Negroes. Poor white people stayed inside and watched sports and drank beer and terrorized their kids. All the years that we lived in the project, all the years that we lived just a few hundred yards away from a placid, slow-moving river that could have provided a respite from our unhappiness, we simply ignored it.
One summer morning not long after we moved to East Falls, my father woke me early. He said he was headed downtown to apply for unemployment compensation and wanted me to come along. I did not know what unemployment compensation was—it took me a long time to understand the protocol involved in losing a job—but the prospect of embarking on an adventure with my dad was thrilling. What I did not realize when he issued the invitation, however, was that we would not be taking the bus, the subway, or the trolley car downtown that morning, because we had no cash on hand. Not one thin dime. Not one red cent. Not even one wooden nickel. Nothing. Instead, we would be making our way on foot. Children have a distorted concept of size and space, so in my memory the distance between our home and downtown Philadelphia was easily fifteen to twenty miles, a Herculean undertaking for a youngster, as we would also be making the return trip on foot. This made the outing immeasurably less appealing.
Life in those days, for the Queenans at least, was a trail of automotive tears. Not having a car in the age of the Thunderbird was a tremendous humiliation for a grown man. It was bad enough not having a television or a telephone, but those were minor inconveniences. Having no car left us at the mercy of the dreaded Philadelphia Transportation Authority and its fleet of unreliable, herky-jerky buses, subways, and trolleys, most of them going places we did not wish to visit. No car meant no trips to the country, no trips to the seashore, no trips to visit those few relatives we did not wish to see impaled on sharp sticks. Not once in his life did my father own a new car or anything resembling one. For most of my childhood, we did not have a car, and on the rare occasions when we did scrape together enough cash to buy one, it would turn out to be some wheezing bomb that keeled over and died within a few weeks. To the best of my knowledge, my father also never flew on a plane or found himself in a position to order room service. The late twentieth century had a lot to offer working-class people, but he missed out on all of it.
Carless, cashless, we hoofed it downtown that day. Though there were several routes we could have taken, he opted to walk straight down Ridge Avenue, straight through his old childhood haunts, straight through the heart of the North Philadelphia ghetto. My father was not especially fond of Negroes; like most white people we knew, his idea of race relations was to stay as far away from black people as possible. But he was adamant in his refusal to surrender this hallowed terrain to these tetchy intruders. To him, traipsing through a slum was a way of abolishing reality, a way of insisting that the past was still the present and always would be. It was an attitude he maintained until the end of his life, when he would breathlessly tell me about his latest excursion to an unappetizing neighborhood his ethnic group had deserted two generations earlier. To him the phrases “Eighth and York” and “Strawberry Mansion” forever evoked the glory of days long past. Such glories were not apparent to the uninitiated. Our trek through the urban wilderness scared me speechless; I didn’t know anything about black people except that they weren’t all that fond of white people. Throughout that forced march down Ridge Avenue, I kept my eyes down, my face forward. And I walked double-time; I wanted to make sure we were out of North Philly before nightfall.
Many years later, on a visit home, I took a long, relaxing walk along the river. I was forty-seven yet had never once strolled any great distance along the Schuylkill. My
One summer morning not long after we moved to East Falls, my father woke me early. He said he was headed downtown to apply for unemployment compensation and wanted me to come along. I did not know what unemployment compensation was—it took me a long time to understand the protocol involved in losing a job—but the prospect of embarking on an adventure with my dad was thrilling. What I did not realize when he issued the invitation, however, was that we would not be taking the bus, the subway, or the trolley car downtown that morning, because we had no cash on hand. Not one thin dime. Not one red cent. Not even one wooden nickel. Nothing. Instead, we would be making our way on foot. Children have a distorted concept of size and space, so in my memory the distance between our home and downtown Philadelphia was easily fifteen to twenty miles, a Herculean undertaking for a youngster, as we would also be making the return trip on foot. This made the outing immeasurably less appealing.
Life in those days, for the Queenans at least, was a trail of automotive tears. Not having a car in the age of the Thunderbird was a tremendous humiliation for a grown man. It was bad enough not having a television or a telephone, but those were minor inconveniences. Having no car left us at the mercy of the dreaded Philadelphia Transportation Authority and its fleet of unreliable, herky-jerky buses, subways, and trolleys, most of them going places we did not wish to visit. No car meant no trips to the country, no trips to the seashore, no trips to visit those few relatives we did not wish to see impaled on sharp sticks. Not once in his life did my father own a new car or anything resembling one. For most of my childhood, we did not have a car, and on the rare occasions when we did scrape together enough cash to buy one, it would turn out to be some wheezing bomb that keeled over and died within a few weeks. To the best of my knowledge, my father also never flew on a plane or found himself in a position to order room service. The late twentieth century had a lot to offer working-class people, but he missed out on all of it.
Carless, cashless, we hoofed it downtown that day. Though there were several routes we could have taken, he opted to walk straight down Ridge Avenue, straight through his old childhood haunts, straight through the heart of the North Philadelphia ghetto. My father was not especially fond of Negroes; like most white people we knew, his idea of race relations was to stay as far away from black people as possible. But he was adamant in his refusal to surrender this hallowed terrain to these tetchy intruders. To him, traipsing through a slum was a way of abolishing reality, a way of insisting that the past was still the present and always would be. It was an attitude he maintained until the end of his life, when he would breathlessly tell me about his latest excursion to an unappetizing neighborhood his ethnic group had deserted two generations earlier. To him the phrases “Eighth and York” and “Strawberry Mansion” forever evoked the glory of days long past. Such glories were not apparent to the uninitiated. Our trek through the urban wilderness scared me speechless; I didn’t know anything about black people except that they weren’t all that fond of white people. Throughout that forced march down Ridge Avenue, I kept my eyes down, my face forward. And I walked double-time; I wanted to make sure we were out of North Philly before nightfall.
Many years later, on a visit home, I took a long, relaxing walk along the river. I was forty-seven yet had never once strolled any great distance along the Schuylkill. My
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