This Is the Place

by Margot Kahn

  As I come closer to the building where my grandparents used to live, a strange sensation comes over me. It’s not a feeling of dread or anxiety, but something else. I’m trying to understand exactly what’s happening as the past comes into view: their front door, the porch, the two living room windows, the small dirt yard. I think I expected to feel only one thing when I got to their old apartment—comfort or distress, certainty or confusion—but I’m experiencing the pleasures of my childhood and the pain of my teenage years all at once. I abandoned this part of my life for so long that I have no idea how to walk back into it.

  A couple of days after sitting with my grandfather on his porch and laughing at his showmanship I made a decision that I’m desperate to undo. I spotted my mother’s journal on our stairway; it was brown with musical notes on the cover and for the first time ever I picked it up. I was searching for an answer, about how to deal with my feelings or at least understand them. Flipping through the pages I found the day, June 11, 1987.

  My mother had only written: My father died.

  I convinced myself that those words were enough. Dada had been shot and killed while breaking up a fight. I figured the only way to survive losing him was through restraint. I didn’t talk about him to my friends, I wouldn’t put up any photos that had him in them, and I’ve still never been to visit his grave—all a feeble attempt to move forward.

  After Dada died and after I had left Eastern Circle for college, a mural went up in the projects. It was spray painted on the side of one of the apartment buildings, not far from where my grandparents used to live. The guys from the Circle chipped in to pay a graffiti artist from another neighborhood to paint it. The letters R.I.P. were huge and around it were the names of a handful of residents who had been killed. Like my best friend’s brother who was nineteen years old and found shot to death in a nearby park. The mural was large enough to be seen from the circular street in the center of the projects, which was where I stood. I could make out Dada’s name easily: James Allen Jr.

  I thought it was nice of the guys to include Dada since his death wasn’t a part of all that had happened. He had been killed right around the time that coke and heroin bowed down to crack, when users became addicts, and small guns were put aside for Glocks. The guys in Eastern Circle became the East View Posse to set themselves apart from the other gangs in the city. All these years later I’ve found out that the fight my grandfather was breaking up was between them and outsiders. At one time Eastern Circle, nestled away from the rest of New Haven, afforded us a safety we couldn’t count on anywhere else. But it also meant that when drugs and guns flooded city streets we were on our own.

  I look toward the brick wall that the mural had been painted on—the wall is still there, but of course, the mural isn’t. I wander further up the hill taking in everything that’s been revamped or done away with and wonder what it takes for an entire neighborhood to change course.

  Twenty years after my grandfather’s murder all the residents were made to leave Eastern Circle, and a demolition began. Nine apartment buildings came down and even part of the street that made up the circle was broken apart and carted off. What was left was built back up. Since my grandfather’s death I’ve tried to start over, too, but have managed it in only fits and starts.

  From my vantage point at the top of the hill I can see all the changes the housing authority has made to make the projects safer. Their office is very visible—as are the security cameras attached to the side of buildings—and the circular street was cut off because they figured it made it easy for people buying drugs to come in and out. At one time, the circle felt like a symbol for our lives in the projects. But maybe with its allusions to peace and harmony, it had promised too much.

  The name of the street leading into the projects has been changed, too. Later I find out that it was named after Levi Jackson, who grew up in New Haven. In 1946 he enrolled at Yale University and joined its football team as its first black player.

  Eastern Circle is now Jackson Lane. Renaming the street establishes a new beginning for New Haven and for the projects, and I understand the impulse to sever the past, to uproot it completely. But even so, some things remain: there’s still so much sky and the smell, of bluegrass and dandelions, is even the same. And of course in the distance I can see East Rock, an ancient ridge of sandstone that shoots up three hundred feet in the air. Its brown ridges can be seen from anywhere in the projects. I’ve never been to the top, but I know that people go up there to take in a view of the city: the New Haven Harbor feeding into the Long Island Sound, the downtown office towers, the grand arches of Yale, the railroad tracks and lines of trains. From where I’m standing I can see the monument that rests on the highest summit of East Rock, a tribute to soldiers who gave their lives in war.

  The city, like the nation, stamps the past with one battle or another. Statues are built to remember the fallen, to honor sacrifices, to recognize all the terrible losses, and I think there should be a marker for those who died in Eastern Circle, something more lasting than the mural that was painted on the brick wall.

