Excerpts from The Believer: Notes from Chicago: Allen, Part II
Last week, our friends at The Believer sent a trio of novelists, poets, and critics to the Windy City to report from inside and around the Democratic National Convention. Daily installments of this limited series, which is inspired by Esquire’s 1968 coverage, will run on The Believer’s website for the rest of the week. Today, we’re catching you up on recent events with a new installment by acclaimed author Jeffery Renard Allen, who chronicles his first day on the convention floor.
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August 19,
Day One of the Convention
The Uber driver is a slim, attractive Black woman in her late twenties. Hair neatly styled above her smooth brown skin. She talks on her cell phone to a dude who, as far as I can surmise, is trying to woo her. I recognize myself in the cadence of her speech, that Southside Chicago drawl. When I first moved to New York, people used to ask me where in the South I was from.
She tells the man that she is a single mom with an eight-year-old son. Says she had cirrhosis of the liver but received a transplant. Now, she needs another procedure.
Thinking: I had a student once, a young Black woman, who died during the semester while awaiting a liver transplant.
The would-be boyfriend starts checking online to find a hospital in Chicago that will accept her medical insurance. We drive another ten or fifteen minutes. He fails to find a hospital—No dice—but vows to keep searching.
Soon she pulls the car over to the curb. Says, “This is where the app is telling me to let you off.”
I can see the Hyatt at McCormick Place on my right a good five blocks away.
“Can you get me closer to the Hyatt?” I say.
“Okay.”
We try one street after another, only to find that each street is barricaded. Eventually, we are allowed to queue outside a barricade where cops do a security check of the car. A bomb-sniffing dog takes a whiff of the car’s interior while officers check the trunk and under the hood.
We are allowed to pass, but after searching for a clear path to the Hyatt, we circle back to the spot where Uber indicated I should be dropped off. Only then do I realize that the powers that be have cordoned off McCormick Place in such a way that no demonstrators will be able to get anywhere near the convention. Out of sight, out of mind.