Читать книгу Root Shock - Mindy Thompson Fullilove - Страница 9

FOREWORD

Opening day for the Freedom Corner Monument, April 22, 2001, was a day of pride and healing celebration for the Hill District community, but it didn’t feel that way to me.

City Councilman Sala Udin thanked everyone. He thanked God “for bringing us thus far along the way.” He thanked the ordinary men and women who had performed extraordinary feats for the cause of freedom against all odds and whose names we may never know or inscribe onto granite. He thanked St. Benedict the Moor Church, whose various pastors acted as custodians of Freedom Corner for more than 40 years when it was just the broken-down sidewalk in front of their church. He thanked contributors, large and small, for their generosity and the members of the Freedom Corner Committee for illuminating the dream of Jake Milliones and countless Freedom Fighters. Finally, he thanked the architect Howard Graves and me, the artist, calling us two gifted men whose collaboration on the design and building of the monument was choreographed like a fine-tuned dance creation.

The community celebrated throughout the commemorative service on that special day, and rightfully so, for the monument does honor great people who marched and sacrificed for civil rights in America. However, within that rousing chorus, many celebrated the event not only as a commemoration but as a kind of resurrection of their beloved community. Many recognized what had truly manifested at Centre Avenue and Crawford Street had been born of emotions that stewed from 40-odd years ago when Pittsburgh Mayor David L. Lawrence and his wealthy renaissance men deemed the Lower Hill to have long outlived its usefulness. This declaration of the Hill to be a slum of no social value to anyone, soon thereafter, unleashed a sweeping urban renewal plan, that by March 1958 demolished every building in the area. Headlines called the mayor’s ruthless plan ‘Slum Clearing’, but the urban renewal project, all for the sake of one civic auditorium, displaced 8,000 mostly black families and demolished the entirety of the Lower Hill District.

By springtime of 1957, we’d grown accustomed to hearing demolition sounding in the distance. Oftentimes, my brothers and I, taking pause from playtime, watched the buildings come down. I was delighted seeing the brick walls taking a hit, the way they’d stagger at first, seemingly poised for another mighty blow, but, when that 2-ton iron wrecking ball smacked again, walls faltered like shameless drunks, collapsing in dazzling clouds of dust. And to be there when they released that wrecking ball from way up sky-high—setting it free—letting it freefall from the tip of the towering jib—oh my!—did the sidewalks let out a bluster of dust and a thundering shuddering right up through our sneakers.

And then, there came the dusty black men from way up on the hill, strutting down our way looking for a day’s work. Carrying tiny hammers for tending the fallen brick, they’d saunter about, some taking giant steps, their clodhoppers stomping, puffing up the dust. Some parked their Rocket 88s right next to a humped pile of brick and claimed it as their own. Others power-steered junkyard Buicks across vacant lots and still others backed their Fairlanes leaving the trunks gaping open wide, hungry to find whatever metals they could salvage from the dust.

Hunched over scattered bricks, they toiled, getting dustier than us, so heavily blessed under crowns of mortar dust, we could hardly tell the young men from the veterans. Most often, the old men sat straddled a crate. Gripping a brick with their calloused black hands, they’d flip the brick in one hand, tapping it with the hammer as if performing a magic trick; having struck off the mortar, they’d heave their bricks atop sorted heaps, each one landing with a clink among the chorus of many. By day’s end, pennies earned accounted for the history that each man sweated to pile so high.

And then there was always that local man, the special man, the old one who’d lay his hammer down. Carefully brushing dust from his dirty overalls, he’d ascend woefully to the top of the highest mound. Gasping as if he’d climbed peaks of Mount Everest, sucking dust from his laden history, he’d scan the aftermath of his labor before looking toward the sky. And we’d be, right there, my brothers and I, stoning windows or playacting as pilfering pirates ransacking houses nearby. Oblivious to our sordid surroundings, we climbed atop those treacherous heaps—claiming ourselves kings of the hill.1

I was six years old then, the youngest in a poverty-stricken family of eight, twice displaced by the civic auditorium project. Nevertheless, my story is but one drawn from such a bad time experienced by many.

In time, the mayor’s 1950’s urban renewal project was proven to be nothing more than a giant steel chastity belt purposed to preserve white virtues, wow the wealthy, and, in the process, castrate the Hill District’s cultural crotch. The brutal renewal plan nearly succeeded in destroying the Hill District in its entirety, but the Hill community, declaring the steps of St. Benedict the Moor Church and the run-down sidewalks at the intersection of Crawford Street and Centre Avenue as their recognizable line in the sand, fought heartily against the mighty political power of city hall.

