Maxwell Street, 1999

by Margaret Mantle


Margaret Mantle <mmantle@topco.com> is a British-born journalist, author, and poet who now lives in Evanston, Illinois.


The street is dying.

The sun pulls wet exhausted air

from the gutters where scraps of garbage

drown in dirty water.

Broken buildings lean and tremble.

Hungry creatures forage in hallways.

**

This is where they came

in their thousands, generations of them,

old men and women and babies,

skinny young eager men holding their breath

and jumping off the dock at Ellis Island

headlong into America.

**

Promises loud in their ears brought them to Chicago,

to Maxwell Street and the market

where they opened their battered suitcases,

borrowed pushcarts, set up trestle tables

piled with watches, socks, bits of bicycles,

all the minutiae of urban living sold for a song, or less -

a snatch of sound, a single trumpet note

from a black bluesman standing on a crate.

**

Maxwell Street,

Chicago in its urgent, early incarnation,

opportunity a word to tangle foreign tongues,

its promise, though, clear as the lighthouse beacon

swinging its shaft of light across Lake Michigan.

**

The blues were born again here,

singing the world's heart full of longing,

loss, resignation.

Nations met and mixed

and became a family, a city, became Chicago

on Sunday morning living, dealing,

swift as swallows -

"we cheat you fair,"

shouts and laughter

and the smell of onions from Jim's hot dog stand

sashaying up the street.

**

Parking lots and college dorms go up

and sanitation trucks sidle past with averted eyes.

But the people of Maxwell Street have been around longer

and seen more and sung and suffered with more passion

than the city fathers and seem not to hear

the death cart's clanging bell.

**

Their world has shrunk to a city block,

perhaps, but they can fit a world into that space.

The tourists still come and are not disappointed:

They see the street wake up on Sunday morning

as the folks for whom the dilapidated remnants

of this place still mean a room out of the cold

emerge from drab doorways, nod to curious cameras.

**

On the corner of Maxwell and Halstead

Jumping Willie Cobbs sweats and rejoices

to the band's pounding beat,

Huge, sweet-faced, Jimmie Lee Robinson,

silver spurs on his boots,

pauses a moment for a photograph,

then takes his guitar and mounts the makeshift stage

to sing the song of Maxwell Street.

**

It's Sunday morning,

and the people of the dying street

dance in the gutters,

comfort the broken buildings with music,

relive their past

defiantly

here on the corner

where the street is living.

-- Margaret Mantle

June 16, 1999


Margaret Mantle was raised in Kent - the garden of England - and trained and worked as a reporter and feature writer on London's Fleet Street before embarking on some rather exotic marriage-induced travels which brought her to the United States 20 years ago.

Her poetry, a relatively new development in her writing career, has appeared or will appear shortly in publications including A New Song, Troubadour, California Quarterly, and Windhover.

Mantle is the mother of two beautiful daughters, Victoria and Emma Kate, and the author of Some Just Clap Their Hands: Raising a Handicapped Child (Adama Books, 1985) which was inspired by Victoria, now 31, who has mental retardation.


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