Homework

Our assignment in my urban planning class was to write an essay about our experience with Black America. I'm not sure if my essay accomplishes this, but here's what I turned in. Unlike the rest of the class I didn't editorialize about negative stereotypes or apologize. Anyway...

My neighborhood was filled with students and poor people. Down the street was the soup kitchen being run out of an old house and down the other street was the grocery store where there was always a police officer on duty and where somebody once found a needle in amongst the oranges. Tall boys and malt liquor cans littered the curbs and finding a heap of a homeless person asleep in a warm apartment building hallway wasn’t unusual. Weekend disputes could get loud, but things usually managed to work themselves out by morning. Occasionally our worlds would intersect when someone would ask for change or when someone would loudly direct their commentary about your outfit from the porch of the soup kitchen. And so, we lived in a peaceful coexistence, one marked not by tolerance and acceptance but one where gentle poverty rarely collided with hard lives.

I put my credit card back in my wallet and tossed it onto the passenger seat and when I looked up I realized that there was a man walking quickly toward my car. He was wearing a dirty sports team jacket and sweat pants, his stocking cap stuck up tall in the back, and I could see he was clutching something in his left hand. I sighed and rolled my eyes as I reached up to lock the car doors. My mind slid over the options I had if my wallet was taken, and I readied my excuses against giving out money. It was clear he wanted to talk and reluctantly I rolled my window down as he ran his hand along the hood of my car up toward the windshield. I inhaled deeply ready to cut his pleas short, but instead he blurted out, “I had to tell somebody.” Silently I filled in the details of the homicide he’d just committed or the fast food place he had robbed, “I, I just found twenty dollars over there.” It took twice as long as his story for my head to catch up with what he was saying. “Rock on” I said as we high-fived. Before he turned to go he added that he had had to tell someone.

I left my window down as I watched him head off through the gas station parking lot toward the alley and the nearby trashy apartments silhouetted by the evening sun. As he angled west I also noticed that he was headed in the direction of the liquor store, the hookers who hung out on D Street, and the numerous meth. houses that were in the neighborhood. I shrugged, to each his own.