I know a woman who moved apartments because of the murals. In her first apartment, she had to walk under the 53rd Street viaduct, past the murals, to get to school everyday. She wanted the city to paint over them, to make them clean and white, to sterilize the blue-black face and the cowry shells that shaped its eyes and mouth. The murals got the best of her: they forced her to move to the other side of the viaduct, where she didn’t have to pass by the shell-faced figure every day.

The first time I saw these murals, I was walking under the 53rd Street viaduct on my way to work. I was rushing and only glanced at them. I noticed that big white-and-brown rectangles had been painted over the original murals in big blocks, covering the graffiti tags that inevitably appear on concrete walls. In other places, the paint had flaked off in sheets, revealing dull concrete beneath.

Maybe it was this decrepitude that bothered the woman; maybe it was a sign to her that people let things crumble and decay; we let nature, or art, run its course. Maybe it was the figures themselves, the thought that an apparition could float from the wall at any moment during a late-night walk home. I understood: the ebony shell-faced figure looked back at me whenever I rushed by on my way to work, its mouth a gaping black “o.”  I thought that something powerful might arise from standing and staring at the murals, from walking up and down the sidewalk and running my hands along the crumbling paint. But I resisted. Would my sense of wonder crumble, too, if I got to know these murals? I worried that wonder would deteriorate into disappointment, that my walk to work would become monotonous. The woman’s fear intrigued me—what power these murals must possess to drive her from her apartment!—and I wanted to hold on to my awe of that power. I wanted to hold on to my ability to rush by them with the shell-faced figure staring at me. I wanted to hold on to not knowing.

I finally visited the 53rd Street murals on one of those cold mornings when the stinging wind reminds you that Chicago is on a lake, the kind of morning when the precipitation is neither snow nor rain nor sleet, but some vicious, frozen mixture that bites mercilessly at your face. The question of whether these concrete walls might indulge me an immersive experience would have to resolve itself quickly.

Time slowed while I ran my eyes over the sometimes vibrant, sometimes shredded, concrete. The mural’s colored ribbons blew across the viaduct wall and gusted into the blue-black body of the shell-faced figure that had driven the woman from her apartment. Maybe it was an apparition to her, a mean spirit whose swirling, tangled arms might spin right off the concrete wall and run its fingers through her hair. Empty-eyed and open-mouthed, its gaping orifices were formed by small shells arranged in circles. The shells were tipped with bloody red; the openings created by their circular arrangement were abysmal and black.

The spirit arose from nothing; the swirls and streaks of color that formed its body had their own mind. Its right arm crossed its body, one brightly-colored streak after another, dancing, overlapping, flying up toward the next section of the mural. As the arm lifted upwards, it splintered, not into fingers, but into something more like bare tree branches beribboned with pinks and oranges and reds, exuberantly streaking down into a brindled landscape.

The tawny streaks looped up into the dreadlocked hair of a coppery black woman who tossed cowry shells into the sea with long, boneless hands. A sheer, light blue cloth draped her shoulders, covering her breasts but revealing her stomach. She was more proud than provocative, her dreadlocks streaming behind her and her eyes gazing steadily forward. Red, yellow and white rays emanated from her face and melted into the sea in front of her.

I crept closer to the mural, mindful of the occasional pedestrian who stumbled by. Staring at a viaduct wall at that hour probably marked me as crazy as the early morning drunks. As I got closer to the murals, I noticed something strange. Small hieroglyphics dotted the concrete canvas, drawn in only a slightly darker blue than the impressionistic sea. Scarab beetles, stern vultures, and kohl-lined eyes were inked in amongst the cowry shells, at once cryptic and legible.

Maybe some budding Egyptologist had indulged in late-night graffiti, delighting in the symbolism and eroticism of the cowry shells, which are often used in Africa as symbols of fertility and wealth. It was strange that cowry shells and hieroglyphics, these artifacts of ancient Africa, would be exposed on a crumbling wall on a crumbling Chicago street.

Aside from the occasional passerby, my only company under the viaduct that cold gray morning was these painted spirits. They were deathless things, howling and scowling at me. A bird rose from the cowry shells, its feathers overlapping in diamonds of oranges, purples, and reds. Astride the huge bird was another genderless ebony-blue figure, clad only in a necklace, who commandeered the bird into a flaming sun. Painted-over graffiti left big rectangles over its center, marring its blaze. The sun burned weakly in the amber glow of the light affixed near the top of the mural, lighting the way for pedestrians, keeping them safe from crumbling spirits. Instead of crumbling away, my wonder was gathering momentum. I was hooked.