Arm in arm, the community stood in solidarity, launching protest marches from the renowned intersection against the city’s ongoing aggression. Massive well-organized protest marches from that corner addressed loss of housing, employment, police brutality and social ills that coincided rightly with the nationwide Civil Rights Movement, and thereby thwarted Pittsburgh’s 1950’s renaissance plan and its potential expansion beyond Crawford Street. Understandably, and deservedly so, many people accepted the well-known intersection at Centre Avenue and Crawford Street as Freedom Corner.

In essence opening day for the Freedom Corner Monument was an unstated victory celebration for a community moving forward in its decades-long fight against displacement by the city’s failed 1950’s urban renewal project.

I was almost thirty-years old by the time I suspected any personal emotional damage done. Even as Councilman Udin praised the community and its achievements, I stood silent among them, for, even then, I had yet to recognize my place among the joyous people and truly appreciate my part in the daylong celebration.

Over a span of 16 years, I lived at 15 different addresses throughout the Hill, a love/hate relationship at best, never truly accepting the neighborhood as home. The Lower Hill was both playground and plaything for me, but coming of age there during its downfall made it seem that I was born into a bad time, conditioned by it, raised by it.

The familiar African proverb—It takes a whole village to raise a child—applied to my brothers and me. Although our home was a place of refuge and my mother cared for us, she didn’t nurture by definition of the word, and, in that sense, a lesser-known African proverb—One knee does not bring up a child—extended beyond home and family to the pitiful neighborhood at large. More often than not, anonymous elders scolded, “you kids leave that alone, you kids stay out of there” or “stop throwing those rocks!” to quell our naughty ways. For the most part, time spent on the cobbled streets guided us. The weedy lots, ransacked houses, and stray cats game for chase were our calling. I recall more about the pathways, alleys, and byways I played in than I remember the workings of apartment spaces we lived in. Later, as I worked in white-collar America, I often denied ever having lived there.

Embattled for nearly a century, the district had welcomed generation after generation of immigrants into its swollen belly, and despite its broken condition, it had cradled my family too. Living there, on the brink of its demise, mine was a family without a legacy, so it seemed, for we did not have family traditions or practice ceremonial behavior in accordance with any ancestral wish, nor did we declare love for the decrepit places we lived in. I had not set any roots there, and I carried that shame with me to Freedom Corner’s opening day.

Having designed the monument, I had reached the height of my art career, but, for reasons I had yet to understand, I felt unworthy.

I had left the Hill 1970 and moved to Pittsburgh’s Manchester neighborhood, hoping never to return. But following a near-fatal head injury in a cycling accident, and haunted by my own mortality, I wanted to pursue my beginnings. Returning to the Hill, I wandered through the vacant buildings, just as I had done as a child on the Lower Hill many years before. For nearly a year, the few blocks between Crawford and Roberts Streets, where most all the dilapidated buildings waited for the wrecking ball, served as my place for introspection. Regarding the area as my sanctuary, I braved those unfamiliar places hoping to revive my dampened spirit. Sometimes sadness outweighed any desire to sketch or to make a photograph. I’d set up my tripod and camera, stand in the darkness and look through the viewfinder, hoping to sense that ineffable spirit of being. But no matter how angelic the view, my camera would have never captured what I was seeking, for there was no substitute for what I had been missing for so many years, the Lower Hill—my heritage so to speak.

Every trip to the Hill revealed a changing landscape, particularly between Arthur Street and Crawford Streets. Weeds outlined spaces where junked cars had rusted in place. Sagging telegraph cables no longer laced telegraph poles to the avenues and byways. Like odd-shaped tombstones, crumbled walls and twisted pipes marked block-long burial plots where homes had once stood. In a matter of weeks, dump trucks rumbled where the Hurricane Bar used to be, and bulldozers shadowed the façade of the Palace Hotel Bar. Within months, all of my sanctuaries were gone, every deserted space that had provided stability and a sense of order. Nevertheless, the loss—the demolition there—had somehow unearthed feelings for what I had been missing from so many years before.

Addressing the matter through art and journaling, I never suspected that my reaction to conditions there had resulted from myriad issues stemming from demolition of the Lower Hill years before, nor did I realize how emotional my connection was. I didn’t know whether to address issues from my past or present. Attempting to understand my dilemma more clearly, I created a diptych composed of two photographs, in which one double-exposed image symbolized past and future simultaneously, and a second image represented the present.

Belonging to any single place and time seemed an impossible task. Having one foot buried in the past and the other striving toward an unknown future was a dilemma. While I searched incessantly for my identity in both, I had neither. Nor did I feel a sense of place or belonging to the Hill District.

No one was aware of my hidden, simmering feelings, not even those closest to me. My artwork was the only mirror reflecting how I felt. To the novice my art was “nice work,” and always in demand for Black History Month exhibitions. Oftentimes wondering, who am I to exploit a downtrodden community for the sake of art, seemed a pointed question through welling tears.

