfrog
operation. It took hours. Finally at the Park it rolled down an embankment to its new home.
The
Big Boy in the park then set on its rails completely in the open. Tim and I would visit it and climb all over
the engine. I would sit in the engineer’s
seat with my head and elbow out the window with my other hand
on the throttle. Somewhere there are little Kodak Brownie snapshots of the heroic
pose.
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Big Boy 4004 on static display at Cheyenne's Holiday Park was already surrounded by a chain-link fence when it was flooded in 1984,
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Eventually,
long after I left town, the old Big Boy was caged behind a chain-link
fence. It had suffered at the hands
of scrambling children like me, vandals,
and souvenir hunters. Exposed to the elements it rusted and deteriorated. Over the last two years dedicated local volunteers completed a cosmetic restoration of 4004 to its former glory and are currently
working on restoring a UP caboose to
put on display with it.
Seven
other Big Boys were donated to various railroad museums or cities. All but two have been displayed outdoors and
are in various states of repair. Two are
undercover at the Forney Transportation Museum
in Denver and the National Railroad Museum in Green Bay, Wisconsin. 4014 was long on display at the Fairplex RailGiants Train Museum in Pomona, California.
In
2013, the Union Pacific re-acquired
4014 and brought it home to Cheyenne for a complete restoration project at their Steam
Shop. Its huge driving wheels were
sent to be repaired by the Strasburg
Rail Road in Strasburg, Pennsylvania and the boiler had to be
adapted to fire No.5 Diesel fuel instead
of coal. After more than two years work
the boiler was successfully test fired on April 9, 2019 and on May 1, it moved
under its own power for the first time in more than 59 years. The next evening,
the locomotive made its first test run—a round
trip from Cheyenne to Nunn, Colorado.
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Restored Big Boy 4014 by historic Union Station ready to leave Cheyenne.
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4014
was official designated for excursion
service and made its first run to and from Ogden Utah for that city’s Heritage
Day Festival. Then in July it began
a Midwest tour hauling a rolling museum in a restored mail car with stops in
Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska, and
Wisconsin.
If
you live in these parts and you are nimble you might catch that Big Boy on
the move. It is scheduled to leave West
Chicago this morning at 8:30 with stops at Rochelle,
Clinton and Wheatland, Iowa before
stopping overnight at Cedar Rapids. There will be several other stops in Iowa and
Nebraska before 4014 comes back home to Cheyenne. For a complete
schedule check here.
Interestingly
in addition to excursion service, the UP indicates that 4014 is designated to
haul revenue freight during ferry moves. So the old warrior might occasionally be put back to real work.
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The Old Man and Big Boy, united at last.
|
On
our quick visit to West Chicago, throngs
were overwhelming the Provo Training
Center. Neither local police nor the UP
seemed quite prepared for the crowds.
Clear signage pointing to the somewhat out-of-the-way and to parking
was sorely lacking. So were
directions on the ground leaving many folks wandering about trying to find out
how exactly to access the display at ground
level. We huffed and puffed back and forth a long viaduct and around the grounds before we finally could get up close.
The
Old Man lay his hands on the old engine.
He was, as they say, verklempt.
Monday, July 29, 2019
Three Poets and a Chicago Riot—Sandburg, Brooks, and Ewing
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A white mob attack a black home during the 1919 Race Riots.
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The Chicago 1919 Race Riots seared the
souls of the cotton field diaspora
who had found rough shelter in the
city’s unwelcoming arms—the Great Migration, Exodus indeed. The proper city of the gleaming towers and rah-rah
civic boosters strove mightily to forget,
to infuse or enforce a willful amnesia. But the poets noticed.
Carl Sandburg was 41 that year and bursting
forth as a poet to be noticed. Chicago Poems had shaken up conventions in its sensational appearance
in 1914 and later in the fatal year Cornhuskers would win the Pulitzer Prize. But the prairie Socialist was still proud to pound a typewriter at the Chicago Daily News as a working reporter.
Things were
already tense on the South Side. Race
riots had already popped up cities including East St. Louis, Illinois that summer. In Chicago a series of bombings had occurred on the fringes of the Black Belt aimed at discouraging Blacks from moving into adjacent white blocks. White gangs would
occasionally cruise through the neighborhood
shooting indiscriminately out car windows. In self-defense
Black veterans organized “sniping”—firing on the raiders from windows and doorways—as they sped through.
It was a practice that would be honed during the full-blown riots with
the addition of using refuse and trash cans to barricade the streets and
trap the cars longer under the return fire.
 |
Carl Sandburg--poet and reporter.
|
All of the major
newspapers were wringing their hands
and nearly unanimously laid all the blame on “invading Negros” who were depicted variously as filthy, ignorant, lazy, violent, and criminal.
