It’s summertime in the inner city. High season on the potholed theatrical stage of our asphalt streets. When I first moved to my neighborhood over a decade ago, I didn’t understand street dynamics. Why people would walk down the middle of the street, leaning into cars and slowing down traffic when there were two perfectly good sidewalks on either side of the road. Where I grew up, a tidy, well-insured, all-white neighborhood in Minnesota, it was considered law-abiding good citizenry to walk on the sidewalk. Back there, one person of color walking in the street was considered suspicious; two persons a conspiracy; three surely a gang up to no good. I’m embarrassed by all that now. Now that I live in the inner city and experience the forces that lead you off the sidewalk, into the street.
The first thing that forces you off the sidewalk in the inner city is the sidewalk. A lot of these sidewalks are impassable, fractured, heaved-up concrete slabs covered with everything from broken glass to matted hair inserts to fallen tree limbs. The second thing is the dogs. Not the cute, family pet breeds but the muscular, fur-covered terminators that can explode off a porch uninterested in your education, your community service, or pacifist temperament. Third, sidewalks guide you close to neighbors’ front porches: a fine thing unless it belongs to that one guy who’s always screaming at his girlfriend, attracting police cars and exercising his god-given right to celebrate national holidays with semiautomatic handgun fire. Finally, there’s the libertarian argument. Who says we have to walk on sidewalks? What’s that all about? Particularly here, where the people are not all that convinced they enjoy the equal protection of the non-criminal laws.
But the street, now that’s the place to walk. The street is the social forum. In the inner city, people are highly aware of who’s in the street, revealed by the nonchalant backwards glance as you drive up from behind. People will move, or not move, out of your way based on a sophisticated equation of recognition and respect, controlling vehicle access as effectively as a security checkpoint in Bagdhad. This is not hubris, it’s politics. Real power based not on social or financial status but on the other thing: knowing the cultural odds and the racial angles. Street walking is performance art: self-created characters laughing and cursing on asphalt Shakespearean stages with free admission and stage lights high on street poles. All life’s narratives right there in full R-rated candor without the self-conscious editing of my own tribe. Teenage courtship rituals, social clans, team sports, new clothes, old addictions, marital strife, booming rides, and wailing police cars. It’s damn good entertainment, a now-time drama of energy and people.
I drive up our street the other day and see my daughter’s friend Nikki, walking aimless in the road. I hang my elbow out my car window, stop in the middle of the street, give her a fist bump. “What’s up?” I ask. She leans on my door, looking inside. “Not much. Where you going?” We talk a while, then I pull away.
Driving east across Portage and up toward the big university, I notice things you don’t see much of in my neighborhood: white folks on ladders scraping furiously at peeling paint, a woman with hands on her hips glaring down at a piece of litter, a man armed with a spade, bent over a gang of 3 dandelions. All doing their best to hold off the uncertainty and the wildness that leaps and dances just beyond the perimeter the known world. Out there, where people walk in the middle of the street.