Part 9 of personal reflections and historic explorations of the Grafton to Cairo length of Illinois Route 3 by writer and poet Richard Stimac.

My grandpa on my mom’s side was an interesting guy. He liked to tell entertaining tall tales. Sometimes they’d have bits of fact. Other times, pure fantasy. He told me that he bought his multi-acre farm in downstate Illinois from local Native American tribes for a gold medallion. At any time, they could reclaim the land by producing the medallion. They must have lost it, he said, because he hadn’t seen them since. At the end of World War II, he was stationed in Paris. To combat the century-plus old issue of men peeing in the street, the city installed open air urinals behind shoulder-high screens. My grandpa stayed tickled at the fact that a man could watch people pass by, even wave to a friend, all while relieving himself.

JAZZ CLUBS

One story rooted in history was his youthful escapades as a jazz clarinetist. He’d go to the jazz clubs in East St. Louis, probably the Blue Note Club, the jazz club for the entire St. Louis region. The Blue Note Club was the after-hours club where musicians gathered after their paying gigs and played for themselves and each other. If you were there to listen, then good for you.

One night, and I’m not quite sure why, but my grandpa and his rural White jazz-playing buddies got into some trouble. With the owner? Other club patrons? A bookie? The mob? I don’t know. What I do remember is his acting out how he and his buddies drove their car off a railroad crossing onto the tracks. He made the rumbling noise of the car bumping over the ties that ran parallel to Illinois Route 3.

INDUSTRY AND THE GREAT MIGRATIONS

East St. Louis was a small Illinois town for the first three-quarters of the 19^th century. In the 1870s, two major events changed that. The largest coal reserves in the United States lie beneath two-thirds of Illinois. Large scale coal mining began in the state supported by new mining technology and labor from the Great European Migration. Also in that decade, the St. Louis Commune, modelled on the Paris Commune, took over St. Louis in a bloodless strike. The stockyards and meat packing plants in East St. Louis closed. St. Louis Business leaders met in East St. Louis to respond. The strike ended in St. Louis first and resolved in East St. Louis shortly after.

As a result of the labour unrest, East St. Louis became more business friendly and more organised labour antagonistic. In other words, East St. Louis and the Illinois side of the river positioned themselves as a better place to build a factory than the more densely populated St. Louis. Next to East St. Louis was the village of Alorton, short for Aluminum Ore Town, a reference to the Aluminum Ore Company factory nearby. National Stockyards incorporated National City and Monsanto founded a village named Monsanto, now Sauget.

Besides the influx of eastern and southern Europeans during the Great European Migration, Black people from the South moved north in the Great Migration. This second migration was often prompted, if not paid for, by companies attempting to flood the labour market to push down wages or to use Southern labour as strike breakers. Instead of seeing African Americans as compatriots in the same struggle, European immigrants fell into the trap of seeing Black workers as threatening competitors. In 1917, this antagonism erupted into violence. Given the war footing for World War I, legal support for unions decreased.

Companies pitted Black and White workers against each other. Segregation led to Whites forced into the draft and Blacks were excluded, or exempted, depending on perspective. In July 1917, violence by White workers towards African American residents of East St. Louis resulted in hundreds of buildings destroyed and hundreds of Black people killed. The riots became a focal point of the early 20^th century civil rights movement.

GWENDOLYN BROOKS

When I was an English school graduate at a local university in the mid-1990s, I worked as student assistant to Eugene B. Redmond, the prominent poet laureate of East St. Louis. Eugene had deep love for the city, its residents, and its history. His resume was strong enough that he could have finished his career at a better paying and more prestigious school, yet Eugene decided to teach at a small state school and devote himself to the arts in his hometown.

Given his literary connections, he was able to bring in writers who would not have otherwise visited. One was Gwendolyn Brooks, who read in the atrium of the East St. Louis City Hall. She did read “We Real Cool”. Indeed, it was real cool to hear Brooks read that poem in the East St. Louis City Hall. I waited my turn in the greeting line to shake her hand, which she gave graciously and with a smile.

For East St. Louis, such an event was bittersweet. A few years before Brooks’ visit, a judge awarded the city hall as damages in a lawsuit. The city was broke. All it owned was property. Soon after, another court reassigned ownership to the city. Around the time of this first ruling, the pioneer of daytime talk shows Phil Donahue hosted an on-location show in the nearly exclusively Black East St. Louis, then the poorest city in America. The weekly TV news show 60 Minutes ran a piece on East St. Louis and Belleville, the nearby town to where many White people from East St. Louis moved.

I think back to my grandpa and his idealised past of fact and fiction, especially his adventures as a young White man in the largely Black East St. Louis jazz clubs. There are many ways to tell stories, ways with their own facts and embellishments, their own sound and silence, their own tension, their own release. One simply chooses.