Street Corners: Cicero and Polk – Sharing Soul Food, Fellowship and Faith

Eddie Pickens Jr. helps run Marvin's Soul Food restaurant, where the feeling reminds customers of their country childhoods.
Sally Ryan/Chicago News Cooperative

Lunching on greens and cornbread, the dignified church ladies huddled around a table at Marvin’s Soul Food restaurant on Cicero Avenue. They talked about corrupt politics, a wayward society and the truth of the Bible.

“If you’ve got a problem,” Sadie Coleman said with a disarming wink, “we’ll solve it for you.”

Dressed in Sunday church finery and fashionable hats, these devout Baptist women looked decades younger than their ages, 70s and 80s — evidence, it seemed, of virtuous living.

The group of a half-dozen or so gathers every Sunday after church to talk about their shared bonds: faith in Jesus, and memories of long-ago journeys from sleepy Southern country towns to the big city with its smokestacks and sirens.

“We fellowship,” said Gloria Davis, a native of the Mississippi Delta, “and we remember the days.”

These women were part of one of the nation’s most important periods, the Great Migration, the mass trek of blacks going north for jobs and the hope of civil rights. It has been more than a half-century since the peak of migration to Chicago.

The numbers are dwindling among those who can recount the movement that changed the city and America. “We are coming to the end of a chapter,” said Howard Lindsey, a professor of black studies at DePaul University.

Elderly natives of the South like to come to Marvin’s at the corner of Cicero and Polk Street, where the ham hocks, turkey wings and black-eyed peas are some of the best you can find, and where the hospitable ways remind them of country childhoods.

Eddie Pickens Sr., 72, who grew up in the rural South, took over the restaurant to keep soul food alive in the neighborhood.
Sally Ryan/Chicago News Cooperative

The owner is Eddie Pickens Sr., a tall, lean 72-year-old with a vice-grip handshake and a toothpick sticking out of his broad smile. He ambles from table to table, sitting to share stories.

Like many of his customers, Mr. Pickens grew up in the rural South. “We had a farm in Mississippi — raised cotton, corn, sweet potatoes, cows, you name it,” he said. “I liked the country life. But you couldn’t make a living.”

As a teenage newcomer to the big city, Mr. Pickens confessed, he felt intimidated by its brash, high-stepping ways. But the wages were better, and he made a good living as a sanitation worker — or “garbage man,” as he preferred to be known.

He took over the old Continental restaurant 17 years ago when the owner, Miss Glenny, as everyone called her, decided it was time to rest. She virtually ordered Mr. Pickens to take over the restaurant. She said she wanted to keep soul food alive in the West Side neighborhood and feared an empty building would become a hide-out for drug dealers and gang members.

Relaxing after a meal at Marvin’s Soul Food restaurant.
Sally Ryan/Chicago News Cooperative

“I told her I didn’t know anything about running a restaurant,” Mr. Pickens said. “And she said, ‘Well you better get in here and learn.’ ”

He learned. In a neighborhood of shuttered buildings and graffiti-strewn rail cars, Marvin’s Soul Food is a beacon for the working class and a favorite of the older crowd that feels at home here.

“This is a place for people who have worked hard all their lives,” Ada McDonald said.

Some older blacks at Marvin’s lament that young people do not value soul food as their elders do. Like children of every background, they favor fast-food restaurants. And they do not listen to blues music, one elderly customer lamented. They see it as country fare for the old fogies.

But in the view of the church ladies, that is all small sweet potatoes compared with the decline among young people going to Sunday services. At the First Baptist Institutional church that morning, the elderly women agreed, young people were scarce.

“When I was coming along, you got up and went to church, no questions asked,” Inez Banks said. “And you went to Sunday school.”

The church ladies did not have to look far, though, for a young person trying to do the Lord’s work. Nathaniel Pickens, the 26-year-old grandson of the founder, now manages the place.

He works with a local church, and attends Northeastern Illinois University. He will soon earn a bachelor’s degree.

It makes Grandpa Pickens proud. “First one in the family to go to college,” he said with a smile.

The young man did not have time to talk about his accomplishments. He was too busy scooping collard greens.