The Gold Coast

On the last Wednesday morning of a particularly fetid August, Niecy Northrup summoned her “muskrats” down to an early lunch. Netha and Travis and Lane were the rodents in question, and this was the last day of their two week ritual exile, the part of the summer when the childrens’ parents — Niecy’s son Walter, and his wife Leslie — abandoned their offspring to their grandparents’ care. Two weeks of sticky fingerprints on all her antiques, two weeks of warm bodies and breath, contempt and laughter. She loved it exactly as much as it exhausted her.

“Come and get it while it’s hot,” Niecy called up the stairs, arranging eggs, pancakes, and a raft of sausage patties on the good china. As they appeared, one by one, she considered her grand-children, their summer tan faces, as they trundled into the kitchen. Their greedy hands grasping. She took a deep breath.

“Now, before your parents arrive, there’s something your Pop Pop and I wanted to talk to you about.”

Travis, the baby — sensitive, sloe-eyed — lifted his gaze from his Switch. “Uh-oh, ya-ya,” he said. “That’s your serious voice.”

“Not so serious, sugar,” Niecy cooed. She had been a preschool teacher for forty years and sometimes found herself drifting back into a certain dove-like soprano, best used on toddlers.

“Now your parents don’t know this yet, but Pop Pop and I are sort of hoping you’ll help us break the news.” She inhaled sharply again. “We’re headed South.”

The children stared at their grandmother, eyes wide with an unprovoked betrayal. The eldest, Netha, moved to lower her phone. “South as in… America?” she said.

Niecy turned to her husband, who gifted her a single eyebrow raised over the edge of his Air Force mug. “Try the Carolinas,” he said. “I would like to see my hometown again, before I go in the ground.”

“But you aren’t going in the ground just yet, are you, Pop Pop?” said Lane, the middle child and second-born daughter. She was the thoughtful one of the three. “Why now?” she asked with her father’s vexed expression.

Both grandparents opened their mouths to reply, but no words seemed handy. But how could I tell you, Niecy was thinking. How could I even begin?  

Later, the three Northrup children held a private summit, convened by Netha on the back porch. The oldest daughter introduced the “emergency meeting” as Damage Control, and spoke in an urgent whisper.

“So, what. We’re shrimp toast?” she said. “Bye bye, mansion?”

Lane and Travis nursed the standard mix of fear and respect for their oldest sister, whose oratory powers often compelled unthinking support. Netha was quick to rally the troops, but her marching orders would rarely suffer clarification. She was like a dictator that way: all charisma and terror.

“What are you talking about?” said Travis, shyly.

“The Carolinas?” Netha cried. “I mean, they can’t be serious.”

Their grandparents’ house spilled out onto the beach. Now Lane gazed out at the edge of Lake Michigan, into which their grandmother plunged every morning at dawn alongside the other members of her Polar Bear Club. After those freezing dashes, Lane liked to greet her ya-ya at the back porch with a cup of tea. Then they’d read together, on the porch, as her siblings slept in. As Netha pontificated on the “heartbreak” of lost real estate and summers in the sun, Lane let her mind drift to other sentimental pictures, all of them tied to this view. The cooking smells drifting up into the attic eaves. Afternoons spent curled up in the turret, basking in light from the stained-glass window.

“It would be sad to leave this place,” she admitted.

“At least we’ll get to visit,” Travis said.

“Down South, you mean?” Netha pulled a face.

To children of the midwest, “the South” can hold a particular, arguably under-considered mystique. And these children had never ventured — latitudinally — below Springfield. Their America was a tight circle, bounded by St. Louis to the West and Philadelphia to the East. The world beyond was only what could be gleaned from culture. Florida Man. Segregation. Guns and country music and SUVs.

Such references tended to omit their own grandfather, who was Gullah-Geechee. Raymond Northrop’s folks came from Mitchelville, the freedmen’s colony in South Carolina. In rare chatty moments, he liked to extol his grandchildren with stories of a childhood spent on Hilton Head island. But the anecdotes of gumbo, woven sweetgrass baskets, and “Ring Shout” dance were as fanciful and distant to them as a Disney World.

