Gary Anthology

 “We may have a lot of cleaning up to do, but we are hopeful, not miserable.”  Latrice Young, from “Not Miserable in Gary.”

below, Jimbo and Sam with Jesse Johnson triptych in background

At a Gardner Center book signing in Miller, Samuel Love gave me a copy of  his edited volume “The Gary Anthology,” which he signed, “To Jimbo, a true master of history from below.”  Nice.  I was particularly interested in reading “The Spring at Small Farms” by folklorist Kay Westhues as an illustration, in her words, “of how people of color and those with few economic resources are disproportionately burdened with the cost of pollution.”  On hand were a representative from Belt Publishing and at nearby tables authors Tyrell Anderson of the Decay Devils and former IUN student Jesse Johnson, now studying at Valparaiso University, whose work reminds me of Midwestern muralist Thomas Hart Benton. A couple days earlier, Brenda Love had posted a photo of their cat Captain Andy with a bookcase in the background containing Steel Shavings magazines. It reminded me I hadn’t given Sam my latest issue, so I had one with me, as well as another copy for Tyrell Anderson, both of whom are in it.

 

In the “Anthology” introduction Love noted that outsiders using various economic data recently pronounced Gary to be America’s “Most Miserable City.”  To counteract that specious conclusion Love wrote: “There is a love of loyalty and place that Gary inspires, intimately connected to the love of self-determination.  Miserable is not a word any of these writers would use to describe Gary, Indiana. And they know this place well.” Typical of this sentiment is this untitled poem by Tynlvae Taylor:

king drive 

huntington

king drive 

virginia

7th Av

my early life 

revolves around the east side

yellow buses to the west side

midtown

miller

tarrytown

surrounded by folks 

who looked 

talked

thought

like me.

the powers that be 

were black like me.

blight violence 

the negative press 

stays intact

but

i won’t let it distract

from the amazing life it gave

the beauty it has raised

i proudly claim Gary

sweet home always

Several contributors wrote about their parents’ civic-mindedness influencing their values.  In tenth grade Dena Holland-Neal, whose father became deputy mayor for Richard Hatcher, organized a walkout at Baily School in Glen Park, where she and other black students had been bussed, when the administration refused to honor Dr. Martin Luther King after he was assassinated.  Kym Mazelle wrote about her father, John Grisby, whose parents Harrison and Rosie (later Hassan and Rasheeda Shakir) arrived from Athens, Alabama, when John was a small child.  A steelworker who collected hundreds of signatures encouraging Hatcher to run for mayor, Grisby became a precinct committeeman and, according to Kym, worked tirelessly for his neighborhood and city:

   We would get calls in the middle of the night to help clear roads on cold winter nights.  I would hear my Dad take a call and say, “I’m on my way,” while getting dressed.  We got calls to help someone’s child get out of jail, calls to help feed and clothe people.  He would make sure people had their lights.  I remember how everyone loved and respected my dad.  He was a gentleman., he was kind, and never raised his voice.

Gardner Center photo by Joseph S. Pete

Joseph S. Pete wrote about the death in September 2016 of U.S. Steel maintenance worker Jonathan Arizola, electrocuted while trouble-shooting a crane in the slab storage yard.  Just a week before, Arizola had suffered an electric shock, and he told wife Whitney that things were getting perilous and that he had observed several close calls. As Pete concluded, “You have to work at the mill to appreciate how dangerous it truly is.” Previously, despite protests by union officials, steel officials had laid off maintenance workers, shut down safety training, and put off preventive maintenance, causing a backlog of work orders, and, wrote Pete, “forcing steelworkers into roving bare-bones crews to do maintenance in the areas of the sprawling mill they were unfamiliar with.” Following his death, the company almost immediately cut off Arizola’s family insurance and ultimately paid a paltry fine of $42,000 for safety violations that contributed to the fatal accident.  Pete concluded:  “Gary Works, the steam-plume-shrouded steel mill that’s all rust and rumbling semi-trucks hauling off heavy steel coils to points unknown, remains a place where there’s so guarantee you’ll return home when you start your shift.”

Lydia Johnson

Lydia Johnson’s “I Am From: Gary, Indiana” begins, “I am from a place where we say ‘pop’ instead of soda, from the North but the South slips out in our accents and hospitality.”  Lydia wrote of growing tomato plants in tire pots among mill pollution and of aunties and grandmothers who knew their neighbors by street or nickname.  Here is how the poem concluded:

I am from warm welcomes and hugs – not handshakes

from black Baptist hymns and the Quiet Storm on Chicago radio, 

I am from a city with black history and white flight, a place where crickets

sing in the grass of abandoned buildings all night.

 

Returning home, I complimented neighbor Cecilia on her Halloween decorations, and her friend Carl asked about the buttons on my vest.  When I noted that one represented the official seal of the city of Gary and that I was a regional historian, Carl said he was related to Northwest Indiana’s first permanent residents Joseph and Marie Bailly, who established a trading post near the Little Calumet River in present-day Porter County.  I told him my history, “Gary’s First Hundred Years” contained a section on them titled “Between Two Cultures” and gave him a copy.  During the 1830s Joseph Bailly acquired property at the mouth of the Grand Calumet River in present-day Gary where Marquette Park is located, in the hope of founding a “Town of Bailly.”  He laid out the site, naming future streets after family members. After his death a court-appointed trustee cheated Marie and their children out of the property. Raised by Ottawa tribal relatives, Marie dressed in Native American clothing and in widowhood seldom socialized with whites.  After the Potawatomi were forcibly removed from Indiana, she had few visitors, but her granddaughter Frances Howe wrote that on occasion a group of Potawatomi “came up from central Illinois to make maple sugar in a fine forest of hard maple nearby.”  I concluded:

    Years later, local residents honored her memory, but during her lifetime she was maligned and misunderstood.  Insensitive settlers regarded the elderly widow  as a half-caste whose Catholic religion was heretical and whose Indian habits were barbaric.  As a missionary, she had hoped that white settlers and Indians could coexist in harmony and that man’s capacity for love could overcome his immorality and greed., but her dreams collapsed in the 1830s.  The disillusionment of her remaining years was softened only by her enduring religious faith.

In 1962 Bailly Homestead became a National Historic Landmark and , located within Indiana Dunes national Park, in preserved by the park service.