the birds chirp in the bronx, too
I recall my initial perplexion as our car turned onto my new street in University Heights, in the Bronx. "This is the one," conveyed my dad from the wheel, as he pulled up in front of the building I was to call home for the next six months.
An imposing edifice, composed of cream-hued weathered brick, stood before me. Rows of windows dotted its front facade, with worn air conditioning units protruding out of them. Litter marred the streets around me. Yellowed grass inside the courtyard wilted, woefully. Only mismatching blinds and curtains offered a glimmer of color in this largely decrepit scene. I jumped out of the car, uncertain. This was not exactly the polished New York experience I had in mind for my six months in the city.
Loud music floated out of passing cars. A group of men sat on folding chairs by the entrance, smoking stogies as bachata music surged from a portable radio. Children climbed out of ground-level windows onto the sidewalk for play. A cluster of young mothers, covered in toddlers and infants, spoke impossibly fast Spanish by the front gate.
I swiftly realized that every single person surrounding the building was a person of color. Other than my family that would be leaving me here the next day, I was the only white person present at the scene. I felt the double-takes as I walked by, with the insurmountable feeling I didn't belong -something I admit I have never felt before. Very, very rarely in my life have I entered into a space and been forcefully aware of my skin pigmentation. Growing up in the suburbs of Montreal, attending a rather elitist Canadian University and hailing from a largely monoracial family, I have never been the sole white individual in a room. Ever.
I was raised in a church with a large percentage of Haitian and West African immigrants, and was raised by culturally aware parents who ingrained in my sister and me a deep love for diversity and otherness. Never has being in a multicultural or ethnically plural setting been uncomfortable to me -until the day I set foot in my new home in the Bronx and was vigorously humbled when I realized it was I who was the other.
It is one thing to say you are a lover of difference when your ethnic heritage is consistently the dominant group -it is a whole other thing, however, when your ethnic heritage sets you apart.
A rangy iron gate towered over my sister and I as we approached the courtyard, my parents having gone off to find parking before we moved in my belongings. An older man, sporting a do-rag and chains, sat atop a fire hydrant in front of the gate. As I walked by him, he looked up at me and said, "You're new here." (This was an assertion, not a question.)
I nodded, silently answering "I am. Just moving in today, actually."
"Welcome to the hood," he said. "I'm Ansel."
And with that, I'd met my first neighbor.
The amalgam of emotions felt as I made way to the front door was vivid. I was assuredly overwhelmed, holding back tears at the mere thought of my family driving home to Montreal without me soon. The stark contrast of this neighborhood to all that I have ever known seemed staggering, and I doubted my ability to navigate the cultural barriers set before me.
Before entering the building for the very first time, I heard birds chirping, and noticed them perched on the branches of a nearby elm tree in full bloom.
Setting foot into the lobby, I took it all in: the scruffy checkerboard flooring, the tall ceilings and tethered moldings, the soggy smell of the elevator. The place seemed run down, but certainly had the bones of what might once have been a handsome art deco building.
Our apartment, nestled in the corner of the top floor, felt like a different world. Entirely renovated with polished hardwood floors, granite countertops, generous windows and an accentual brick wall, it oozed charm and coziness. Epitomizing the early stages of gentrification, the apartment had recently been fully remodeled and, assumedly, its previous tenants had been bought out by city planners who saw the neighborhood as nothing but a fixer-upper.
My roommates were kind and warm and, curiously, spoke of this neighborhood with such fondness. I was out of sorts: were they not seeing what I was seeing? was I ridiculous to feel such overwhelm and fear?
I couldn't grasp then what I see now, just a few months later. The notion that the Bronx would somehow make its way to a soft place in my heart was, just then, laughable to me. I wanted out.
I watched my parents and sister leave the next day, surely looking woebegone as tears welled up in my eyes. As I placed picture frames and fairy lights atop my bedroom window that afternoon, I heard the birds warbling again. Their song streamed into my space, filling the tangible loneliness within it, as if to mark their presence nearby. Looking back, I see there was a sweet familiarity to the birds. Though I was in a world miles away from my own, this was a music I knew. It brought me back to the back porch of my childhood home in Montreal, where I'd so often read and prayed and written as they chirped from our crabapple tree. It brought me back to my walks to the bus up the road, during which they serenaded me. It brought me back to our kitchen window, where we'd eagerly watch a northern cardinal hop along our backyard fence. It brought me back to a place I've known, though my feet were firmly set in a place I knew so little of -though I intended to learn as much as I could.