“Why do you think they moved here in the first place?” Lane asked. The sun was now crawling down the horizon line, as if reluctant to leave their summit.

“You haven’t covered the Great Migration yet at that podunk school? Yikes. Illinois Publics stay failing you, fam. Good thing you’re leveling up this fall.”

“Of course I know about it,” snapped Lane. Which was true, in the barest sense of the world. That year in Art, her sixth grade class had looked at Jacob Lawrence’s color-block paintings depicting Black stick figures on planes, trains, and automobiles. She knew they’d sought work, those figures, and an escape from persecution. But it had never occurred to her to apply those moving figures to her own family.

“But why the big fuss about moving?” said Travis. “That’s what I wanna know. Why tell us, before Mom and Dad?”

“Three little words, kid. Butter. ‘Em. Up.” Netha mimed spreading something across a piece of toast.

“The ‘rents aren’t gonna like this loss one bit.”

That evening, as was tradition, their parents arrived with pizza. This was the annual “hand-off.” Three generations of the Northrup family would sit and eat dinner together before parting ways. The children immediately clocked their parents’ lifted moods. The line that usually joined their father’s eyebrows was gone; ditto the bags under their mother’s eyes.

Over supper, the parents confided that they hadn’t even bothered to leave Chicago for this year’s “ritual exile,” having opted instead for a “staycation.”

“We snuck in a few museums,” said Leslie. “Saw some of this town we actually live in.” Walter had been raised on the Gold Coast, in that very same house. Leslie was a South Sider. Weeksville. “Your Dad read a whole-darn novel.”

“My son read a novel?” Raymond hooted. “I don’t believe it.”

Travis — who was always fussy when his parents returned from their summer gallivanting — frowned. “Last year you at least went on a cruise. Are you seriously saying you just sat around at home, not wanting to hang out with us?”

Their mother’s face fell. “No, sweetie. Of course not. We love when everyone’s all together.”

“Just needed to catch up on work this year, little man,” said their father. “And anyway. Who’s got cruise money? In this economy?” Walter and Leslie Northrup were both instructors at a university — which sounded prestigious, but effectively meant that their employment was insecure and their fields of study prescribed by departmental demand.

“Maybe next year, we can all do a cruise,” their mother chimed. “Or Dad and I can do a small one, right when the semester ends. So you get your time in here.”

It was at that moment Grandma Niecy cleared her throat, mounting an “actually… ” Her voice was weirdly high, as it had been at breakfast. Lane looked to her older sister and caught her miming again, spreading butter on a piece of invisible toast.

The car ride back uptown was tense, underscored by low whispers from the front seat. It seemed Netha’s prediction had come true; the news of their grandparents’ reverse-great migration had not been warmly received. Every so often the children would catch snatches from Walter and Leslie, a string of words — long-term plan, assets, future — but their mother had strategized cover music. Mostly, the dulcet sounds of Kenny G conspired to conceal their murmuring.

As her siblings pawed at their respective consoles, Lane looked out the window and marked the familiar stations of their approaching neighborhood. Here was the smiling icon of Pete’s Fresh Market. The police car mounted over Hollywood Boulevard Cinema. It never ceased to strike her how quickly familiar things became strange after time away.

“… when our place is a crap-hole!” This was their father’s voice, breaking the surface of murmur.

Their mother turned around. “Sorry, kiddos. Please pay no attention to the boring grown-up talk.” She pulled a goofy face, in an attempt at distraction. Nobody laughed.

The younger branch of Northrups lived in a two-bedroom apartment on the edge of Jefferson Park. This had been true since Travis’ birth. Though cozy on salad days, after stints on the Gold Coast it was always difficult to readjust to the scale of their place’s thousand feet square footage. The intimate bathroom sounds. The shared bedroom.

And that night, reintegration threatened to be worse than usual.

After tossing their keys into the hallway bowl, Walter and Leslie shuttled straight to their room. There, the arguing continued, audible through the shared wall. The children could hear their parents throw around the same collection of words as they’d done in the car, with a few fresh additions: Inherit, deserve. Pass down. Pass over.

