Rodney Cozart knows that at 27 he’s a little young to appreciate his own mortality. Yet he’s lived on the west side most of his life and has seen it become a place where young people have to face death every day. “I recollect that when I was coming up, if a kid died, they were either sick or got hit by a car. But now a kid will come home and say, ‘Oh yeah, mama, we stepped over a body coming across the parking lot.’ It’s so common now. If a kid died, we used to not be able to get any sleep. Now it’s so common, it’s nothing to see a hearse going this way and that down the street.”
Yet Cozart knew that his destiny was to own a funeral home. “Black people, they’re supposed to be spiritual people, supposed to have God call you to do a lot of different things. Some people are just called younger than others. I don’t even know why. Nobody in the family was in the funeral business. No one had ever even worked in a funeral home or was ever affiliated with one in any kind of way. It was just something that I knew I wanted to do.”
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Cozart says he was “different” as a kid, and that included developing a store of imaginary characters he would trot out for his mother’s friends. “It got to the point where my mom said, ‘You should do something with that, because it’s good.’ The older I got, the better I got with it.” His first character was an old woman named Miss Lizzie. Then he cooked up an old man, a bum, a little boy named Claude, a white used-car salesman named Bob, and a bushel of others. “I can do my characters spontaneously. I’ve actually done cassette tapes where it sounds like there are three or four people sitting around talking. And I don’t have to stop and think about what this one would say or that one. While I’m being old lady, it’s like my mind is already focusing on what the old man is going to say. And if I’m old man, my mind is focusing on what little boy is going to say.”
A couple of years ago he was placing an ad at the offices of the Windy City Word when a friend who worked there approached him and suggested that he write an advice column for black teenagers. Cozart hadn’t really considered journalism before, but he put a few sample columns together. He figured that helping out teenagers in need was something his mother would have wanted him to do. Soon after the column began running, it was picked up by the Chicago Defender, where it now runs weekly under the title “What’s Up?” Another column, “Ask Rodney,” runs in the bimonthly west-side Austin Voice.
Cozart may be down-to-earth, but that doesn’t mean he lives ascetically. He’d always dreamed about a more luxurious life, with fancy cars and clothes. Money may not be his primary goal in operating the funeral home, but he’s making it and spending it.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Charles Eshelman.
