Spook Who Sat by the Door (9780244198718) by Greenlee Sam

Author:Greenlee, Sam [Greenlee, Sam]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: non-fiction
ISBN: 9780244198718
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
Published: 2019-07-03T06:00:00+00:00

12

It had been a harsh winter, with subzero temperatures a regular thing. There would be an occasional respite while the big, soft snow covered the city and for a short time covered the grime and dirt and ugliness of Chicago with its virginal whiteness, but within hours after the last flake fell, the virginal snow would be a greasy, dirtgrimed whorelike snow and then the temperature would drop and film the streets with mirrorlike glaze, turning the city snow into something that crunched underfoot like an old cereal in a new box labeled super and all-new. There was nothing super and all-new about Chicago and it is not a place for people who concern themselves with the weather, winter or summer. The wind would whip in from the lake, bearing airborne razors of ice that sliced the flesh. There were regular gray skies and little sun. The sky seemed to sit just above the Tribune Tower and it would sometimes descend to the city streets when the warm-air masses moved up across the plains 134

from the Gulf of Mexico to turn the city into a fog-bound, slushy swamp full of mud-splattered people who groped their way in the dense muck, mire and moody low-sitting cloud, like amoebas in search of a guide to nowhere.

When there was sun, it would come from afar in a hazy, cloudless sky, giving a harsh, cold and biting light, the lack of clouds permitting what little warmth remained to flee toward the planets above, the people below creating little clouds of their own as they breathed and gasped, moving through the brutal city. Because the weather was so menacing, the Cobras were not missed from their usual haunts and there was no need to interrupt training by having some of the gang members on the block. It was too cold to be there and the police and social workers did not worry where they might be since the word was that the Cobras were no longer a bopping gang. And since lower-class Negroes are visible only when convenient or menacing, the Cobras disappeared and no one concerned themselves with what they might be doing that cold and forbidding winter.

They were learning the lessons of the oppressed throughout history in striking back at their oppressors ; the linguistics of deception ; subterfuge, to strike when least expected and then fade into the background; to hound, harass, worry and weaken the strong and whittle away at the strength and power that kept them where they were. Just before the rumble near the railroad tracks, the winter ended as abruptly as it had begun and spring was in Chicago with no warning, the flowers blooming, the trees suddenly budding, the grass turning green, the dirty snow melting and disappearing into the sewers. Spring meant baseball and track, walks in the parks for young lovers and examinations for the students reluctant to remain in the libraries and overheated apartments with textbooks that had become symbolic of the prison of a nasty Chicago winter.

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