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A Place Not Unlike Your
Own
Brett Busang
Tennessee
Williams once announced that he had lived, for the most part, a
gypsy life, bouncing from place to place, project to project.
In my case, the word bounce might give the wrong impression,
suggesting, as it does, spontaneous eruption. Though I have
lived in lots of places, I settled down pretty deep and, when it
came time to go, I didn’t wanna. That is to say, when I lived in
Brooklyn, it was the world for me. I was perfectly happy to be
there and didn’t desire to be anyplace else. I liked its clash
of ethnicities, its uneasy boundaries, its age-old skeins of
rivalry and ritual. Black people, for example, knew not to come
into my neighborhood. And, for the most part, didn’t. Turf was
respected, by both underdog and “master.”
I was not acknowledged until the year I left. I had been on
probation for some years and had grown to accept my lot as the
guy you didn’t say hello to. One day, after the proprietor of a
coffee-bar opened up to me, I was in. Just like that. When
you’re willing to stick around, things open up.
I should speak only for myself. Black folk were obliged to seek
Opportunity in other places.
Washington, DC, where I live now, is overrun with people whose
critical faculties are underutilized. To wear themselves out,
they do crossword puzzles, see darkly paranoid films, attack
zoning issues with the tireless consideration you hope to see in
a family doctor. They’re a careful lot whose salient virtues are
loyalty and consistency. They cut their yards every other
Saturday, put their kids in schools that are community-oriented,
and are fiercely “pro-active” where property values are
concerned. I plan ahead in the sense that I can’t do it
backwards – am a bit of an outsider. I’m the only shabby-looking
guy who isn’t ranting to an audience that won’t stop to argue.
I’m the guy who wanders around looking up – or sideways. I’m the
guy who can have a conversation with somebody everyone one
avoids.
Washington is as complicated a place as Brooklyn, with its
unequal distribution of wealth and poverty; its occasionally
craggy beauty; its flat-wound streets and squares; its cruelly
oblivious urban culture. Where I live, it’s, by turns, smugly
charming and Doomsday-desolate. As a painter, I’ve stuck to the
more desolate areas because they’re asymmetrical, both in their
human and architectural dimensions. There are no right angles –
or “right” people. If something’s old, you do the best you can
to keep it going. When an argument breaks out, it’s settled
expediently, if not fairly. For spiritual sustenance, people
drink – or go to church. A lot of the people who live here came
from Tennessee and North Carolina; from crossroads villages with
flat-lined economies; from brawling cities where you could get a
job in the big furniture factory. They came here to work in jobs
that paid good money and were steady and stable. They came here
to get away from the racial prejudice whose sickening imagery a
wider public would occasionally see in the newspapers. They came
here not necessarily to right wrongs, but to roost in a place
that was a little better and a little safer than the places they
knew only too well.
Every city has attracted similar populations and expanded to
accommodate them; they put out the lights in one place and
turned them on in another. My city would be familiar to anybody
who lives in America today – though it is possible that, the
more people can drive away from things that aren’t perfect, the
less they’ll see of such places. Escape is very tempting when it
is so “easy” a thing to do.
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