Mitchell Duneier, the author of “Slim and Bart” and the book from which it is excerpted, sat at a table at Valois cafeteria on 53rd Street ten hours a day every day for four years. That’s roughly 10,000 hours and 2,000 cups of coffee. Known locally as “See Your Food” because of a large sign out front, Valois (Val-OYZ) offers home-style dishes like Yankee pot roast and boiled potatoes, baked chicken and succotash, and enormous meat pies. Steam rising from the serving line at the back of the cafeteria fills the long room with beef and vegetable aromas. The smells coax diners to pick the large, more pricey entrees over the cold and odorless sandwiches. It’s hard to choose turkey on wheat bread with an au jus mist in one’s face. The cash register is hidden behind shelves of dessert–to see the Greek cashier one must peer past glistening, syrupy dishes of rice pudding coated with cinnamon and teetering plates of key lime pie five inches tall. A full lunch–enough for dinner for four–runs around five dollars. Negotiating the narrow aisles of the packed restaurant with a loaded tray is a bit like balancing an armful of beers past fans at a crowded ball park. After much dodging and weaving and finally coming to rest at a table, usually shared with other diners, the food offers an ample reward.
Just outside the door, life was not so sweet. In the daytime, 53rd Street is Hyde Park’s main business district, drawing patrons to upscale–for the south side–shops like Pier One Imports, Starbucks Coffee, and middle-class restaurants like the pleasant, wood-paneled, plant-filled Mellow Yellow one block west of Valois. At night, however, 53rd Street more closely resembles Chicago’s other ghetto thoroughfares. On the street blacks far outnumber whites. Fast-food restaurants and the Hyde Park movie theaters, which often show films marketed to black teenagers, attract south-siders from outside the neighborhood, many of whom come to Hyde Park’s neutral turf showing their gang colors. One black Hyde Parker called the teens “punks with their hats on sideways.” Violence at the theaters has necessitated police presence at the otherwise peaceful Harper Court, the small square that art galleries, cafes, and shops share with the movie house. To avoid spillover traffic from the movies, Starbucks cut its evening hours. Duneier found that Valois offered patrons a sense of tranquillity amid the urban mix on 53rd.
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For the first several months in the restaurant, Duneier just watched and listened from a table near the back, monitoring both the cooks and the patrons. Eventually he focused his eavesdropping on a table of elderly working-class black men who came to the restaurant for their lunches and dinners. Their conversation, he discovered, reflected their beliefs that society had changed in some ways for the better, but mostly for the worse. On a nightly basis their friendly interaction in the restaurant re-created the social and ethical world of Chicago’s great south-side black ghettos, as if these men meant to preserve at a single table of acquaintances the values of church, family, and hard work they felt younger black men had lost.
So if Chicago was not the birthplace of modern social science, it was certainly its nursery. The University of Chicago’s first president, William Rainey Harper, forged an institution he hoped would both reveal and remedy society’s problems. “[D]emocracy,” Harper wrote in 1899, “has scarcely begun to understand itself. It is in the university that the best opportunity is afforded to investigate the movements of the past and to present the facts and principles involved before the public. It is the university that, as the center of thought, is to maintain for democracy the unity so essential for its success.”
The first Chicago sociologist to look at ethnic communities was William I. Thomas, who spent ten years researching Polish society and migration to America. His study, The Polish Peasant in Europe and America, written with Florian Znaniecki and published between 1918 and 1920, dealt in part with the Polish community in Chicago. Thomas looked particularly at the ways some Poles found assimilation difficult, describing how the rapid cultural changes encountered in urban Chicago weakened group solidarity and created an individualism that strained marriages, spurred teenagers to leave home, and led to violence. Not coincidentally, Duneier’s discussion of older black men’s alienation from their communities has similar themes.
As Duneier’s study progressed, he found that he could no longer keep his distance from his subjects. Like a child who joins the parade he’s been watching, Duneier moved himself closer and closer to Slim’s table, eventually acquainting himself personally with all the regulars. He once asked Slim about his relationship with Bart, a reserved, tight-lipped regular Slim drove home every evening. Slim told him he “didn’t think it right that people neglect their elders.”
