Bronzeville, where Marcus Whitby had bought a house, was yet a different South Side, one I only knew secondhand. I got there early enough to do a little exploring. Whether because of Lotty’s magic potion, or because Geraldine Graham let me sleep through the night, I’d woken early, with more energy than I’d had lately. I took the dogs for a brisk walk, went to my office to check messages and complete a report-and still reached Twenty-sixth and King, where Bronzeville starts, before eight-thirty. I paused in front of a statue commemorating the great wave of black immigration into the city. Driving on down King to Thirtyfifth Street, I passed the husks of the businesses that used to make up the so-called Black Metropolis. As Aretha Cummings, Whitby’s assistant, said yesterday, no one wants those old segregation days back, but it was painful to see the wreck of buildings that once had been the heart of a vital community.

The same thing has happened in South Chicago; I can hardly bear to return to the scenes of my youth because of my old neighborhood’s rotting buildings. But South Chicago has forty percent unemployment and the highest murder rate in the city, while Bronzeville is on its way back. True, many of the businesses around me were dilapidated, but an art deco building on the corner of Thirtyfifth and King had been turned into an insurance company, and the stately mansions that lined both sides of the boulevard looked well maintained.

Marcus Whitby had bought a town house on Giles, a short narrow street just west of King Drive. I found a parking space on the corner of Giles and Thirty-seventh, and walked back up the street to the address I’d found on Nexis. Some of the houses on Giles seemed to be teetering on their last beams, with broken windows and sagging roofs. Others had been restored even beyond their original beauty, with the addition of painted Victorian curlicues on the porches and window trim. Most, like Whitby’s own, fell somewhere in between.

I stood on the pavement, staring at it, as if I could learn something about Whitby’s life from studying his home. It had been built high and narrow to fit on a small lot. The dark red brick was old, cracked in many places, but freshly mortared, the modest porch and wood trim around the windows patched and painted. Louvered blinds were drawn on all three floors, making the house look forbidding, its empty eyes closed to the world.

Children straggled out of the nearby houses, backpack laden, on their way to school. They flowed around me like fish parting around a piece of piling—I was a grown-up, nonexistent. For the adults heading to work, it was a different story: I stood out as a stranger, and a white one to boot. Several people stopped to ask i? I needed help. When I told them I was just waiting for someone, they eyed me narrowly: white suburbanites come into the black South Side to buy drugs, so they can keep their own little towns clean and crime-free. I’d dressed soberly, in my greenand-blackstriped wool, to look both respectful of the dead and professionally competent-but that didn’t prove I wasn’t a crackhead.