Reclaiming Your Community

You Don't Have to Move out of Your Neighborhood to Live in a Better One

Majora Carter

• Editorial: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
• Año: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781523000319
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Categoría: Stadtplanung & Stadtentwicklung

How can we make the promise of America more accessible and equitable for everyone? What is a path toward wealth creation, quality of life, and happiness in low-status communities, whether in the inner city, in Rust Belt towns, Native American reservations, or other “marginalized” places? There is an alternative to programs that simply ameliorate poverty without building wealth or counteracting the effects of displacement and cultural erasure through gentrification. What Majora Carter proposes in this inspiring and eye-opening book is a talent retention community development strategy. Low-status communities have never had a shortage of successful people emerging fromthem. What they have had is a shortage of successful people staying. Carter focuses on retaining homegrown talent to create a robust, economically diverse ecosystem. She advocates •	helping property owners resist selling to speculators
•	assembling available resources to build local businesses
•	creating vibrant third spaces where personal and professional connections can grow
•	and much more Throughout the book, Carter shares key lessons from her personal and professional journey. The result is a powerful, heartfelt rethinking of poverty, inequality, economic development, and individual and family success.

CHAPTER 1

MEASURING SUCCESS BY HOW FAR YOU GET AWAY FROM YOUR COMMUNITY

The woman’s folded arms provided a shelf for her boobs as she leaned on her windowsill. Her window was on the ground floor of the apartment building on my corner. I don’t remember what she looked like or even her name, but she was always enrobed in a flowered housecoat, perched at her window when I came home from school.

She didn’t seem to know the given names of any of us kids, but she knew who our parents were and which buildings we lived in. She knew whether we were the troublemakers or the quiet ones or something in between. After making eye contact—because she wanted to make sure you knew exactly whom she was talking to even if she didn’t address you by name—she would yell out all sorts of things at us as we passed by.

Boy, I saw your momma today. Miss Garcia said you better get straight on home and stop messing with them no-good boys. They ain’t gone do nuttin but bring you and your momma and papi trouble. G’awn now.

Miss Carter ain’t got nuttin to worry ’bout witchu. She whoop your butt good if you do like the rest a these fast girls, but you got a good head on your shoulders—she say you got a honor mention in that Highlight magazine? Keep it up! Thank ya, Jesus!

She was one of the cast of characters that made up my neighborhood. I was fascinated that someone learned so much about other people by keeping her head stuck out a window while wearing a housecoat. I literally never saw what her lower body looked like.

Her building had a little courtyard in the center of it that separated the building into two sections. The side she didn’t live in was mostly abandoned because it had been torched earlier that summer. People were still living in some of the apartments that escaped the flames, smoke, and water, although they had to walk down stairs past floors where apartments had been burned out. Squatters, sometimes drug dealers, had taken over some of them.

It took what seemed like hours for the fire department to get there when the building was actually burning. Nobody blamed them. Firehouses were being closed all around New York City and in Black and Latino neighborhoods especially, so neighbors pitched in as they could.

I saw Peto, a young man whose family lived two doors down from mine, carefully helping a very old lady down the fire escape. Others helped too, but I remember Peto the most. He was so gentle with that lady, who could clearly not move very fast, and he got her down safely. He was and still is a hero to me.

Some believed the building was torched by the landlord to get insurance money. Others said it was started accidentally by the kids in a family full of mean kids that lived in the building.

Those kids didn’t seem to have any adult supervision; they were always beating up on someone, and they knew how to fight dirty. I saw one of them bite the cheek of another kid. Even though the skin wasn’t broken, there was a nasty-looking bruise there for weeks.

I took no chances. Even though I was tall for my age, I had never even thrown a punch and wasn’t keen on trying, especially with that family. I would cross to the other side of the street whenever I saw any of them coming.

Either way, the mean-kid family was burned out of their apartment and I never saw any of them again.

Later that summer, the side of the building with Miss Housecoat was torched as well. And overnight, she was gone too.

It was August 23, 1974. One of the cops was a little paunchy with sandy blond, greasy-looking hair. His skin was slightly pockmarked. He had a kind but worried expression on his face—probably because my mother was crying softly, leaning into my father’s shoulder. Another cop was there, but I don’t remember him at all.

I was seven. I crouched down and peeked around the door of the living room, hoping that they wouldn’t see me. I heard snippets of the conversation.

I knew that my beautiful big brother, Lenny, was dead—shot in the head above the left eye.

The cops were trying to understand how he ended up where he was, what got him killed. It was “suspicious.” One of them asked my parents if they could search his room.

I scurried back to my bedroom before they started to move and took a post just inside the door. I couldn’t hear anything they were saying in the other room, but I convinced myself that Lenny was in the top bunk and that the kind but worried cop just so happened to be a surgeon and was extracting the bullet from above his left eye and Lenny would therefore, miraculously, come back to life.

That fantasy lasted about two minutes as my other family members started to wake up.

Lenny had what is now commonly known as PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder). Once, I overheard my mother telling her friend Ms. Mattie that when she went to wake him up for his shift with the US Postal Service, he jumped out of bed and lunged at her as if she were a Vietcong soldier. Thank God he didn’t sleep with a gun, she’d said.

Many years later, I discovered that my brother, like some young men in the South Bronx and other poor communities of color around the country, got caught up in the illegal drug trade in the late 1960s–1970s.

Lenny served two combat tours in Vietnam. I wish I could find the letters that he wrote to me in his perfect penmanship. He would enclose little gifts for me in the envelope, like a handwoven ribbon made in Vietnam that I wore as a headband around my tiny little afro.

