At a demolition site on the southwest side, an end loader pulls up to a diminutive old man wielding a hammer. The man, who has a lazy eye and a mouth full of false teeth, looks up with dismay as a new load of bricks tumbles out of an enormous set of jaws and lands on the small mountain already amassed in front of him. He hates it when the wreckers pile up the bricks this way. It makes his job, stacking the bricks, more difficult than it already is.
Stacking is strenuous work, and the pay is not good. Each Chicago common, the most common local brick, weighs about four pounds. For putting up one skid of commons, 530 bricks, stackers make $10, sometimes $12 if they travel to a site beyond the city limits. In a good week, working six days, the best stackers can earn between $200 and $300. Preacher is not one of the best stackers. Someday soon, he tells me, with the Lord’s help, he’s going to stop stacking. Someday soon, he’s going to own his own wrecking company.
Stackers can come and go each day as they please. They can stack one skid and call it a day or stay until the last brick is gone. Ronald, 32, puts it this way: “When you’re working for someone else and you say you’re tired, they say you’re fired.” Stackers take breaks whenever they want for however long they want without consequence. Since how much they make depends in part on how hard they work, they have some control over their own wages.
No one knows how many people stack bricks in Chicago. Most estimates hover around 200. The workforce is composed predominantly of black men, though some black women and a few Latinos stack too. Preacher, in all his years on the brick fields, says, “I ain’t never seen any white stackers.” White people at demolition sites are usually tearing down the buildings, cutting off the gas and water lines, assessing the quality of the bricks, or unrolling blueprints.
Preacher doesn’t object to young guys busting bricks, but he wishes they wouldn’t use “vile words” or drugs while doing it. He’ll try to dissuade stackers from getting high, but usually, he says, “They don’t want to hear it, so I leave them alone.”
Preacher rarely talked to his children about his upbringing, unless he wanted to make a point about how good they had it. Then he would give a slim, rote account of how he “came up rough,” back when black children like himself spent their days laboring alongside their fathers, planting corn or cotton or some other seed, instead of attending school.
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The bricks these plants produced looked different from bricks produced elsewhere, a result of the geological composition of the indigenous clay and the way in which it was fired. The clay that borders Lake Michigan from Milwaukee to Gary, stretching west to where I-294 is today and south to Kankakee, is derived from drift deposited by the last northern Illinois glacier. Grayish blue in color, this ancient clay contains carbonates like limestone not typically found in clays used for brick making.
