I read these passages at the beautiful new LGBT center on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania, where P-Flag Philly holds its meetings. (That's Parents, Family and Friends of Lesbians and Gays.)
from the Introduction
I came back to Philadelphia because I could not run away again. Twice I’d lived on the affordable edge of its inner city, and twice left. The first time I was twenty and sharing a house with five University of Pennsylvania students. Not a student myself, I was nevertheless learning. It was the late seventies. I went to open mikes in storefronts painted Peter Max style, crashed a poetry class at Penn, and relished a workshop at the Jewish Y with Sonia Sanchez. Money I earned selling leather coats at the downtown mall.
I enjoyed the tree shaded enclave of the Penn campus, with its modern sculpture and fortunate young people, but the streets drew me too: vendors and preachers, the suddenly shifting compositions of fountain and child, spire and cloud, “angels in the architecture” (as Paul Simon sings it), genius in the graffiti. A street musician played his plastic recorder out to the side as if it were a silver flute. When I heard the same man’s music not long ago, almost thirty years later — Greensleeves echoing in the portico of City Hall — I felt I knew Philadelphia well, and loved it.
But I did not always love it. The noise and the pollution, the poverty and my reaction to the poverty, and most of all the racial tension made me eager to leave. Growing up white in South Florida I had seen how violently many white people fought school desegregation, how the black students and teachers endured. I knew our Broward County town had two halves, but only one police force, and that one white. The race riots in nearby Liberty City and the rioting beamed contextless into our livingroom between Lost in Space and Gilligan’s Island left me fearing that the black people on that other, othered side of town would come get us if they could. It seemed only logical. And nobody telling me about King’s agape illogic, or showing me the few white people trying to trade in white supremacy for the beloved community King called forth.
At twenty, oblivious to my white privilege and largely ignorant of America’s racial history, I yet felt the fear those who expect to be held accountable feel, and guilt that made living on the edge of the inner city a personal dilemma — one I wasn’t ready to solve. When it came, I welcomed the chance to get away. The day my first love and I drove her VW bug out of West Philly, with Schuylkill the kitten clawing at the windows to stay near his namesake river, I didn’t think I’d ever see
Philadelphia again. When I was drawn back for a visit a few years later, I supposed it was out of nostalgia for the college relationship that by then had ended. With a heart more numb than ever to the relationship the city offered I once again walked its streets. I like to think I crossed the paths of the young parents at the center of this book, Tahija Ellison and Lamarr Stevens, who were just then beginning their lives, but it’s unlikely: They lived in a neighborhood I would have avoided then, though it became my own and precious to me, the very North Philly where this story takes place.
The second time the city of B. Free (Ben) Franklin reeled me in I was thirty. I lived in Germantown, in a cooperative home where the writer Toni Cade Bambara had once lived. Across the street was a rehabilitation program for women in recovery. There I met women who’d nearly drowned in the flood of crack cocaine pouring into the inner cities through channels that seem to have had government sanction, if not downright sponsorship. It was crack that stole the mothers of Tahija Ellison and Lamarr Stevens, for a time, and stole their chance at a happy childhood forever.
Just as my roots were beginning to take hold, I felt the pull to leave. I told myself I needed more time in nature, that the city was too expensive, that I should move nearer my family, but something else was happening, something simple and human, yet complex and mystical. I was waking up to my membership in the dominant majority; I was hearing a call to change and to work for change. I have met people as young as twenty and certainly many at thirty who have heard and answered such a call. I was not like them. What I heard, faintly, I had neither the confidence nor the hope to respond to in a meaningful way. And so I ran away again. But the people I’d met and the stories I’d heard clung to me like wildflower seeds patient for a chance to take root.
I moved to New York’s Hudson River Valley and found part-time work at a community college teaching writing and literature. That’s what I was doing when I met the woman who would lure me back to my first city. It was 1997, and I was nearly forty. I didn’t know exactly what it was I had been running from all those years but I knew enough to know that, like Jonah, I ran at my own peril. Philadelphia is not, however, my Nineveh; Philadelphia’s the whale. And the shore that whale spit me out on is this book.
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from Chapter 1
How long Lamarr Stevens had been at the front door I didn’t know. I was up on the third floor painting my new bedroom (white with dark green trim). A guy from the apartment building across the street was washing his car, blasting brassy salsa like it could blast him a lawn and circular drive. During a quiet interval (was he washing the speakers?) I heard the knocking.
I opened the window on a stream of bus exhaust and looked down to see a big head flanked by broad shoulders, arms very dark against a white t-shirt. Though it was cold enough, he wore no coat, no sweater even, and nothing on his head but the silver curve of headphones. He pushed these back and hung away from the handrail, looking up at me.
“You Kathryn?”
“Yeah.”
