Toya Wolfe, Author of Last Summer on State Street, Discusses Writing and More
By Allison Yates
Do you know about the former Robert Taylor Homes in Chicago’s Bronzeville neighborhood? They were a public housing project built by the Chicago Housing Authority that broke ground in 1959 and opened in 1962. The housing development consisted of 28, 16-story high-rise buildings, mostly grouped in threes in horseshoe configurations, with a total of over 4400 units. In 1999, the development was slated for demolition in what was referred to as the “Plan for Transformation”: There would be demolition of 18,000 units of neglected public housing and the construction or renovation of 25,000 units, all over the course of about a decade. The effects—physically in Bronzeville and psychologically and emotionally on the former residents—of this demolition are still seen today.
In Toya Wolfe’s debut novel, Last Summer on State Street, readers get a glimpse into what this process was like—all while main character Felicia is grappling with growing up.
“In April of 1999, the Chicago Housing Authority started tearing down the buildings on our block. A year before that…Precious and I sat in class and listened to Ms. Pierce read an article from the Chicago Tribune about how they’d started knocking down the buildings in the Hole, at the very end of the State Street Corridor, one of the most notorious blocks of Robert Taylor high-rises.
Sitting directly directly across from my building like its reflection, 4946 had been empty for months. Black boards replaced curtains, and the porch lights stopped blinking on every night. Then, the day came when CHA began the slow, agonizing process of knocking it down.”
We spoke with author Toya Wolfe in July 2024. Watch the video below to hear her read and excerpt from Last Summer on State Street, talk about how the novel came to be, and more.
Want to learn more about the former Robert Taylor Homes?
Video Transcript
[ 00:00:00 ]I hope you had a chance to read the book. I was just telling Toya how much I love this book. I didn't get a chance to say at the beginning of the run, but I love these sorts of types of coming-of-age stories. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Another Brooklyn, The House on Mango Street, and I would put this book in that same category. So I'm really honored to be able to introduce her today and meet her. Toya Wolf was born and raised in the Robert Taylor homes. So, a Chicagoan through and through. She attended Columbia College to study a master's of fine arts and creative writing. And that led to the book that we all know and love today, Last Summer on State Street. Again, I'm the founder of Black Girls Read Book Club.
[ 00:00:40 ]We read stories written by and about black women and have been around for about seven years now. So if you can follow us on Instagram. And feel free to join us for our next book discussion, which will be on this book. So I'm going to turn things over to Sophia to lead the Q&A. Thank you so much for stepping in for me. And I think Toya is actually going to start by reading a little from the prologue. So thank you so much. Oh, yeah. I think it's green. Is yours green? I'm not a tech person, everyone, but I do my best. Can you hear me all the way in the back? I also have a mic.
[ 00:01:17 ]If at any point, like, I would rather people be able to hear, so if at any point you can't hear, just tell me and I'll pause you all. Is yours a screen? Is yours a screen? And then I wanted, oh yeah, please go ahead. And I wanted to say real quick, just so you all know, Sophia is a volunteer, but you maybe don't know all about Sophia, so I'll tell you a snippet. Sophia is a two-year Chicago transplant from the East Coast who was a bookworm as a kid and has rediscovered her passion for reading as an adult. In addition to volunteering for Read and Run, she helps facilitate monthly book swaps and participates in several run clubs around the city. This is my favorite part, everyone. Get ready.
[ 00:01:53 ]She's lactose intolerant but likes to take risks. That is a fabulous bio. Okay, thank you, Sophia. We'll put that at midnight. Okay, well, have fun. We'll help you around. I wanted to just read a little bit of the book. I know we read books, but it's always great to hear the cadence from the author. That's always my request when I go to a reading. So I'll just read a little bit from the very beginning of the book. I've known Precious forever, Stacia a year, and Tanya for just a minute. We were so different, but everybody loved them some double dutch. Sometimes we made a tight-knit crew. Other days, we couldn’t get along for nothing. Our friendship started with, what’s your name? The answer carried with it looks I could still see clearly.
[ 00:02:47 ]Stacia’s begged me not to talk to her, and Tanya’s asked, is she talking to me? We got past those facial expressions and gave our names. Names that sound like heartbeats. Fifi, Precious, Stacia, Tanya. It’s kind of a miracle that we formed those bonds, because our mothers couldn’t stand each other. To this day, I wonder how me and Precious were cool for so long, and Stacia, everybody has something negative to say about the Buchanan family. I knew there'd be backlash for bringing Tanya around, but I couldn't know at 12 how bad things would get. That summer, one by one, they dropped out of sight as if we were playing a game of all-in together.
