Lately I have been connecting myself in small ways to the house in Newark that my mom owned with my grandmother. Maybe it is because I am doing estate planning stuff and looking at relieving myself of debts. Maybe it’s because part of that financial planning will be deciding what I do with the homes my mom and I owned together in Pennsylvania’s Mon Valley. I’m not sure. But the memories feel like flashbulbs going off in my head. Tulips in a tiny fenced in front yard… Entire blocks of homes on one side of the street that are identical to one another… The clothesline out my mother’s bedroom window secured to the top of the garage we never parked in… Stephanie Mills and Millie Jackson riding incense smoke from the stereo system in the most comfortable living room I have ever been in to this day. At some point – tenants; sometimes relatives and sometimes people we knew nothing about but all the times people who truly needed a home.
My mom and grandmother bought a home together on Brookdale Avenue in the Vailsburg section of Newark sometime in the early 80s. Before that, my mom and I had moved around quite a bit. We mostly ping ponged between Irvington and Newark. I do not recall minding it at all because my mom was a truly gifted homemaker who always made me feel like her space was a palace. The only time I remember her minding it was a month or so when we moved into a high rise with huge windows. Think Polaroid flash cube but make it a double set of buildings. I was a soap opera in the lap of aunts and older women kid who looked at that place like we had absolutely moved on up to the east side. My mom hated it. Tons more people up and down elevators than she wanted and then something happened that triggered her extremely protective stance. I held my cabbage patch doll and titled my head back into a right angle to say a tearful goodbye to that place. But otherwise, I would just pack my Atari and be ready on the 1st. Changing schools was the more difficult part for me because I was awkward and none of my siblings lived with me so I behaved like an only child.
Then they bought this house. I don’t remember how old I was. If I ever actually take this from blog to page, I’ll research the sale and get more insight but for now, let’s just say I was somewhere between 3rd and 4th grade. The home had 3 units. My grandmother lived on the first floor. Me and my mom were on the 2nd and a man someone was dating lived in the basement apartment. I know he was dating someone in the family. I know that person was not my mom. I know he had a problem with his hands on little girls. And I know that once i finally had the courage to say that to these women who loved me so much, they handled it. Not much more to say than that because there was no aftermath or reckoning. Soon after that reveal, my grandmother got very sick.
At least it was soon after that I realized how sick she was. I did not know that she was dying until really close to the time of her dying. The way this all played out felt like heaven was having a fight and I was watching my angels lose. Grief, anger, rifts, and weird periods of transition all collapsed around me and my mom then. What did not collapse was that home and our neighborhood.
During my grandmother’s lung cancer growth, my mom and aunts did so much to make her comfortable and have room for healings. We had neighbors on one side of us with a daughter not much older than me. I idolized that girl but whew my mom couldn’t stand that. Years later I learned that the girl had a habit of jumping rope between our houses right near my grandmother’s room. My mom said she had asked her several times to go jump somewhere else but she kept doing it and it irritated my mom tremendously. Ronnie was definitely the type of kid who would have continued doing this because the smooth black top of my mom’s driveway was so much better to jump on than anywhere else around us. She probably thought it was no big deal or that doing it when my mom wasn’t home was courteous. What she couldn’t have known was that my mom’s Aries fire was not to be fucked with…at all.
The disciplinarian in my mother simply could not let this slide. She finally went to the girl’s parents and got it stopped. That situation taught me two important things. Your home deserves respect. And you had better learn to set the boundaries right away. I hope Ronnie learned that from the interactions too. I suppose another important thing I learned was that my mom valued the ability to have this home where my grandmother could address her health in peace. In these simple moves, my mom imparted to me that this was our sanctuary and a place of profound peace.
We stayed in that home another few years after my grandmother’s passing. Ronnie became a teenager who was vibrant and beautiful and full of black girl love for her community. I still think of her and her parents to this day when I think of examples I had in my Newark girlhood of neighbors. The tulips continued to come up every year and I continued to sit on our brick porch taking praise for them as people passed by on their way to the bus stop or the C-Town where my one way street met a major thoroughfare. The 2nd floor sun porch became a sacred space where I would creep out at night and sneak half smoked cigarettes I had pocketed while I cuddled with whatever pet I hadn’t managed to let escape that evening. Sometimes Ronnie would be out on her sun porch as well and we would chat from screened windows about what was going on with the other kids in the neighborhood. From there, I could tell her about the dobermans behind Mr. Sal’s gates and she could tell me what Ms. Jackson was making for dinner.
Of course, I also told her more. Likes and loves, plans to be free when I grew up, new records i had gotten at the mall. She was always quick with solutions to any problems and truths about whether what i was saying was dumb. LOL. Maybe she was an Aries, too.
I would close the porch doors and head back to my room at the other end of the long shotgun of a home. Look at the posters I cut from Jet and Word Up! and read late into the night. The next morning, oatmeal or Wheatena would be on the kitchen table ready for me to get the day going. My mom would check my homework if she hadn’t done it the night before, check my hair to make sure it was oiled well enough, check my prayer life to make sure I had gotten a morning one in and check my pockets for my keys and monthly bus pass. Years later I would (gratefully) quit smoking cigarettes and remember only the good habits I picked up there. That Newark house was not home because of the music from the glass enclosed stereo system, the tulips, the comfy couches and sun porch I loved so much. It was home because my mom made all of those things possible. It was home because my mom dreamt, planned and worked for it. And then when she got it, she did everything in her power to protect its peace for me, for us.
There are many additional layers to this story and things I have not yet unpacked in therapy so I don’t write them out here. As with anything, no one experiences a person or place exactly the same way as another. I know people who were around during that time could throw a million “whatabouts” my way. Further consideration is always something I welcome. But as I consider in this season what home means to me, that house and Ronnie and knowing what it means to have a place where you put joy in glass cases and preserve it with prayers, fills me with blessing and wonder about a next chapter of home for me.