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177 6 Integrating Urban Homes Cockroaches and Survival In the essay “Eye to Eye: Black Women, Hatred, and Anger,” Audre Lorde recalled sitting down next to a white woman on a crowded subway train as a small child in the late 1930s. The woman “jerk[ed] her coat closer to her” with a look of horror on her face, and the young Audre assumed that there was something disgusting on the seat, “probably a roach,” and so pulled her own coat toward herself as well. “Suddenly I realize[d] there [was] nothing on the seat between us,” Lorde remembered. “It [was] me she [didn't] want her coat to touch.”1 Lorde’s1974poem“BrownMenace,orPoemtotheSurvivalofRoaches” elaborates upon this sense that many whites in her time perceived and treated blacks as pests. Yet African-Americans had survived and would survive hatred and disgust, attempts to contain them, and even threats of extermination.2 “Call me/your deepest urge/toward survival,” the cockroach narrator says. “Call me/your own determination/in the most detestable shape.” Lorde makes roaches’ stubbornness an inspiring trait, even amid the trials of living with them. Roaches also embody the sense of shame that Lorde believed blacks internalize through the experience of racism—just as the young Audre sensed that there was something dirty, roachlike, about her own body because of incidents like the one on the subway . Furthermore, roaches themselves “alter— / through your greedy preoccupations / through your kitchen wars / and your poisonous refusal—/ to survive.” Attempts to put roaches in their place remade roaches as an ever more tenacious part of the environment. 178 Resistance in the Age of Ecology Across the United States, German cockroaches had survived and changed long past the introduction of DDT and a succession of other pesticides . For decades, residents of the Chicago Housing Authority’s Henry Horner Homes, a segregated project on the Near West Side, felt shame and visceral disgust about the roaches that became ever more tenacious members of their households. Families declined to host Thanksgiving dinners for fear that a roach would sneak into the turkey only to reveal itself as the guests sat down to eat. Mothers worried about both the chemicals that the exterminator sprayed, with their lingering, putrid smell, and also the effects of roaches crawling on their food or into their children’s ears, polluting the entire home environment—sometimes just days after a pesticide application. One woman was mortified when a roach crept out of her purse during a job interview.3 Roaches made the other insults of living in segregated public housing all the more tangible, corporeal, and humiliating. Each encounter with roaches signified the disregard and dehumanization to which the housing authority subjected them. A resident leader named Sarah Ruffin recalled that infestation “was just an everyday thing, and [there was] nothing we could do about it”—although many applied their own pesticides when they saw the exterminators’ did not work. While residents tried to put roaches in their place, they themselves had been consignedto a poor,crime-riddenneighborhoodbythehousingauthority’sJim Crow policies. The housing authority had long neglected Horner’s physical environment, and the effects of that neglect extended into the residents’ very bodies. Roaches became part of Horner residents’ struggle against racial injustice by the state—a struggle to survive in their own homes. The Chicago Housing Authority completed construction on the final annex of the Henry Horner Homes complex in 1961, just a year before the publication of Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring, which condemned the reductionist thinking behind contemporary pest-control practices. Carson popularized ecological thought and, as the historian Maril Hazlett has put it, blurred the lines among human bodies, animals, and the environment, helping to galvanize the modern American environmental movement.4 Carson showed that attempts to put pests in their place had sent pesticides coursing through the veins of entire ecosystems; under contemporary pest-controlregimes,neitherpestsnorpesticideswerecontained.Entomology and ecology researchers called for a more “integrated” approach to controlling pests, which accounted for the complexity of natural ecosystems Integrating Urban Homes 179 rather than trying to simplify ecological connections with quick chemical fixes. Carson and the mainstream environmentalists and scientists who took up her rallying cry did not, however, integrate the problems of environmental pollution and those of social injustice. Environmentalists demanded information about and regulation of the pesticides used on their food, on suburban streets, and in parks, but few seemed to think about landscapes like Henry Horner in the years after Silent Spring...

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