While riding the L, you might occasionally have heard a story told by another rider that caused you to turn down the volume on your headphones to hear more.
We have a few of those types of Chicago tales. They come from the writers we’ve selected, based on their entries, for our second group of Chicago’s Next Voices guest columnists.
One is a Chicago author who saw a snake slither through her family’s mail slot after they helped break the color barrier at a South Side public housing project.
Another is a North Side lakefront lover who sparked a controversy by plucking a patio chair from an alley and plopping it on a beach for all to enjoy.
Another is a South Loop cancer survivor who overcame stage fright to fashion herself into a racy blues songstress.
The people selected come from all walks of life and share the hopes, frustrations and fears that connect us all.
Over the next six months, these are the Chicago’s Next Voices writers whose work we’ll be publishing:
Norma Jean McAdams
Norma Jean McAdams was shaking like a leaf at open mic night at Buddy Guy’s Legends blues bar, unable to spit out the words of Koko Taylor’s “I’m a Woman.”
Chicago bluesman Nicholas Alexander got on stage and grabbed her hand and walked her back and forth and told her to look at everyone in the audience and smile and take a breath. But she still couldn’t break out of her frozen state.
On her second attempt a few days later, she got the words out.
Public singing became a goal as she battled early Stage 1 colon cancer in 2015.
“When you’re lying in your hospital bed and start to contemplate your life, you ask, ‘What else do I have to offer?’ ” says McAdams, 73, who’s retired after working administrative positions with several Fortune 500 companies.
Since her shaky start, she has blossomed as a blues singer, performing under the name I’m M$. B’Havin.
She sings a song by Saffire — The Uppity Blues Women titled “Too Much Butt” and proclaims, “There’s no such thing as too much butt.”
The South Loop resident gets a kick out of seeing people in town from all parts of the world at Buddy Guy’s Legends.
Her message to anyone who will listen is a line borrowed from the late Sophie “The First Lady of Show Business” Tucker: “Be in the business of staying young.”
Essyl Ghim
Essyl Ghim spent part of her childhood living behind the traditional Korean dress shop near Kimball and Bryn Mawr avenues in North Park that her grandmother ran.
Her family slept on hardwood floors and bathed in a small plastic tub in the basement. Grade-school classmates gave Ghim a hard time for frequently wearing the same clothes to school.
But navigating worlds inside the store and outside shaped her.
“Now, I know who I am,” says Ghim, 38, a mother and longtime server in Chicago restaurants who lives on the North Side. “But, at the time, it was really hard, trying to find my identity in Korean culture and my identity in my classroom.
“I’d help relatives coming from Korea who were trying to acclimate and read the bills that came in the mail to my grandmother. My Korean was OK but not excellent. I speak Chicago.
“Looking back, in a sense, it’s a little bit of pain and beauty.”
Ghim says she hopes that hearing her story might convince some people to take the time to get to know and better understand their neighbors.
“Sometimes, people make assumptions about certain people, and they don’t know their story,” she says. “In Chicago, we are so diverse but also segregated, stuck in our own bubbles. Sometimes, it’s OK to get out of the bubble and get to know people.”
Sandra Jackson-Opoku
Not many people have clear memories from when they were only 3 years old. Sandra Jackson-Opoku does.
Someone put a snake through the mail slot of her family’s front door. They had recently moved to the Trumbull Park Homes, which was run by the Chicago Housing Authority. It was 1956, and her new, largely white neighbors were expressing their displeasure that Black families were moving to the row houses on the far Southeast Side.
News clips documented the first Black family who moved in a couple years earlier.: Donald Howard, a mail carrier, his wife, Betty, and their two kids.
Within days, angry crowds gathered, bricks were hurled at their apartment, police barricades were erected around the Trumbull homes, and hundreds of police officers were assigned to guard the area day and night.
The police stemmed the initial outbursts of violence, but the animosity hadn’t vanished when the Jackson family arrived.
Jackson-Opoku says a Trumbull Park neighbor, Frank London Brown, a journalist and writer, documented the injustices of the era in his book “Trumbull Park.”
What Brown represents, she says, is “the importance of role models and the possibility it creates when a kid sees someone who represents possibilities other than whatever limited options seem to be around ... that it’s possible to be a writer even if you’re poor, or in reduced circumstances, or experiencing racial violence. You can still tell your story.”
Jackson-Opoku, 71, retired in 2015 from teaching fiction writing and English at Chicago State University. Her mystery novel “Savvy Summers and the Sweet Potato Crimes” is set in Chicago and will be published in 2025. She lives in Hyde Park.
Madeline Esterhammer-Fic
Budding standup comedian Madeline Esterhammer-Fic loves the open mic scene in Chicago and is trying to make it even better.
“The comedy scene in Chicago is so well known and active and churns out so many great, talented artists, but it’s not necessarily a very inclusive atmosphere, especially for new and different performers who could use the feedback of an actual audience,” she says.
In April, Esterhammer-Fic and a couple of her friends hosted a queer comedy open mic at Whiskey Girl Tavern, an LGBTQ+-friendly bar in Edgewater. They call the monthly event “A Mic of Their Own.” Nearly two dozen comics took the stage that first night, most identifying as female, queer or trans.
“The idea is to create as safe a space as you can because comedy is kind of known for being divisive, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be warm and welcoming,” says Esterhammer-Fic, who lives in Andersonville. “The first 10 spots are reserved for queer comedians, then spots open up to any and all allies. We don’t want to be an open mic that turns people away.
“We’re curating an environment at Whiskey Girl where most comics stay the whole night and actually bring friends who aren’t comedians, which, to me, is a better way of figuring out what’s working as a comic.”
Esterhammer-Fic, 31, grew up in Morgan Park, attended Mother McAuley High School and the University of Chicago, where she studied literature. She works as a proposal writer for a consulting firm. Her calling, though, is in the creative world. She wrote and stars in a solo show, “The Curator Presents,” at the Neo-Futurist Theater.
“I love Chicago so much,” she says. “I’ve grown up in the city my whole life. And if I could change it in some small way with my friends, that would be an accomplishment in and of itself.”
Nestor Gomez
Nestor Gomez found a patio chair in an alley last summer and put it on the sand at Hartigan Beach near Loyola University Chicago for all to enjoy.
Gomez chronicles the joy and angst it caused — much of which was on display in social media posts and comments.
One woman was thankful she could sit there with her dog and enjoy the lakefront for a last time before the animal was put to sleep.
Another woman scoffed at the trash someone put on the beach.
“Just because you think something is garbage, it’s not necessarily garbage,” says Gomez, who came to the United States as an undocumented immigrant from Guatemala in 1985.
“To me, that chair is a reflection of people who come to this country like I did. People say they don’t belong here. It’s illegal. But people don’t give people a chance to show what they are worth.”
Gomez, 52, of Rogers Park is a writer and storyteller who has a day job at S&C Electric.
A.J. Sanders
A.J. Sanders tells a story about a racial slur that took place on a playground and is about Chicago and neighborhoods and kids and their beauty and innocence.
Sanders, 73, grew up in Chatham and saw, between piano and ballet lessons, how, as Black families came to the area in the 1950s and early 1960s, panic peddling real estate agents pounced, and white families fled.
Sanders’ father, Andrew Smith, a CTA bus driver, and her mother, Ann Smith, a grade school teacher, talked about what was happening but always changed the subject to something cheerful when their daughter walked in the room. She was blissfully unaware of what was going on around her.
“We were kids just living our best lives,” the retired Chicago Public Schools teacher says.
Her message: “The views and prejudices and biases that people grow up with are handed to them. You inherit them from your parents, good or bad, one way or the other.”
