Larry Benjamin's Blog: Larry Benjamin's blog - This Writer's Life - Posts Tagged "east-falls"

I write fiction—there’s a reason for that. I find real life, well, boring. It was for that reason I never had an interest in journalism—reporting facts and on real life? No thanks. I’m beginning to have a change of heart though—not that I’m going to start reading nonfiction or become a newspaper reporter. No, no. Somehow last fall I got talked into joining our neighborhood community council. The experience has been...eye opening, and far from boring.

First a little background on our neighborhood. It’s a former mill town, started, and stopped, by the river from which it takes its fantastical and picturesque name: Falls of Schuylkill. Sadly, since the late 1800s, it’s been known as East Falls. The new name is perfectly fine, I suppose but, I don’t know…it lacks the musicality, the romance of the original. Anyway, it’s a diverse neighborhood, in a city of neighborhoods, each with its own distinct personality. Here there are row houses , (which define the vernacular architecture of the city) in the two models: “airlight” (kitchen on the side of the dining room, and “straight-throughs” (kitchen at the back, behind the dining room), twins—large and small—and single family houses on double or triple lots, with a few bonafide mansions thrown in for good measure.

As I mentioned, it started as a mill town, but it is now, despite public housing projects at the edge of the neighborhood and a smattering of seedy bars along the railroad tracks, quite removed from its humble beginnings, being populated as it is by lawyers and doctors, and home to one of the most expensive private schools in the city.

It’s a small neighborhood which is also home to a startling number of community organizations. There’s a development corporation and given how little has actually been developed, I can’t tell if the name is hopeful or delusional. Change comes slowly here.

I’ve never been entirely sure how I came to be invited to “run” for a seat on the community council—I use “run” in italics because my nomination was uncontested, and I had no opponents—but I wasn’t entirely surprised. I knew labeled old, white, wealthy, and exclusive, the council had an image problem. They needed to freshen their image by becoming inclusive to which end, they needed to add more “diverse” members. Being Bronx-born, Ivy-league educated, black, gay and married to a white guy, I knew they couldn’t tick off more categories than if I’d also been female, Jewish, and handicapped.

Yet despite those facts, the nominating committee insisted on interviewing me. During the interview, I was asked, “What made you decide to join the counsel?” I replied, “Um, because you asked me to.” My response was greeted by blank stares. No one laughed. I watched three sets of lips fall open, forming little Os which promptly collapsed, in unison, into wrinkling lines of thin-lipped disapproval, then into those Os again, making them look surprised, then disgruntled, then surprised again.

I assumed the role of corresponding secretary in October. Since then, I have stumbled upon:

A shrill, disruptive harpy and her evil factotum who have joined forces to become a kind of toxic Batman and Robin, a decades old scandal involving a pair of librarians, an elderly tree-hugging dowager overly fond of bourbon, and a mysterious couple who run the local newspaper with their own unfathomable agenda.

As I a writer, I’m pretty observant. Here’s what I have observed after six months of attending monthly meetings:

Privilege gives rise to entitlement. People are motivated by many things but none more than entitlement. And fear.

It’s that sense entitlement that led one person at one meeting to ask SEPTA, Pennsylvania’s regional transportation entity responsible for all public transportation, to remove the bus stop in front of his house because riders leave trash in his garden, and prompted another to ask SEPTA to reroute the bus that ran down her street because the lumbering diesel drinking beasts are noisy and disrupted her sleep. Really? It’s a city neighborhood that touts among its amenities access to public transportation!

Fear, is the other motivator. A recent proposal to change zoning along on particularly dismal stretch of streets, to encourage commercial development, led to widespread panic. Panicked neighbors stormed the walls of change like paratroopers from the past, insisting that allowing commercial development where an ancient and much loved, though seldom full, church, has stood for two centuries, would prompt the Archdiocese to sell it to a developer who would promptly tear it down and put up a Walmart. The idea was absurd, and I couldn’t help but be reminded of the spinster who fears there are men hiding under her bed. Fear of change, has led many to see men under the bed, as if any change, every developer, was a horny half-man, half-beast waiting to pounce and ravish East Falls.

So there you have it—I joined a community council and stumbled on a truth, a real world, far stranger and less believable than fiction. I’ll continue to observe this strange world and report back periodically and who knows maybe this town and its otherworldly inhabitants will find their way into a future book. Maybe, I’ll bring back the Restoration Drama…

D I S C L A I M E R
The characters and events described in this blog post exist only in its pages and the authors imagination.
Or do they?

