Who knows what southeast Chicago is for? In her new book, Exit Zero: Family and Class in Postindustrial Chicago, Christine Walley talks mostly about what it was. Wisconsin Steel, where Walley’s father worked, shut down in 1980. He and other workers on his shift were sent home without explanation. Armed guards padlocked the factory gates, and Walley’s father, who died in 2005, never really had a stable job again.
Walley is at the end of four generations who lived on the southeast side, though she’s not there anymore—a professor of anthropology, she lives in New England and teaches at MIT. Exit Zero is an attempt to graft a memoir onto an academic treatise that, in its unusual form, recalls Beryl Satter’s masterful 2009 book Family Properties, which was both a broader tale of white flight from the Lawndale neighborhood and a story about Satter’s father, a lawyer who owned buildings in the area.
What Walley wants this book to be is an experiment in good old-fashioned consciousness raising, a warning against thinking ourselves on a straight line away from the past. We can always go back: to the 12-hour day, to a lower class status. There are other concerns, too. Walley’s gone from poor, white southeast Chicago to academic New England, but she’s not so much worried about going back economically as about what upward mobility can do to a person. She wonders: “What if I started to believe that I deserved this?”
By Christine J. Walley (University of Chicago Press).
