Author Linda Gartz tells of her childhood and early adulthood amidst social upheaval in the city of Chicago in her memoir, Redlined: A Memoir of Race, Change, and Fractured Community in 1960s Chicago.
Gartz grew up the second child of second-generation immigrants to the US. Her father’s father boldly made the trip to the land of opportunity at age 21. She spent much of her childhood in cramped quarters with her parents and her older brother, living alongside strangers. They paid this price for the “dream” – the couple bought a house in a decent neighborhood; keeping roomers, even living in the same flat with them, helped pay expenses.
Gartz’s grandmother, a talented dressmaker, helped out with childcare and other chores while her mother worked to manage all the finances, tenants, and repairs in their rooming house; she had to do this alone half the year while Gartz’s dad traveled for his job. But Grandma K suffered mental illness and abused Gartz’s mother and father, sometimes violently. Gartz’s father felt oppressed by her presence, which caused ongoing, if mostly unspoken, conflict in the home.
Chicago’s social and economic upheaval served as a microcosm for national change, and as backdrop for the Gartz family drama.
African Americans fled the dangerous and economically dead-end South for more promising prospects in places like Chicago. But majority white cities and regions resisted their incursion through restructuring and re-designating neighborhoods and school districts. All the while, the civil rights movement sought large-scale change amidst peaceful protests, riots, and violent reprisals from the law.
The influx of black workers into her own neighborhood affected Gartz’s choice of schools and friends. Civil rights struggles incited her sympathies while her parents expressed their older prejudice. They feared that all of their hard-earned investments would vanish if “the colored” came in. Still, the teen had black friends and neighbors. She felt touched by the spirit of rebellion in a new testing of societal limits: sexual freedom.
Gartz felt driven to compose this intelligent account of the changing times when she and her brother “found our gold” in the attic of their parents’ home: diaries, letters, cards, calendars and notebooks reaching back to the couple’s own youth.
The undercurrent of family tensions became clear. Grandma K’s psychosis put the house on edge. Gartz’s father struggled to balance his home and work life, needing to earn money with a job that required six months of travel across each year, and also supporting his over-burdened wife with the demands of their rooming house with as many as eleven tenants. Her mother saw her behavior in the sexual revolution as shocking. Gartz includes details of the subtleties of “redlining” that allowed cities and regions to keep African Americans down and poor by limiting their ability to own property. Family photos pepper her book, lending emotive touches. The result is a vibrant look at the coming of age of a nation through the eyes of a frank, freethinking woman.
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