Redlined by Linda Gartz

Author:Linda Gartz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: She Writes Press
Published: 2018-04-17T04:00:00+00:00

By early July, my grandparents and Will had moved, so Dad and Mom tackled the six-flat in earnest. “After all the bragging Grandma did about her great housekeeping, they sure left that place a mess!” Mom told me once she and Dad returned home after spending the day determining what work my grandparents’ former apartment required before it could be rented.

Sweating through the July heat, Mom and Dad steamed and scraped off the old, dirty wallpaper only to discover the walls beneath were riddled with cracks. They hired Italian plasterers and, at a cost of several thousand dollars, replaced the failing furnace. Mom scrubbed the floors with trisodium phosphate, then sanded and varnished them. But Dad forgot to lay a drop cloth before prepping the walls for paint, and the newly varnished floor was spotted with primer. Mom wanted to cry.

“You ruined the varnish!” she yelled at Dad. He spent several hours with a turpentine-soaked rag and scraper, removing the errant spots. In most Chicago apartments, especially in African American communities, if landlords even bothered to paint, they certainly wasted neither time nor money cleaning up splatters or smudges. Windows often stayed broken for months or were permanently painted shut. Heat might be unpredictable or inadequate. But my parents’ old-world values required that their work was perfect.

Just as they were investing more effort and funds into the West Side, fate stepped in, giving them a clear vision of how to fulfill a dream they didn’t even know they had.

It was another building.

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