I Heart My Hood

warningsignsblog.blogspot.com

Back before Harlem was sexy (again) and fearless gays led the gentrification movement in many of the country's roughest neighborhoods, the "hood" was just that, rough. Having grown up there, I claim full rights to exposing it for what it was; dirty, scary, loud, captivating, empowering and memorable.

Knowing the hood intimately, I was stupified by the middle-aged woman standing next to me in line at the gas station store. As she ordered three different kinds of lottery tickets and joked with the cashier about her misfortune in the day's games, I noticed that her shirt read "I Love (heart) My Hood."

I was immediately the-opposite-of-nostalgic as I recalled growing up in the hood in my attempt to understand her shirt's sentiment. Even though I lived there, I had a sort of "imitation of life" relationship with the hood. During the day, I walked and talked the upper east side (as much as a visitor could), but at night I moonlighted as a street-aware achiever in a place where you avoided eye contact with the figures looming in dark doorways.

I remember dusky apartment fires and finding a human head in the dumpster. I remember coming home from school and finding what I learned was a bullethole in our front door. I remember looking down on and envying the children who played in the chaos and knew too little of the world outside of Edgecombe Ave. to realize that their lives pretty much sucked.

What I didn't recall was loving my hood; I was ashamed of and revolted by it. Save the cultural havens that attracted regular kids and down-to-earth famous do-gooders alike, my hood was a miserable stain on the city. The elderly residents who had built these streets and were now scared to walk them -- hostage to rent control and a lack of alternatives; the unbroken cycles of generations of unwilling and half-dead victims fed and led by the resourceful drug dealers, pimps, and murderers; it was easy (understatement!) to run from that scene and those memories and never look back.

I wondered if the woman genuinely loved her hood, or whether she had simply resigned herself to the dysfunction. For all I know, she could have been a senior executive for a Fortune 500 who was thankful to her hood for imparting on her the strength of heart and spirit to claw her way to success. Maybe I, too, should be paying homage to my roots. Or perhaps my grown-up version of the survival tactics I employed as a child justify my judgement of this woman -- I make her wrong and misguided so that I stay different and better.

Reflection. Self-judgement. Sympathy and empathy. Anger. Disappointment.

As she drove away in a beat-up Oldsmobile with the garbage bag rear windshield and the empty-eyed children in her back seat, I wondered if she had put a fraction of the thought I had put into her, into me. And if she had, had she seen something of herself in me? Staring into my disdain, was she forced to confront and acknowledge her failures? Wonder where she went wrong? Feel shame for giving into the dysfunction so much so that she peddled the notion that the hood is even remotely lovable?

Even as I write this, I feel like a sell-out.

Like somehow I sold out because I got out.

I didn't love my hood and I never will.

And frankly, I wanted to slap her for claiming to.

Cut to me getting my ass beat.

I got out before I learned to fight, before I had to.

And for that, I am thankful.