This weekend, I finally got around to reading Slim’s Table, the 1992 book by Mitchell Duneier about Valois. Duneier was a graduate student in sociology at the University of Chicago when he began his research for the book — going to the restaurant and talking to the groups of men who were its daily patrons.
The book, Duneier’s debut, was an overwhelming success upon release — it received glowing blurbs from Studs Terkel and Orlando Patterson, won awards from the Sun-Times and the American Sociological Association, and was optioned for a (never-made) TV show by Spike Lee.
A central concern of Slim’s Table is countering a popular narrative in sociology and journalism about Black men, a reductive, racist portrait of them as aggressive and hedonistic, possessed of a “weak character” and, at least in low-income urban neighborhoods, devoid of respectable role models. Duneier wants to show that this approach over-generalizes, doing a disservice to its subjects and forgetting large swaths of men.
Thirty years on, there are aspects of Slim’s Table that can feel dated, like the persistent use of “ghetto” to describe the South Side neighborhoods surrounding Hyde Park. (Duneier, who’s now at Princeton, released a book in 2016 tracing the history of that word.) In fact, even the sketch of a community of restaurant regulars can feel a bit like a relic, particularly, it goes without saying, given the last year.
The men who patronize the restaurant — women are largely absent from the cast of Valois regulars — are working-class or uncertainly middle-class, mostly single or divorced, and deeply invested in the community they’ve created together, even if they don’t usually show it. The titular Slim is a kind of moral exemplar, who shares a table with a group of other Black men that include a Playboy photo technician and an administrator at the Board of Education.
Their inviolable habits are structured by the obligation they feel to visit the restaurant; one man tells Duneier that even if he doesn’t quite feel up to going out for dinner, he knows that people are expecting him. Another spends an hour at a restaurant next door reading the sports section of the newspaper, then goes to Valois for forty-five minutes and reads the business pages.
The most moving chapter might be at the very beginning. Duneier introduces us to Bart, a white, septuagenarian Hyde Parker he first met at the old International House cafeteria. Bart eventually switched over to Valois — he says the food is cheaper and better — where Duneier reencountered him while beginning research for his book.
Bart is a difficult character, closed-off, laconic and odd; one day, he admits that he was only late to work once in the last 30 years — when he was one of the passengers in the 1972 commuter rail crash that killed 45 people. After the crash, he walked out unscathed, without helping anyone, and went straight to his job. When asked why, he says, “I figured there was nothing I could do, and anyway I didn’t want to be late for work.”
He is also racist, and thinks of himself as superior to the Black men he eats near every day. At some point, Slim begins giving Bart rides home from Valois, since, he says, it’s too dangerous for an old man to walk home alone at night. The two become close, in a way, and the serving-ladies start referring to Bart as Slim’s “pappy.”
Duneier is careful, however, to emphasize that the intimacy between the two does not have a conversional effect on Bart; at most, it just softens him a little. But perhaps it still matters. As a white friend puts it after Bart’s sudden death, the friendship with Slim “certainly made him more accepting. He saw what it means to care for another person.” Not a ringing endorsement, maybe, but a testament to the kind of “caring community” that the restaurant is able to create, in a book that’s worth reading for anyone interested in a portrait of Hyde Park at a particular place and time.