“I been hearing about you.”
“Yeah?”
“A lot.”
He smiled, and I saw he was a teenager, fifteen or sixteen.
“I’m Lamarr. Kaki said I could use the shower.”
And I said, “What, now?”
And he said, “Yeah.”
And the salsa music resumed its pinballing up and down the street.
I went down the stairs to find out about this promised shower. Before me, on the other side of the wrought-iron bars of a security door the house’s previous owners had put in, was a young black male, on the stocky side, wanting in. His white t-shirt reached low over creased jeans so baggy only the orange tips of his boots showed. I was being seen through the bars too: middle-aged white woman, medium build, ruddy face, small hazel eyes, short hair, jeans and sweatshirt marked by green paint. Hesitating.
“I called Kaki last night,” he said, “asked could I use the shower, I have this meeting, with a record producer? She said yeah, she’d tell you.”
I’d been living in that neighborhood known as the badlands long enough to notice how even the small children formed protective associations. The very postures of the stray dogs and edgy cats said it: don’t trust anybody. But he had an open, expressive face, eyebrows like strokes of charcoal on a dark brown canvas, and he spoke in a reassuringly even voice.
“She must have forgot,” I said.
He smiled, his cheekbones two knobs nudging the outer corners of his eyes upward. “That’d be Kaki.”
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Kathleen Nelsen became Kaki on the way home from Hawaii. Her missionary brother had invited her there, for a vacation, he said. And the hotel was four star, but it wasn’t a vacation, exactly, it was an Intervention. A born again former lesbian locked her in earnest conversation and did everything short of kissing her to persuade her that lesbianism was a sin. At the airport, she bought a key chain with the Hawaiian spelling of her name on it: Kaki (sounds, she tells people, like cocky, but with the stress on the second syllable). Perhaps to buffer herself from the family that loved her but couldn’t seem to love all of her, she adopted the new name. Back at Penn Mutual her co-workers tripped over it — Khaki, Cookie, Keekee. It just didn’t seem the sort of name a mid-level insurance executive ought to have. But she wasn’t going to stay a mid-level insurance executive much longer, anyway.
One day a group she’d given a 401k presentation to went into the silence: fifty or so middle-aged people sitting, eyes closed, hands in their laps. They were Quakers.
Kaki stood before them in her suit-set, hose, heels, and gold hoop earrings wondering what to do. What was there to do? She sat down and went into the silence too. Within a year she’d joined a Quaker meeting and begun going with its members into the prisons. She began to facilitate workshops in the Alternatives to Violence Program (AVP), and before long the disparity between her privilege and the extreme poverty so many of the prisoners had survived struck her as unconscionable. How could she share her faith in Transforming Power when she’d never walked the streets they’d walked, never been asked in the face of death to count on grace instead of a gun?
So she left; left the promising career, the house designed in the style of Frank Lloyd Wright, the relationship of fifteen years. She was forty-one. She rented awhile then bought a row house in the neighborhood whose young men fed the bellies of the upstate prisons. Now when she talked about non-violence she drew upon real-life encounters set on real-life corners: Broad and Erie, 2nd and Diamond, Kensington and Allegheny. She told about confronting a man as he beat a woman in front of a grocery store, how he’d been so shocked by her mild “Do you need help here?” that his outburst stalled and he went into an explanation that ended in tears. The prisoners said she was crazy, said she should move out of the neighborhood or at least learn to mind her own business in it, but they had encounters to talk about too — conflicts, fights, crises that might have gone differently.
So much could go differently with peace as an alternative. Asking people to consider that became her work. She lived simply, and much of what she did she did for free.
Because “Kaki” sounded to some of her neighbors like a Spanish slang word, many called her Aki instead: in English, here.
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I met Kaki Nelsen at the 20th annual Quaker Lesbian Conference. Like many of the women attending, she lived in Philadelphia. Unlike the rest, she made her home in the inner city. I told her how I’d lived on the edge of Philly’s inner city in my early twenties, and again in my thirties; how each time, leaving, I had felt a strong pull to stay, for what exactly I hadn’t been sure; and how now, near forty, I had this sense that I should go back to Philly, find out what for.
I might have moved to the city Kaki or no Kaki, but maybe I’m fooling myself. Maybe I needed the anchor of a place to live and the carrot of a good relationship. And it did seem that, except for the fact that a significant portion of our fellow citizens thought our love strange, threatening, or downright sinful — all attitudes that affected me more than I could know. Affected but did not prevent. And so there I was, a year after falling in love with her and an hour after meeting Lamarr Stevens, driving down rush-hour 95 looking for a prison.
