This summer she was interning in a Chicago Park District youth camp, coaching soccer. She’d played enough soccer as a child that she knew the basics. She’d jumped into the sport with the energy she brought to everything she did. Even though her kids hadn’t had all the private camps and other opportunities that came to girls in affluent communities, Bernie inspired them to play with something close to her own ferocity.
I’d come down to Forty-seventh Street to watch the eleven-year-old Sisters play their final match of a round-robin tournament. The South Lakefront Improvement Council—SLICK—had helped sponsor the Sisters and wanted them to take a bow following the game. SLICK was holding their monthly meeting; the girls were supposed to wait in the hall until someone came out for them.
A woman whose tightly curled hair was dyed a rusty brown opened the common room door and stuck her head into the hall. “Can you girls keep it down—oh! Are these our soccer players?”
“Yes,” Bernie said. “We are a wonderful team, but we are not wonderful at waiting in the hall. When do we go in?”
“Very soon.” The woman tittered, as if Bernie had made a mildly amusing joke. As she shut the door, we heard a man yelling from inside the room.
“You damned liar! Where’d you come up with this pile of crap? You go to Lying School? Because you sure as hell didn’t learn this in any environmental studies program.”
The girls put their hands over their mouths to muffle their shocked laughter.
I moved to the door and stuck my head through. The meeting room had served as a community meeting hall back when Prairie Savings and Loan was a Bronzeville landmark. It held a shallow stage and perhaps a hundred fifty folding chairs, arranged today in concentric semicircles. The seats were full, not because the community wanted to attend a meeting on a late summer afternoon, but because family members had been rooting for the Sisters and now wanted to see them get their awards.
Two men and a woman, all in later middle age, were trying to run the meeting, but the shouting from the audience had apparently taken them by surprise. One of the men had a gavel that he kept pounding against a wood block while shouting, “Order, order!” The woman—thin, wiry, wearing a blue T-shirt with the SLICK logo—was bouncing up and down in her chair, trying to scream at the heckler in the audience. The second man didn’t look up; he was writing on a white pad in a slow hand.
The protestor was a white man in his forties, his skin tanned like old leather, wearing khaki shorts and a T-shirt with a faded sunflower on it. He might have been handsome, but fury had distorted his expression.
His wrath was apparently directed at a young man on the stage who was awkwardly balancing a computer on a music stand: like much of the South Side, the building where SLICK held its meetings didn’t run to amenities like podiums. He’d apparently been making a presentation about filling in part of the lakefront around Forty-seventh Street; a sketch of a sand beach, playground equipment, and a bar and restaurant was projected onto the wall behind the stage.
“But, sir, this is part of the original Burnham plan, or at least, it’s how Burnham—”
“Like crap it’s the Burnham plan.” Although the younger man had a mike, the protestor’s shout drowned it out.
The man charged up the aisle to the stage. The youth flinched and dropped his mouse. When he bent to pick it up, his computer hit the floor. The picture on the wall behind the stage disappeared.
Before the protestor reached the steps, several audience members were there, blocking his path. He wrestled with them, still shouting abuse, at both the speaker and the trio running the meeting.
A pair of Chicago cops appeared from a far corner. They pinned the man’s arms behind his back and marched him down the aisle and out the door, shoving me to one side. A forest of cell phones rose up, recording the moment.
Much of the audience had cheered the cops, but a few yelled in support of the protestor. “Let him speak!” “Let him breathe.” “The whole world’s watching.”
The man with the gavel continued to slam it against a wood block. In the hall behind me, the girls were watching, openmouthed, as the cops hustled the protestor out of the building. When they’d disappeared, the soccer players began an excited chatter that Bernie didn’t try to silence.
“That is Leo he was attacking,” she said to me. “Good that the police have arrested him!”
“Leo?” I echoed.
“He is working for this SLICK this summer. He helped me organize today’s celebration for my team. He does not need this attack.”
She ushered her players into the room, where they clustered behind the last row of chairs.
The woman on the stage was now marching back and forth across the short platform. She slapped a wooden pointer against the open palm of her left hand, as if it were a field marshal’s swagger stick.
“Our council is committed to protecting the lake and the lakefront,” she screamed. “We scrutinize every action that impacts Lake Michigan. I’ve been living on the South Side since I was nineteen; I raised three children here. I’ve dedicated my life to this community and to our lakefront. I resent professional protestors coming in here trying to overturn the applecart.”
“Hear, hear!” cried the gaveller. “No professional protestors.”
The second man on the stage still didn’t look up from the documents he was working on.
“We need a motion to accept the report as Leo presented it.” The woman smacked her pointer on the table so hard that the note maker dropped his pen.
“But I haven’t finished,” Leo objected.
“That’s okay, son,” the gaveller boomed. “Everyone who wants the details can get them from the SLICK website.”
A white-haired woman near the front of the room got to her feet. “I’m not a professional protestor, Mona; I’ve lived on the South Side longer than you, I’ve raised children here, although what that has to do with protecting the lakefront I don’t know. However, I also have some knowledge of parliamentary procedure. We can’t vote on a proposal whose details we don’t even know.”
“You’re not recognized, the chair does not recognize you,” the gaveller roared, his cheeks swollen with rage.
Next to me, Bernie was frowning, worried by the way the meeting was devolving. “This isn’t right. Why won’t they let Leo finish?”
I didn’t try to answer. “This would be a good time for your girls to get their awards. Otherwise the meeting will turn into a gong show and your kids will be ignored.”
Idea and action go hand in hand with Bernie. She blew a sharp trill on her coach’s whistle. The room became silent. She nodded at her team, and they marched to the stage, chanting,
“South Side Sisters coming through
We finish any job we start to do.
We played our best
We passed the test
We’re the champs
So forget the rest.”
The girls stepped in front of the table. They stomped, twirled, and performed an elaborate choreography with their arms. The audience burst into spontaneous applause, everyone relieved to abandon the fights over plans for the lakefront.
Mona went to the mike where Leo had been speaking, told the girls what a credit they were to the South Side, to the values of hard work and determination, and presented each with a certificate and a red rosette. Another sponsor, a local pizzeria, handed out coupons for free pizzas, and the girls marched off the stage, yelling their chant again, more loudly than before. Their families followed. In a few minutes, only about a dozen people were left inside. I stopped to ask the white-haired woman what was going on.