May 28, 1954-July 29, 2009 If you commute into town from the west side you may recall having seen a stout woman with straight blonde hair and glasses determinedly trudging along Madison, then later that afternoon she’d be sitting on a bench at Jefferson and Second waiting for a bus. Maybe you used to see her weekends walking near Fairhills Mall with a little boy’s hand firmly in her grasp, the doting grandmother vibe obvious even though their skin colors didn’t match. If it crossed your mind at all to notice, maybe you think she got in a car.
She didn’t. Carol Manley got a one-way ambulance ride on July 29 when her heart failed her.
During her 55 years she’d gone from her blue collar family in Belvidere, Ill., to poverty as a Chicago welfare mother of mixed race children. In Springfield she finally arrived at middle class respectability as a state government employee who owned her own home and had married her longtime love Leon Johnson. (Her friend and mentor Jackie Jackson’s poem quoted her in full: “Leon and I got married on my lunch hour yesterday. Seems to be working so far.”) Carol bootstrapped her way to better times for herself and her children through education and grindingly hard work. Look up her name in the Illinois Times search function at www.illinoistimes.com and read some of her accounts of when food was scarce and respect nonexistent. Measure “White Christmas: The Church People Come for a Visit” against the bachelor’s degree she earned with honors in computer science and her master’s in English.
Of course, her real career was her writing, which was anything but pedestrian. Last year Rodd Whelpley reviewed Carol’s collection of stories, Church Booty, in IT with an eye for the humor, horror and humanity that she brought to life as a blonde member of the black community. He wrote of her characters that “They spend as much energy looking for rides as they do looking for someone to love and be loved by, and they have to do it on the cheap.” It doesn’t matter if you’re rich, poor, black, white, male or female — Carol’s stories will stick a fork into your heart and twist it. Oprah needs to know about Church Booty and surely President Obama would recognize something of his mother’s life and his own within its pages.
Who benefits from Carol’s passing? Only other contestants for writing awards. The rest of us will miss the decades of stories, poems, articles and reviews that she won’t be writing.
Lola Lucas is author of At Home in the Park: Loving a Neighborhood Back to Life about Enos Park in particular and Springfield in general. It’s available at Amazon.com.
Excerpt from “White Christmas” by Carol Manley
They were the type of people I had been before a marathon of poor judgment had led me to this life and this building. (…..) When they reached a safe distance, they remembered what they’d come to say. “Merry Christmas!” they chimed as they edged away from my door. I closed the door and looked in the bag. There were three boxes of macaroni and cheese, a loaf of bread, and a box of cornflakes. Each had a sterile white label stamped with black letters. I looked at those generic labels, impersonal and punitive in their lack of color. I needed that food. How could I not be grateful? Yet somehow I felt condemned by it. I ached for the luxury of red-and-blue stripes on the bag of a normal loaf of bread. I carried that bag of joyless groceries to the alcove that served as a kitchen in the studio apartment. I put the bread and cornflakes in the refrigerator to protect them from roaches. I would try to save the cornflakes until my next check, when I’d be able to buy some milk. Without a colorful rooster or bright-yellow rising sun, that miserly box would camouflage itself in the white interior of the fridge. I had a little salad dressing, so I’d be able to make the macaroni and cheese without milk or butter, but the thought of it made me weary. I looked around my shabby apartment. I was paying for my sins, for those twin evils of gullibility and fertility. Out the window I could see the red and green traffic lights on Wilson Avenue, the white headlights and red taillights of the cars on the street, and the broad palette of Chicago brick colors in the buildings surrounding me. I looked at that colorless box of macaroni in my pale hand. Then I sat down on the pullout couch where my beautiful brown children slept. I rummaged in its crevices until I found a crayon and began to draw red ribbons on the bland box of generic macaroni and cheese.