Theme Week 4 the rest of the truth.

I went to CT. for the weekend so that I could visit with my family in Waterbury. I was looking forward to going home and seriously recharging my inner-city battery. Living in Maine can drain that battery very quickly. While I was in Waterbury I decided to drive around and check out the old neighborhoods and see what's changed since the last time I was there. I was driving on Long Hill Rd., the street where I grew up, and decided to drive through the Berkely Projects and reminss about growing up there.

Driving through Berkely I was transported to riding in Dad's 1979 brown Cadillac, listening to Curtis Mayfield. I looked out the windows and remember seeing afro picks with the black fist on it, also how we used to nail milk crates and bike rims to the telephone poles. We used to shoot hoops by throwing crumpled paperbags, balled up socks, and the invisible, "real basketball" through those crates and rims. The manhole cover in the middle of the street was always homeplate for kickball and baseball. So many kids in those projects got to college from using those poles and that manhole cover.

The red bricked apartment buildings of Berkely were run-down then and have not changed at all. It seems like the city put poor black people there and forgot about it. The roaches were like roomates to the tenants and the graffiti served as the only cartoons to watch for the people that couldn't afford television sets. The broken windows were state of the art air conditioning. I was home though, even if it was the projects. We were poor in money, but our culture was rich with black pride.

I drove past bldg. 32, thats where my gramma lived. I looked at the stoop and could remember gramma out there slicing watermelon. All the kids would call out, "Mrs Weaver! can we have a slice, can we have an Icee." You didn't need an Ice Cream Truck when you were equipped with some red Kool Aide and a good freezer. We would sit on that stoop and turn the Icee's upside down in the dixie cup to get the sugary part. We would sit on that stoop and have watermelon seed spitting contests.

I drove around Berkely for a bit and found myself on the infamous "School Road." Nothing good ever happened on that road. That area was not safe back in the day. It always smelled like dead dogs and weed smoke. The police would take people down school road instead of to jail and beat people. A person could count on being robbed there and at times killed. School Road was a place where black people were scared to be around other black people.

The tour through the projects was ending as I came to the exit. Before I left Berkely Projects I stopped and just looked around. My memories of that place were good and bad. I thought about growing up there on Long Hill and my life now, living in Maine. I do miss my culture, my people, and the city experience. The culture is different here in Maine and so are the experiences, but I am just glad to have two places now instead of one to call home.