My writing is marked by a rawness and an honesty that I have been told is both startling and off-putting. I usually shrug off such criticism because I write not to tell a story but to make you see, to make you feel; that you feel something—even discomfort—tells me that I’ve done what I set out to do. But I try never to be mean.

You see, years ago when I young, I moved to Washington, DC. I’d never lived on my own before and I didn’t have much money but I found an apartment I could afford. It was, in a word, a dump. Soon after moving in, I discovered I had a roommate, Mouse—no that’s not a cute nickname; he was an actual mouse. I was grossed out and terrified. After weeks of terror, I caught him—in the very box my new Kermit the Frog telephone came in. Now, I knew I had to dispose of him. Terrified, I upended the box over the toilet and flushed. I watched his confusion as he struggled against the rush of water. Once he disappeared from view, I threw up in the sink. When his angry cousins showed up, I let them share my apartment. I could not bring myself to hurt another one. That’s pretty much the way I am in general. I try not to hurt anyone deliberately.

As I said, I’m used to reactions to my work but I was not prepared for the shitstorm of reaction my last blog post engendered.

As a writer, one of the first lessons you learn is the story you write is not always the story people read. Reaction to that blog post reminded me of that lesson. Reactions were split along generational lines: the younger were quite vocal in their approval; the post, which was my most read post ever, was met with stony silence from older neighbors. But whenever I ran into one of them, the language of the body—the sharp intake of breath through pursed lips, the squaring of the shoulders—said: How dare you!

Still, nothing was said until one neighbor confronted me. “I have to ask you—what did you intend to accomplish with that post?” she asked.

“Excuse me?”

“People were hurt by what you wrote.”

I was confounded. I knew people were mad, but hurt? Why? She soon made it clear why. I’d thought of that particular post as literary caricature—that is I took a fundamental truth and exaggerated it to make a point. In so doing, I, accidentally, came too near one truth. What I saw as a quick sketch, a few words to throw light on the kind of community I was describing, others saw as me passing judgment, or, worse, inviting others to pass judgment. Neither is true of my intent. Love can be messy; it can be inconvenient. What it should not be is denied. It’s too rare.

Furthermore, we cannot change the past, we cannot deny it or hope it remains behind us. I don’t believe in revisionist history. I believe we can change our story at any point—start a new chapter, if you will—but the story that has already been written, cannot be rewritten. And we shouldn’t try to. What we can and should do is own our past. That strips others of the power to hurt us, to use it against us.

With the post, I’d meant to defend the council I was a part of—the bad behavior of neighbors is not the fault of the council. And bad behavior isn’t unusual. On social media what I heard most was: you could be talking about my town. One person tweeted “You’re describing Rye, New York, aren’t you?” For me, for others, the post wasn’t only about my neighborhood; it was a story about any town USA.

This was the very reason there was a disclaimer at the end of the post. Yet the disclaimer did not stop people from taking to guessing who I was talking about, did not stop others from assuming I was talking about them.

I keep thinking about the conversation I had with the neighbor who finally clued me in about why some people were so mad. She said, "I was fond of you...” The past tense did not escape my notice. I can only assume that the idea she had of me has been replaced by the messy human truth of me.

In closing, I will leave you with a song: “I Am Not America’s Sweetheart” by Elle King , which seems a fitting ending.

We had just gotten home on Saturday, when two black women walked up to the kitchen door. Attractive, smiling, there was an openness about them that made me rethink my original dismissive appraisal: Jehovah’s Witnesses.

As I corralled the dogs, the older of the two said to Stanley, “Hi. We used to live here. We were hoping we could come in and see the house—”

“Oh,” Stanley cried, “You’re Moodys!”

They seemed surprised we knew who they were. I guess they don’t know they are practically legendary. In fact, nine years after we bought it, our house is still referred to as “The Moody House.” We’d, of course, heard about the Moodys before. A local realtor, who spoke highly of the family, once told us that when her own daughters had held a party which her mother chaperoned, her mother had called her in a panic and whispered there’s a black kid dancing in the garage with the girls!” Her response? “That’s not a black kid, that’s Moody!”

We took them—they turned out to be Mr. Moody’s daughter and grand-daughter—through the house and they shared memories and answered our questions. Towards the end of the visit, after they’d cried, and thanked us for taking care of the house, Kim who had lived here for thirty-some-odd years, asked us, “What’s the neighborhood like?”

