A Neighborhood

I grew up in a poor family. Until I was thirteen I shared a room with my two little brothers in a 4 room apartment in Norfolk, Va. Naturally, like everyone else in a poor childhood, we didn’t know we were poor. No one in our apartment complex had money. But we had free run of our apartments which faced the Lafayette River. Woods ran down to the inlets of that river and we played there and in the large open fields throughout the apartments until our parents yelled for us to come home for dinner. After dinner we ran out again. “You all better be here when the street lights come on!” our mothers would warn us.

We went to a high achieving school with the richer children whose homes surrounded the complex. We walked to school like everyone else. We brought our lunches like everyone did. I was so sheltered that I didn’t know until junior high school that my clothes were ten years out of date, hand-me-downs from my older cousin Lois.
When I was 13 we moved to a small town in North Carolina. Once again, we rented but this time it was a house in an old section of town, across the street from an even poorer neighborhood. While still poor ourselves, we lived on the fringes of another world. Yet my brothers and I were never afraid to walk through that section of town. We went to school with kids from there. We went to the same little neighborhood credit grocery stores they did. We played softball and baseball and basketball with these kids. And we were never afraid to be in that neighborhood. The worse thing we saw was old men in the alley behind “RB’s Independent Grocer”, drinking out of brown paper bag covered bottles and hooting and hollering occasionally. Or the old crazy woman who took her reclaimed Piggly Wiggly shopping cart around the neighborhood to pick up bottles to turn in for the deposit.
Drugs. Drug users. Drug dealers. Drug buyers. That’s the major difference I see in the poor neighborhoods now from the poor neighborhoods of my youth.

When I was a little girl, we could live in a poor neighborhood and not be afraid. If you were poor, you could raise your children there and not be afraid they would end up in a morgue. You worked to get your kids out of there. Like my mother, you expected your children to work so they would have it better than you did. You sacrificed for your kids and over and over and over again let them know that there was another way out of poverty….education and hard work. Now, I’m not sure hard working poor parents in poor neighborhoods can get that message to their children.
Today I read that the murderers of a bright 15 year old teenager were sentenced to life in prison. The child, a twin, was killed as a substitute for his brother, who owed drug dealers $200. And because “You can’t be seen as sweet,” one of the killers said. So when they couldn’t find the brother who owed them money, they took the next best thing.

Would you live in this neighborhood? Where no one would come forward to the police, even though they see a murder? Where many people know who shot a 15-year old but won’t tell? A neighborhood where you’re not sure you could let your children play with someone else’s child because you wouldn’t know who would be hanging out at that house? Where you were afraid to stay in your own living room if it faced the street because of stray bullets? Or you worry every time your child walked to the school bus stop that they would see someone getting robbed or accidentally shot in a shower of drive by retaliation?

You would if you were poor.