There was a lot about the world that Southside didn’t trust. He was kind of a classic old-guy conspiracy theorist. He didn’t trust dentists, which led to his having virtually no teeth. He didn’t trust the police, and he didn’t always trust white people, either, being the grandson of a Georgia slave and having spent his early childhood in Alabama during the time of Jim Crow before coming north to Chicago in the 1920s. When he had kids of his own, Southside had taken pains to keep them safe—scaring them with real and imagined stories about what might happen to Black kids who crossed into the
...more
