by Michelle Tea
It seems I am on the up. But there is an odd sort of psychological catch-22 that happens when you straddle both worlds—the working-class world of the shop and the professional world of the college. You realize you want success but you don’t want to be a successful person. Straddling the line is impossible. I was always so proud of not being one of those people who needed a fancy job or fancy clothes to feel valuable. “Look at me!” I’d think. “I’m confident and happy and I stack shelves for a living while being unable to afford a car. That’s real confidence!” I laughed at my “sheltered friends” who were banned from mixing with my neighbors, the “undesirables.” I based my identity on being the kind of person who wasn’t afraid to get her hands dirty, and didn’t need to feel a sense of superiority over others in order to feel worthy. I refused to see that there were things I could learn from my more successful peers.
There is a link between how much we get paid and how valuable we feel, and so to earn both a little and a lot at the same time leaves you wondering which one is your “real” value. Logically, you know it’s the higher one—if you weren’t worth it then you wouldn’t be earning it. But then what does that say about my “working-class” friends, my colleagues at the shop? Am I somehow worth more than them?
The conundrum is limiting because it fosters a negative attitude toward “success” (decent salary, breathing room in the budget) that I can’t disengage from. More simply, I want success but I don’t want to be a successful person. I want the management skills of my college colleagues, and I want their salary and lifestyle, but I never laugh with the other lecturers in the same way as I do with my shop colleagues. I have friends who work in bars and shops and have no money and I feel more at home with them than anyone else in the world. At times it occurs to me that perhaps I’m just romanticizing my “working-class roots” (a phrase I hate almost as much as “real, salt of the earth people”) because I’m scared to take another step up the ladder. But if I give up this mentality, what is there to replace it? I won’t ever be a Professional from a Professional family, but I have few role models of the Professional from an Unprofessional family. It seems, as with everything else in life, we have to make it up as we go along.
So I no longer live in a house where I can see people being arrested on a weekly basis. I have friends now who have never, not once in all their lives, seen someone be arrested. I’m not convinced that’s a good thing, but it does seem to be a very good thing professionally. And now that I have seen it, and can never unsee it, I will have to find a way to work around it.
THE PRISON WE CALLED HOME
SIOBHAN BROOKS
I WAS BORN IN THE SUNNYDALE HOUSING PROJECTS IN SAN FRANCISCO ON July 14, 1972. My mother had been living in the Haight Ashbury district, where she used to take pictures of the Bay Bridge from her apartment, but the rents increased and white people moved in, so she had to move. Being a single Black woman without a high school diploma, the projects were the only place she could find to live. And Sunnydale, known for its violence, always had vacancies.
These projects are the largest in San Francisco. Built during World War II, they look like red-and-white row houses. Though they are now predominantly Black (along with a few Asian, Latino, and Samoan families), they weren’t always. White people used to live in them during the 1940s, when they functioned as military housing. Then the suburbs were built up, and white people went to live in those communities, keeping Blacks out, locked in the ghetto. It was strange for me to see old photos of Sunnydale with suburban-looking white families living there. The only white people who lived in Sunnydale when I was growing up were white women who mothered Black children and had been rejected from the white world.
Like most projects, Sunnydale had a reputation for violence, and was referred to as “Swampy Desert” or “Swampy D.” My mother tried her best to make our unit seem like home. She bought beads, curtains, a birdbath, and marble tables that she ordered from catalogues in order to make the house look nice, in spite of the roaches that lived in the corner of our stove. We covered our food with foil to keep them away. I used to love watching her decorate our place with contact paper, woodprints, plants, and bright fabric that she would sew onto our chairs. She bought the initials A and S (for Aldean and Siobhan) to place outside our door.
I felt most loved by my mother at Christmas, when she would buy me dozens of gifts—toys, dolls, games, and clothes: Christmas was her way of proving that we weren’t poor, even though we lived in the projects. One Christmas she bought a gingerbread house and wrapped it up to surprise me. I was delighted. I had never had a gingerbread house. While we were looking at the frosting and the smiling gingerbread man, I noticed some-thing brown on top of the house, moving. I pointed it out to my mother—it was a roach. My mother threw the gingerbread house across the room, then grabbed a hammer and crushed it to pieces. She said every racial slur toward Black people imaginable—because of her internalized racism, she often blamed her problems on being Black, not on the effects of white racism against us.
Once we were returning home from the circus and there was a horrible car accident. A little girl, also returning from the circus with her parents, got hit by a car and was killed. The driver was drunk, and the car had actually run through a liquor store; the girl was decapitated. As we approached the crowd, my mother, seeing something, led us in a different direction. We heard about the accident later on the news, and a Malcolm X mural was painted where the accident occurred, but there was no discussion as to why there were so many liquor stores in our area.
Another time there was a Black man running from unit to unit in Sunnydale breaking windows. He had been stabbed and wanted someone to call for help. My mother and I were relieved that he didn’t break ours. We had bars on our windows to keep people from breaking in, but they also kept us locked in—if there had been a fire, they would have prevented our escape. Even so, we had our place broken into twice, both times through the door.