A few days later, school began. Travis and Netha were returning to familiar buildings, rising into sixth and tenth grade respectively. But Lane was destined for greener pastures, having received a scholarship to the elite St. Aubyn’s Middle School. The posh private school was the result of a conspiracy between her English teachers, who’d advocated on her gifted behalf. It had been a whole production, involving notes in the knapsack and recommendation letters. The decision to forsake the public high school, where Netha was already comfortably ensconced, had also resulted in a lot of hushed, dramatic parent conversations. But the parents had come to an agreement on this case.

To reach St. Aubyn’s, Lane had to take the el five stops Loopward on the Blue line. After kissing her parents goodbye at the station, she experienced a flood of relief. After all that late summer drama, time carved away from the Northrups — any and all of them — struck her as divinely given. A chance toward freedom. She couldn’t help thinking of those Lawrence prints, those hectic figures moving somewhere better. Or at least, farther away.

It wasn’t until lunch that someone spoke to her. This intrepid explorer was a blonde girl with field hockey shins and a poreless face.

“I saw you getting off the train earlier, didn’t I?” she said.

The girl’s voice was kind, and it hit Lane like a balm. Like cool lake on hot toes.

“Oh, no. I don’t think so,” she heard herself say. “My dad dropped me off. Around the corner.”

The girl’s smile flickered for an instant. “Huh. Weird.” Then — “Dropped you off from where?”

Lane swallowed, like she might be able to push down the ball of dread building in her chest. Three years. Three years! She’d be spending an unfathomable amount of time with these doll people. And after that, probably high-school. Something had to be done. In her panic, she conjured the view from the turret. On a clear day, you could confuse the blue seam of the lake for the horizon line. It was possible to forget where earth ended and sky began. It was possible to forget plenty of things.

“We’re over on the Gold Coast,” Lane said. The lie fell out of her easily.

At this, the girl smiled, then introduced herself as Electra. “Come sit with us!” she said.

Lane smiled with the relief of the ages. “Okay,” she said.

That night, Leslie greeted her children with a festive air. She’d spent her free afternoon making a “back-to-school feast” of shrimp creole, black eyed peas, and lemon meringue pie. “Come and get it while it’s hot, muskrats,” she cried, an unwitting parody of her mother-in-law. But the family was slow to rise.

Travis, who’d clearly passed a screen-less day longing for his Switch, didn’t even budge from the couch. “I hate black eyed peas,” he snapped. “Only person who likes those nasty things is Daddy.”

Leslie looked to her husband for support. But Walter, installed in the armchair, was still giving off a beleaguered air. He said nothing, but pointedly turned the page of his Nation magazine.

“Well, that’s what it means to be a family sometimes,” Leslie said, pressing forward. “We trade off giving each person their favorite, special thing. That way, everyone gets what they want.” She shook a potholder, determined. “Now come eat.”

Leslie Northrup was the kind of woman who was ill at ease in tension. She didn’t believe in bad moods, nor could she afford a quarter for her husband, who was still so aggrieved over that childhood house. Now, in an effort to shake her people from their doldrums, she hummed an old gospel song. Lift Every Voice and Sing.

“Mo-om,” Travis whined. “Stop it. You’re annoying people.”

“Who, me?” She made a piggy face. Unable to help himself, her little son giggled, and there — she could feel it — the tension broke.

“I ain’t doing nothing,” Leslie said, upping the ante. She started humming again. That’s when Netha joined in. Placing a bean on the top of her fork, the oldest daughter drew the tines back like a slingshot and turned a steely gaze on her parents. Leslie pretended to cower. Travis screamed with delight. Even Little Lane, who’d looked so pensive, dropped her recalcitrance and picked up her own loaded fork. Everyone hovered at the tip of a belly laugh, and Leslie felt a burst of joy. They were at their best, as a family, in such crack-wise moments. It was during these moments when they remembered that the world was silly and the stakes were low.

Well, when most of them remembered. Walter, who was still refusing to meet her eye, frowned at his children.

“Don’t play with your dinner, now,” he said. “Your mother and I don’t slave away to put food on the table so you can throw it all over the place.”

 “Well technically nobody slaves anymore,” Netha muttered. Leslie suppressed a laugh. This oldest child liked to walk the line between insolence and good fun. Netha’s “smart Aleck mouth” could infuriate her husband. But for the most part, it drew Leslie’s respect. She liked having a daughter who was bold and brazen. Unafraid to stand up to the world.

