July, July!=Chicago Heat Wave
In 1995 a heat wave hit Chicago. Almost 800 people died.
Their bodies, too many for the morgue, were kept in refrigerated trucks in the coroner’s
parking lot.
From July 12 to July 16 daytime highs were above 100 degrees
while at night it didn’t cool off. Back then AC was not the norm. You opened
the window and turned on the fan. In my building the fuse box overheated and
fuses blew out until we were down to the last one. We were asked to turn off
refrigerators, TVs, stereos, whatever was drawing power.
I remember it was the very week I started recording Marie James,
a bag lady, to get her story. We sat in a room with a window open to the alley
and the fetid dumpster. She rolled in with her cart full of old milk jugs and
wiping her neck with a dirty rag. But somehow I was able to overcome the
sensory distractions and turn on my recorder. Her story transported me. A year later
Orphan Girl was published.
I have just now gotten around to reading 1919 by Eve Ewing. Dr. Eve Ewing, though
when she sat behind me at a performance of the play No Blue Memories: The Life of Gwendolyn Brooks I didn’t know she
was a PhD. She looked way too young. We chatted for a moment. She was way too
humble. I discovered she was the co-author of the play.
In her poetry collection 1919
she revisits the hot summer, the red summer, of 1919 in Chicago where from July
27 to August 3 38 people were killed in a race riot.
Dr. Eve L. Ewing is a sociologist of education and a writer
from Chicago. She is the author of Ghosts
in the Schoolyard: Racism and School Closings on Chicago’s South Side. She
is also author of Electric Arches,
which received awards from the American Library Association and the Poetry
Society of America and was named one of the year’s best books by NPR and the
Chicago Tribune. She also writes the Ironheart series for Marvel Comics. Ewing
is an assistant professor at the University of Chicago School of Social Service
Administration. Her work has been published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic,
The New York Times, and many other venues. She is a literary force to be
reckoned with.
In 1919 she has a
poem dedicated to the heat wave of 1995. As Chicago moves into another heat
wave beginning Thursday through the weekend, let’s keep these tragic events in
mind—check on seniors, our at risk neighbors, hand out bottles of water, have
mercy on us O Lord.
Link to sound cloud July, July
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