WHILE THESE EVENTS DIDN’T HAPPEN EVERY DAY IN THE PROJECTS, they are reflective of what it is like to grow up in them. Whether you’re talking about projects in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Oakland, New Jersey, Philadelphia, New York, or Chicago, they all share the same incarcerating elements. While projects do have elements of culture, community, and resistance, they also have fear, sadness, hopelessness, and dramatically violent events that, no matter how infrequent, stay imprinted in the mind. There is limited access to space, a dearth of businesses, and intense social isolation. I remember riding the bus with my mother and passing banks, schools, and real-estate agencies, not realizing what they were. Most people in the projects carried cash and/or cashed their checks at a check-cashing place. Few people I knew had bank accounts.
The real-estate agencies were partly responsible for why Black people and other people of color could not live in safe housing. They often catered to the white elite, and steered people of color to the houses with the lowest property values. Poor people of color are forced to live in projects. For us, to be working class would have been a step up. We were the prelude to the working class, locked in a ghetto.
Growing up, we didn’t have a playground. We went roof-hopping, played hide-and-go-seek in vacant apartment buildings, climbed trees. We tore the boards from the doorways of vacant units and rode them down nearby steps. We ate dirt, pulled sour grass and chewed on it. Later we were told it was called “sour grass” because the dogs peed on it.
Getting Exposure
The first time I entered a real house, I was eleven years old. I had a Filipina friend named Mary who lived a few blocks away, in one of the houses alongside Sunnydale populated mostly by Asians. Mary went to my elementary school; we were in the same third-grade class. I didn’t know her well, but I noticed that she would walk the same way as me when my mother picked me up from school and disappear into one of those houses. One day she invited me over, out of the blue, and without asking my mother if it was O.K., I went.
I remember being amazed a
t how much space Mary and her family had, compared to the one-bedroom unit with the six-foot ceiling my mother and I shared; Mary’s house was like a mansion compared to any unit in Sunnydale. They had a garage, four bedrooms (each of her siblings had their own room), a spacious bathroom, a kitchen with tile floors (clean, no roaches), and a living room with a fireplace. I had never seen a house like that except on television. I remember feeling very small in her house. Her mother was sweet, but wary of me in the beginning, watching my every move. Like many immigrants, she had been taught to fear Black people, and I was the first Black person they had ever had in their house. Even though they lived only a few blocks away from us, we lived in different worlds.
Growing up in the projects, it was common for us to refer to where we lived as our “house.” My friends would always ask if they could come over to my house, and vice versa; we never said, “Can I come over to your unit?” But after visiting Mary in a real house, I felt how marginal we were in the projects. Things they took for granted, like space, were new to me. Mary’s windows opened up to the view of a garden in the back, birds, and blue sky, without bars.
That day Mary’s mother made us Rice Krispies Treats, and we played in her garage. It changed my life forever. After being in their house I never wanted to go back to Sunnydale. I continued to visit after school for an hour and play, becoming exposed to a whole new world. Living in the projects is very similar to living on a Native American reservation—the projects are located on poorly kept land, isolated from the rest of society, and controlled by the government. I recently read that HUD builds the houses on reservations as well as in the projects.
For people living in projects, all roads lead to the ghetto. Our whole social world usually does not expand far from it. The schools we attend are often near our neighborhoods, and, because of our lack of property-value-generated revenue, they have poor funding and overcrowded classrooms. Everyone I knew from school lived in a ghetto or not far from one. I hardly ever met middle-class people—Black, Latino/a, Asian, or white. At school we learned more about our social status by the lack of care the teachers gave us. I remember a class where the social sciences teacher just up and left class because he was tired of dealing with us. He was Black, and so were most of the students. During lunch we were not allowed to leave the campus, and we even had security guards standing outside the entrance. Sometimes the principal would use a lock and chain to keep us in. This was during a peak of gang activity in California, and the principal thought it was safer for us to stay inside during lunch. Once I cut class to visit a friend of mine at another school, which was mostly white; I was surprised by the amount of freedom they had. During lunch the students could sit outside on the grass, or leave the campus entirely.
Everywhere we went there was a police presence: school dances, the bus stop, a police helicopter flying over us at night. And we were always crowded into small spaces: the projects, the welfare lines, the bus. We never experienced the larger, open places in San Francisco. With inferior school systems and housing, the projects were often a prelude to the final form of incarceration: jail and prison. A few of the guys I grew up with ended up in jail, on probation, or dead, while the girls ended up single parents on welfare.
If you want to succeed, all you need to do is act right, I believed. I didn’t understand, at age fourteen, that our oppression had nothing to do with good behavior and everything to do with racism and classism.
