the eighth grade, a mediocre status that more truly reflected my place in Meyer Levinâs educational universe. Socially I was much more comfortable, of courseâmore black males, more brothers and sisters from the Ville, though I felt embarrassed when I encountered my former 7-14 classmates in the hallways or cafeteria. It turned out that that feeling of inferiority was good for me. Not being âspecialâ anymore made me bear down on the books. I could still read at a higher level than my classmates, but now, with a real sense of purpose, I applied myself much more to math. No whiz, but at least now I competed.
So for my last year at Meyer Levin I was promoted to 9-12, one of the top classes in my grade. My yo-yo junior high career established a lifelong pattern. I tend to stumble and sometimes outright fail my first time doing most things. Iâm a natural at almost nothing. Eventually I get my bearings, find my legs, and can thrive where Iâd once failed. Junior high was my first sign that I was not a sprinter but a long-distance man.
To be poor is to never quite warm up in the winter and never be truly cool in the summer. It is to use the stove for heat, and to work your wrist to soreness trying to create a breeze with a paper fan. Itâs wanting to stick your head inside the open oven like a freshly basted turkey, and to lay your head against the spinning wheel of your metal fan in search of relief from the humidity.
When youâre poor you are always subject to the extremes of weather, âcause your apartment is never really heated properly. You spend long winters with a slight chill in your bones that only hours in school can thaw out. When youâre poor in summer you sit outside, find some shade, and luxuriate in any stray breeze that comes briefly, sweetly, your way. It is socks and sweaters to bed. It is sweat as second skin. It is figuring out that weather is a tool of an amused god used to illustrate just how brittle the walls of your apartment are and how little comfort your place of shelter really affords.
When we lived in the projects I remember how vulnerable my family was to the fluctuations of nature, and how flimsy was our grasp on security. My mother held my sister and me just above the poverty line for yearsâworking poor but not homelessâbefore we actually started creeping up toward the middle class. But we never did live anywhere with serious central heating. So winter morningsâwhen the wind whips and my clothes seem to disappear in the face of arctic blastsâI always get pulled back to the days when I stood in front of the kitchen oven with outstretched hands, briefly warm when I was dying to be toasty.
Hot summer days remind me of roaches. Being poor in Brooklyn also meant having unwelcome little brown visitors. We never had rats. I saw a mouse now and then. But in a New York City housing project in the sixties and seventies roaches were to our life as blue sky was to someone in Montana. Live in a sixteen-story building packed with poor people, and maintained by a crumbling cityâs bureaucracy, and youâll have roaches, despite your motherâs best efforts. To paraphrase a football cliché: You couldnât stop the roaches; you could only hope to contain them.
For years I used to worry that Iâd be at school and a little brown roach would crawl out of a book, a bag, or even my shirt. No matter how you dressed or how poised you sounded, a roachâs appearance just howled poverty like a wolf does at the moon. In the days before we finally moved out of the Tilden projects my mother was carefully looking through our clothes and belongings for roach eggs, determined to leave the projects behind and not bring any souvenirs with us.
Ma was, not surprisingly, considered uppity by a lot of our neighbors in the projects. She didnât sit outside on the benches and gossip. She didnât drink beer, play cards, and watch the
So for my last year at Meyer Levin I was promoted to 9-12, one of the top classes in my grade. My yo-yo junior high career established a lifelong pattern. I tend to stumble and sometimes outright fail my first time doing most things. Iâm a natural at almost nothing. Eventually I get my bearings, find my legs, and can thrive where Iâd once failed. Junior high was my first sign that I was not a sprinter but a long-distance man.
To be poor is to never quite warm up in the winter and never be truly cool in the summer. It is to use the stove for heat, and to work your wrist to soreness trying to create a breeze with a paper fan. Itâs wanting to stick your head inside the open oven like a freshly basted turkey, and to lay your head against the spinning wheel of your metal fan in search of relief from the humidity.
When youâre poor you are always subject to the extremes of weather, âcause your apartment is never really heated properly. You spend long winters with a slight chill in your bones that only hours in school can thaw out. When youâre poor in summer you sit outside, find some shade, and luxuriate in any stray breeze that comes briefly, sweetly, your way. It is socks and sweaters to bed. It is sweat as second skin. It is figuring out that weather is a tool of an amused god used to illustrate just how brittle the walls of your apartment are and how little comfort your place of shelter really affords.
When we lived in the projects I remember how vulnerable my family was to the fluctuations of nature, and how flimsy was our grasp on security. My mother held my sister and me just above the poverty line for yearsâworking poor but not homelessâbefore we actually started creeping up toward the middle class. But we never did live anywhere with serious central heating. So winter morningsâwhen the wind whips and my clothes seem to disappear in the face of arctic blastsâI always get pulled back to the days when I stood in front of the kitchen oven with outstretched hands, briefly warm when I was dying to be toasty.
Hot summer days remind me of roaches. Being poor in Brooklyn also meant having unwelcome little brown visitors. We never had rats. I saw a mouse now and then. But in a New York City housing project in the sixties and seventies roaches were to our life as blue sky was to someone in Montana. Live in a sixteen-story building packed with poor people, and maintained by a crumbling cityâs bureaucracy, and youâll have roaches, despite your motherâs best efforts. To paraphrase a football cliché: You couldnât stop the roaches; you could only hope to contain them.
For years I used to worry that Iâd be at school and a little brown roach would crawl out of a book, a bag, or even my shirt. No matter how you dressed or how poised you sounded, a roachâs appearance just howled poverty like a wolf does at the moon. In the days before we finally moved out of the Tilden projects my mother was carefully looking through our clothes and belongings for roach eggs, determined to leave the projects behind and not bring any souvenirs with us.
Ma was, not surprisingly, considered uppity by a lot of our neighbors in the projects. She didnât sit outside on the benches and gossip. She didnât drink beer, play cards, and watch the
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