I knew him in the mid-1950s, a “knowing” that wasn’t real, because Frank London Brown was a grown man with a wife and family — and I was a 3-year-old child.
Yet of all the people from my childhood, he made the most indelible impression. He worked a blue-collar job like other Black fathers, but he was also a writer. Then, too, our small community lived through a traumatic event in Chicago history.
The Trumbull Park Homes back then was an all-white community of squat, two-story row houses and three-story apartment buildings on the city’s far southeastern edge next to the Indiana border.
Though built before World War II, the complex felt fresh and expansive with its landscaped grounds and brick-fronted buildings.
Yet no welcome wagon met the Browns, the Jacksons, or any other Black families that began arriving in 1953. Instead of cookie platters, we were greeted with fury and flames.
Bricks came crashing through windows, Molotov cocktails were thrown in after them. The fires burned out some Black families and their adjacent white neighbors. Someone dropped a snake and firecrackers through our mail slot.
Frank London Brown would chronicle these events in the autobiographical novel “Trumbull Park,” published to critical acclaim in 1959.
Frank London Brown’s novel “Trumbull Park” tells the story of the first Black residents who tried to integrate the CHA’s Trumbull Park housing complex on the southeast side in the 1950s.
Northwestern University Press
Other than describing them as light-skinned, his characterization of one family seemed to match my own — a pretty young mother of two preschoolers, a handsome father over-fond of his liquor and struggling to keep a job.
My mother went to her grave convinced that “Frank London Brown wrote that book about me.”
Brown’s example as a working writer had a deep effect on me. I would find stray books around the house and scribble in the margins and flyleaves, convinced that I, too, was “writing books.”
In years to come I would become a writer, just like Brown.
When Brown died tragically at 35, he missed the publication of his second novel. “The Myth Maker” was released posthumously in 1969.
A half century after his death, I rediscovered his work when I was asked to write the introduction to “This Is Life,” a collection of flash fiction and essays published in the Chicago Daily Defender from 1959 to 1960.
In those pieces, he reminds me of the midcentury Black Chicago I lived through as a child when people listened to records on their stereos, and TV was replacing radio as the broadcast medium of choice.
The recent Korean War had ended and Emmett Till had been murdered. The Civil Rights Movement was underway, while the Great Migration from the South had been steadily populating the urban northlands.
In “This Is Life,” I get to meet familiar, though unforgettable characters: “… winoes, rentmen, swingmen, bosses, foremen, and policemen that floated in and out of his life like dirty corks upon a filthy sea,” as I describe them in the introduction.
I revisit the bustling neighborhoods and treacherous street corners, the lakefront and landmarks that have all but disappeared from the city map, though some are still around: 47th Street, Cottage Grove, Madison Avenue, The Strand Hotel, Congress Expressway, South Parkway before it became Martin Luther King Drive.
I can’t help wondering what Brown would make of 21st-century Black Chicago if he’d lived to see it. Or might he be writing about some of the same issues — street violence, the aimlessness of urban youth, drug addiction, mental illness and systemic racism that characterized those times?
Because, unfortunately, “this is life” today in areas of Black Chicago.
I feel lucky to have these rediscovered treasures of life writ large by a man who lived it fully, if not for very long. “This Is Life” reminds me that Frank London Brown’s Chicago is still my Chicago.