The Daily News, however,
decided to put Sandburg, a reporter known to be keen on social issues and familiar with the working class streets, on the story. He covered it as no one else would, by
spending ten days in June talking to ordinary Black residents including women whose
voices were seldom heard, their White neighbors, business people and real estate
brokers, police, preachers, and precinct level politicians. He
asked pointed questions about everything—the Black Migration and why people had
come, housing conditions, work opportunities and competition for jobs including charges of strikebreaking,
wildly exaggerated and sensationalized press accounts of Black
crime, primal fears of race mixing and miscegenation.
Sandburg wrote
to father in-law, “I have spent 10 days in the Black Belt and am starting a
series in the Chicago Daily News on
why Abyssinians, Bushmen and Zulus are here.” Some later commentators
would take that sentence as proof that even a sympathetic Sandbur was tainted with racism. No doubt like almost
every White person of the time—or now—that might be true. But it fails to take into account the bitter irony that often infused his
poetry. He was never afraid to use the blunt language he heard on the street
to expose its outrageousness.
 |
A black crowd gathers on a Black Belt corner ready to defend the neighborhood from white gangs.
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Among his most
telling observations, which would be born out in the riots, was the significant
role played by Black veterans who had served in France. While the served in segregated units and many were assigned
menial labor like loading and unloading munitions and supplies
or carting the dead from the battlefield,
others served in infantry regiments who
fought alongside the French and earned their admiration. All of the veterans returned with a sense
that they had earned the respect of all of society. The city’s Black Belt neighborhood sent more
than 18,000 draftees to France in addition
to volunteers. Sandburg reported:
In barber shop windows and in
cigar stores and haberdasheries are helmets, rifles, cartridges, canteens and
haversacks and photographs of negro regiments that were sent to France… So it is clear that
in one neighborhood there are ... strong young men who have been talking to
each other on topics more or less intimately related to the questions, “What
are we ready to die for? Why do we live? What is democracy? What is the meaning
of freedom; of self-determination?
He quoted Charles Duke, one of the relatively few
Black officers who served:
All attempts at segregation bring
only discord and resentful opposition. The bombing of the homes of colored
citizens is futile. This will neither intimidate any considerable number of
them nor stop their moving into a given district.
His series of
articles began running daily on July 14—perhaps not entirely accidently Bastille Day—and ran until just before
the riots broke out on July 27. If
anyone wondered why or how the ultimate explosion
occurred, Sandburg had already supplied the answers.
 |
The book assembled from Sandburg's Chicago Daily News articles.
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NAACP Joel Spingarn board member was in Chicago
during and after the eight days of rioting.
He discovered Sandburg’s series and was so impressed that he sent it to Alfred Harcourt of the Harcourt, Brace and Howe publishers without
consulting the reporter. Harcourt was
impressed and contacted Sandburg with an offer to do a book based on the
series. Sandburg, who had other projects
at hand in addition to his work as a reporter, agreed with the stipulation that
he did not have time for much new material including a detailed account of the
actual riots.
The original
articles became the core of the book with a little introductory and final
commentator. Walter Lippmann, then known as a liberal commentator was tapped to write the forward, which gave the slender volume some literary heft. It was
quickly issued under the slightly deceptive title of The Chicago Race Riots, July 1919
despite the fact that it was mostly essential background to the actual
disturbances.
In his own brief
introduction Sandburg summarized his
findings:
In any American city where the
racial situation is critical at this moment, the radical and active factors probably
are (1) housing, (2) politics and war psychology, and (3) organization of
labor.
The book sold
well and became an essential text for anyone studying the Red Summer in
Chicago. But the title continued to fool
people. A 50th anniversary edition was
published in 1969 on the heels of a new wave of race riots. Distinguished Atlanta Constitution editor
Ralph McGill did the new forward but
despite the clear evidence of the text he was praising wrote as if Sandburg
reported and wrote after the riots. He
couldn’t believe that Sandburg’s prescience
was not hind sight.
 |
Gwendolyn Brooks as a young poet about the time A Street in Bronzevill was published.
|
Decades later for
Poet Laureate Gwendolyn Brooks the riots of the Red Summer were the background
and subtext to her Bronzeville poems and the haunted roots
of her turn-the-table verse of the
1968 West Side riots.
Riot
A
riot is the language of the unheard.
