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People bury the parts of history they don’t like, pave it over like African cemeteries beneath Manhattan skyscrapers.
annoying people with history they didn’t want to acknowledge was kind of fun.
carrying the ashes of my marriage and my pride in an urn I couldn’t stop sifting through,
The landscape of my life is unrecognizable;
“Girl. Sydney. I’m sorry you’re sad, but how many times do I have to tell you? You won’t find gold panning in Fuckboy Creek.”
“Baby, if you wanna keep what’s yours, you gotta hold on to it better than that. Someone is always waiting to snatch what you got, even these damn birds.”
Kim has a framed portrait of Michelle Obama in our living room, so she’s not . . . you know.
“You’re making me feel unsafe, and if you don’t stop, I’ll—I’ll call the police.” There’s a malicious glee on her face as she says it, like when she knows her renovating work has woken me up. An expression that says, I’m fucking with you just because I can.
“No license plate, front or back. Should we call the police?” I shoot him a look. “Yeah, so another scary white man can show up at my door, but one who can definitely kill me with no worries instead of probably kill me with no worries.”
In all the times I’d moved in New York, I’d only thought about how safe the area was for me, not what my presence meant for people in the neighborhood. Not about what advantages I had that they didn’t. I was poor, too, after all, even though I had figured out how not to be, for a little while at least.
“You work at the public school. This is going to be an independent school priced just high enough to do the work of segregation for the people who will send their kids there.
When I think of a Black community, the first thing that comes to mind—even if I don’t want it to—is crime. Drugs. Gangs. Welfare. That’s all the news has talked about since I was a kid. Not old people drinking tea. Not complex self-sustaining financial systems that had to be created because racism means being left out to dry.
“Sometimes you have soil that isn’t good for growing things in anymore. It needs time to become fertile again. So you cover it with the shit, and then you wait. You let the shit do the work, then you come in and plant your crops.
I came back to Brooklyn to find home, and these bastards have taken even the comfort of the familiar from me. Taken my mother’s dignity, and my best friend’s loyalty, and my community. I can never get those things back, and they think they’ll get away with it because no one cares.
“I wish I’d told you that earlier. How to treat men who want to make you small, crush you under their heel.” She looked into my eyes, her gaze loving but hard. “I put my gun in your daddy’s mouth and I made him apologize.
The lock isn’t heavy duty, and was installed to keep visiting kids and nosy houseguests out of Mommy’s things when locked from the outside. Locking it from the inside was another “in case of emergency” bonus—the poor woman’s panic room.
Not being able to call the police when you need help really sucks, I’m learning.
WE’VE HAD BLACKOUTS AND BROWNOUTS IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD since I’ve moved back—when the grid gets hot, we get shut down so the richer neighbors can stay cool. The fact that the electrical company feels comfortable admitting that seems sinister given everything else going on.
white people clambering into a hood, be it the original Algonquin hood or closer in history, like Weeksville. If I’m right, what Paulette said makes this darkness even more frightening. Break and build. This is the breaking point.
Break and build. Night hunt. Rejuvenation.
“Bad things happen in this world, every minute of every day. We try to stop them, when we can, how we can. We try to look out for one another.
“Break and build.”
“They can break, but they can’t erase,” Gracie says. “They can build, but they can’t bury us.”
“Transformer,” she says, more lucid than I’ve seen her in months. “Causes blackouts. Causes fires. Makes the sky so pretty, too. They like the dark; this is so bright that no one in the city can ignore it.
Overnight, all the original inhabitants of my neighborhood went from living the American dream of owning property that had appreciated in value to having to sell because only millionaires can afford these kind of taxes.
