11 minute read
City Voices
FIRST PERSON
Just a game
RICHARD KLAYMAN
It was a long while ago, but there was once a square, made up of dilapidated buildings, two stories high, and stores where pickles, a deli, and two full service drugstores, and ice cream stools, waited for all that ails us. Did you have a square like this? More than several three-decker tenements danced all around us living, as my family did, in what was our spot. How about that: we had a front porch and a back porch, too!
Uninformed about ourselves, unaware of how poor we were, dutifully, we went to school and, I suppose, that is were it all began to change. It was an Irish town, and all my teachers were Irish-Americans but this was where success seemed most to matter, and it did. We worked and worked at our lessons: got it wrong, got it right, and did it all again. It was our practice for a life that we hardly understood. Yes, practice was an end result.
And we tried so hard to get the equation correct, to display our understanding of the scientific principles, of microbiology, and of all the angles that made up this world or whatever world might come; back to practice, once again.
Then, somehow, at 10, my father died. And my brother was 9. But we were truly not alone.
Thinking back, other’s fathers and mothers might have died, too, but no one I actually knew.
Just the way it was, so we thought.
We scrapped by, sort of like our own infantile pandemic. Just the way it was.
We had no car, no one to drive us anywhere; we had no money, and there was nowhere to go.
And we knew the square quite well, and we walked its streets and the tiny shops and we were adept. And we walked again. That was fun. It made up our day. Or maybe we took a bus. My mother paid a dime to ride the bus, but sometimes she would rather walk; again, so we were told.
Sure, there were bikes to ride, balls to toss around, yards that had grasshoppers, peach and plum trees to climb, and grapevines that invited us to eat our next doors neighbors grapes.
And then, from someplace else, my mother saw that other kids had tennis racquets. She bought me one.
“Can you play,” someone asked me the rest of my life?
But maybe it was the house we lived in, to my brother Mel and my mother, too.
Yes, we lived in a “third” of the house.
That house, the three-decker, is where we shared ourselves with shopkeepers, laborers, factory workers, housewives, and all the other people, like us.
It was an ancient three-decker and our home.
Our three-decker had a place of tiny alcoves, tiny bedrooms and our linoleum kitchen floor, forever in search of wax.
We lived on the bottom floor; an extended Irish family, living with Grandparents, and a married couple who occupied the second floor; and an African-American family lived on the top floor. Together, there were nine kids in the building.
No one had a shower: just a tub.
Everyone used the stairs to climb up and down, front and back stairs, as I explained. All rutted stairs to mark our lives, as though our lives of work and leisure kept us in rhythm with the cold, the rain, the heat; our little protective shell.
“Is that you, Eva,” the neighbors questioned when my mother returned home from shopping?
A little woman, with longer arms from carrying all of her goods from one section of the square to our house, buying meats, various breads, and all the essentials of running a household. All in two bags, one in each of her longer, extended hands.
Everyday, in two bags, she did all of this.
“Is that you,” a voice from one of her neighbors could be heard, a call from some distant upper floor,
FILE PHOTO/CHRISTINE PETERSON
out there in the street, somewhere up in the air, from a middle or top floor, way up high.
And she waved, with a hand heavy from a short but extended arm, careful and attentive to the apartment which she bestowed her gracious expression.
But we had hope, too. And we chatted on our steps, late into the summer evening; we offered inspiration to one another, and gave our counsel.
Do not forget of our park. Call it Ferryway Green: Yes, it had a name,
built by Frederick Law Olmstead we came to discover, just a crust of a park, something we cherished.
And there were benches all around it, and a sprinkler system under the trees to keep all of us cool in the heat, and my mother sat over there. (Watching. Forever watching.)
And we played near the sprinklers and my mother brought some towels to dry us off.
And when no one was around we stayed there into the summer’s night and, later in the evening, we walked home before it got too dark.
We were not alone.
We were never really alone.
But one day led to other days, and into a lifetime, and there was my mother and my younger brother and it made all the obstacles of life just a stretch of our life together.
“Was that the phasing of the moon and the stars,” I asked?
Maybe both.
It reminds me now, how I must admit, of enjoying our starry nights.
Richard Klayman, PhD., is Emeritus Professor of History at Bunker Hill Community College and the author of the book, “The First Jew: Prejudice and Politics in an American Community, 1900-1932.”
WORCESTERIA
It’s OK to change your mind
VICTOR D. INFANTE
THE IMPORTANCE OF LISTENING: A few weeks back, Worcester Magazine columnist Sarah Connell Sanders wrote about having the DefundWPD organizers on her podcast, “Pop It,” and how conversations and research after that show had changed her opinion, bringing her around to the “Defund the Police” position.
Soon after the column was published, we received an email to her accusing her of “flip-flopping” on the issue. This raises two points. First of all, Connell Sanders wasn’t flip-flopping. “Flip-flopping” is when you change your position frequently, usually depending on who you are talking to. Famous examples are almost every politician you have ever heard of, particularly the current president, who is capable of changing his opinion within the exact same sentence.
The larger issue, though, is something far more culturally insidious: The strange idea that it’s somehow a weakness to change one’s mind on an issue, even when exposed to new information and differing perspectives. It’s a puzzler pulled from the deepest depths of the comments section of any daily newspaper article, and it seems almost absurd. If no one can change their mind, then why are we spending so much time arguing over everything even remotely political? Shouldn’t we give up on the pundits and the Twitter feuds and the protests, and just go hunker down in our separate camps?
