On the Sunny Side of the Street

I was not born into a wealthy family. As a child of a Protestant Methodist minister, I learned early that I lived on the "other side of the tracks." We had enough food to eat because my parents always had a garden and church folks were generous especially during holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas. My mother was a very good seamstress and made many of the clothes my sister and I wore. She would knock herself out, staying up all night sewing, just so we'd have a new dress to wear to church at Easter or for our piano and voice recitals. We also received "hand-me-downs" from folks in the community. I'll never forget the skirt I had to wear to school that had been "donated" to the "preacher's family." It was a beige corduroy and had large prints of Disney's "Lady and the Tramp" all around it. I thought it was grotesque and hideous, and I was ashamed that some child might recognize it as one she had got rid of.

My father gave my sister and me each an allowance of a nickel each week. With that, we could buy a big dill pickle at the local drug store right across the street or five pieces of penny candy from the nickel-and-dime store just a block from the parsonage. We'd traipse over to the store and drool as we eyed the aisles of candy, trying to decide which tasty morsels we'd spend our pennies on. Or we could go to the High's Ice Cream store and get a cone of ice cream for a nickel and sometimes we did that instead. My favorite candies were Mary Janes and Tootsie Rolls and, of course, bubble gum. I also liked "fire balls."

By the time I got to middle school, we had moved from Highland Springs to Petersburg where, for some reason, I had been designated "leader" of the pack from the other side of the track. We had lots of fun getting together after school at the parsonage and playing pranks on our adversaries and rivals, classmates who lived in a wealthy section of the City called Walnut Hill. We'd pull innocent stunts like telephone one of them and ask if their refrigerator was running. "Well, you better go and catch it," we'd say real quick and hang up. Then we'd holler and howl and roll on the floor laughing. Of course, they retaliated in kind. I didn't have a boat load of fond memories of my preteen years, but at least I had a few. Sometimes my family would get out in the backyard and play crochet. We'd set up the tins and see who could knock each other's balls out of bounds with our mallets and who would make it all around the backyard through all the tins to the final goal post. On Sunday afternoons after church, our father would take us for a Sunday ride in the country and treat us to a fudge ice cream bar before we'd go back home. As the preacher's kids, we were very much isolated in the communities where we'd relocate every four years. After all, who wants to play with the preacher's kids? Still, we did have a few friends along the way--two sisters--Marilyn and Linda--who lived right across the street from us in Highland Springs. They became good friends. They had a chicken coop out back of their house and we formed a secret club and had club meetings in our "club house." I don't think we had much business to discuss. It was just an excuse to get together and play. I don't remember having any girlfriends in middle school. I was pretty much a loner, but I did have a boyfriend in middle school. He and I were in the same advanced algebra class in 8th grade and we had pocket mirrors we would set on our desks at just the right angle so we could stare at each other. We had an excellent math teacher, an older petite woman with a metalic sounding voice and tiny, thin red lips. She rolled the ends of her white hair up all around her head. We called her George Washington because she looked just like she had on one of those colonial wigs.

to be continued...

Shooting In the New Year

I had planned to celebrate the end of 2004 quietly at home. I had watched the ball in Rockefeller Center drop, turned off the TV and had just crawled into bed with my cats curled up beside me when the fireworks outside my door startled me bolt upright and sent the cats flying off the bed and scampering underneath it. At first the shooting sounded like popcorn. I listened as single shots punctuated the air, then rapid fire followed by more single shots. The shooting went on for nearly a half hour with intermittent moments of silence only to start up again. The rapid fire, machine-gun sounds were unnerving. I couldn't imagine why my neighbors would have or need such weapons, but this was the first New Year's Eve I had spent in the black neighborhood where my daughter's house was located and where I now resided. She had inherited the house from her godparents, and I had moved in to serve as live-in housekeeper. We'd cooked up a mother-daughter seven-year agreement for me to take care of the upkeep on the house with her financial assistance until I retired and then move to New Jersey to live out the rest of my days near her and her husband. Then I'd take care of my grandchildren when they arrived in the world.

I may be the only white person in the City who has voluntarily moved into a black neighborhood, but I had been named executor of my daughter's godfather's estate so I had a fiduciary duty to take care of the property after he died and I also wanted to help my daughter financially.

When Juanita called me New Year's Day from her home in New Jersey to wish me a Happy New Year, I related the experience of my first New Year's Eve in her house on Richmond's Southside. She didn't seem too surprised. After all, her godfather had a large arsenal of guns himself which we had found in a closet. The previous summer, a close friend had come down to the house to help me paint one weekend and had seen the guns. A few were German rifles from World War II. She suggested her husband, a retired police officer, have a look at them. When he later joined us, he dismantled them and asked, "Did you realize they were all loaded?"

Whew, no, I had no idea. Were the guns telling me something about the community where I was living? I didn't want to think about it. Anyway, Juanita's godmother had warned me about the shoot 'em ups on New Year's Eve. "Bunch of crazy folks," she used to say. And Juanita had reassured me that this house had been her second home and she had been safe all those many years when her godmother kept her after school hours so I as a single parent could work in peace.

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January 2nd, 2005 was a Sunday and I was up early to read my Sunday paper. I turned to the column I love to read by Mark Holmberg, who not only writes well but with heart and has a lot to say about the City. He described listening to the fireworks on New Year's Eve as he stood on the front porch of an apartment in one of the subsidized housing complexes in Richmond's East End. He had been invited to a New Year's party there. Probably the sound of the guns shooting in the New Year didn't startle him since he had spent years covering the Richmond City's police beat, reporting on crime scenes. He hoped our new Mayor, former Governor Doug Wilder, would hire more homicide detectives and that our criminal justice system would get serious about locking up career criminals. In a related article that Sunday, another staff writer commented that "for all its ballyhooed new business development and bond upgrades, the city begins 2005 still trapped in the cycle of poverty, drugs and gun violance that make it the ninth-most-dangerous place to live in the country." Now, there's something to mull over as we toast the New Year. I have to say that I wish I lived in a City where bells could be heard ringing in the New Year instead of guns. That would be a very good tradition for this Southern City.

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A Street Scene...

Monday morning, January 3rd, I had taken my car to my mechanic so I took the bus to work down Semmes Avenue and River Road across the Robert E. Lee Bridge onto Second Street and up to Main Street. Just as the bus was turning off the River Road ramp onto Second Street, it passed a man standing on a grassy knoll pointing a gun straight at the SunTrust Mortgage Corporation building. Even after a night of fireworks on New Year's Eve, the sight of this man pointing a gun in broad daylight still startled.