It has been almost fifteen years since the last building of the Robert Taylor Homes was demolished. The Robert Taylor Homes was a public housing project in Chicago’s Bronzeville neighborhood that housed 27,000 people at its peak. The bulldozing of the buildings left many displaced and scattered across the South Side of Chicago.
Toya Wolfe’s debut novel, Last Summer on State Street, is set in the Robert Taylor Homes. The book focuses on the lives of four young Black girls as they come of age while watching the buildings around their home get knocked down.
Wolfe's Last Summer on State Street is intentional to include both moments of joy of playing Double Dutch to the quick reality of dodging bullets.
"I grew up in the Robert Taylor Homes. And if I was going to write a story about girlhood, that's the neighborhood, the block, I know best,"says Wolfe.
Throughout Last Summer on State Street, we follow twelve year old, Fe Fe and her friends, Precious, Stacia and Tonya as they navigate coming of age in the buildings. While the anxiety of not knowing when they will have to move from their homes. And tells the often-forgotten stories of Black girlhood.
The author emphasizes she wanted to include the lives of families, of kids just being kids.
"I remember growing up, like you lived with that duality," she says. "There was danger, but you also carried on and you found a way to find joy. So I definitely needed to get that into this book."
But the narrator, Fe Fe quickly realizes something isn't right with her friends, Stacia and Tonya. And as her family and neighbors move out, she grows up to worry about what may have happened to them. The ghosts of their girlhood and what happened on the block haunt her.
"We don't always know what happens to people and why things are the way they are," Wolfe says. "Sometimes there's just no answers to these horrible things that happen. And it sits with you and it haunts you."
Ultimately, Wolfe hopes readers remember the humanity of the residents of the Robert Taylor Homes.
"Even if you're just considered a victim, that's not presenting a person as a whole person," Wolfe says. "Things happen to us, but we're still people. We're still important."
Wolfe will be at Boswell Books on Wednesday, September 28 at 6:30PMfor an in-person reading and conversation.
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