She had told me to watch for pink buildings with windows like the handles of disposable razors. Just north of an older prison’s crumbling stone turrets I spotted it — a Pepto-Bismol colored complex that but for the razor wire topped fences might have been a community college. I pulled up just as the doors opened on a dark blue stream of corrections officers (CO’s). Within it drifted a bright buoy — a tall woman in a red pullover with Build Community Not Conflict across the front. A white headband held back her long brown hair, leaving short bangs to bounce as she walked. From one arm hung a straw bag, from the other two striped hula-hoops.
I knew those hula-hoops. I’d tripped over those hula-hoops. They were filled with beads that whirred like skateboarders on a plaza. When she opened the door and tossed them into the back seat they seemed to chuckle — contraband laughter. We kissed hello and told how our day had gone. Hers had been the last in a week-long workshop attended by inmates and C.O’s. Mine had featured Lamarr’s visit.
“Oh that’s right,” she said, “I forgot to tell you he was coming over.”
“Forgot to ask me you mean.”
Right there in the white Chevy Cavalier her father had left her we had our first argument over Lamarr and Tahija (or Tamarr and Lahija, as we sometimes trippingly call them). Not very heated, it turned into one of the debriefing, self-assessment sessions that was becoming our habit: processing our experience of life in the ‘hood, examining, owning, trying to stretch our perspectives.
“So what did you feel,” she asked when she’d finished kibitzing with the guard at the front gate, “having a young black male you’d never met before show up telling you he could use the shower?”
“Come on,” I said, “I did desegregation in middle school, in the south.”
“South Florida’s not The South.”
“It’s more south than Minne-so-ta.”
She smiled, just, but it was enough. Her mother had the same smile: paired hills of the upper lip rising and sloping down again to a valley, a point, that looked penciled on. But she was so serious. As I drove through the bleak white neighborhood that surrounded the prison, I thought back to that morning.
“I guess it did seem a little . . . I mean, I didn’t want to be doing something where everybody would say later, ‘How could she be so stupid?’ You know. But I could see he wasn’t one of the addicts who come around selling stuff — ”
“Boosting,” she said, “selling stolen goods.”
“Right. So I open the door, and what comes into my head, when he’s standing there in the livingroom, is this black kid from first grade, the only black kid in the class, probably the whole school. He was tall, reddish hair, serious, angry — I thought. The way the nuns treated him I figured he must be angry. Plus it was 1963, riots on TV, the white people around me all ‘talking shit,’ like people here say, you know.”
“Scared, guilty, projecting their own motives onto a people they hardly knew,” she said.
“I guess,” I agreed, glancing at her to see if she meant me. Here was someone who at twelve-years-old left her Methodist church when it refused to invite to services a poor black family the church had been giving charity to, left and never went back.
“So Lamarr’s standing there,” she prodded.
“Right. And this fear from first grade, fear of this kid, hits me, and it sets off a sort of domino chain . . . and when the last domino falls, smack, there it is: guilt.”
“Guilt,” she said.
“About feeling the fear.”
“Okay.”
“About reacting mainly, or at all, to his skin color.”
Kaki turned to me, her knees bumping the gearshift (her 5-10 height is all in her legs).
“Lamarr’s had it hard, I kid you not. Food, clothes, deodorant, a bed, a shower, cash to keep utilities from being cut off — you name it, he’s had to provide it off and on for himself and his younger twin brothers since he was small — I mean like five. Sympathetic white people were the only renewable resource around. Watch him, or he’ll be playing you like a gosh-darned banjo before you can say Jiminy Cricket.”
That’s the best cussing Kaki, raised Minnesotan, can manage.
“So I should have feared him?” I asked.
“No. But neither should you let him manipulate you.”
“I didn’t let him manipulate me.”
“Did you give him any money?” she asked.
“No. Well, two subway tokens.”
“That’s what I mean!” she said.
“You’re the one told him, without informing me, that he could use the shower.”
“He had a job interview.”
“He told me it was a meeting with a record producer,” I said.
“For Pete’s sake! So did you let him take a shower?”
“Yes. And he knew right where everything was, Miss Banjo.”
We were on 95, heading toward the city and not, with the crawling commuters, away from it. Stretching to the right of the elevated highway was Fishtown, the working class white neighborhood separated from ours by the El. I walked there sometimes. The corner bars and football fields felt more familiar to me than the drug corners and basketball courts of my new neighborhood, and I could blend in there, comfortably anonymous for awhile.
To the left, east, flowed the Delaware River. On its New Jersey shore in the shade of the Betsy Ross Bridge hunkered another new prison — rows and rows of the razor-handle window slits.
“At least those prisoners have a river to look out at,” I said.
“Unless the windows were placed above eye level,” Kaki said.
I didn’t want to think about a world in which windows were purposely placed above eye level. Yet here I was in it, as I always had been.
