last line, obscured by concrete: "these rivers must be crossed"Some places are walkable from our location on Allison Hill, and most are bikeable. When we want food supplies, we can either go to the Corner Grocery, or, in the other direction, to a large Vietnamese grocery store on Cameron Street where a boy told me he had the power to turn into a snake at will. He was sitting on the beige tiles by the noodles, doing his homework, and asked his mother how to spell “activity.” She moved her lips indecisively, emitting some non-committal m-sounds, and then looked around for backup, and there I was, white and presumably fully fluent in English. I knelt down and dictated the letters as he scrawled them in magic marker on a purple sheet of construction paper. Then, as if in thanks, he promptly informed me of his unusual abilities in the sort of matter-of-fact declamation employed by six-year olds around the world. Yeah, I have special powers, he said. I can turn into a big, yellow-spotted snake. And when I’m a snake, I know karate.
Despite the proximity and colorfulness of local stores, we most often pile in to a car and head to Giant’s, where the apples are redder and the prices are lower. Generally, Arthur and I go together and leave Edmund to fend for himself. He prefers it that way; he uses his own ingredients and cooks his own dishes and encourages us to do the same. “It really works much better if we all just do our own thing.” He usually hits the stove first, frequently conjuring delicious, achingly tantalizing aromas that waft through the house, summoning us hungrily down to flit impatiently around the kitchen until he finishes. Then there’s the changing of the guards. Edmund clears out, dish in hand, to eat and to watch an episode of Oz or Lost, and Arthur and I stomp in, cracking rude jokes, tossing the garlic and dropping the onions.
Sometimes, however, paths align, especially when we all need groceries. Then it’s a straight shot to Giant’s for the whole group.
We leave our house, set the alarm, lock the door, and argue over the vehicle for the day. We decide on Arthur’s car; it’s small, but it’ll burn less fuel than my parents’ SUV. We walk up our broken little street to meet the machine. Harrisburg is reeling from a heat wave, and Mrs. Rodriguez is on her front porch, rocking back and forth and waving a fan with a firm grip. We pause to greet her; she smiles widely back at us, her brown face crinkling into kind, dry folds. We struggle to understand her through her toothless, heavily accented vowels. Edmund has of course known her by far the longest and understands her the best. They discuss the latest on the hedgehogs. There is a family of the furry pests living on the wooded slope behind our houses. They emerge by night to chew up the vegetables Mrs. Rodriguez still grows in her tiny back yard, and Edmund is trying to catch them. The bit of chivalry in this project charms me, but I could be imagining it. He succeeded in trapping one a few days ago, but it was small. “Naw duh bi’ mawmmuh,” drawls Knight Edmund’s lady fair, nodding, rocking. “Stiw haffuh cachah bi’ mawmmuh.” But she seems content with this progress.
As a young woman, Mrs. Rodriguez fled Puerto Rico and an abusive husband with her six children, raising them all in the Bronx before moving to Harrisburg thirty-odd years ago. Now her children are all grown. Some have moved away, some have stayed in central Pennsylvania, and each pursues a different career. She lives alone but enjoys frequent visits from her many grandchildren and great-grandchildren. From the relatively little I’ve seen of her, it’s clear that she shares the ineffable serenity of many women in her generation, lives spent facing down adversity and mostly winning, working, moving, grinding through setback and oppression with little pause for reflection, trusting themselves and teaching their children to do the same. Now the hardest years are behind her, and she spends her time swinging on her front porch, greeting her neighbors and tending her vegetables, fanning herself through the heat and tolerating the hedgehogs.
She recognizes Arthur from his presence at Edmund’s birthday parties in elementary school, and meets me with the same measured, genial tranquility with which she seems to regard everything from her high, creaking seat. Neighborhood solidarity against the furry intruders established, we wave our goodbyes and continue on to the car.
We wait at the stop sign for the man who lives at the end of the street to cross. I still haven’t met him; he’s black and middle-aged, and looks out of it. “He’s been here forever,” Edmund explains, “he’s weird.” The man turns and waves to us as he steps onto the curb, and promptly collides head-on with the stop sign. I see his glasses squirm up and then back down his face as he negotiates his cheek off the metal pole. He removes them, holds his forehead and stumbles away, leaving me to wonder if they’re broken or just bent.