—martin luther
king
John Cabot, out
of Wilma, once a Wycliffe,
all
whitebluerose below his golden hair,
wrapped richly
in right linen and right wool,
almost forgot
his Jaguar and Lake Bluff;
almost forgot
Grandtully (which is The
Best Thing That
Ever Happened To Scotch); almost
forgot the
sculpture at the Richard Gray
and Distelheim;
the kidney pie at Maxim’s,
the Grenadine de
Boeuf at Maison Henri.
Because the
Negroes were coming down the street.
Because the Poor
were sweaty and unpretty
(not like Two
Dainty Negroes in Winnetka)
and they were
coming toward him in rough ranks.
In seas. In
windsweep. They were black and loud.
And not
detainable. And not discreet.
Gross. Gross.
“Que tu es grossier!” John Cabot
itched instantly
beneath the nourished white
that told his
story of glory to the World.
“Don’t let It
touch me! the blackness! Lord!” he whispered
to any handy
angel in the sky.
But, in a
thrilling announcement, on It drove
and breathed on
him: and touched him. In that breath
the fume of pig
foot, chitterling and cheap chili,
malign, mocked
John. And, in terrific touch, old
averted doubt
jerked forward decently,
cried, “Cabot!
John! You are a desperate man,
and the
desperate die expensively today.”
John Cabot went
down in the smoke and fire
and broken glass
and blood, and he cried “Lord!
Forgive these
nigguhs that know not what they do.”
—Gwendolyn
Brooks
 |
The cover of Eve L. Ewing's 1919 Poems from Haymarket Books.
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The
Negro in Chicago: A Study in Race Relations and a Race Riot was the dry, academic title of the report published
in 1922 of an evenly split Black and White 12 person commission established by Illinois Governor Frank Lowden and
selected by the Chicago Commission on
Race Relations. Not the kind of
inspiration you would expect for a poet.
 |
Ewing's touchstone and inspiration.
|
Ewing
first encountered the report in her research for a previous book, Ghosts
in the School Yard: Racism and School Closings on Chicago’s South Side. She
was struck that:
…a view into
Black life in my city a century earlier, and so many things struck me as being
either radically different or completely unchanged. And even though this was a government issued
report, many of its passages immediately think about poetry. They were so narrative, so evocative, so
imagistic. The report was like an old pastry
with loose threads sticking out, and I wanted to tug on them and see what I
could unravel, see what new thing I could weave.
Thus
the conception of her new book was born.
Ewing uses direct quotes from the report as epigrams for each poem and then riffs on it in a wide variety
of styles and in many voices as
they seem appropriate. It is all fresh.
More than that, it is liberating.
Ewing
was born in Chicago in 1986 and grew up in Logan
Square the daughter of a radio
reporter and producer mother and
an artist father. She attended public schools and graduated from Northside College Preparatory High School before entering the University of Chicago. She earned an masters degree in Elementary
Education from Dominican University
and taught middle school science in
Chicago public schools before moving to Boston
where she earned an M.Ed in Education Policy and Management in 2013
and a doctorate from Harvard University's Graduate School of
Education. Ewing is currently an assistant professor at the School
of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago.
 |
Eve L. Ewing--scholar and poet.
|
Beyond
her impressive academic credentials, Ewing has been a prolific writer and poet
whose work has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, The
Atlantic, The Nation, the Washington Post, The
New Republic, Poetry Magazine, and the anthology American
Journal: Fifty Poems for Our Time, curated by Tracy K. Smith, Poet Laureate of the United States. With Nate Marshall, she co-wrote the play No Blue Memories: The Life of Gwendolyn
Brooks, produced by Manual
Cinema and commissioned by the Poetry Foundation.
On
top of all of that Ewing displays her versatility
as the writer/creator of the Ironheart series for Marvel Comics and a contributor to
other of their projects. She co-directs
Crescendo Literary, a partnership
that develops community-engaged arts
events and educational resources
as a form of cultural organizing.
And
since last October she has hosted of the podcast
Bughouse Square with Eve Ewing
which begins each episode with an excerpt from the vast archive of Studs Terkle’s radio
broadcasts then interviews a
guest in a conversation with parallel themes. She uses Terkle’s source material in ways the
echo her use of The Negro in Chicago in
her new collection.
 |
Her
debut literary collection, Electric
Arches published in 2017 by Haymarket Books was an imaginative exploration of Black girlhood and womanhood
through poetry, visual art, and narrative prose. The book gathered high praise and awards including the Norma Farber First Book Award of the Poetry Society of America, the Alex Award for Young by the American Library Association Winner, National Public Radio’s list of Best Books of 2017,Top Ten Books of 2017 by the Chicago Tribune, Best Poetry Book of
2017 by the Chicago Review of Books, and Top Ten Books of 2017 by the Chicago
Public Library.
