Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
CHAPTER 13
WHENIwasachild,PhiladelphiawasthethirdbiggestcityinAmerica.WhatIremembered
of it was driving through endless miles of ghettos, one battered block after an other, on a
hot July Sunday, with black children playing in the spray of fire hydrants and older people
lounging around on the street corners or sitting on the front stoops. It was the poorest place
I had ever seen. Trash lay in the gutters and doorways, and whole buildings were derelict.
It was like a foreign country, like Haiti or Panama. My dad whistled tunelessly through his
teeth the whole time, as he always did when he was scared, and told us to keep the windows
rolled up even though it was boiling in the car. At stoplights people would stare stonily at
us and Dad would whistle in double time and drum the steering wheel with his fingers and
smile apologetically at anyone who looked at him, as if to say, “Sorry, we're from out of
state.”
Thingshavechangednow,naturally.PhiladelphiaisnolongerthethirdbiggestcityinAmer-
ica. Los Angeles pushed it into fourth place in the 1960s, and now there are freeways to
whiskyouintotheheartoftownwithoutsoilingyourtiresintheghettos.Evenso,Imanaged
a brief, inadvertent visit to one of the poorer neighborhoods when I wandered off the free-
way in search Of a gas station. Before I could do anything about it, I found myself sucked
intoavortexofone-waystreetsthatcarriedmeintothemostsqualidanddangerous-looking
neighborhood I had ever seen. It may have been, for all I know, the very ghetto we passed
through all those years before-the brownstone buildings looked much the same-but it was
many times worse than the one I remembered. The ghetto of my childhood, for all its poor-
ness, had the air of a street carnival. People wore colorful clothes and seemed to be having
a good time. This place was just bleak and dangerous, like a war zone. Abandoned cars,
old refrigerators, burned-out sofas littered every vacant lot. Garbage cans looked as if they
had been thrown to the street from the rooftops. There were no gas stations-I wouldn't have
stopped anyway, not in a place like this, not for a million dollars-and most of the storefronts
were boarded with plywood. Every standing object had been spray-painted with graffiti.
There were still a few young people on the stoops and corners, but they looked listless and
cold-itwasachillyday-andtheyseemednottonoticeme.ThankGod.Thiswasaneighbor-
hoodwhereclearlyyoucouldbemurderedforapackofcigarettes-afactthatwasnotloston
me as I searched nervously for a way back onto the freeway. By the time I found it, I wasn't
whistling through my teeth so much as singing through my sphincter.
It really was the most uncomfortable experience I had had in many years. God, what it must
be like to live there and to walk those streets daily. Do you know that if you are a black man
inurbanAmericayounowstandaone-in-nineteenchanceofbeingmurdered?InWorldWar