[ 00:03:27 ]When you play all, you get two people to turn the rope, and then a ton of kids, it could be eight of us, we'd all jump in. The people turning sang, 'all, all, all, all', and repeat the word until there's no more room in the rope. Precious and I began that song before we could even walk. Stacia jumped in when we started sixth grade, and Tanya appeared months later in the middle of June. The song went on, and we jumped, screaming the lyrics, attempting to overpower the sounds of construction vehicles as they dismantled our Southside neighborhood and the Robert Taylor homes. All in together, any kind of weather, I see teachers looking out the window, ding, dong, the fire bell, January, February, March, April, May, June, July.
[ 00:04:10 ]When we played the game, people left the rope one at a time reliably when they heard their birthday month. But in real life, their departures were sudden. Tanya got pulled out of the rope, and not long after her disappearance, Stacia vanished too. Passion stuck around until pretty late in the summer, like her birthday was in August, and then she just slid out and rolled away in her family's Camry. They left me standing there with the rope. After all these years, I can still hear their voices screaming, first, second, and zero no higher, and arguing over who said zero no higher first. The memories won't go away. They're proof that once upon a time, I lived in a brick skyscraper on State Street, in a place where stairwells filled with echoes of stampeding gym shoes and harmonizing winos. Those memories won't let me believe that I dreamt up precious Stacia and Tanya, but all in together is over.
[ 00:05:08 ]Okay, we're going to jump into the Q&A and the first question we have for you. Last summer on State Street includes so many historical details. It was easy to forget sometimes that this is a novel and not a memoir. What was your research process like? What resources did you use? Who did you speak with to help you recreate this time period? My grandmother. My entire life, my grandmother was a bit of a historian. She would, you know, she was just being herself. And I was just like absorbing all of it. I didn't think I would write a book set in the Robert Taylor homes. In fact, if you know anything about Robert Taylor, it's the kind of place that she worked really hard to forget.
[ 00:05:51 ]And when I started writing fiction, I realized that these girls were back in these buildings and it was not a happy day to sort of just give into it, just kind of go with it. And I found that I was just sort of putting in all this stuff that I just already knew. And I always tell people, like, write a book and research last, because research is like candy. And at the very, very end, when I decided to, like, make sure I wasn't telling lies, like, fact-check myself, fact-check my memory. Like, it was all, like, right. So I did not do a lot of research for this book. I just wanted to make sure that I was getting it right, because I was sitting in rooms like this, and you've got to get it right.
[ 00:06:33 ]People will come for you. That's great. Thank you. So you grew up in Robert Taylor Homes in the 1980s and 1990s. And you have first-hand experience with so much of this history. Was there anything you discovered in your research for this novel that surprised you? And did you find it difficult to revisit that period of your life? Definitely found it difficult because I think it's the kind of place that you could very well work really hard to get away from. And if you succeed. Say if we're like, capital I, F, if you can succeed, like if you could physically sort of leave a place like that, if you could mentally sort of leave a place like that, it's really hard to sort of go back to write scenes that feel real to like a reader, like these buildings you ran past where they were, you ran past like this open ground right.
[ 00:07:28 ]So I had this difficult task of rebuilding these buildings in literary form so that a person could read it and be there. And what that takes is you have to really go back. And so there are times when it was really hard. There are times when you have to close your computer and go do something else and come back when you can. I think in terms of research, I thought it was fascinating that so there are 28 of these 16-story buildings that made up the Robert Taylor Homes and I for a time was flirting with the idea of writing a sequel and that of course requires like a ton of research that's beyond my grandma's like scope you know the other things that I know, and I was asking questions like who designed these buildings?
