My American Dream isn’t that much different than my parents’
It is September 1978, the second week of school, and an 8-year-old boy with thick glasses is playing a handheld football video game at the kitchen table with his friends LaVelle, Gary and Lucius.
The boy is awkward and curious. He has a lopsided Afro and a shy grin. He and the others talk about TV shows (“CHiPs” and “The Six Million Dollar Man”) and which NFL running back is better (Walter Payton or Earl Campbell), as they wait for a quick breakfast. The boy is me. We have just started third grade at Samuel Clemens Elementary School on Milwaukee’s north side and are wait-
ing for my father to serve up breakfast — it’s always either grilled cheese or Spam and toast. We are barely finished eating before my Dad rushes us out the door. We can’t ever be late.
After a block or two, Corey, Yolanda, Lance and Desiree join us. Yolanda, whose mom died when she was 18 months old, is the first kid I knew who grew up without a mother.
I started third grade about two years after my parents bought their first home, a duplex near N. 39th and W. Capitol Drive. The neighborhood was a lot different from the one where we had lived before, renting a home off N. 9th St. and W. Keefe Ave.
Our old home was one block west of the freeway, where some homes were run-down and lawns were overgrown. The neighborhood was all black.
Our new home was on a street lined with trees, the branches meeting overhead. To a boy, it seemed like driving through a tunnel.
Our home even had a swimming pool in the backyard. My parents had it removed because none of us knew how to swim, and they were worried about me drowning.
We were the fourth black family to move onto our block. Our yellow brick duplex was sandwiched between two white neighbors. A massive oak tree stood guard in the front yard — still does.
We would often see an elderly white couple, George and Audrey Fargo, who lived a block away. My parents nicknamed them “the lovebirds,” because they always held hands while walking through the neighborhood.
They knew the kids in the area and encouraged us to succeed in school. I would show them my report cards, and they gave me chocolates or quarters for every “A.”
George was a retired foundry worker. They didn’t own a car, but my parents would give them rides when they saw them walking.
Although I was young, I was keenly aware of the racial changes in my neighborhood. The lovebirds had lived in their house for several decades before we moved in. When most of the white families started to flee the area, they refused to leave.
That is, until their home was broken into in 1993. After that, relatives stepped in, sold the house and whisked them away up north.
We still live in the same house. A few of the other homeowners from 40 years ago still live in the neighborhood, too.
But corner stores have been replaced by smoke shops. And with the closing of Wal-Mart and Lowe’s at Midtown, few stores remain nearby.
On W. Capitol Drive and N. Sherman Blvd., the building that once housed 1290-AM — long considered the voice of the African-American community — closed in 2013.
You can usually find empty liquor bottles, take-out containers and blunt wrappers entwined in the fence.
I used to carry a plastic grocery bag to pick up trash when I went walking in the neighborhood, but realized I needed a much bigger bag because it was always full before I completed my journey.
His grandparents introduced my parents to kielbasa and sauerkraut, while my mother introduced them to southern-style fried chicken, greens and hot-water cornbread.
When Jimmy’s grandfather took ill and moved into a nursing home, the house was sold.
The woman who bought it was black and the mother of three children. When her youngest child was in high school, he was shot in the alley behind Capitol Foods, near the intersection of N. 41st St. and W. Capitol Drive — just blocks from home.
Paralyzed from the waist down, he now lives in the house alone. His mother passed away a few years ago.
I pull his garbage and recycling bins to the curb on collection days and check up on him from time to time.
*** For my parents, everything about homeownership was new. They wanted to fit in, so when my father saw the neighbors edging their lawns, he started doing it, too. And he made me pull all the weeds from between the cracks in the sidewalk.
We followed the unwritten rules of the block, shoveling the snow in front of the house as soon as it stopped falling and making sure the grass never got more than three or four inches high.
As the owners of a duplex, my parents had the added responsibility of being landlords. That meant being role models for our tenants.
Once, my parents had to evict a couple when the man became addicted to drugs and started abusing his girlfriend. After that, the upstairs was vacant until I moved in several years after college.
I’ve had stable housing all my life. Some of my third-grade classmates were not so lucky.
One of my classmates said the apartment he lived in while going to Clemens was so infested with roaches that he had to shake his clothes out before putting them on for school. No matter how hard he tries, he can’t escape the memory.
Of the 27 others, at least two grew up to know homelessness.
My parents were able to achieve most of their success with little more than a high school education. Half the parents of the students in my class owned homes.
When I walked to school, I would see neighbors in coveralls and steeltoed boots, carrying metal lunchboxes as they walked to A.O. Smith, one of the largest manufacturers in the city.
Back then, the steel car frames outside the plant were stacked up like Tinker Toys, waiting to be shipped by train to Detroit.
***
My parents, James David Causey and Otha Reatha Tobias, met in Mississippi, where both were born.
My father worked with my mother’s father at a sawmill in Liberty, Miss. My Grandpa Tobias was a minister and a NAACP activist. My father respected that.
One day, my grandpa told my dad he should come over to the house and meet his daughters. My father instantly fell for my mother.
