Chris Radjenovich’s Reviews > Black Boy > Status Update

My first glimpse of the flat black stretches of Chicago depressed and dismayed me,
mocked all my fantasies. Chicago seemed an unreal city whose mythical houses
were built of slabs of black coal wreathed in palls of gray smoke, houses whose
foundations were sinking slowly into the dank prairie. Flashes of steam showed
intermittently on the wide horizon, gleaming translucently in the winter sun.