[ 00:08:19 ]What, you know, because I have friends who are like architects and like to think like a designer now, like who designed them, who decided on the materials that were very cheap, like, you know, cheap materials. What were the policies that went in place to allow this to even sort of be constructed? And the most fascinating thing I found out was that these buildings were built in a year. 28. 16 story buildings. in one year and I will let you guys take that in because it just punched me in the chest it's like the quality yeah you know you can't build an addition I mean I don't know personally but you can't even build an addition to your house in a year right so I just I think like to kind of put it in perspective of like this is they were not building a quality home for African Americans to live in you know
[ 00:09:16 ]So that was like the most jarring thing I found in research for a book that would come along somewhere down in the future. Those facts are very shocking. And the acknowledgments you mentioned about this book grew from a short story. What's the process of turning a short story into a novel? Insanity. Don't do it! Was there anything in the short story, the original short story, that changed significantly when you transitioned into the full novel? No, the short story was called Tanya from the Ten and it was just about Tanya. It was just about Tanya's disruption of this friend group. Raise your hand if you've ever read 'Bartleby, the Scrivener' by Herman Melville. All right, the one nerdy lit person in the room. They're like, we are the runners, we do read books, but.
[ 00:10:08 ]All right, so Herman Melville wrote this short story. Did he write Moby Dick? Yes. I'm blanking because I'm sitting in front of a ton of people right now. Okay, most famous thing he wrote was Moby Dick. And when I was in school, like so, I studied; I was an English major and then I did an MFA, which means you read a lot of literature and you learn a lot of useless facts about things. When I was an undergrad at Columbia, we had to learn structure by doing structural parodies. So, you read a story and then you write your own story, but make it the exact structure of that story. Time for the 10 was a homework assignment. That one, it won $500 for me, which is a big deal.
[ 00:10:55 ]When you were young and broke, and somebody's like, 'You won second place.' It wasn't even first place; it was second place. You won $500. I was like, 'Oh my gosh, $500.' So the story, already I have this confirmation that my teacher didn't fail me, and then somebody gave me some money. And I was like, 'Man, you've really got something here.' And I just continued to write about these girls. If I had a homework assignment, we were it was back these same group of girls were back in these buildings and then suddenly I just realized like this wants to be a novel like you're not going to stop writing these stories and so I but the heart of the story is just that Tanya gets invited into this group and then it just kind of falls apart and that's really that's what happens in the book too, but um but then I started to talk about like
[ 00:11:42 ]these girls and their individual families and then Michi was from a totally different book and a dear friend of ours who we just lost recently who was like a trusted mentor advisor coach good friend he was my thesis advisor in grad school and he said to me you're not gonna like this but I think you should put these books together and so Fifi got a brother And his life is wild as well. So yeah, I just think the short story is sort of like the heart of what became this novel. I didn't take anything out. I built more things onto it. That's inspiring. The four girls at the center of the story are each so different. What were your inspirations for each of these characters? yourself or other people in your life?
[ 00:12:28 ]So because I've had a long time to sit with this material I know the real answer to that question and it is they are all parts of me. Now, of course, they're like the extremes, like Stacia, and then there's the Fifi's of the world who are trying to get everybody together and be in everybody's business. And my friends will tell you that's a lot like how I used to move and still do, but I think I wanted to start out as these sort of archetypes because I wanted to present four very different black girls to the world. Because when I watch TV, the same little girl rolling her neck and being way older than she ought to be did not represent the people I could even play with, because our parents didn't want you were not getting away with behaving in that way.
[ 00:13:15 ]And so I wanted to write like four very different girls, the only thing binding them together is double Dutch, and I've taken an informal poll, you know, and apparently people who play sports, I don't play sports. I look like I play sports. It's not true. But people who play sports will play with, if you need like a fifth person so you could like play whatever game, you will play sports with anybody. You may not invite them to your house, but you need them for that thing. And so this is how these girls become friends eventually, like a unit, because it's like, okay, three of us, you need at least three people to play double dutch. But if you have a fourth person, you can stay off the end and that's like a big deal.
[ 00:13:56 ]It's like if you're really good at this and you've got four people, you can play beat and then you never have to turn the room. So this is sort of what what like pulls them together; double that's just like space to black people-like, if it's not your thing. People are just like, 'Get out the way.' There's like no room to teach you. You know, you don't... Some people, when it comes to W, some people are just like, 'Don't even bring it up,' you know? Of course. Does anyone have any questions? Did you have a Mrs. Pierce in your life? Yes, in fact. The question was, do you have a Mrs. Pierce in your life? Not currently, but she is based on my teacher who was my 6th, 7th, and 8th grade teacher.