We drive up Mulberry, away from the bridge and deeper into Allison Hill, past its V with Derry and then right onto 13th Street to catch the ramp onto 322. The familiar scenes of the neighborhood drift past through the windows. There’s a crowd in front of the Corner Grocery as always. A young man in baggy jeans and a basketball jersey is gesticulating wildly, probably for the benefit of three or four women, most of whom share some resemblance to the inflatable trampoline we set up in the driveway for my nephews, only with some of the air let out. His bill of his brightly colored baseball hat bobs up and down as he ducks and bounces. On the edges of the crowd, a particularly flabby white woman in shorts and a wife-beater seems unsure what to do with her feet. Further down, a middle-aged man with a hard looking face and a muscle shirt dances in front of a house with a tiny, hopping puppy. A compact old Asian lady steps out the door carrying plastic bags in either hands, and sets them down to lock up, her squat body slowly rotating on an invisible hinge. Her face is inscrutable, like the mask of some lost native tribe behind glass in an art museum. A few stoops away, a group of women are sitting about, talking, fanning themselves. A young couple walks past. She’s stunningly beautiful, strutting in denim shorts that seem more like twistable caps gripping her thighs than clothing. The man is thinly mustachioed, Hispanic, beady eyes set within a long thin face ending in a wicked curve of a mouth. Thin, grim lips. His bare arms look like the blades of a Saracen.
Driving through the Hill is quickly becoming a routine, but it’s still loaded with subtext. For Arthur and me, it remains a cultural experience. The people who crowd these streets are in many ways from a very different country than us. We can talk to Mrs. Rodriguez about the hedgehogs, but it’s hard to know how to interact with the man who runs into stop signs. On these streets, there are those who stagger down the sidewalk, spitting thickly into the gutter, and there are those who parade with a militant dignity, head held high and eyes immutably fixed before them as you pass. Neither stops to talk or even really notice, and I’m not sure what I’d have to say to them if I did. There is always a crowd of young people at the door to the Corner Grocery, and I’m always wildly uncomfortable with my self-consciousness as I pass through them to pick up a cold cut of chicken.
A large aspect of the division, of course, is racial. Harrisburg is too small a city for its poor people to self-segregate, so Allison Hill is a potpourri of colors and tongues, although its public face is probably black. The wider city is 55% black, has a healthy Hispanic population and a small but significant community of more recent Korean immigrants. The Hill largely reflects these numbers, although white people are a smaller minority, black people are much more predominant, and almost all of the Hispanics or Koreans live here, in Midtown, or in similar neighborhoods to the South and East. The racial tensions frequently implicit or relegated to border streets in larger cities are everywhere and every day. Nevertheless, The neighborhood is still considered from the outside as a “black neighborhood,” and while this characterization is misleading and mostly harmful, it can also be a helpful device if we assume a more nuanced idea of blackness. Ralph Ellison, writing on assertions of black identity as a means for demarcating the extent of social status and Americanism, observed that
“…White Americans have suffered from a deep inner uncertainty as to who they really are. One of the ways that has been used to simplify the answer has been to seize upon the presence of Black Americans and use them as a marker, a symbol of limits, a metaphor for the ‘outsider.’”
Nevertheless, “whatever else the true American is, he is also somehow black.” True Americanism, in other words, inherently involves an element of the outsider, of the other. In this sense, Allison Hill is certainly a “black” neighborhood; it is just the community that “white” America would use as a foil for its own Americanism, and, according to Ellison, is also therefore a most quintessentially American place.