I was so happy when he wrote that he was coming home and wouldn’t have to go back to that vicious war that I saw on the news. Unlike the rest of my siblings, he never made fun of me for being an awkward little bookworm, tall for my age with an afro that never grew beyond an inch in the era of big afros.

Sometimes, Lenny rode me on the handlebars of his bike, let me hang out with him even when his friends came over, and led me to believe that I was a graceful dancer worthy of the most skillful Soul Train line—I definitely was not, but I liked hearing him say it.

Lenny was my brother.

A very good brother, indeed.

But he’s dead now,

Killed with the slightest of ease.

I was crying at his funeral wishing he were back,

But he’s in the hands of the Lord now

And he cannot come back.

I wrote that poem for him shortly after his murder.

I knew what to do. I had a good head on my shoulders after all; the lady in the housecoat confirmed what I already knew to be true.

At the age of seven years and ten months, I was determined to grow up and get out of there. I started planning my escape from The Bronx.

CHAPTER 2

GEEKY LITTLE KID IN THE GHETTO

When school started again, after the summer of my brother’s unsolved murder, I sat next to J. in Mr. Dombrow’s third grade class at PS 48 just as the rest of the class was settling in.

J. was a lithesome, pretty, brown-skinned girl, always dressed in fashionable clothes. She was partial to bell bottoms with embroidery on them. She was the cool third grade Black girl version of Marcia Brady. Her thick, long hair was neatly done in two double-stranded ponytails that grazed her shoulders, and elastics with plastic marbles secured her hair at the root and the ends.

I felt like a hulking beast next to her. I wore sensible dark blue “Marty” shoes from Buster Brown that my mom insisted on getting because they were indestructible. I know they were because I tried to destroy them—many times. I dragged the toes on pavement and scraped the sides along curbs. “Nothing a little navy blue shoe polish won’t fix!” my mom would say, delighted by the outcome of her thriftiness. When I outgrew a pair, they would be replaced by yet another.

I wore the one new outfit that my mom bought me for the first day of the school year. I am pretty sure it was bought at either the Robert Hall or the Great Eastern department store. It wasn’t anything like the fashion show that J. put on at the beginning of every school semester. It seemed to me that she never wore the same outfit twice in the first month of school. I knew that tomorrow, I’d be back in hand-me-downs from my sisters or brothers, anywhere from three to sixteen years older than me. My clothes were outdated before I even put them on.

But J. had always been nice and chatty to me, despite my bad fashion sense. She told me she wouldn’t be seeing me anymore soon. Her family was moving to New Rochelle.

She shared that her parents said the neighborhood was getting bad and they didn’t want her in it anymore. Their new home wasn’t ready by the time school started, but she assured me it was really nice and her new school was too.

“How was your summer?” she asked.

“My brother got killed.”

“Welcome to third grade!” Mr. Dombrow announced. I was glad he started the class.

J. and I never spoke of my brother’s murder again and within the month, she was gone—another one of the sirens that signaled all was not right in my neighborhood.

There were many sirens. After a while, you barely heard them anymore, despite their growing frequency.

Early in our courtship, my husband, James, and I told each other about our childhoods.

He told me that he rode horses and motorcycles, that his first girlfriend was also his closest neighbor and her family lived over a mile away, and that there were more cows than people in his hometown in rural Wisconsin.

I told him about my brother’s murder, the fires, and investigating with my friends the bloodstain that was left in an alley after a junkie fell or was thrown from a roof.

Despite his small-town roots, he has traveled the world and speaks several languages. More than one of his trips took him into intense conflict zones in Nicaragua and Colombia as well as on ocean crossings on small sailboats. So it meant something to me when his big brown eyes got even bigger and he said gently, “It sounds like you grew up in a war zone.”

Hmmm. I never thought of my life that way, but I could see why someone else would.

When I had that exchange with J., I was almost eight years old—a bit too old to admit that I still loved Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, I thought. The serenity in the Neighborhood of Make-Believe was like a meditative state that I could retreat to when I needed to abide my introverted tendencies.

Funny enough, my life did have elements of Mister Rogers’s neighborhood. Despite the trauma caused by losing people and places I loved, I never felt unsafe as a child in Hunts Point.

Safety—not the first thing that the South Bronx would bring to mind when anyone who knew about the South Bronx would think about it. But as a little kid, the blocks around my house were the beginning and end of my own happy universe.

My life was going to school and soaking up all the knowledge I could from my favorite teachers, running home, doing my homework, putting on my play clothes, and then playing street games like double Dutch, skelsies, and stickball with my friends in the middle of the street outside our houses, grudgingly moving out of the way when cars needed to pass. And there were the occasional packs of roving stray dogs that were a little scary at times.

I remember that when it started to get dark, the mothers on the block would call their kids inside for dinner. My mom had a particular whistle that I can remember to this day: two identical short tones and then a sharper, even shorter one.

I was the youngest of ten kids. My father was twenty-one years older than my mom.

When they married, he had three sons about her age and she had three kids under six years old. After my dad moved my mom and her kids to Hunts Point, they had four more together. We were the ghetto Brady Bunch.

By the time I was born, six of us kids still lived at home and we all sat down to dinner together, frequently joined by friends and neighbors from far and wide. Our home was a happy sanctuary to me and many others.

Daddy was a news junkie, often flipping between the three major networks available at that time in case there were different takes on the news. There really weren’t.

Even though we now have many more opportunities to find out about current events, and they are increasingly polarized by both progressive and conservative media outlets, it never ceases to amaze me about how the same news stories get recycled over and over again. It was the same back then.

Figures 1 and 2 show the kind of images that appeared on the nightly news programs that I watched with my dad. This is how I learned that my neighborhood was nationally known as the poster child for urban blight.

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