[ 00:14:50 ]And I think she represents a lot of, especially during the 80s and 90s, the CPS teachers who They wanted to work in the schools by the Robert Taylor Homes or troubled neighborhoods because they were like, these kids need education, but they also need love, they need direction, they need mentorship. Education is such a holistic, and a lot of them went to historically black colleges and universities, and they got the same sort of education from their teachers at college. To be a teacher means you are a holistic teacher. People don't really talk about like those of us who came from this golden era of CPS where it was like, you got quite an education and so I really wanted to get her down in a book so that people understood, this is what being an educator This is what you were agreeing to if you decided to teach, especially if you taught in these specific neighborhoods.
[ 00:15:48 ]And so that character is based on a teacher from childhood who's no longer with us. And there's someone from my school who, I don't know if she, I don't think she made it today, but she was like an administrator. And she was part of that whole crew of teachers who were just like, we're going to, because the buildings weren't coming down at that time. It was like, this is our existence. There is no future outside of this; this just is you live there and I'm going to educate you as best I can because this is this is home for you and this is all that's being offered you know to you. I have a question: um, so going back in time when BP went to visit her aunt from the suburbs, yeah, and she gets punched and her brother goes to the hospital, yeah.
[ 00:16:38 ]So with that scene, what I think about is like, you know, it's black people, but it didn't matter that they were black people. They were looked upon, like, they were down, like, 'you're from the projects.' So, can you speak to how people felt leaving the projects and trying to, you know, become part of a different, you know, community that was not welcoming? I think, um, two things. Roseland is considered the South Side. So it wasn't the suburbs. It's just there are parts of Chicago, parts of the South Side where black people live, that were absolutely lovely and stunning. And then over time, things fall into disrepair. But I think it just depends. Because I think about where my, I was in college when this relocation happened.
[ 00:17:35 ]Fifi's time period is like, she's growing up like a decade after I would have been running around with my friends and jumping double-dutch. So when the relocation happened, my mother and younger sister were still living in Robert Taylor. And they moved to like 57th and Michigan, which was also another black neighborhood. And they didn't have a lot of like people sort of looking down on them. That was their experience. What I'm getting to is like I can't speak to everyone's experience. We can just kind of like make some assumptions. A lot of people move to Chatham, and at the time Chatham was like single-family homes. And I can let's make some assumptions real quick: I can assume they were not excited to have a bunch of non-homeowners flood their neighborhoods, change their property values, those sorts of things.
[ 00:18:25 ]Because one of the things that I'm really big on transitions and helping people understand what a transition would be. And I just wish that there were conversations with those homeowners. There were conversations with the people leaving the projects and saying like, 'Hey, you're about to move into this neighborhood where everybody owns everything.' And they're going to keep their grass like this. They're going to expect this. And if you're going to sort of like kind of become part of this community, like let's do these things. And then also sort of talking to the people who were. These people were moving to their neighborhoods and, like, trying to mediate what it means to have all this unknown because we're afraid of things that we don't know or understand, and so I just think none of those conversations happened.
[ 00:19:08 ]And a lot of sort of being displaced and crash landing into other neighborhoods. A lot of the sort of negative effects of all of that, I think, sort of stem back to no one had a conversation with any of the people involved in the transition. And so I'm sure like some situations were better than others and some were just very damaging. You have people who are leaving one gang territory and moving to another gang territory. Like these are things you don't policymakers don't necessarily think about. Like there's a whole other world happening outside of the world you can see with your eyeballs so I can only imagine um that it was really terrible for some people and then not as terrible for others. I think we have time for one last question and then there's a wrap.
[ 00:20:19 ] Yeah, Fifi's always been the main storyteller because I needed a character who cared about everything and everybody. Because imagine if this was narrated by Stacia. You would hear about what Stacia wants, what Stacia needs, what's happening at Stacia's house, pissing her off. You wouldn't know anything about anything happening. And so I think when you're choosing, especially a first-person narrator, I'll nerd out for a second to anybody thinking about writing a book. When you're choosing a first-person narrator to narrate an entire novel, you've got to be careful. You've got to choose someone who's going to teach us about a whole world. They can still have their feelings and be biased or whatever, but they've got to care about a wider range outside of themselves. So she was always the person to tell the story. I think when it became a novel, you got to know go into everybody's homes and you got to follow them a little bit. Yeah, but it was always Fifi.