Ewing
divides 1919 Poems into three
sections: Before, What Happened, and After. Before examines Black
roots in slavery and the South and the Great Migration to
Chicago. Biblical Exodus is a recurring theme as is the Great Fire that had scorched the city. She takes care to present individual voices
as well as a mystical collective consciousness.
True Stories About the Great Fire
…the
sentiment was expressed that the Negro invasion of the district was the worst
calamity that had struck the city since the Great Fire. A prominent white real estate man said: “Property
owners should be notified to stand together block by block and prevent such invasion.”
(118-19)
Everything they
tell you is wrong.
The Great Fire
came here in a pair of worn loafers
dating its last
sandwich wrapped in paper
and the Great
Fire had a smell like grease and flowers.
The Great Fire
did not come to eat up the homes,
The homes lay
down at the foot of the Great Fire,
for it was
godly, and it glowed.
The Great Fire
blessed the rooftops.
The Great Fire
danced with the lakeshore.
The Great Fire
has an auntie who makes dresses
and the Great
Fire wears a red pinafore
and dances in a
cake walk.
The Great Fire
can only move at right angles.
The Great Fire
goes from block to block at night
and kisses stray
cats in the moonlight
and the cats
catch the Holy Ghost.
The Great Fire
sits in the balcony and yells at the picture.
The Great Fire
sings in a too-loud voice.
The Great Fire
has plans for you.
The Great Fire
is going to take your daughter someplace.
The Great Fire
has a hoard of gold like a dragon.
The Great Fire
already lives next door
and hides in the
daytime.
The Great Fire
knows that they don’t want it here.
The Great Fire
is going to burn the city they built
and we will
watch from the stone tower
and we will wait
for it to finish
and we can wait
a long time
and the Fire can
too.
—Eve
L. Ewing
In What Happened
she captures snap shots of the events.
City in a Garden
After
Carl Sandburg
The
Negro crowd from Twenty-ninth Street got into action, and
white men who came I contact with it were beaten…Further to the west, as darkness
came on, white gangsters became active.
Negroes in white districts suffered severely at their hands. From 9:00 p.m. until 2:00 a.m. twenty-seven
Negroes were beaten, seven were stabbed, and four were shot. (5)
o my ugly homestead,
blood-sodden
prairie.
Who
is horto, meaning:
if it grows it
once came from dirt.
o my love, why do
you till the ground with iron?
o my miracle,
why do you fire in the dark?
you, thief of
dusk, you, captain of my sorrows. you avarice.
your ground is
greedy for our children, and you take them as you please.
the babies come
from you, the train car orators, and the beloved hustlers.
they die, and
you send forth more, you who makes a place
in a middle
land, you ruthless. you seed ground.
you bear the
best of us and the worst in equal measure.
o my garden,
which am I.
—Eve
L. Ewing
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A youth confronts Illinois National Guardsmen during the 1968 West Side riots after the assassination of Martin Luther King.
|
April 5, 1968
After Gwendolyn
Brooks
Our country is
over, you see. Here lies
my prettiest
baby and her glass fingertips are
are all over the
tar. In the before I told
her, ‘play
beloved’ and
from the
storefront piano came legends
of the
mountaintop and it made
me weep. I was an ugly phoenix
but our dirt was
our own. As the sun rises
now I know what
we do is right. Unafraid
I stand before
the skinny boy with the
bayonet &
say ‘before I’ll be an ashen ghost, black
gone gray at
your hand like our dead philosopher,
I’ll burn my
own, you see, just the way I want, & you will
know it’s mine.’
Goodbye Madison. I will remember
my country, my
sun-up town. Because there
on the
mountaintop I saw the fire in the valley.
They
were coming to
take you away. They came
with cursed wat,
the hurting river the used to
strike down the
children of Birmingham, each life
a bad joke in
their bull eyes. And
I said ‘not
here. Not never. Not Madison. And exulted
in the shadow of
the first fire, then the next, the
the heat sending
sweat into my eyes, that simple salt hurt
keeping me from
thinking too long of your piano gone mute.
I suspect the
boy wanted to run then
but he stood
shaking, gun raised, and I said, “if this is it,
if this is my
last day that ever was,
man, at least I
know I got over,
that the likes
of you will never have us, that the
street I call my
only home burned to dust
at my hand. Let them sing of how bright the sun was as
a coward struck
me down. They will tell it always, they will say
that one
glorious morning, I showed hem your heart, lest they think it was settled.
—Eve
L. Ewing