This close-packed diversity – and poverty – make the Hill the clear cultural inheritor of the Old 8th Ward. As the scenes roll by, I try to imagine them a hundred years ago. In some places, it isn’t a terrible stretch; almost all the houses on our own street are at least a century old, and still retain the original floor plans. There’s even little protrusions in the walls where the fuel would run out to light the kerosene lamps. Nevertheless, the comparison doesn’t really work. In my imagination, the Old 8th is seedy but alive, dangerous but exciting, full of desperate and colorful visiting characters, shot through with a nervous electric energy. Where is that crackling vitality today? There are certainly still characters here, but the ones who would arrive, tear the house down, and leave the next morning are gone. The heroes of Allison Hill are instead marked by their stationary rootedness. They grew up in the neighborhood, lived in it and worked in it, and not infrequently died before their time in it. They do not so much revel in the energy of their environment as churn under its weight, hoping some day to get out. They are sometimes depraved with the poison of their streets, sometimes militantly noble in their resistance, and most often, just trying to get by despite the odds. Exciting danger is replaced by just plain danger, and the fear it engenders replaces a raucous nightlife with empty, shadow-crossed streets. Similarly, the breed of despair that increasingly pervades the neighborhood seems a more recent addition. It is what Cornel West calls a new sort of nihilism, “a numbing detachment from others and a self-destructing disposition toward the world.” The Old 8th Ward surely had its fair share of misery, but it could not compare in cold numbers to modern Allison Hill’s violence and crime, or, in my own analysis, to the modern urban center’s sense of ennui. As West notes, right up until the 1970s black Americans – the most populous residents of the Hill and similar neighborhoods – had the lowest suicide rate in the United States. “Now young black people lead the nation in suicides…. What went wrong?”
At the heart of the Old 8th was, of course, the canal. Allison Hill is higher up and further south. The site of the old canal runs by the train tracks. Many of these rails have in turn been lifted, and the gash that runs between the Capital complex and Allison Hill is largely empty. Cameron Street boasts a number of mechanics, the Vietnamese grocery store (which has a terrifyingly sketchy club on its second floor), and a number of small businesses including the Appalachian Brewing Company, where Arthur and me frequently retreat for beer and wings. There is the post office, there is the train station, and then there are storage spaces, and then there are parking lots, and then there are barren lots, zoning unclear, nature dubious. They’re overgrown with weeds and shaded by the Mulberry Street Bridge. There are no houses, no shops, but cars sometimes still park there, and when they do, you pretend not to see them. In the middle of it all, the old canal sits fetid and still, and the water does not move.
Harrisburg is a city robbed of its movement. Settled by the Indians for the running water of the Susquehanna, founded by white men as a rough-and-tumble outpost on the frontier of their known world, as long as Harrisburg retained an element of the frontier, it was alive. Even after the frontier moved North and West, Harrisburg remained in motion, sending people, supplies, and vitality from the big urban centers to the edge of things and back. The river, the canal, the railroads, the highways; these were the blood of the city, and as they ran, they brought life to the streets, and the heart of the city beat. Now, there is no frontier. The long, coursing motions of border expansions and westward migration have birthed, and been necessarily, inevitably consumed by the tick-tock cycles of the modern workday. The natural, inexorable flow of the river has been rendered pointless by the narrow bridges that allow people to cross it, back and forth, back and forth. The wide, proud channels of commerce and travel have been replaced by suburban grids and endless exit/entrance ramps to nausea. And when its residents fail to lock into even this weak simulacrum of true movement, they, like the canal, simply sit still. They get stuck, they get clogged up in Allison Hill, they find themselves at the bottom of a cul-de-sac with broken glass.
Meanwhile, the powerful cultural battlements that fended off nihilism for generations are increasingly threatened. Their new, more devious enemies are economic pressures and mass culture. West writes, “the recent market-driven shattering of black civil society – black families, neighborhoods, schools, churches, mosques – leaves more and more black people vulnerable to daily lives endured with little sense of self and fragile existential moorings.” While West is using a conventionally racial definition for blackness, I think his words also apply in Ellison’s more inclusive terms. The social mechanisms that once led the oppressed to band together and overcome are muted and fragmented by a nationally driven impetus to acquire pleasure. Success, the market mentality reads, means acquiring things. It means bling. It means showing off your house on MTV’s Cribs. It means paving anyone who gets in your way, and increasingly viewing even your friends and loved ones as devices towards furthering your own pursuit as pleasure. It is not a frontier, it is a grid; it is not movement outwards, it is a stultifying inner system of exit and entrance ramps. It does not serve to ennoble and move the human spirit, it seeks to get it stuck.
However, they tell me Harrisburg is on the rebound. Jobs downtown are up 75%. The mall at Strawberry Square is booming. There are gunshot detectors on the streetlights.
