On August 22, 1962, Gwendolyn Brooks wrote to Elizabeth Lawrence, her editor at Harper and Row, about her fixation upon the Mecca Building, the turn-of-the-century apartment complex John Bartlow Martin (an essayist who would in 1968 serve as Robert Kennedy's urban policy counselor in the wake of Martin Luther King's assassination) had declared “the strangest place in Chicago.” The building, described with curatorial gusto by Martin in Harper's Magazine, had “become one of the most remarkable Negro slum exhibits in the world” (1950: 87).

For Brooks, however, the Mecca (site of her first employment and subject of a series of unpublished prose narratives) registered more than urban blight: it signaled the “material collapse” of a community dependent upon white agency as it indexed the possibility of recovering the subjectivities trapped within.