They dated with chaperones — my uncles.
In 1963, after serving in the U.S. Army during the Korean conflict, my father moved to Milwaukee. He was a free spirit and wanted to explore
something new.
“My cousins were already here, so it made everything easier,” he said. “They told me where to go and where not to go, and they helped me to find a place. That’s how it was done back then. It was more opportunities here.”
Around the same time, my mother and her older sister moved to Chicago to live with an aunt. When my father discovered he could take the Greyhound bus to see her, they quickly rekindled their romance.
They settled in Milwaukee because they believed its smaller size and lower cost of living would help them get established faster than in Chicago.
At first, my family rented from an elderly black man named Charles Addison, whom everyone knew as “Mr. Charlie.” He was from Mississippi, too. We lived upstairs and he gave my parents a break on their rent because my mother helped care for his ailing aunt.
She ultimately died in my mother’s arms. Years later, after moving back to Mississippi, Mr. Charlie died at 97.
“He never charged us more than $65 a month for rent our entire time there,” my mother said. “That helped us to save up for our down payment on our home.”
In March, when I took my mother to Mississippi to see her dying brother, Mr. Charlie’s son, Willie Addison, stopped over to pay his respects.
Addison said Mr. Charlie moved back to Mississippi in the 1990s and he often talked about my parents and what great tenants they were.
** *
The opportunity to get betterpaying jobs also helped my parents make the transition from renting to homeownership.
One of my mother’s first jobs was making salads at Karl Ratzsch’s restaurant downtown. She left there for assembly line work at Koss Corp., which still makes speakers and headphones.
After earning a certificate in welding at Milwaukee Area Technical College, my father put those skills to use at Safeway Products, which made scaffolding.
The black marriage rate was a lot higher back then — about 61% in 1960, compared to 31% today, according to the Pew Research Center.
My parents only owned one car at a time, even though they both knew how to drive. My parents always cooked — my father usually fixed my breakfast and my mother usually prepared a big enough dinner over the weekend that we could eat off it for a few days.
We didn’t dine out often. When we did, it was usually a buffet lunch after church.
** * The neighborhood began changing around us as the city’s job situation worsened.
When I attended Jackie Robinson, my neighborhood middle school in 1983, I was jumped by the 2-7 Boyz — a new street gang — on my way to school one morning. I still remember the chant they would say before they would pounce.
Who that talking ‘bout whippin’ 2-7? Who that? Who that?
I was one of many at Robinson who got jumped that year. My glasses were broken and my Velcro wallet stolen.
My mother wanted me to transfer to a suburban school. My father wanted me to learn how to defend myself. So I started taking boxing lessons at the Al Moreland Boxing Club.
My parents let me make the decision about whether to stay at Robinson. I decided to stay, but kept some brass knuckles that my father had welded for me in my backpack.
I am an only child, and my parents are getting up in age. They still live in the downstairs apartment of that duplex they bought more than 40 years ago. My fiancée and I live upstairs, and she helps take care of them.
I’m planning to buy the house from them this summer.
I never thought I would buy a home in Milwaukee, in part because of the climate here — political, racial and social — along with the lack of opportunities for African-Americans to get ahead.
I have a daughter and in 2014, a study by the Annie E. Casey Foundation called Wisconsin the worst state in America in which to raise a black child.
But I know everything about our duplex. I know which floorboard screeches when you step on it. I know how our grapevine in the backyard brings the biggest raccoons you could ever want to see in the summertime. I know the tree in the backyard drops tiny acorns every few years, and you can’t walk barefoot in the grass.
I love my community. There’s Ms. Betty, 77, who makes sure her grass is the greenest and her yard is the cleanest.
When the weather is nice, Ms. Betty is outside as early as 6 a.m., sweeping her side of the street or sitting in her lawn chair enjoying the quiet of the morning.
I love how Mr. Thomas picks up the trash people toss out of their cars on weekends.
Then there’s Mr. Clay, four houses down on my side of the street. He’s a snowbird, a former Pabst Brewery worker who travels to his home in Mississippi for most of the winter. When he returns, he meticulously edges his lawn and pulls every weed by hand. He still treats me like a teenager, always telling me to be careful when I drive.
They never moved because N. 39th St. is home.
My neighbors, the older pillars of the block, watched me grow from a child who made a lot of noise doing spinouts on his bicycle to a man.
We never formed a formal block watch because we never needed to. Most of us know one another, and we talk to each other all the time. My biggest fear is this: Who will move in next? Will they have the same level of commitment to keeping our block clean and safe? To being good neighbors? Our block is not crime-free. Last October, a hit-and-run driver totaled Ms. Betty’s car in front of her home, moments after she got out.
In the four-unit building Mr. Thomas owns, someone kicked in the front door of one of the apartments a few months ago — the second break-in there in less than a year. No one was home at the time, and the police recommended he install security cameras.
My American Dream isn’t much different than my parents’.
Forty years ago they wanted to build wealth by investing in a home. They wanted to give me the opportunity to attend a good school in a safe neighborhood.
That’s the same thing I want for my daughter.