I forget my answer but it wasn’t until after they’d left that I realized there was more to her question. The Moodys had bought our house in the 70s. They had been the first black family to buy a house in East Falls. A title search had revealed that the couple who’d sold the Moodys the house had held the mortgage. Most likely because, as a black buyer in what was then an all-white neighborhood, Mr. Moody had been unable to secure a mortgage through a commercial bank. That this occurred in the 70s, dismays me.

Remembering that, I wondered how I should have answered Kim’s question.

On our block, I’m one of three black people. There are more gay couples than black people. With the exception of a couple of “A-list queens,” who don’t speak to anybody, everyone has been welcoming and inclusive. But racism does raise its head from time to time.

There is a woman in the neighborhood—I’ll call her Lily. Reasonably intelligent and seemingly liberal and without prejudice, she remarked the first time she heard me speak publically, “You are so articulate.” The second time she heard me speak she came up to me afterwards and said, “You express yourself so well.” The first time she walking out of our house she stopped in her tracks, looked at the house and exclaimed “You live there?!”

Once, as I was raking leaves to the curb, a city worker who was picking up the leaves asked how I’d gotten the job raking leaves at this house. “It’s my house,” I explained. “I live here.” He glanced up at the house again, then at me. “You live here?” I could forgive his surprise. He was after all black and ours is still perceived as a white neighborhood. I could forgive his surprise in a way I could not forgive Lily’s.

When we first moved to East Falls, we got a flyer under our door telling us Halloween was being celebrated a week earlier than the calendar date. We thought this odd but went along with it. And in truth Stanley had a blast giving out candy to the children in costume.

This went on for several years until younger people started moving into the neighborhood and questioned the practice. It then came out that neighbors had started the practice of the early Halloween in large part to avoid having to open their doors to the black children from the projects in the neighborhood. So, neighbors would discreetly pass around the date of the “East Falls Halloween” then on actual Halloween everyone would turn out their porch lights and not answer their doors.

It’s been my experience that racism is subtle and often catches one off guard. In my interracial romance, What Binds Us, this happens twice to main character Thomas Edward.

The following scene occurs when Matthew and Dondi, both of whom are white, take Thomas, who is black, to a black tie ball at a country club on Long Island.

Matthew snorted and walked off in the direction of the bar. I was standing alone, waiting for him to return with our drinks, trying unsuccessfully not to feel out-of place when a dowager thrust her empty glass at me. “A refill, please,” she said.

Matthew took my arm, handing me a gin and tonic. “He’s a guest,” he told her. As we walked away, I turned. “We’re not all waiters anymore, you know,” I told her. She at least had the good grace to be embarrassed; her white arrogance changed to scarlet shame.
Matthew led me outside. “I’m so sorry that happened,” he said, blushing.

The second incident occurs at a hospital where Dondi is an inpatient. Thomas, as Dondi’s best friend and primary caretaker, tells the doctor they will be stopping treatment.

We were utterly silent as first one doctor then another droned on about grotesque invasive procedures, experimental and useless.

“No,” I said, interrupting one monologue.

“Excuse me? What did you say?” the interrupted monologist, a kindly and bespectacled senior physician with brilliantine hair, asked.

“No,” I repeated. “I said ‘no.’”

“No, what?” he asked wearily, removing his glasses and polishing them to further brilliance in that white light.

“No more pills. No more impossible treatments. We’re taking him home.”

The doctor glanced at Matthew and Colin. I intercepted the look. I stood and leaned toward him, my palms splayed on the table. “Do not think,” I said through gritted teeth, “that because I am black I am not a part of this family.”

Recently during an astonishingly vitriolic debate about a proposed new playground in McMichael Park, it was suggested that instead of the park a playground should be added to the Mifflin school—a long time neighborhood school, currently at about 50% capacity and whose students are mostly black. Odd in a-neighborhood that is overwhelmingly white.

One person, calling it a “heretical thought” posted the following on the community bulletin board, Next Door East Falls:

“…there is an 800-pound gorilla in the room that everyone pretends not to see, and will go to great lengths to avoid confronting the truth about their choices. I wouldn't send my own kids to Mifflin unless a critical mass of other middle class (and mostly white, to be perfectly honest) parents choose to do the same. …I choose to be honest. Most people feel the same way but refuse to admit to themselves certain uncomfortable truths…”
I found his post disturbing but ultimately not surprising. What I found more disturbing was not so much that no one challenged him on this but that a few people actually “thanked” him for posting.

The sad truth is eight years into the country’s first black presidency, we are still not a nation that is “post-race”— arguably we should be, but we are not. Racism simply put on a new hat and stepped into the shadows.