The Bronx

6

This is the sixth part of a serialized memoir. Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, & 5.

The population of Rice, Minnesota, was not quite seven hundred in 1981. My birth inched us closer. I spent my childhood and adolescence there and in other small towns. At twenty-two, I left for the Bronx.

Sometimes I considered the reverse scenario. I imagined a person from the Bronx moving to my hometown. Someone who had not grown up there or any place like it, ignorant of the place’s culture, an obvious outsider, wired with city energy, moving to that small town not just to live and work, but with an eye toward improving it. Seen through that lens, the place would appear bright with pathology, as will any human creation when viewed askance. That brave traveler’s conclusions would not be all wrong. They would see things I can’t see. But when experiences are translated into the language of theory, even progressive theory, much of life becomes invisible. Such a visitor would, in any case, be intensely irritating to the locals.

(Recently, I read a book with something close to this premise: Main Street, by a fellow Minnesotan named Sinclair Lewis. It is about a young woman in the 1910s who, fresh out of college, and full of progressive ideas, marries a country doctor, and moves with him from St. Paul to a town like Rice. I sympathized with her desire to improve the place, to broaden the cultural offerings, spruce up the main square, be more accepting of Finns and socialists, and I sympathized when the townspeople and eventually her husband began to bristle at her arrogance. It was a fine balancing. Lewis won the Nobel Prize).

My knowledge of the borough came primarily from two books: Savage Inequalities and Amazing Grace, both by Jonathan Kozol. The former is a polemic about the vastly different educations of children who attend poor inner-city schools vs. wealthy city or suburban schools. One chapter compared two schools in poor neighborhoods of the Bronx with a school in Riverdale, the neighborhood I lived next to, which was technically in the Bronx but far richer, and culturally separate. The impression I took away was that kids in the South Bronx were just as smart as kids in Riverdale, but they had crumbling schools, cheap textbooks, and lousy teachers, whereas the kids in Riverdale had fresh construction, well-stocked libraries, and great teachers. The root of this disparity, Kozol explained again and again, could be found in funding differences, with schools in richer neighborhoods receiving more per student due to their higher tax revenue as well as PTA fundraising abilities, and that the root of those funding differences, if you dug just a little deeper, was racism. His call to anger, and his straightforward diagnosis, stayed with me.

The latter book, published in 1995, focused on the Mott Haven neighborhood of the South Bronx, and painted a much darker picture. I reread it recently. About that particular area, Kozol reported the following.

Crack-cocaine addiction and the intravenous use of heroin, which children I have met here call “the needle drug,” are woven into the texture of existence in Mott Haven. Nearly 4,000 heroin injectors, many of whom are HIV-infected, live here […] Depression is common […] Fear and anxiety are common […] Asthma is the most common illness among children here. Many have to struggle to take in a good deep breath.

This grim vision, more than that of the first book, seemed to align with what people had heard about the place. Perhaps it was the vision they preferred. Like the end of a ruler. It’s useful to have a Bronx.

In any case, I didn’t trust these impressions. I felt that, given my spectacular ignorance about the place and its people, I needed to stay in a receptive mode, to learn about regular life, the small moments that made it up. That meant every impromptu conversation, every stop into a Dominican restaurant, every stroll down the broad walk of the Grand Concourse, sweat gathering on my back, then cooling as I stood reading a plaque or bit of graffiti, shaded by elm or honeylocust, was time spent twice.

Read part seven here.