I hear Chicago is feeling some kind of way about being left out of our story. I respect my sister, so I’ll fill you in on her own little renaissance. Even if I shot her lightly, and she died politely, she could have provided a nice home for Helga Crane if Helga Crane weren’t such a malcontent pink toes. Chicago’s Negro neighborhood was known as Bronzeville, and was maybe a little behind Harlem in draping down. Sure, the Great Migration increased Chicago’s Black population by 500% in 1930, but there were still 328,000 of us in New York, compared to 234,000 in Chicago. Our Chicago brothers and sisters in black wore blue collars, most of them. As far as other writers go, Richard Wright came up there, even if he did move to Harlem in 1937. Around then was closer to when Chicago was booming, with lots of folks getting WPA money, including Richard Wright, Margaret Walker, Arna Bontemps, Fenton Johnson, Katherine Dunham, Frank Yerby, and Richard Durham, who were working for the Illinois Writers Project. Helga Crane had fun dancing in Harlem–who wouldn’t–but Chicago had a function or two with some solid rug cutters. Louis Armstrong jooked it there real good, along with Willie “The Lion” Smith and Mahalia Jackson.

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