  I can’t imagine a shrine or a heroic bust but I can envision a stone pillar etched with the story of what happened—an acknowledgment of the drug epidemic that swept the country and ravaged our community. It would make it harder for the violence to be forgotten, or denied, or justified, or diminished. I’d hold it in my mind as a stark contrast to all the monuments that put forward the idea that American splendor and victories serve everyone to the same degree. Throughout the country, in housing projects like Eastern Circle, the landscapes could be dotted with the pillars dedicated to those who died and those who survived. Each one, a record and a reminder.

  Catina Bacote’s nonfiction has appeared in the Gettysburg Review, the Virginia Quarterly Review, TriQuarterly, the Common, The Sun, the Southern California Review, and Trace: Transcultural Styles + Ideas. She wrote a companion guide to the documentary Banished: American Ethnic Cleansings and has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Millay Colony, the Headlands Center for the Arts, Hedgebrook, and Ragdale. Catina holds an MFA from the University of Iowa, where she was admitted as a Dean’s Fellow and subsequently served as the Provost’s Visiting Writer in Nonfiction. She is a professor of creative writing at Warren Wilson College.

  Acknowledgments

  To Cleveland, Lewiston, London, Morningside Heights, Brooklyn, Seattle, and Lopez.

  To Stephanie Knapp, Sharon Kunz, Michael Clark, Jack Lenzo, Martha Whitt, and the whole team at Seal, thank you for helping us make the best possible book.

  Thanks to Andrew Blauner, Columbia University’s School of the Arts, and Seattle’s excellent literary community—especially Seattle Arts & Lectures, Richard Hugo House, the Mayor’s Office of Arts & Culture, King County 4Culture, Jack Straw, Humanities Washington, Seattle Public Library, and Type Set.

  Thanks to the MLK studio crew and MW, for all the good reads.

  To everyone who contributed an essay to this collection and to Kelly, I’ve loved every minute of this with you. Thank you.

  To my parents, thanks for making home a place of creativity and inspiration.

  To Scott, thanks is too small a word for all the things. I’m home with you anywhere, but I’m grateful we agree about the mountains and fruit trees.

  And to Toby, my sweet boy, thank you for coming up with the title for this book. I love that you think home is the best place.

  —Margot

  With gratitude and thanks:

  To Shirley, Vassar, Brooklyn, Great Jones, Honesdale, Lancaster, and now Port Washington.

  To my friends, colleagues, and students at Columbia University, Franklin & Marshall College, and Hofstra University.

  To the entire Seal team, especially Michael Clark for his enthusiastic calm, Sharon Kunz for her wisdom and cool, Stephanie Knapp for her patience and taking a chance.

  To friends of the book from the start: Andrew Blauner, Lauren Cerand, Melissa Connolly, Michele Fil
gate, Sam Freeman, Pete Gudwin, Taylor Larson, M., Katie Machen, Laura McManus, Martha McPhee, Patty O’Toole, Keaton Ramjit, Noah Ross, Sammé, Jennifer Shapiro-Lee, and, as ever, Anna Stein.

  To my tribe of women who have taught and continue to teach me how to mother and make home, including: Rachel Anderson, Dardana Henci, Megana Hosein, Brandy Keenan, Melissa Merendino, Marci Nelligan, Margaret Parker, Andrea Romano, Momoko Yagishita, and each and every one of your mothers.

  To Valentina Venegas and Christina Paizis, without whom nothing would get done.

  To my parents, who built every home they ever made with safety and love.

  To my sons, my everything.

  To Margot, and all our beautiful and fierce contributors: I am so honored to share these pages with you. Thank you.

  —Kelly

  About the Editors

  Margot Kahn is the author of Horses That Buck, winner of the High Plains Book Award. Her essays and reviews have appeared in Tablet, River Teeth: A Journal of Narrative Nonfiction, the Los Angeles Review, Publishers Weekly, and elsewhere. A graduate of Columbia University’s MFA program, she has received grants and residencies from the Seattle Mayor’s Office of Arts & Culture, King County 4Culture, the Ohioana Library Association, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Jack Straw Writers Program. She lives in Seattle. www.margotkahn.com.

  Kelly McMasters is a former bookshop owner and the author of Welcome to Shirley: A Memoir from an Atomic Town, the basis for the documentary film The Atomic States of America. She is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize nomination and an Orion Book Award nomination. Her essays and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post Magazine, Paris Review Daily, American Scholar, River Teeth: A Journal of Narrative Nonfiction, and Newsday, among others. She holds a BA from Vassar College and an MFA in nonfiction writing from Columbia’s School of the Arts and is an Assistant Professor of English and Director of Publishing Studies at Hofstra University in New York. www.kellymcmasters.com.