My New Neighborhood

          I’ve been living in my new apartment for about five hours now. This is the first time I’ve even been able to lie down since we moved all of our stuff in. I do have to say, it’s not too shabby. Even though I have already learned a ton about this neighborhood, there’s still one question that has been gnawing at me. Where are all of the white people? I mean I get that we didn’t exactly move to a diverse neighborhood or even a well-lit neighborhood, but I still would like to know where they are. From what I can ascertain, our community is about 95% black, and I would have to go a mile east or south of my apartment to find a neighborhood with a fair amount of white people. I mean I’ve heard of white flight but this is just something else. But I don’t think it’s completely bad. I feel as though I can learn about the fairly poor African American neighborhoods in better depth this way. After all, if this isn’t the so called “ghetto”, where the heck is it?

            As I said before, the neighborhood is predominately African American. Also, there seems to be a lot of garbage spread about the streets. This hints to the theory that many of the people living here don’t really care about the neighborhood and the people who live within the neighborhood. Often I see many young males wandering about on our side of the street and at a house on the other side. If they see a friend down the block, yelling to them loudly seems to be they’re apparent course of action. Either they aren’t thinking about the people living in the nearby houses or they just don’t care. I wonder if the men who wander about the neighborhood just want fresh air and a smoke, or if it’s something more. I think only time will tell.

            From what I’m noticing most residents of the homes on our block are reclusive. This may be due to the fact that our neighborhood isn’t exactly the ‘gold standard’ of low crime rates. However two houses seem to break this pattern. One of them is a house on the opposite side of the street, which frequently has four or five young men and women talking and hanging out in the front yard and on their steps. I wonder what they are doing, what they talk about and what is on the inside of those walls. The second house that seems to be different from all the others is our neighbor to the east. On the front porch there’s an elderly woman that usually sits in her chair and thinks. I’m not sure what she thinks about, but I know if I were her age I would think about my life and what I’ve done during that life. My family and I had a fairly interesting conversation with her, discussing our neighborhood and each other. Apparently she has lived there for a long time and has children and grandchildren living with her. There’s possibly eight people living there, but at this point it’s hard to tell. She is a very peaceful old woman though.

            I’ve been asking myself if this is a good neighborhood to move to. Overall, I think that it is, but good isn’t the right word. I would say that it is more so enlightening than good. Before we moved here, I never really got a good look at poverty. However I don’t think I’ll ever truly understand poverty. It’s just one of those things that you have to experience to understand. Just because I live in a lower class neighborhood, doesn’t mean I am experiencing poverty. I’m simply witnessing it. So I look forward to witnessing a bit more and every day, a bit more.