She and I were all for strengthening the character of black youth across America, but we also needed rather desperately to get to Water Tower Place before the K-Swiss sneaker sale ended. We often found ourselves looking for rides or to borrow a car. Because I lived in a one-car family with two working parents, the odds were usually better at the Jacksons’ house, where Mrs. Jackson had both a wood-paneled station wagon and a little sports car. Sometimes we’d hitch rides with the various staff members or visitors who buzzed in and out. What we sacrificed was control. This would become one of my early, unwitting lessons about life in politics: Schedules and plans never seemed to stick. Even standing on the far edge of the vortex, you still felt its spin. Santita and I were often stuck waiting out some delay that related to her father—a meeting that was running long or a plane that was still circling the airport—or detouring through a series of last-minute stops. We’d think we were getting a ride home from school or going to the mall, but instead we’d end up at a political rally on the West Side or stranded for hours at the Operation PUSH headquarters in Hyde Park.
One day we found ourselves marching with a crowd of Jesse Jackson supporters in the Bud Billiken Day Parade. The parade, named for a fictional character from a long-ago newspaper column, is one of the South Side’s grandest traditions, held every August—an extravaganza of marching bands and floats that runs for almost two miles along Martin Luther King Jr. Drive, through the heart of the African American neighborhood that was once referred to as the Black Belt but was later rechristened Bronzeville. The Bud Billiken Day Parade had been going on since 1929, and it was all about African American pride. If you were any sort of community leader or politician, it was—and still is, to this day—more or less mandatory that you show up and walk the route.
I didn’t know it at the time, but the vortex around Santita’s father was starting to spin faster. Jesse Jackson was a few years from formally launching a run to be president of the United States, which means he was likely beginning to actively consider the idea during the time we were in high school. Money had to be raised. Connections needed to be made. Running for president, I understand now, is an all-consuming, full-body effort for every person involved, and good campaigns tend to involve a stage-setting, groundwork-laying preamble, which can add whole years to the effort. Setting his sights on the 1984 election, Jesse Jackson would become the second African American ever to run a serious national campaign for the presidency, after Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm’s unsuccessful run in 1972. My guess is that at least some of this was on his mind at the time of the parade.
What I knew was that I personally didn’t love the feeling of being out there, thrust under a baking sun amid balloons and bullhorns, amid trombones and throngs of cheering people. The fanfare was fun and even intoxicating, but there was something about it, and about politics in general, that made me queasy. For one thing, I was someone who liked things to be neat and planned in advance, and from what I could tell, there seemed to be nothing especially neat about a life in politics. The parade had not been part of my plan. As I remember it, Santita and I hadn’t intended on joining at all. We’d been conscripted at the last minute, maybe by her mother or father, or by someone else in the movement who’d caught us before we could follow through on whatever ideas we’d had for ourselves that day. But I loved Santita dearly, and I was also a polite kid who for the most part went along with what adults told me to do, and so I’d done it. I’d plunged myself deep into the hot, spinning noisiness of the Bud Billiken Day Parade.
I arrived home at Euclid Avenue that evening to find my mother laughing.
“I just saw you on TV,” she said.
She’d been watching the news and spotted me marching alongside Santita, waving and smiling and going along. What made her laugh, I’d guess, is that she also picked up on the queasiness—the fact that maybe I’d been caught up in something I’d rather not do.
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