Neighborhood Flight

My friend, Mary Thompson, was one of the first to leave. I’d met Mary at the precinct caucus shortly before her first child had arrived from Korea. Mary loved to cook and when her husband worked late, she invited me to dinner at her house. She lived two blocks away and when her son was an enfant, I walked to her house for dinner. Five years had passed, another child had arrived from Korea and I drove to Mary’s house because I didn’t want to walk home alone, not even two blocks, after dark.

“I don’t want to move,” she complained to me over a supper of lemongrass chicken with coconut rice. “I want my kids to grow up with diversity. I don’t want us to be the family integrating the neighborhood. I want my kids to see that families are made up of people of different colors.”

Like me, she and her husband were Scandinavian Americans in their late thirties.

“But when Sid Cutney shot at his wife and the bullet went through the wall of their house and lodged in the tree in front of my house, and then he bragged nothing would happen because he knew the police chief and nothing happened,” she paused, took a breath, closed her eyes momentarily, “and then when the gang members shot all the garages in the alley,” this had happened mid summer, “that’s twice my kids coulda been shot. It’s not about race. It’s about dysfunction. It’s not about poverty. It’s about men and their guns.”

Sid Cutney was white. A retired city worker with a good pension.

“I don’t want you to move but I’d move if I had kids,” I told her.

“You need to replace those lace curtains,” she advised. “A person outside can see right into your house.”

White flight began. One household at a time, families flew out from the center of the city, out to the suburbs, out to safety. They hoped so. A few, like me, chose to stay. I was single, a nurse who had a knack for finding interesting, low-paid jobs. My house was lovely and suited my needs and I had a low mortgage. I did not and had never made much money. I was a bit of a caretaker and I saw a population that needed to be taken care of. I loved a good story and this was a block with a million good stories.

But more than any of these things, I would not bend to the injustice of having to move. Why should I move? I was not committing crimes. The criminals should move. I would make them.

Houses went up for sale and sold to people with less money than the sellers. They sold to young families and to retiring people and to small time investors. The investors were people who had little money and wanted to make more, so they bought small fixer-uppers and rented them with or without having fixed them up.