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from Chapter 17
Was I just meeting his need, watering spindly roots, or did I have a need to bond with Damear? Better to ask someone who’s parachuted out of an airplane whether they have a need to land.
It happened that fast. I remember the day the glue set. The other two were asleep, Tahija at school. I rested on my side on the edge of her bed, my body a guardrail as Damear crawled about on the expanse of wine-red bedspread, discovering its braided tassels and the curiosities on the windowsill: a bonky plastic cup, the squishy nose-suctioning bulb, a hard red comb. . . . Soon the exploring wore him out and I laid him on my chest to sleep.
I have always loved that zone between waking and sleep. It’s a crowded shoreline, an intertidal zone rich in imaginative life . . . images, symbols, dreams, memories, insight. Damear lingered there, raising his head now and again to look into my eyes, questioning, opening, going deeper, coming back to look into me again before he submitted completely to sleep’s warm depth. I followed soon after, and when I woke found that there had been a blending, there in sleep, or in sleep a journey to some place where we are all of us blended. Waking, I simply remembered that place, that oneness; I think Damear did too.
I bonded this deeply with the boy I cared for the first time I was nanny, with one of my sister’s three, with my brother Joseph, and with Damear.
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[I read this section below for the first time, thinking the parents and friends of lesbians and gays would appreciate it more than other audiences.]
Kaki still had her bedroom/office on the second floor at the front of the house. She lived with traffic noise on one side and, with Tahija’s bedroom next door and the nursery down the hall, teen and baby noise on the other. I couldn’t blame her for wanting to turn the unused room on the third floor into a bedroom. Our bedroom.
When I first moved in we had felt we ought to forgo sex, for a time, until some green light of higher direction told us move ahead. The problem with that, living in the same house, was that all manner of other green lights kept going off. She was just too wonderful and, well, there. Soon we were forced to lower the bar: separate beds in separate rooms. But now, with so much activity on the second floor, all rendezvous of a romantic nature tended to happen on the third. Why not just put the bedroom there? It did make a kind of sense, as if our sacrifice of space and privacy brought with it a little bonus: an unselfish reason to lower the bar still more.
Or put it right on the floor and just step over it, as if it were . . . well . . . a broomstick. Niether marriage nor civil unions between same sex partners was legal at that time, any place (in the U.S anyway). In some Quaker meetings — Kaki’s included (with my old meeting beginning to deliberate the question) — gays and lesbians were being married or, using some other term, joined “under the care” of the meeting. Still, growing up when and as I had marriage was not really within my conception of what my life could be. In a sense though, as we walked together with this young family, Kaki and I made marriage-like commitments. Circumstances seemed to push us into it, but I wonder — did we feel we had to earn a right so many others took for granted?
So, sharing a bedroom was a symbol. This particular symbol, however, was not a very
pretty one. The room measured ten by ten. Clammy plaster crumbled from the walls, which the previous owners’ son, a troubled teen, neighbors had told us, had painted dark purple. Spills of this purple, and older colors, lay like growths on the bare floor boards. The barred window looked out on the same alley Tahija’s room faced, with views into the rooming house next door.
“It needs a lot of work,” I said.
“Lamarr’s younger brothers could do it,” Kaki said. The twins, Donovan and Dante, visited from time to time. I liked them because they liked to hold their nephews.
For the work it afforded two young men, and the step deeper into commitment it gave two women too long alone, the purple room became a bedroom (not, however, a master bedroom), and the stage for one of my most treasured memories of Lamarr.
Donovan and Dante, with Lamarr, did do much of the work, framing the walls and hanging sheetrock, but first the old plaster had to be sledgehammered off. Somehow one Saturday this job fell to Lamarr and me.
Within minutes we were two white-haired dust-covered people, and by the end of the day the floor was buried under half a foot of rubble.
“That was the easy part,” said Lamarr, lowering his dust mask. “Hard part’s getting it out the house.”
Someone told us later we might simply have sheetrocked over the old plaster. That’s not what we did. What we did was lower it from the roof using a rope-pulley we bolted there. Because the third floor had only two rooms to the other floor’s three, its hallway window opened on the flat, tarred roof of the nursery, a kind of terrace. We shoveled rubble into Spackle buckets that we then passed out through the window and carried to the edge of this roof. Then I went down through the house to the back yard and looked up at Lamarr on his belly on the roof, shoulders and arms over the edge, ready to lower the first bucket. His hair, half-an-inch or so long then and worn natural, was framed by the pale-green leaves of our tree, with behind the leaves blue sky. He’d inch a bucket down. I’d reach up to steady it, bearing some of the weight as he eased it the last few feet to the ground.
In this way over and over I trusted him not to lose his grip and let a bucket drop onto my head, and as many times he trusted me not to let go too soon and let one yank him over the edge.
copyright 2009
Elizabeth K. Gordon
