| Land is a commodity that continues to be alien to me even though I have had the privilege of owning land and the buildings that sat on them. I've mentioned several times that I was born in Harlem, New York and lived with my grandmother, grandfather, aunt, mother and father until we moved to the housing projects on the Lower East Side. The apartments were tiny and families were assigned space according to family size. I remember one family that was so large a wall was knocked out between two apartments to form one large apartment. But all of us acclimated to the absence of space. My bedroom, for example, had a ceiling so low that I could put my flattened palm on it when I was in junior high school. The width of the room wasn't much wider than my outstretched arms and the length was little more than two giant steps. Four of us shared the same bathroom, and there were miraculously few conflicts. Plenty of kids had bicycles and if you lived on the tenth floor, like I did, the elevator was the only way to get your bike down to street level. Stairs were out of the question. But the elevators weren't made for bikes and had to be wedged in at an angle to fit. In fact, the housing projects weren't made for people in general. I'm convinced that the people who designed them did not have one single family member living in any of them. If they had they would not have located garbage incinerators directly outside of the A apartments, among many other oversights with regard to what it takes for humans to have a chance to live decently. Things opened up a bit when you reached the street. The concrete courtyard and steel monkey bars for kids to climb on and fall from. The busy highway that separated the projects from the park that straddled the East River. Brooklyn was on the other side. Some old men still fished and talked about the days, long ago, when their fathers taught them to fish and there were actually fish in the East River. Now all they caught were eels. Long, slimy eels. The last living thing in a dying river. Some of the old fellows toted their catches home in burlap sacks and cleaned, pickled and canned the eels. The park was a glorious place with wild spots and thick vegetation. There was an interesting variety of insects there because it had ample dirt, grass, trees and plants. Other kinds of little living things seemed to like the bricks, concrete and steel of the projects. And they were generally not the kinds that were looked on with wonder. Many of our Saturdays and Sundays were spent driving around. We'd invariably get lost because my father was from the drive-til-you-get-there school since neither he nor mother were big fans of maps. We loved to go to the Cloisters in the Bronx. I fantasized that it was a medieval castle. My father would pick out familiar plants from among the wild things growing. "We used to call this Polk Salad," he'd say as he held up an uprooted handful of the plant. "We cooked them the same way as collards, and they were good. Mama would put a ham hock or a piece of salt pork in the pot and cook it for days. That was some good eatin'" Back in the projects in the confines of our little apartment it was the recent or distant memory of space that allowed us enough room to breathe in and out in the apartment with rooms the size of prison cells. Our land ownership (stewardship would be a better description) consisted of my father's parking space in the lot that lived under the shadows, sounds and belching chimney smells of the Consolidated Edison power plant. It was a very prestigious thing to have your own parking space since there were only about 30 remaining for the thousands of tenants of my housing projects. To have a space was a sign of longevity, a distinction that set you apart as one of the pioneers of the Jacob Riis Housing Projects long before the negative connotations of "pioneer" were freely discussed or even known. There was an oppressive hierarchy of humanity that was more or less accepted and glorified on television shows like "Rama King of the Jungle," "Tarzan," and "Davy Crocket." It was thought to be heroic to kill, mock, minimize or otherwise work to destroy indigenous cultures. The logical progression of things was supposed to be from the tenements to housing projects to owning a little house with a fenced-in backyard in a suburb of one of the boroughs of New York. That kind of positive mobility didn't happen for my family and most of the families that looked like mine. I only knew two Black families who left the projects to buy homes. And there were no laws to fall back on in the '50s. No fair housing legislation. No equal employment considerations. Arbitrary fairness at best. When I talk with friends and the subject turns to money and investments, land is usually at the center of the discussion. A piece of land inherited from a relative. A piece of land that wasn't worth much way back when, but is now sufficient to get the attention of astute financial planners, stock brokers and real estate agents. Wealth is passed on from generation to generation in the form of land and sometimes the houses that sit on them. Ninety-nine percent of my conversations about land passed on from generation to generation do not occur with people who look like me. And when you rent, you can't even pass on the lease because you have no say in who the next tenant will be. You can't guarantee the place to your daughter or son. And even if you could their staying there would not increase their wealth. I remember visiting my kids' mother's family farm years before my children were born. I slept on the third floor which was an experience in itself. Imagine. A family living in a structure that had three levels. A third-floor window looked out on an expansive field that I was told was about 60 acres. And that was only part of the farm. It took my breath away and formed part of a critical picture that contributed to my affinity for the land even though I have yet to fully realize the economic implications. Animals -- including humans -- need room to stretch. Need to feel connected to and not alienated from the places we live. Need a way to pass on to our children whatever wealth we've accumulated during our time on this earth and land is as good a way to do it as any. Not just in terms of dollars and cents, but also because land has history that we all need to be part of. |
| Simple Things/Lang Kenneth Haynes Contemplating the land |
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