This book is hard to categorize. It isn’t quite a memoir, though it is drawn from Larsen’s memories of growing up in the Englewood neighborhood of Chicago in the early sixties. It isn’t a history exactly, though one can catch hints of the extensive research that went into it. It is certainly a novel, but it is hard to nail down at first exactly whose story this is. But I can tell you one thing for sure: although it defies categorization, it is a good book.
For example, the opening chapter of Green Street in Black and White introduces the reader to the Green Street boys: Catholic Frank Bertolli, Erik Pederson, Eddie Medema, and Pete Koning. They consider themselves something of a gang, though they seem to be more friends in their 1960s Chicago neighborhood than they are hoodlums. The reader might be forgiven for thinking at first that this is a novel for and about middle school readers. But this is not the story of the Green Street Gang, not exclusively anyway.
Other chapters might make the reader think it is the story of the Pedersen family, or the Jackson family, or six or seven other families. It actually has more in common with a very serious take on a Garrison Keillor story–one in which we get to know many inhabitants of a town (or in this case, a Chicago neighborhood block). We laugh along with the story sometimes, but we also wince at the moments of biting irony. Because this isn’t a story about the Green Street boys, the Pedersons, or the Jacksons. It is a story of a community.
The second chapter makes this clear. On a summer evening, many of the families of Green Street enjoy the porches of their Chicago bungalows, having dinner together with pleasant conversation, and strolling up and down the block. We meet Carl and Florence Bensema, George and Millie Clement, Fenna and Magnus Pederson (Erik’s parents), Werner Eck, Henk Koning–all of whom seem to be friendly neighbors who appear to get along reasonably well as part of a small community. This particular night, however, the talk focuses on concerns about a Black family that has moved into a nearby neighborhood and a story about a Black man who tried to get a haircut in a nearby barbershop and how the owner scared him off with a razor. The chapter ends the next morning, when the first for-sale sign appears on the block.
The perspective of young kids, perceptive enough to figure out what is happening to their community, shows their moral outrage at the hypocrisy they witness. The perspectives of a range of families and adults in the rest of the book reveal reasonable adult concerns, unreasonable biases and fears, and a range of opinions. This story invites us onto the porches and into the living rooms and kitchens of many families. It shows us the church council meetings and Christian school board meetings of this neighborhood. We hear the conversations, the rationalization, the sorrows, the desperation, the regrets, and all the ways a community feels when fear and a herd mentality cause people of faith to make decisions that directly go against what they say they believe.
Larsen uses humor to disarm the reader, which can then set us up to see that this story of prejudice and racism in the 1960s is describing communities that sound remarkably like our own. By presenting the story from so many different angles, Larsen is presenting us with that part of our own history that falls between the cracks. This familiar-sounding community is not only a predominantly Christian community, it is significantly a Reformed community. Larsen describes a community that moved from Chicago neighborhoods like Englewood, Roseland, and Evergreen Park, to suburban South Holland, Oak Lawn, and Lansing, Illinois, and then moved again to Orland Park, Crown Point, and Cedar Lake, each time at least partly motivated by one group of God’s children fleeing another group of God’s children.
But of course, that is an oversimplification that only tells one part of the story. Larsen captures a remarkable array of circumstances, contexts, motivations, and situations. A short time after the for-sale sign goes up, George Clement, an older White man, is harassed and beaten up by three Black kids. Erik Pederson, who witnesses it, and several neighbors arrive and the kids run away, but the story begins to circulate, get exaggerated, and get out of control. As the narrator reports, “As so often happens when fear grabs hold of a group, truth was the victim.”.
As the book goes on, more and more perspectives pile up and we begin to see how complicated all this is, and how much the community is connected. We meet a missionary family from Nigeria who enroll their children in the local Christian school and receive both support and hate. We meet Carl Bensema, the angry next-door neighbor of the Jacksons, who is later recruited by the KKK. We also meet many nice people who initially do nothing to support their new neighbors or to flee from them, choosing caution over caring.
