Benefits of Teaching Memoir: You Learn from Experts

As Whitney guided me through the lobby to our memoir-writing class at the Chicago Cultural Center last Wednesday, I got wind of a special exhibit there about a Chicago neighborhood called Bronzeville.

Wanda Bridgeforth, the 95-year-old matriarch of my classes? She grew up in Bronzeville. In her essays, she describes that segregated South Side neighborhood as a “city within a city.” Overcrowding, joblessness, and poverty were facts of life in Bronzeville when Wanda was growing up there. So was literature, jazz, blues, and gospel music.

An ad for The Sunset Cafe from the Bronzeville Echoes exhibit.

The neighborhood is also significant to Audrey Mitchell, the writer in our Chicago Cultural Center class who leads a memoir-writing class of her own now at her local Chicago public library. When her parents moved from South Carolina to Chicago during the Great Migration, they settled in Bronzeville.

The exhibit at the Chicago Cultural Center is called Bronzeville Echoes: Faces and Places of Chicago’s African American Music, and the City of Chicago web site describes it as an exhibit that highlights the contributions of important places and people that shaped the music scene. Their blurb encourages people to come and “explore Chicago’s music legacy through ragtime, jazz and blues.”

Of course I asked Wanda and Audrey if they’d stay after class Wednesday and talk me through the exhibit.

”Oh, we had that exact piano music,” Wanda gushed at the framed copy of a Scott Joplin rag. ” Audrey called Wanda over to an oversized black and white photo of a church. “That’s Ebenezer, isn’t it?” “Sure is,” said Wanda. “Ebenezer Mission Baptist,” she added. “At 45th and Vincennes.” Wanda is shrinking with age –under five feet tall now – but she talks big. Club DeLisa, Avalon, Trianon Ballroom, Wanda had a story about each of them. Soon passers-by were stopping to listen in, too.

When one stranger mentioned Grand Terrace, a Bronzeville club his father talked about all the time, Wanda called out the corner the club was on. After regaling the stranger with names of the businesses near Grand Terrace back then, she gave me a quick nudge. “Only Whites went to that club,” she whispered. “We couldn’t go there.“ I was dumbfounded. “This was a music club in Bronzeville, and you weren’t allowed in?” I asked, sounding a bit angry, I suppose.

“We couldn’t go because we couldn’t afford it!” she laughed, explaining that performers would always play a cheaper Sunday show at The Regal. “You’d get in for a quarter, that’s where we all went, all our friends and neighbors always went to the Regal,” she said, describing men in hats, vests and spats at jazz shows. “women wore hats and gloves, and we carried purses that matched our dresses. We were hitting on full,” she said.

Hitting on full?

“We were dressed to the nines!”she laughed, and I thanked her for the translation.

Hotels were segregated back then, so performers stayed in Bronzeville with friends. “We’d see Louis Armstrong, Fats Waller, Earl Hines and all those guys around the neighborhood all the time, too.”

Decades later, Audrey would attend some of those same clubs to see The Temptations and Smokey Robinson and the Miracles. More people stopped to eavesdrop on Wanda and Audrey, others followed us for a while, and when we left the exhibit, Audrey and Wanda started chatting with each other about special guide books and directories they used during Jim Crow days. Audrey remembered her family bringing the Green Book — officially titled the Negro Motorist Green Book — along on vacations to find hotels that were safe to stay in, and Wanda said that once she got home she was going to dig out her Scott’s Blue Book to look up some of the names she’d read in the exhibit. “It’s like the white pages, but half the size…The real name is longer,” she said. The “Directory of Greater Chicago’s Colored Citizens – I still have the 1947 edition.”

Gee whiz. The folks who curated that exhibit could have used Audrey and Wanda as fact-checkers. What a treat — and a privilege — to walk through that exhibit with experts.