I’ve always been a newshound, and the election frenzy has only made it worse. But the last few days I have been watching TV for every scrap of news about Jennifer Hudson and the tragic murders that have befallen her family. No amount of fame or success could ever compensate for the loss of her mother, brother and nephew; she has been in my prayers since Friday.
I have haunted the television for the scenes outside her mother’s home, watching the shots of the makeshift memorial constructed against the chain link fence, and the faces of her neighbors, at once shocked and compelled to bear witness. I don’t know any of these people I have seen, but I recognize them. They are the men and women, the boys and girls that populated the first 18 years of my life, the working-class, “round the way” folks I’ve been looking at all my life.
Like Jennifer Hudson, like Michelle Obama, I’m a South Side Girl. Watching the Skycam shots of Yale Ave., I found myself lonely for the six-story buildings that line the streets in neighborhoods like Englewood, and Kenwood-Oakland, where I grew up. All my life I have loved those streets; those buildings; those loud, earnest, hard-working, aimless, church-going, hilarious and loving people who hang out with each other, take care of each other, hurt each other. I am not romantic about where I come from. Much as I loved the South Side, I knew I had to go, a long time ago. But just because you leave home doesn’t mean home leaves you.
Many of us leave behind people we love. Sometimes, we leave the people we have to leave behind; it’s either us or them. Here in New York, a long way from my childhood life, I heard someone on the street wondering how someone like Jennifer Hudson could even know “people like that” –meaning, I presume, the estranged brother in law who is being investigated for the triple murder. Plenty of us from humble beginnings know “people like that.” I don’t know anybody black who doesn’t know somebody who hasn’t been to jail–usually a relative. (That is a fact that often says more about the criminal justice system than it does about our relatives.) But it also speaks to the complex loyalties of black family life, the unwillingness to disown someone unless you really must, and the paradoxical desire to both separate yourself from and belong to the people who make you who you are. It is really nothing new; I have felt it periodically for decades. Rarely, though, have I felt it so intensely as these last few days, when the divergent stories of two South Side Girls–Michelle Obama and Jennifer Hudson–are everywhere.
South Side Girls
I’ve always been a newshound, and the election frenzy has only made it worse. But the last few days I have been watching TV for every scrap of news about Jennifer Hudson and the tragic murders that have befallen her family. No amount of fame or success could ever compensate for the loss of her mother, brother and nephew; she has been in my prayers since Friday.
I have haunted the television for the scenes outside her mother’s home, watching the shots of the makeshift memorial constructed against the chain link fence, and the faces of her neighbors, at once shocked and compelled to bear witness. I don’t know any of these people I have seen, but I recognize them. They are the men and women, the boys and girls that populated the first 18 years of my life, the working-class, “round the way” folks I’ve been looking at all my life.
Like Jennifer Hudson, like Michelle Obama, I’m a South Side Girl. Watching the Skycam shots of Yale Ave., I found myself lonely for the six-story buildings that line the streets in neighborhoods like Englewood, and Kenwood-Oakland, where I grew up. All my life I have loved those streets; those buildings; those loud, earnest, hard-working, aimless, church-going, hilarious and loving people who hang out with each other, take care of each other, hurt each other. I am not romantic about where I come from. Much as I loved the South Side, I knew I had to go, a long time ago. But just because you leave home doesn’t mean home leaves you.
Many of us leave behind people we love. Sometimes, we leave the people we have to leave behind; it’s either us or them. Here in New York, a long way from my childhood life, I heard someone on the street wondering how someone like Jennifer Hudson could even know “people like that” –meaning, I presume, the estranged brother in law who is being investigated for the triple murder. Plenty of us from humble beginnings know “people like that.” I don’t know anybody black who doesn’t know somebody who hasn’t been to jail–usually a relative. (That is a fact that often says more about the criminal justice system than it does about our relatives.) But it also speaks to the complex loyalties of black family life, the unwillingness to disown someone unless you really must, and the paradoxical desire to both separate yourself from and belong to the people who make you who you are. It is really nothing new; I have felt it periodically for decades. Rarely, though, have I felt it so intensely as these last few days, when the divergent stories of two South Side Girls–Michelle Obama and Jennifer Hudson–are everywhere.
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