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tried to get on the bandwagon, he was given a job as a building superintendent.
    Gertrude Williams does not speak in the polished, cultivated accents of a Charlotte Hawkins Brown. In fact, she considers emphasis on such matters sheer frippery. “I’m the same woman I always was,” she says. “Folks used to say to me, ‘Miz Gert, what you got on your mind? I said, just one thing—that little boy.’ It’s the same today. My duties now are to see over everything. I fill his place when he’s away. I can sign any check he can sign. I’m there whenever he’s honored. I got so many plaques and awards I can’t count ’em! It’s because I believed the Lord was going to bring us out. Nobody gets between my son and me, not even his wife. If it’s a question of her or me, it’s me he listens to. I’m his mother, and I’m his best friend, because he always trusted me to be a Christian and a mother. I taught him to wait and pray, and he saw how I suffered and how I sacrificed to bring him on up. During the early days, he worked, and I worked. I took in sewing night and day. I helped him buy an old second-handed car when he needed it, and he worked nights with a chauffeur service for college students. Now I spend Christmas and New Year’s in Palm Springs, California. I’ve been to Hawaii, Mexico, and Canada, but I haven’t changed. I still help everybody—we have to help each other—and if I’m not at Emanuel Baptist Church every Sunday morning, a dozen people call to ask me where I’m at. I’ve got some nieces andnephews and cousins in the South—they write and ask for help, and I help them. I send them something every Christmas, and I don’t just send stuff . I send money . And I send money to friends, too, that needs help. I say, ‘The Lord knew what he was doing when he didn’t give me more children, just my son. It was the Lord that brought us both over.’ I’ve got nothing against anybody, I’ve got love in my heart, and my love of my son is like my love of the Lord. A girl friend once asked me, ‘Miz Gert, would you take money for him?’ I just laughed and said, ‘Honey, there isn’t that much money in the whole wide world!’”

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    Apartment Hunting
    The tall buildings of steel and stone and glass that line Chicago’s North Lake Shore Drive array themselves in a wide arc along the shore of Lake Michigan, a glittering symbol of the city’s wealth and power. These proud apartment houses, curving northward in a seemingly endless procession of canopied entrances and uniformed doormen, address the morning sun and the shimmer of the lake in an attitude of limitless self-satisfaction. The buildings are, of course, a magnificent facade, a screen that hides a somewhat different situation because just a few short blocks to the west of Lake Shore Drive the city shrugs its shoulders and collapses into an appalling slum of cheap rooming houses and dingy bars, weed-filled vacant lots and cracked sidewalks where it is dangerous to walk at night, an area that has become predominantly black. Still, North Lake Shore Drive—the “Gold Coast,” as it is called—remains Chicago’s most prestigious address. Here, in vast floor-through apartments and a few remaining private city mansions, live Chicago’s rich.
    Along Lake Shore Drive are not only the homes of Chicago’s Old Guard—Swifts, McCormicks, Wrigleys, Swearingens, Seeburgs, Paepckes, and Palmers—but also the new-rich arrivistes . Anyone who has prospered mightily in the city is expected to move to Lake Shore. Still, there was more than the usual stir caused in 1970 when Mr. and Mrs. John H. Johnson moved into not one, but two, huge apartments at the Carlyle, at 1040 North Lake Shore, one of the most opulent buildings on that opulent street. It was not just that Mr. and Mrs.Johnson were black, but the