“That’s true, honey,” she leapt to say, in her most placating voice. “We’re very lucky that way. Your father and I have jobs that pay us to do what we like to do.”

“Some of what we like to do. And those jobs pay rather little,” Walter blurted. Silence fell. Forks were lowered.

“Walter, please,” said Leslie. “Not in front of the kids.”

“No, I think we should tell them. Better they know now than never, right?” Her husband, her proud husband, now clasped his hands and set his elbows on the table. “Kids, you know we love you. But you should know that everything — everything! — costs money in this life. It costs money to follow your dreams. It costs money to follow your heart. And every decision you make, when you’re a grown-up, involves the foreclosing of some other possibility. Y’all know what foreclosing means, right?” He plowed on before anyone could respond. “This society is not kind to artists, to upstarts, to innovators. We know it isn’t favorable to anyone who looks like us. So when you’re making choices about how and where to live, you gotta know what you’re dealing with. It all costs something.”

“Walter… ” Leslie started. But no words followed. After all, what could she tell them? How could she even begin?

Silence reigned, then thickened. Leslie felt the failure — of the game, and the collective meal — descending. Her own foolishness redounded like a slap in the face. Then she heard a ding of metal, followed by a soft splat.

She looked up and saw that Netha’s peas had hit the wall, right behind her husband’s head. The brown potlicker slid slowly, determined to leave a stain.

Later that night, after the inevitable clapback, after Walter’s fuming and Leslie’s snapping and the revoking of dessert, Netha explained her act of rebellion to her siblings via another emergency “summit.” This one was about the generations. According to Netha, a class of peers that included their grandparents had made it so climate change was irreversible. Such “Boomers,” she declared, and “Gen X” to which Walter and Leslie belonged, had ruined the world, so when they complained about its inequalities it was hard to take them seriously. By this logic, Netha said, the old man’s lingering bitterness was the result of “great but misplaced expectations.”

“What does that have to do with foreclosing, though?” said Travis. “What did that whole thing mean?”

Netha tapped her skull like she was knocking wood.

“It’s the house, kiddos. Try to keep up. It’s all about the house.”

“But it’s not his house to be mad at,” said Lane. And added softly, “It’s not ours, either.”

“Exactly,” said Netha, stabbing the air. “Dad thinks he’s entitled to the Gold Coast place because of old-fashioned ideas about inheriting wealth. But I’m so not here for that. It’s the grands’ place to do what they want with. And if they want to sell it and retire down South like every boring old biddy in the world, I say: ‘Let everybody eat cake.’”

The sound of a door slamming sent all three children spinning into silence again. They listened on tenterhooks as the bathroom door slid grimly shut. This was followed by the stirring sounds of the shower, the opening chords of a PBS News broadcast.

“Maybe it’ll all be okay,” said Travis.

“Nun-uh. Y’all. I’m telling you,” Netha lowered her voice. “We don’t have to be like any of these people. That’s the beauty of our generation. We get to reinvent it all. No one says you have to be obsessed with status or hard work. No one says you have to ‘slave.’ And why would we, when we know there’s nothing to be gained anymore?”

That Sunday, the grandparents were invited for dinner. Raymond and Niecy typically made appearances inland every month, bearing presents and bulk groceries. On this occasion, ostensibly to celebrate “back to school,” Grandma Niecy arrived with a bright red casserole tray full of fragrant dirty rice. Travis couldn’t help but note that this was another of their father’s — and grandfather’s — favorite foods.

Raymond was clad, uncharacteristically, in his Air Force dress uniform. He pulled this out every so often, to attend a luncheon or a fundraiser. But the figure he cut in the grubbier Northrup living room was hard to square. “Hello muskrats,” he said, stiffly, and rubbed Travis’ head.

“Hello my in-laws,” said Leslie. She accepted the casserole dish with much fanfare and, as was usually the case, raced her mother-in-law to the kitchen where they fought magnanimously over who would bring the men their drinks the fastest. Netha shook her head at this spectacle, and sought her sister’s eye. But Lane refused to catch it. Her mind that day was on the green lawns of St. Aubyn’s. Electra’s stables. Summer, the verb.