“In my Sanctuary” by Carlos F. Peterson, circa 1975

Unbeknownst to me, Dr. Mindy Fullilove had been working with inner-city communities around the country—including Pittsburgh’s Hill District—over many years, guiding them through the aftermath of comparable development projects gone wrong and planting initial seeds toward healing and recovery. But, even if I had known that the gifted professor of clinical psychiatry from Columbia University was holding public workshops nearby, I would have never asked for help. Being the brooding artist, wallowing in misery, seemed to be more a part of my creative process than possible aftereffects of Pittsburgh’s so-called urban redevelopment.

My emotional health wasn’t perceptible to anyone—at least I didn’t think it was. But then, Freedom Corner Committee Chairman Sala Udin introduced me to Dr. Fullilove. Dr. Fullilove sidestepped my artist façade and, getting straight to the point, defined root shock as a traumatic stress reaction to the destruction of all or part of one’s emotional ecosystem. Hearing that, I didn’t need to hear any more. I didn’t need therapy—I didn’t need diagnosis. She had answered provocative questions that the troubled artist within me had been tussling with for so long: what was I missing from my past, and how could a bad time from so long ago continue to touch my everyday life?

Having an advocate with such outstanding credentials addressing my realm of anxiety simply overwhelmed me. I felt validated. It seemed as if Dr. Fullilove had come to my rescue. What pleased me most was that she had given my questions a name. She had clearly articulated something that, up until then, had been a mystery to me. I wondered if she had known the extent of my mental health crisis. But then I thought, perhaps my artwork had reflected more of my state of mind than just the social commentary I had intended. Indeed, some of my artwork, along with anecdotes from my memoir, turned out to be important contributions to Root Shock.

I was especially moved by Dr. Fullilove’s grassroots approach to the matter in Root Shock, particularly the sit-down-across-the-table, heartfelt interviews and workshops that struck at the core of the issue. Reading about others from different parts of the country who were grappling with similar issues to mine—knowing I wasn’t alone—provided kinship and perspective toward healing. And how personable she was, advising us that it’s OK to be sentimental about where we once lived—after all, those places were our homes!

Most of the interviewees, me included, responded to questions with nostalgia-flavored sentiment for neighborhoods that can never be experienced again. We had all been uprooted from close-knit places, thereby separated from enclaves supporting the traditional African-American ways of life. That similarity, at least in my view, revealed how far-flung the upheaval had been that weakened our shared traditions and moral values. In effect, urban renewal projects gone wrong made us party to our own cultural breakdown, resulting in bad times that are happening in black communities all over America today.

We must be free to attach to where we live without fear of being ripped away—sold down the Mississippi, in a manner of speaking. Bearing that in mind, as well as how threatened people of color in America are today, urban renewal projects displacing people of any color should be subject to public scrutiny.

Look in any direction from Freedom Corner today, and it is readily apparent that Dr. Fullilove’s in-depth study and workshops helped galvanize the community. Good things are happening in the Hill. The contentious civic auditorium that spurred the urban redevelopment matter in the first place is gone—this, for some at least, settled the score a bit. In place of the civic auditorium a multi-use development, including affordable housing, is underway. More importantly, the new Crawford Square housing development and similar developments taking place throughout the Hill District attest to the community’s ongoing recovery.

While recognizing that the demolition of the Lower Hill was a sad chapter in the community’s long history, and should never be forgotten, the community works to reseed its roots. Residents have developed a beneficial master plan of their own—spurring revitalization and occupying a place at the table with the city and developers rebuilding the Lower Hill.

Through her book, Root Shock, Dr. Fullilove addresses an important societal problem that might have otherwise gone unnoticed, especially by politicians, developers, architects, and planners, and whoever else is making frontline decisions that affect many. She addresses matters of common civil rights owed to anybody, anywhere. Dr. Fullilove delivers her message to communities, the unknowing sufferers, comprised of individuals like me who dare not call ourselves the victims that we are.

I wanted to walk away from the Freedom Corner Monument on its opening day, but now, thanks to Dr. Fullilove’s informative book, I not only recognize my contribution at Freedom Corner, I understand the traumas my family and many others suffered from the city’s failed urban renewal project, as well as how that outlandish project hastened the civil rights movement in Pittsburgh. Moreover, thanks to Dr. Fulliove’s undertaking, I accept that Freedom Corner stands in spirit of the many unscripted stories like mine . . . and as the place that welcomes me home.

—Carlos F. Peterson

Pittsburgh, July 2016

1 Excerpt from “Once Upon a Hill”, a memoir by Carlos F. Peterson