Once Larsen has laid out these perspectives and many more, the reader wonders: What will the Christian school board do? Welcome Black students? Or move the school out of the neighborhood? What will the churches do? Minister to their neighbors? Or appoint a committee to find a new location outside the neighborhood? And what will the Pedersens do? Stay put in a neighborhood that now includes the Jacksons? Or move out with the community they have always been a part of?
Throughout the book, the question is not if people will move, but when and how they will justify it. Willowby Jackson says at one point, “For a long time I thought that you white folks were immigrants to Chicago and us Black folks were refugees. I don’t think that is right anymore. Now I think you and your people are nomads. My hunch is you aren’t done moving…. You’ll uproot and move again once some folks with dark skin move into the suburbs. But that’s just my hunch.”
I said before that this is a good book. It is also a truthful, necessary book. If we do not know our own history, we cannot understand ourselves. Finally, though it might not appear so at first, it is a hopeful book. When the reader turns over the final page, that hope may be hard to spot. And yet it is there. The hope lies in the kids who appeared in the first chapter and the last. While many parents’ eyes may have been clouded by fear, or financial considerations, or peer pressure from other adults, it is the kids who see the injustice, the wrongness of moving. And no amount of adults telling them that they will understand when they are older will satisfy them.
The rest of the hope in this story is not in the book itself. It is in the idea that we have other chances to get it right. On the one hand, white flight has happened again and again since 1962 when the book is set, through to the present in Chicago, its suburbs, and in communities throughout the United States. We have to wonder: what makes us think we can get to the point where Christians can love their neighbors regardless of what those neighbors look like?
But on the other hand, telling the story, the whole story–the pain, the suspicion, the fear, the peer pressure, the moments of grace and moments of greed, telling of emotions, mistakes, perspectives, rationalizations, and disappointments–that storytelling, that memory-keeping contains within it a hope. The hope that if we read our own story, if we remember our own foibles, sins and mistakes, maybe we can reconsider our choices. Maybe we can change. Maybe, finally, we can learn to do what Jesus told us: love our neighbors.
Green Street in Black and White shows us the history of who we have been as Christians, what we have said, how we have thought, and how we have acted–but it also asks us what we should do, what we might do, in our present and in our future.
4 Responses
Thanks for this great review; I’ll need to pick up a copy. I think it will be a nice novel to pair with Mark Mulder’s important book, “Shades of White Flight: Evangelical Congregations and Urban Departure,” which covers the same geographical and chronological area from a sociological perspective.
William, This sounds like the things I have heard about the CRC in Chicago and their pushing it aside. I did not become CRC until I was 19. My husband and I moved back to NJ at age 22 with an adopted son who was half Black and half white. When he was old enough to attend school, he was accepted as were my two biological children at Eastern Christian. There were a number of Black and Asians in the school, so I was surprised when I heard about what happened in Chicago with the CRC and Christian education. I did not hear this for many years. It is still shocking to me who wants to be like Jesus who accepted all the people made by his Father.
Thanks, Bill, for this excellent review. Very insightful. Dave presented a chapter from this novel at Scriptoria Workshop several years ago, and I was privileged later to provide an edit of the novel. Our book club will discuss the novel in October, and are thrilled that Dave will be joining us that evening. I urge book clubs far and wide to place this novel on their reading list.
I also recommend that Christian high schools place this novel on the reading list in one of their English courses–if they have the courage to do so. Many schools may have their students read To Kill A Mockingbird, and wisely so, but I think that Green Street In Black and White might hit students with a story that is a much closer to home part of their history.
Thank you for a good review of a very good book, and thank you, Dave for writing it. I lived in Englewood until I was 10 and my family left before the time depicted in the book. But I recognized the feelings, the arguments, the rationalizations, as well as the violence which lay just under the surface. The hope you identify is indeed in the younger generation. As I enjoyed my familiarity with the scenes in the book – I could identify all the places and many of the people, and I attended the Englewood Christian School until Grade 6 – I also reflected on my own experience and history with racism. God certainly led me into places I never expected to go to open my eyes and my heart. I trust the book will have that effect on many readers.