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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