We Are The West Side; ‘Tell Your Own Story’

By John W. Fountain

This corner on the West Side of Chicago marks the block where John Fountain grew up.

By John W. Fountain

“No outside tongue, however gifted in eloquence, can tell (our) story; no outside eye, however penetrating, can see our wants.” –The Anglo-African newspaper in 1859, born out of the insistence of black abolitionist that they have their own newspapers.

Dear Chicago West Side, there are those who now would suddenly discover the West Side, like Columbus “discovered” America and, along with it, those indigenous people he named “Indians.”

Fellow West Siders, I beseech you to beware of those outsiders of so-called academic and scholarly ilk who now finally would argue that West Side stories too are of critical import to Chicago and the world beyond. Those who, when they arrive to tell the city’s West Side story, ultimately will filter those stories through their own jaded lenses as they have in times before.

Those who, at the end of the day, would assemble and exhibit “our” stories, then appoint themselves as experts of them — of us — having secured funding for their pet project. Then going on to appearances on radio and TV shows, they characterize themselves as historians of the rise and fall of West Side ghetto.

“We don’t need the sympathy of the South Side Afrostocracy that historically has treated us like wet food stamps…”

Maybe I am too distrusting, too skeptical, too pessimistic. Perhaps I have reason to be.

This much I know as a native son of the West Side’s K-Town: The West Side is not now their laboratory. And the dear people who live or have lived there are not lab rats or peons.

Nor are we fodder for some researcher’s next bestseller. Not relics to be reviewed and studied in some museum. Not natives to be gawked and pointed at on the passing Safari tour bus.

We don’t need the sympathy of the South Side Afrostocracy that historically has treated us like wet food stamps. Nor do we need the atonement of the so-called scholarly or liberal do-gooders with some prima facie well-intentioned “project” that will more appease themselves with pats on the back for their foray into the wilds of the West Side and having reemerged with new fodder for books and the study of us.

A wall inside the gymnasium at Providence St. Mel School, Fountain’s alma mater on the West Side of Chicago, where since 1978 100 percent of its graduates have been admitted to colleges and universities.

I stand myself as a living breathing West Side story. And I have come, even as a journalist for 30 years, to distrust the media and also the “academy” in telling “our story.” For I have witnessed on the inside of news and academic institutions the stilted and insidious perspectives that misconstrue, misrepresent and misjudge our lives and stories.

So I say, to you fellow West Siders — past and present — write your own stories. As I have. As many West Siders and West Side institutions already have.

Tell your own stories, using digital technology. In our voices, through our own eyes, show them. Teach them. Preserve them. Pass them on. (I will write more soon about how to do this step by step in a way that even a child can do.)

Dear West Side, we don’t need someone to “legitimize,” or to recognize, our stories in order for them to exist. To finally discover after all these years that we West Siders have a story worth telling and hearing. How elitist! And how arrogant!

We don’t need “them” to tell our stories from the outside looking in, from a classist paradigm. And we must reject even the slightest notion that our story has not been told until those who deem themselves to be the authoritative and legitimate storytellers of society tell it. That’s simply a bunch of bull. And they ain’t got no love for us.

What of the stories and voices of the West Side I have chronicled over the last 30 years as a journalist/writer/author, even in my 372-page memoir, True Vine, about growing up on the West Side? Or the countless stories that other West Siders have told? What is that — chopped liver?

Our stories are valid. That’s not news to us. And no outsider has the power to legitimize or delegitimize our stories, lives and history that are forever ingrained in God’s green earth on this side of Chicago’s tracks that we know as our beloved West Side.

We are West Side. And we have the power, the ability and the right to control our own narrative. To tell our stories ourselves.

So, as far as I’m concerned, “they” who have suddenly discovered the “value” of our stories can kick rocks, if need be, all the way back to the South Side.

Peace, JOHN

Email: Author@johnwfountain.com

School children on Chicago’s West Side walk to a local community center after school.

A portrait of Chicago’s skyline shot from the city’s Near West Side, which is often overlooked in media and history except for stories of poverty and crime that are often stereotypical, says John Fountain.

A portrait of John Fountain as a child with his sister Gloria. Fountain was born on the West Side, where he grew up and where his grandfather George A. Hagler, 96, was part of the Great Migration of blacks from the South to Chicago.

John Fountain’s memoir True Vine chronicles life on the West Side of Chicago.