With a vein of Lucille Clifton’s “In the Inner City”

Our mothers left for work before we woke for school in Toledo in 1975 and our fathers left us latchkeys on the windowsill or under the mat in the inner part of the screen door. Our city was marked by demarcation zones of avenues. We were the kids of Collingwood Ave. Your block was your judge. We weren’t like hard city kids scared of the real ghetto kids past Delaware Ave. We were mostly Black, some white like me with a Black stepdad—call it survival how we made our tribe. So many fathers had it brutal, burned hands and mandatory overtime shifts at the glass factories, barely home to scold their children. Mothers were teachers and nurses, students, or teachers’ aids. Some worked at the factories too. We weren’t poor. None of us said the word poor. But think free lunch. Think government cheese, think a few white kids in class like “salt sprinkled in a lot of pepper,” Ms. Robinson joked. Ms. Robinson, who taught second grade at Fulton school and lived on the corner of Melrose. Hand-me-downs. We were hand-me-down kids, passed from uncles, aunts, and neighbors as our parents worked. Think about a Christmas present was Easter Clothes. Think uptown didn’t apply to our city as much as suburbs and the all-white schools we crushed in sports. And always the asphalt we scrawled our names in chalk, silent in church when told, and the long firefly nights of summer when firecrackers punctuated the dusk and dark was curfew. There was my homeboy Tony the Baloney, my best friend. He lived a few houses down. Tony who lit my first joint. We talked bad but were straight mama’s boys, even the girls were mama’s girls as we sat on that old couch on Marilyn’s porch doing nothing. The dead were years away—OD’s, gunshots, abortions. Men with bottles on the boulevard danced and we ran or fought when the boys of Detroit Ave, the ones who thought they were tough but were more pastel than punks, tried to beat down Kevie under the lights of  Scott High football stadium bleachers. We stood and threw fists, sent them back bloody across the boulevard. We left skin scrapes sliding into first in sand lots. Hang formal meant bell bottoms ironed and ugly striped sweaters. On the bus seats we boys wrote our bravado with markers to leave notes for girls we puppy loved—for our Veronicas and Latashas, our church going Agathas —no one got pregnant—no one was shot, no place lacked joy. Franny and Jaqueline at thirteen were still happy jumping double Dutch and giving chase to the sound of sprinklers on lawns. Be Somebody our teachers told us, alive with the jive of the seventies—Curtis Mayfield sang and talked to us about People Get Ready for that train. In the Pantheon theater matinee we threw Jujus and M&Ms at the screen as Bruce Lee told us to look for the inner Chi and we spilled out into the afternoon sunlight practicing fake Kung Fu. We were the city and the city was us or the city was a secret code or we were the inner heart of the city like our flag was worn jeans stained with the rust from the cars in Midwest winter, or the food stamps we traded for smokes for our grandmas. And if it was true that we were born on stars, that we were stardust and the aliens came back to pick us up, if the call beamed down from the Great Mothership, it would be us raggamuffins who would answer: Sorry we’re already home.

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Sean Thomas Dougherty’s most recent book is Death Prefers the Minor Keys from BOA Editions.

Artwork by Michael Todd Cohen