Planning My Escape
The older I got, the more I hated Sunnydale and all communities of color like it. This is contradictory to the notion of being “down” with the ghetto, which some confused Black middle- and working-class people glorify and romanticize (often in gangsta rap and narrow Black nationalist ideology)—usually out of some strange guilt at being spared the “Black” experience of growing up in poverty. Living in an anti-Black, self-hating household, it was easy for me to begin to hate where I came from and the people we lived among. Contrary to the popular belief that people live in the projects because they are not ambitious, or because they are too lazy to get out, my mother had very bourgeois values and manners, which I shared. I had already decided that I was not going to live in the projects when I got older, or be like the people who lived there: If you want to succeed, all you need to do is act right, I believed. I didn’t understand, at age fourteen, that our oppression had nothing to do with good behavior and everything to do with structural racism and classism.
During my high school years, my mother spared me household chores so that I could focus on my schoolwork, reading, and writing. I was allowed to be selfish in a way most of my friends were not, and in this regard I had more in common with my white friends than my friends of color.
Growing up in a nonworking environment, I had no working-class identity, and actually began to look down on people who were “just workers.” I was going to be a thinker, a writer. When I was sixteen I got my first summer job working at the Presidio hospital doing clerical work, and was surprised when my paycheck did not fall on the first or fifteenth of the month, the dates welfare checks came.
I was fed up with the projects, and desperately wanted out. I hated living in fear of my neighbors, in fear of the men when coming home late at night, fearing the sound of helicopters. I hated being so far removed from the central areas of San Francisco. It took me an hour on the bus to get downtown. Cabs would refuse to bring me all the way home, letting me off where the homes ended and Sunnydale began. I decided that I would explore San Francisco on my own and slowly move out of the projects.
Once, when I was sixteen, I rode the buses until I was lost. I knew that I had to learn the city better if I were going to move outside of my racially segregated environment. I got off at a random stop and went into a cafe to get something to drink.
When I opened the door I was surprised and a bit frightened by what I saw: mostly white people eating and drinking coffee. Prior to opening the door I had never been in a predominantly white environment; I had actually only seen white people on television. I remember feeling awkward, looking at the white boy with piercings behind the counter and at the menu of drinks I couldn’t pronounce. If I could successfully order a drink in this place, I thought, I could function outside of Sunnydale, since anything outside of Sunnydale was most likely to be white. I slowly walked up to the counter and mumbled that I wanted a cafe au lait, hoping I pronounced it right. He turned about and made my drink. I decided to drink inside the cafe and observe my surroundings. Most of my neighbors would have felt inferior or scared, and so they stayed where they were most comfortable and accepted—the ghetto.
I was reminded of how Blacks in my area feared white people, even though they would never admit it. I went to a Nirvana concert in the early nineties, at a venue near Sunnydale, the Cow Palace. I remember thinking that it was one of the rare times something was actually near us—usually we had to go far from our neighborhood to see a show or access services. Old Black men normally hung in front of neighborhood liquor stores until the wee hours of the morning, but on the evening of the Nirvana concert, mobs of white kids from the suburbs dominated their turf. Instead of the Black men being at their usual spots, these teenage white boys had taken it. It was the first time I actually wanted to see those Black men in front of the liquor store, claiming their space in the face of whiteness.
Escape from the Swamp
I moved out of the projects during my junior year at San Francisco State University, at the age of twenty-two. My longtime friend Jennifer, a white girl from a working-class background, became my housing hook-up. This is usually how people of color avoid racism and find housing. She used to live with a friend of ours near Golden Gate Park, and when she moved out she gave me her room. The rent was only two hundred dollars, but I remember thinking it was a lot of money to save each month. My mother only paid $160 for our unit in the projects, and she was getting government aid. I was scared to move, but took the challenge.
The day I moved out my mother was hu
rt; though she wanted me to succeed, she didn’t want me to leave her. Once she’d even asked me if I was going to get a unit next door. I remember rolling my eyes and sighing, I’d rather die than live here another day. No one really moved out of Sunnydale, which is why my leaving was such a big deal. Most people move within Sunnydale, or to another housing project. I was doing something most people in Sunnydale could only dream of doing: moving into a nice, safe neighborhood outside of the projects.
LATER I MOVED INTO ANOTHER AREA, ALSO THROUGH JENNIFER, and lived with a white woman named Mary. While the (mainly white) people that I met in this new-world college neighborhood were nice to me, it was obvious to me that they didn’t know many people of color, and the ones they did know were the very best of the best, the cream of the crop—not the average person of color. I call this the Super Nigger Syndrome—in order for a Black person to have decent housing, health care, etc., he or she must perform way above normal standards (standards not set for white people). Blacks, non-Black people of color, and whites have all asked me if I am mixed, or even from this country, because I don’t act “ghetto.”
Reflections on Sunnydale
Four years ago, after my mother died, I returned to Sunnydale, visiting from New York City where I now attend grad school. I am amazed at how trapped I still feel anytime I spend time there. The projects are more than a physical location, they’re also a state of mind, and the experience stays with you long after you leave them. Even now, whenever I hear a loud noise, I startle, thinking it’s a gunshot. I went back with my friend Jennifer and visited the family that now lives where my mother and I used to live: a grandmother, mother, and daughter. The mother actually remembered my mother and me from when I was little. I was surprised at how different their place looks from when we used to live there. She told me I could visit anytime. After chatting with them, I left, knowing I would not be back.