To get to the root of the issue, I talked with a local politician whose views have evolved over time on a number of issues, Councilor-at-Large Gary Rosen.
Rosen is stepping down from the City Council at the end of his current term, after a storied, off-and-on career, and in recent days, he’s waded into issues including fare-free busing and police reform, and has, by his own account, allowed his research and conversations with constituents to change his positions … sometimes slightly, sometimes starkly.
To be fair, he doesn’t feel his opinions on busing or police reform have changed so much as deepened, but there is one issue he’s willing to admit he straight-up changed his mind on: Needle exchanges.
“In 2005,” he recounts, “when I was on the City Council, (needle exchanges) came to us … I’m guessing the vote that night was probably unanimous against.” He says that people told them that if they voted for that, they’d be encouraging people shooting up drugs. “In 2015,” he says, “it came back to us. I remember saying that night, ‘I’m not making the same mistake I made 10 years ago.’ I think our vote of 10 years ago, it cost people their lives. We know more about AIDS and addiction now … I felt that getting a second chance as a public official, even 10 years later, it was a chance I wasn’t going to waste. I was proud that night I had finally taken the right vote.”
Rosen thinks that, as with needle exchanges, a lot of the issues that look intractable now will look different over time, and that includes the movement to defund the police.
Rosen says “DefundWPD came to our meetings, and I try to listen to them,” adding that he finds policing models such as Eugene, Oregon’s — where for 31 years things such as welfare, suicide and addiction checks have been handled by a team of medics and social workers who don’t arrive armed — to be interesting. “They go out and try to defuse the situation,” he says. “We don’t always need to send out someone with a gun. That’s what I learned from talking to people, I thought it was good for Worcester. It’s good to improve, it’s good to learn along the way. I think we’ll see better policing. You’ve got to listen. You just have to.”
POETRY TOWN
‘Boot on the Throat’/La Bota Sobre El Cuello
JUAN MATOS
(To Black Lives Matter’s martyrs in light of the BLM mural of Worcester)
On the throat of History there is a suffocating black boot that bears the weight of dominant whiteness.
The hands of History are bound behind her by modern shackles (white, of sharp-edged plastic) that also hobble the black ankles of History as she gasps and moans,
I can’t breathe!
The ancestral boot is powerful, knows its own authority, ignores the clamor of History. Unfeeling toward that throat and the life being snuffed out under its weight of white centuries, the boot perpetuates suffocation for centuries — repeated, castrating.
It discriminates, pursues, accuses, beats imprisons dehumanizes buries the tombs to keep History hidden away the same History murdered by the boot. Dead, ignored, silenced, forbidden History is now attired, enhanced with cosmetics, combed by the force of the boot, that centuries-old oppressor omnipresent in the streets, in the prisons, falsified in the schools denied before the altars blindfolded in the courts of law.
It doesn’t matter what name History is given. There have been so many of her sons stifled under that boot that another is simply that, one more. And one more like the one yesterday and tomorrow one more until a volcanic eruption of asphyxiated throats bursts the universe apart after that other corpse (who will not be the last of the corpses) and all of yesterday’s corpses explode like lava with today’s howl down the multiple streets with the cry of the world whose indignation floods the walls of hate, the structure of hate, with an oceanic shout of “Enough!” full of shame and a telluric beat, a vociferous avalanche,
I CAN’T BREATHE!
And the streets fill with angry hearts and at every latitude among all races there swells a roar in unison, a single fanfare determined to destroy the genocidal boots, and a shining clamor reinvents the future without those infamous boots on the body of a new History to be written by The People. (A los mártires de Black Lives Matter a propósito del mural BLM en Worcester)
Sobre el cuello de la Historia hay una bota negra asfixiante, ella lleva por dentro el peso del blanco dominante.
Las manos de la Historia están atadas a su espalda por grilletes modernos (blancos, de plástico cortante) constriñen también los pies a la altura del negro tobillo de la Historia que exhalando gime:
“¡no puedo respirar¡.”
La bota ancestral, poderosa se sabe autoritaria, indolente es al clamor de la Historia. Apática al cuello a la vida apagada bajo su blanco peso de centurias la bota blanca perpetúa una asfixia de siglos cíclica, castrante.
Discrimina, persigue, acusa, golpea encierra deshumaniza sepulta los sepulcros para esconder la Historia la misma Historia muerta bajo su bota. Muerta, ignorada, silenciada, proscrita
la Historia vestida, maquillada, peinada al rigor de la bota opresora de siglos se repite en las calles, en las cárceles, se desdice en las escuelas se niega en los altares se hace tuerta en los tribunales.
No importa el nombre de la Historia. Tantos han sido que uno más de sus hijos bajo la bota es eso, uno más. Y otro más igual que ayer y mañana otro más hasta que un volcán de cuellos asfixiados revienta el universo tras aquel otro muerto (que no ha de ser el último de los muertos) brotan como lava todos los muertos del pasado con el grito presente por las calles plurales con el clamor del mundo que indignado anega las paredes del odio, la estructura del odio, con un ¡basta! oceánico quebrador del oprobio un latido telurico, un alud vocifera
¡no puedo respirar! Y las calles se pueblan de pechos indignados y en todas latitudes y de todas las razas sale el estruendo unísono, el estrépito único quebrador de las botas genocidas, irrumpe el fragor reluciente decidiendo el futuro sin las infames botas sobre la nueva Historia que ha de escribir el Pueblo.
