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Dreams Deferred is a collection of eight short stories, set in a Chicago neighborhood in the nineteen-sixties.   The neighborhood depicted in the stories is a place where no one lived permanently:   “no one grew up in this area; they just came here while they waited to make more money and move to one of the better neighborhoods, or held on for awhile before descending to a worse neighborhood.”  Life in this neighborhood was often cruel; its inhabitants ranged from a theater manager who ran numbers on the side, to a priest whose ministrations to his flock were misguided and unhelpful, to a run-down prize fighter looking to make a better life for the neighborhood kids, to a mentally retarded boy who was abused by his mother’s various boyfriends.

Yet despite the grit and dirt, moments of sublimity sometimes occur:   witness the case of Hector who recited verses from the Iliad to an illiterate prize fighter; or Dr. Abraham Weissman, former concentration camp survivor who ministered to the sick and needy; and finally Perry, a deaf mute whose paintings inspired his friends, teachers and immigrant parents. 

Like the poem Harlem, these stories ask the question – “What happens to a dream deferred?”  In some cases, the dream is shattered by the harsh realities of life in the city; in others, redemption seems possible.  The common thread that binds these stories lies beyond the neighborhood, however.  As the narrator of “Teach Your Children” relates at the end of the collection:  “David was right; sometimes you can take the anger, the bitterness and the disappointment, and make something beautiful grow from them.  Oh, and one other thing; everyone has a disability, some just happen to have theirs on the inside.”