The Neighborhood Is Bleeding CHARLES B. CAMPBELL
In the buildings to the left of my family’s, lived an elderly German woman named Gerta, my grandmother, a divorced black woman, and a lady from New York who was diagnosed with borderline schizophrenia. My grandmother’s friend Louise, and my aunt and uncle lived in the apartment buildings to the right of ours. Both of my parents had to work full time in order to support my brother and I, so we spent a lot of our time visiting with my grandmother and her friend Louise. On many of these visits, the other women from the neighborhood would hang around Louise’s apartment to drink beer and socialize. For the most part, I just played in the front yard and listened to all of the neighborhood women talk. My grandmother and the other elderly women of the neighborhood were always together telling stories. I remember always being interested in whatever it was that they had to say, especially when they discussed things from before I was born. One day in particular, I recall them talking about the racism and segregation that had occurred in my hometown during the 1950’s and 60’s. When I asked my grandmother what they were talking about, she explained to me that segregation was when black people and white people couldn’t be in the same place or use the same things at the same time. Whenever I asked her why, she replied, “Because people were different in those days. They hated what they were told to hate and were afraid of people who looked or acted differently than they did.” My Uncle and his wife were a young interracial couple—he was white, while she was part black and Native American. My aunt Tonya’s daughter was also mixed as a result of her former husband. When my grandmother told me about segregation, I immediately thought of them, so I asked if people like them would have also been considered “different.” Her friends and her all nodded in agreement, giving me a unanimous “yes.” They also told me, however, that people like Louise and Gerta were also discriminated against when they were younger. I remember being very confused at the time because both miss Louise and Gerta were white. My grandmother was a very intuitive woman, so when I looked at her in confusion she told me that Louise was considered different because of a disease she called polio. “When she and I were kids, people weren’t as understanding about people that look or walk a little but different than they do. Gerta was born in Germany and moved here during the Second World War.” I didn’t know much about Germans or WWII, so I asked Gerta why any of this mattered. She told me that during World War II America and Germany had been enemies, and that she had escaped from Germany during the war because she didn’t share the beliefs of a man called Hitler or his Gestapo army.