Dinner began pleasantly enough, with grandpa inquiring about everyone’s classes. Netha complained about pre-calculus. Lane regaled the table with talk of Mr. Wirth, the promising Social Studies teacher. And Travis showed everyone a new level he’d unlocked in his reigning favorite RPG. Eventually, this line of conversation stalled, thanks to Walter — who stayed doggedly silent as his wife tried in vain to keep spirits high. Finally desperate, Leslie turned to the weather. She remarked on the cold front coming up from the South. “But Carolina winters probably ain’t nothing,” she added.

The comment had been thoughtless, but its effect was instant. Walter set his fork down with a clatter. “You know you’ll be abandoning your grandkids,” he said, wheeling on his father. “For those Carolina winters.” His voice was strained. Grandpa set his fork down, too, and gazed at his son.

“It’s not your house, Walter,” Raymond said. His voice was strangely cool, detached. “I paid for it. I worked my way up, hand over hand. Practically built the place.”

“But I thought you wanted to build something that would last,” said this older son, who looked suddenly to his children like a boy himself. Given the wrinkled chin, the high-pitched whine of backtalk in his voice. In a flash, their mother was standing, flanked by Grandma Niecy. “Kids, why don’t you go play for a minute,” one of them said. “We’ll call you when dessert’s up. Okay?”

From the bedroom — a familiar site of ritual exile — they caught words. One in particular stood out: Deserve. Not because the verb itself was unfamiliar, but because it came from Grandpa, who said it over and over.

Netha’s stomach being strongest for conflict, she kept her ear pressed to the wall while the little two clasped hands on the low bunk. “Now they’re saying something about us,” she said, and clicked her teeth. “Using us as pawns again. Classic Boomers.”

Travis whimpered.

“Maybe we should stop now,” said Lane. Netha sighed, but pulled the pencil cup she’d been using as an amplifier away from the wall. This was just as well, as the next words rang through loud enough that they required no mediation.

“We are the ones who built a legacy. And you are not entitled to that,” cried Grandpa. “It’s my house. It’s my house. I’ll sell it if I darn well want to. You want a house, you get a grown man’s job, and you buy it yourself.”

Not long after that, the door slammed shut.

Who teaches you to want more? This was the question left ringing in their heads, stickier than any of Netha’s theories. It would be some time before most of the Northrup children could answer it. But they heard the question, all of them, that fateful Sunday. As they huddled in their shared bedroom, straining to parse the logic of an adult argument. Here was the wondering, dark but insistent: was the roof I was raised under good enough? Could you even begin to know?

Lane, of course, had the first inkling. Being so imaginative. Deemed “gifted,” by the state. As she made a home at St. Aubyn’s, she found she could more and more easily picture how her grandparents, in thrall to an America that would never love them back, could have put all their money towards the idea of a place to call their own. How Grandma Niecy, with her love of beautiful things, would have instigated the wish. It must have been hard to sell Raymond on Chicago. That proud, cranky military man who came from an island, where people looked and spoke and ate and danced like him. Such sacrifice would have required doubling down. An insistent humor. A wall of reasons. And finally, a return. In the future, Lane would recall her own mother’s casual wisdom, when she said that “being in a family means you trade off giving each person their favorite, special thing.”

And later still, much later, long after high-school had been survived and peace had been made and the house had been sold — Lane would also remember a day in Social Studies, when her teacher Mr. Wirth gave daylight to the Great Migration. Picking up where Jacob Lawrence left off, Mr. Wirth had said that to observe discrimination, they needn’t look so far as the former Confederacy, or some “boogeyman in The South.” They could use their own city to see trouble. He told a class full of rich kids that there were houses, right there in Chicago, with language in their leases that prevented Black families from owning their homes. Mr. Wirth spoke about discriminatory co-op boards. Redlining, race riots, contract selling, and said, “the echoes of these practices still shape our neighborhoods. And I bet you can see it.” Lane remembered him casting around for eyes. Landing, at last, on hers. “Who here has been to Bronzeville? Who’s heard of the Gold Coast?”