Introduction and Rationale
Where does a place go that is no longer there? The Ickes Community was a housing project directly behind the building that is now National Teachers Academy (NTA), the school where I teach. Our school community is laden with members of this former community, as Ickes was torn down in stages between 2007 and 2010. What is left is a vacant lot. A large number of our families were deeply rooted in this community. So the Ickes community can be kept alive through oral history at NTA and beyond.
This community is one that has been left without consideration before, during, and after its existence. Our security guard commented on loved ones and students he's known that struggle and make negative choices, but they must be considered because they are real people: "You tell them that they done something positive. You never look at them different when they don't. You encourage. You never talk down." 1 The vacant lot that once was Ickes has sat without consideration for more than three years now. I believe my students will benefit from beginning the school year with a unit of identity and citizenship. They'll accomplish standard expectations and be able to fight for human dignity in their communities by using their words to show they understand their histories and situations. Although not all students at NTA have personal and geographical history in the Ickes community, they do live and breathe these blocks of State Street at the corner of Cermak and 22 nd, zip code 60616, in the City of Chicago. Dwight Conquergood (2013) directly addresses the spirit of what I want my students to accomplish, "...meta-languages, where-by a group or community not merely expresses itself but, more actively, tries to understand itself in order to change itself." 2
The Ickes community members that made the invisible visible to me through memory are John Pointer ("JP"), and Ms. Johnson ("Audrey"). The Ickes Project buildings, the place that is no longer there, has entered an invisible space. The minds and hearts of those who inhabited the once vibrant and living space carry that place. The human beings that continue to live and breathe the memory of the place pass it along through oral history and some documented history. There are the stories of JP and Audrey: the space itself, the circumstances, and the real lives of those present. I am struck by the stories. The story of this unit is threefold. Seminar leader Joseph Roach clarified this by saying, "It is a story of Chicago, a story of public housing, and perhaps most importantly a story of the tornadic path of social policy through actual communities and real lives."
My first year at NTA was extremely difficult. The difficulties were related to earning the trust of my students. We have 99% African-American students/families and the other 1% is made up of mixed race families, Caucasian families, and Latin American families, of which we have one of each. Our school is a pre-K through eighth grade building. Our families all receive free or reduced meals at school, including breakfast and lunch and dinner for after school programming. We have a large percentage of displaced families who reside with friends, family members, and/or in shelter housing. There is gang activity in our neighborhood.
In completing interviews with Audrey and JP, I recorded thoughts and notes while listening back to our time together. I organized my thoughts and the anecdotal facts that they relayed into categories so that I may easily categorize them for my students and share the moments of the interviews that are pertinent to the unit's theme, which is the fight for human dignity. They are as follows: the questions asked, the space, activities, significant events, people, drugs/gangs, and quotations. I want students to understand how I came to learn this information about the two people that our kids depend on.
This is where the importance of my questions comes in. I want my kids to envision the space again and to know that space intimately, so that in the exploration of a place, its conception, habitation, and elimination, there is a clear map of where everything happened.
These key terms, conception/habitation/elimination, relate to the life cycle. We are born, we live, and then we pass. I believe this is the same process/cycle that a place moves through, especially a place that identifies as home for a densely populated community. The choice of the term elimination suggests that the passing, or death, of Ickes was finite and violent. This would explain why the empty space left behind is so full, full of memory. I would like to consider the elimination of Ickes as torturous, because of the stages involved — making it a slow passing and gradual taking-away of resources.
We will be using performance to deepen our understanding of the experiences of the Ickes residents through a re-enactment and creation of a memorial. I read information from the documentation of John Malpede's re-enactment "RFK in EKY" (rfkineky.org, 2004), Theatre/Archaeology by Mike Pearson and Michael Shanks (2001) and The Viewpoints Book by Anne Bogart (2005). The Viewpoints notion of space and time will assist in my students' understanding of character through relationships with other people, spaces, and objects. This practice will take place on the site of the Ickes that is informed by the concept of theatre and archaeology being deeply related the excavation involved in both crafts. John Malpede's work informs our process for making this work public that will lead to focused and constructive dialogue, as he describes. The official RFK in EKY website (rfkineky.org) describes the reenactment: "The Robert F. Kennedy Performance Project, as a series of public conversations and activities centered around the real-time, site-specific intermedia performance that recreated, on September 9th and 10th 2004, Robert Kennedy's two-day, 200 mile "poverty tour" of southeastern Kentucky in 1968." As Malpede did, we'll transcribe text and create a participatory format. Students will experience both an artistic and academic perspective, but the method will "allow a deeper understanding of the social and political forces that shape their lives", as Malpede reflects after the event took place. 3
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