‘Home is the place where, when you have to go there,
They have to take you in.’

Robert Frost. “The death of the hired man.” Poetry Foundation. Accessed August 13, 2019

This region… is not like it was when I lived here, but in a way it doesn’t matter because home is shared memory and companions and/or friends who share the memory.

Toni Morrison. “Home.” The Source of Self-Regard. New York: Penguin-Random House publishing . Feb. 12, 2019 p. 17

About ten years ago, I took a sabbatical from work, gave up a four-bedroom suburban house, and moved back to my father’s row home in the city where I’d spent my school-aged years. I was there to undertake a writing project and to help him take care of my ailing stepmom. It had been 30 years since I’d lived there.

In my mind, I had never gone very far away – you could get from dad’s house to the house I’d just left in under an hour, depending on traffic. My parents’ house and block held memories that were still vivid, such as the day I left for my first year at Princeton, back when coeducation was new there. Our Chevy Malibu rolled down the back driveway on that sunny late summer afternoon with my parents up front and me and my brother in the back. I looked out the back window and saw my friends running behind the car, laughing, grinning, cheering. Their encouragement buoyed me, goaded me, and gave shape and purpose to my life.

When I set off for college, I thought I was going away to gain knowledge and acquire tools that make my community better. Decades later, I came back to a place where shared memory was fast fading. Mr. E, who used to bring us squash, cucumbers and tomatoes from his garden was long dead. Mrs. M. was still at home but her memory wasn’t, so she couldn’t tell me what had become of her children. Her daughter gave me the bob I wore in my high school graduation picture. One of the few elders still living on the block chuckled when I told her I was back: “You’re a teenager again!” She, too, has since died.

Fortunately, the block association still exists. It’s run by some of my peers who decided to stay in the homes they inherited from their parents, a few relative newcomers, and the remaining stalwarts from my youth. The neighbors who once banded together to organize block parties, skating and movie outings are besieged by fliers, texts and postcards trying to get us to sell. Some cash-poor homeowners sell out for pennies on the dollar because they can’t keep up with maintenance and taxes.

These houses don’t just hold our memories. They are hard-won symbols of hope. To get a mortgage, aspiring black homeowners of my parents’ generation battled racist lending practices that persisted even after the passage of the Fair Housing Act of 1968 that made redlining illegal. They persisted in the face of urban disivestment, and ensuing gentrification. The National Community Reinvestment Coalition ranked Philadelphia 18 on its top 20 list of cities with the highest rate of gentrification and cultural displacement between 2013 and 2017. As Princeton professor and historian Keeanga-Yahmahta Taylor demonstrates in the 2019 book Race For Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership in America,

Toni Morrison wrote, “[T]he destiny of the twenty-first century will be shaped by the possibility or collapse of a shareable world.” As centers of civil society, neighborhoods like mine in cities like Philadelphia are places where that community building can happen, if we have the will.

Our story of home by Kim Pearson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.