shackles. In the early 1900s black people were allowed to live only on the South Side of the city, where the authorities built affordable housing for the poor. Many black people were unable to move to better neighborhoods because they were poor and were not able to leave the ghetto. For over a hundred years white people had an aversion, as deeply held as if it were a creed, to living together with black people. That aversion was sometimes referred to in American psychological literature as “Negrophobia.” All attempts, spontaneous and deliberate, to break the barrier failed. On July 27, 1919, it got very hot in Chicago and this made a seventeen-year-old black man, Eugene Williams, seek relief on the beach at Twenty-ninth Street. The beach, like everything else in the city, had its white and its black sections. Eugene felt wonderfully refreshed as he jumped into the cool water and kept swimming for about an hour. Then it occurred to him, unfortunately, to test his ability to stay underwater. So he held his breath and dived under the surface. And because a diver cannot precisely fix his location, Eugene bobbed up and opened his eyes only to discover that he had crossed the barrier and found himself in the white swimming area. He heard angry shouts and before he could hurry back to where he had come from, white swimmers grabbed him, blinded by anger at his sullying their territorial waters. They started calling him names and beating him; they punched him in the stomach and face as hard as they could. Some used wooden oars to beat him repeatedly on the head until he died. Then they discarded his body on the beach. What made matters worse was the fact that white policemen persistently refused to arrest the killers or interrogate them. During the six days that followed Chicago witnessed horrific racial clashes between white and black people, which left thirty-eight people dead and hundreds of others injured or homeless. The memory of Eugene Williams remained for a long time as a strong lesson for anyone who thought of breaking the barrier. In the year 1966, at the height of the civil rights movement against racism and the Vietnam War, the famous black American leader Martin Luther King Jr. arrived in Chicago and led a procession of tens of thousands of predominantly black marchers through white neighborhoods. King wanted to send a Christian message of love and brotherhood and to declare, at the same time, that the race situation was no longer tolerable. But the result was violent and frustrating. White people attacked the march viciously, throwing stones and rotten eggs and tomatoes on the marchers. They attacked them with clubs and gunfire, and many black people were injured. It wasn’t long afterward that King himself was shot by a white racist fanatic. In 1984, a black couple made a fortune and bought a house in a rich white neighborhood. The answer came right away: their white neighbors harassed them and threw stones at them, which resulted in serious injuries. Then the angry neighbors went further, burning first the garage and then the whole house. The couple fled. A similar thing happened to another black couple the same year, and the result was even more tragic.
And thus, throughout Chicago’s history, the racial barrier remained as solid as a rock that could not be ignored or transcended: the north of the city and its suburbs were made up of upscale communities inhabited by a white elite in the highest income brackets in the country, while in the black South Side poverty reached levels hard to imagine in America. Unemployment there was rampant, as were drugs, murders, rapes, and robberies. Education and health services were substandard, and everything was distorted, even the concept of family. Many black children were raised by their mothers alone because the fathers left, were killed, or were in jail. It was this glaring contrast between those two worlds that made the famous sociologist Gregory Squires resort to the language of literature when he prefaced his research on Chicago with the following: “It’s not the many contradictions that Chicago embodies that distinguish it. What makes it a unique city is that it always takes its contradictions to the utmost.”
AS SOON AS RA’FAT THABIT drove into Oakland, he was horrified: many of the redbrick homes were in ruins; backyards were filled with old junk and garbage; gang slogans were sprayed in black and red on the walls; groups of young black people were standing on street corners smoking marijuana; loud music and noise came from some open bars. Ra’fat’s anguish increased as he asked himself: How does my daughter live in such a dump? He was determined to see her by any means. He had not thought about what he would tell her when he knocked on her door and awakened her at two o’clock in the morning. He was going to see her now and let come what may. That was what he told himself as he slowed down and looked at the house numbers. He knew Jeff’s address by heart. When he got close to the house he went into the parking lot across the street. He locked the car using his remote and hurried to get to the street. It was pitch-dark, and he was suddenly overcome by an uncomfortable feeling. As soon as he passed the first row of cars, he sensed that someone was following him. He tried to dispel the thought but heard, clearly this time, something moving in the dark next to him. He stopped and turned around and little by little was able to make out a large body approaching.
“Why hasn’t the old man gone to bed yet?”
The surprise paralyzed Ra’fat, so he fell silent. The man laughed loudly and it seemed from his soft, languorous voice that he was stoned.
“Why’d you come to Oakland, old man? Are you looking for a woman or do you want a fix?”
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