Word count: 1147 | Reading time: 5 min read
Pretzel Logic
A march through Grays Ferry won’t help the blacks and whites who are trying to live together peacefully.
Let me tell you a little story about Grays Ferry and the people who live there.
With all that is going on in this neighborhood, a place that I call home, it’s a good time to tell this story. If for no other reason than to point out that though Grays Ferry sits on one of the most explosive racial fault lines in the country, most people there — white and black — are good and decent and want nothing more than to live in peace.
A couple of years ago I noticed a crudely painted swastika on the wall of a parking lot near my home.
Swastikas being what they are, I immediately went into my basement in search of some paint and a brush to cover up the offending graffiti. I found some old paint but no brush, so I used an old mop. Needless to say, the combination hardly made for a great paint job. And neither did an ensuing rainstorm. The next day, on my way to work, I noticed that the rain had washed away my handiwork, once again exposing the swastika for all to see.
I made a note to myself that I would have to go out and buy some real paint and a real brush when I got home.
But I didn’t have to.
I came home to see one of my neighbors, who obviously saw my feeble fresco, covering up the swastika with her own paint and brush. I thanked her. She smiled.
It was an act of kindness that wasn’t asked for and will never be forgotten. And it is typical of the way my neighbors have treated me, an outsider.
—-
The first thing everyone asks me when I talk about Grays Ferry is why I live there.
The answer is complicated and personal.
The first time I saw the place was about six years ago, at night. I had no idea about all the history of hatred and violence. My wife and I saw an ad for a very inexpensive place conveniently located between both our jobs. We called the owner, went to see it and decided that both the price and time were right to move.
Since then, we have come to learn a lot about Grays Ferry. A lot of what we learned is not good.
We live smack dab between oil refineries and the electric company. We are surrounded by abandoned buildings. Crack dealers are moving their empowerment zones ever closer to my corner.
And whites and blacks — who, contrary to most media coverage, actually do live and shop and sometimes even play together — grow increasingly wary of each other.
And yet we’ve stayed.
Partly because we haven’t figured out where to go.
But much of the reason is because the people we live with have been so kind.
—-
That kindness has taken many forms.
Like a neighbor running to his garage for jumper cables so I can start my car. Or another neighbor who kept coming over to the house to restart the pilot light in my heater. Or the guy who buys everyone coffee and plays with the kids.
Time and again, in big ways and small, the people in my neighborhood have bent over backwards to make me and my family feel welcome.
Chris Brinkman was one of those neighbors.
Chris used to deliver the Daily News and had a pretty good sense of humor when I was late paying him. Like pretty much everyone else on the street, he was good to my kids. And the best friend of the kid next door. Chris Brinkman seemed like a son any parent would be proud to have.
And now he’s gone, gunned down in a robbery cops say had no racial overtones.
Some neighbors, who were among the hundreds and hundreds who turned out Monday night to say goodbye to Chris, think otherwise.
“O and 13,” they say about Brinkman’s death.
No blacks murdered by whites. Thirteen whites murdered by blacks. The violence cuts both ways, but these statistics — so out of whack with the rest of the country, where nine out of 10 murders are intra-racial — feed the white population’s anger.
—-
There is one line that divides my family and my neighbors and we all know what it is.
To us, words like nigger and spook are intolerable, the same as kike and sheeney. To my neighbors, such words are an everyday part of the language.
Before I moved to Grays Ferry, I believed anyone who used those words was totally ignorant and utterly hateful. Plain and simple. Black and white. No gray area.
The words are still as hurtful and folks know that if they want to get rid of me, they’ll turn up the juice a little. But living here, I now know that it is not a complete oxymoron to say that there are good people with strong feelings about race.
Feelings that work both ways.
Recently, while walking home at night on a “black” street, a young girl, about 12 or so, began to taunt me and call me a cracker.
Then she said something else that I can only laugh at.
“How dare a white person walk in front of a black person on Martin Luther King’s birthday?”
As if King, whose eloquence with words inspired me to become a writer, would have had it any other way.
—-
Nobody I know is happy about the beating suffered by Annette Williams and her family at the hands of whites. We are all furious about the murder of a great kid like Chris Brinkman.
Which is why Nation of Islam Minister Rodney Muhammed’s proposed 5,000-man march through Grays Ferry on April 14 is a very bad idea.
More threat than anything else as far as I can tell, it sure won’t help whites feel any better about blacks, or vice versa. It won’t take away the sting of Annette Williams’ beating. It won’t let Chris Brinkman play with his string band again. And it won’t make it any easier for the white kids and black kids on my block — our future — to play together as harmoniously as they have up to now.
All it will do is give radicals on both sides of the racial fault line an excuse to buy guns, store up bricks and bottles and vent the fury that comes with constant hurt and anger.
If Minister Muhammed wants to do something productive, let him take those men and march around the North Philly neighborhood that is home to his mosque. Clean it up, drive away the crack dealers, create some businesses.
But don’t come to Grays Ferry.
The good people who don’t want their loved ones shot and beaten have enough problems.