Soon, I would learn I am one of four or five white people in an apartment building housing hundreds (two of which are my roommates). I have grown used to being the only white person in my subway car during my commute -I better grasp the isolation that classmates of mine experienced as the sole Latina, black or Asian person in a room. Yet, unlike them, not only was their skin color blatant to them, but they also painfully grappled with the notion that the cloud of whiteness surrounding them was a marker of power struggles and systems of oppression (whether present or historical). This is something I have never known, and never will.
Most nights, youth from the neighborhood spill into our living room for food, music, games, a movie, or some chats. That is to say: they come in hopes of a sense of belonging. My roommate is a youth worker in University Heights- a true testament of what incarnational ministry is. She moved into the area with the hope of building relationships with teenagers here, walking with them through current struggles and aches whilst pointing them toward avenues of hope, and humbly introducing them to the transformational love of Christ, in word and deed.
After work, I hear their robust laughter on the other side of the front door as I fumble for keys in my bag. They greet me with a chorus of hellos - some timidly, others with large beams. They help me unpack groceries or carry heavy bags. With grimaces, they ask me about the vegetables I cook with. One of them beats me at chess. The other tells me the Canadian maple syrup I had him taste was the best thing he's ever had. Yet another tells me not to worry about making dinner- he's making a feast and there is room for me at the table. My questionable dancing and inability to keep up with their local vernacular sparks guffaws around the room -but I increasingly feel they are comfortable with my presence. "Let's invite her to the bowling night," I hear one of them say about me to the group one night, as I walked out of the room. My heart instantly melted.
Many nights, they explain current trends to me, or introduce me to their favorite music. We don't understand each other on multiple levels... and I don't know that they fully trust me yet -a white woman, a stranger- but there is an unspoken recognition and respect between us. They make me think of the youth at my church back home -yet their contexts are so utterly different. Slowly, I become a bystander, a person who somehow comes to see and hear of the marrow of their lives.
And it is agonizing.
They speak of drugs and gangs and dropping out. They have come to know, too soon, such things as anxiety and depression and suicide. They have grown accustomed to the sound of brawls downstairs or gunshots in the distance. I learn of fatherless children and children becoming fathers. I witness their familiarity with such things as social workers and homelessness and visitation hours at prisons. I listen to teenage boys using such vocabulary as "when I get locked up" and "when I get killed." I see them carrying pain so excruciating that smoking and drinking and sex feel like the only tangible way out.
As these conversations unfold from the sacred spaces of our living room and kitchen, I hear the birds. Every day, they continue to remind me of their everpresent proximity. Their hymns are unchanging, steadfast. They sing on the day one of the boys celebrates his birthday over pizza, beaming over ice cream cake and candles alight; they sing on the day we hear of a murder on a nearby block, and a candlelight vigil in the courtyard honors the lost. How strange that a flame both marks a new year of life, and a life that is no more.
Regardless, I hear the birds chirping on both occasions, as candles flickered in joyous celebration and in weighty remembrance.
I am mad, often, by how detached and contradictory my life feels. Every morning, I leave the Bronx and make my way to a tall office building in the heart of Midtown, where I swipe a badge to get into an express elevator, where I sip organic coffee, where I stare at a large computer screen, where my colleagues volley ideas of future vacations and complement each other on their blazers. I spend money on outings around Manhattan and book tickets to London in the Fall without batting an eye. I work for an organization that fights for the end of poverty and that champions equality and justice -yet it is so easy to forget that such challenges are right in our backyard. In fact, the moment I step onto the platform at Fordham Road station on my way back from work, I feel as though I have entered another world. In this world, "marginalized people" are no longer a distant notion or category - they are my actual neighbors. They're the man who asks me how my church service was on Sunday, they're the little girl who smiles at me in the elevator and shows me her new sparkly shoes, they're the lady at the market who points me toward the best deals on produce. They're my friends.
I find myself frustrated when people ask me why on earth I chose to live in this neighborhood (I didn't, it just happened), or when they tell me they've lived in New York for years and have never set foot in the Bronx (they deem it unappealing, or just plain dangerous). It feels as though people are blind to the stark reality here -both the immense challenges but also its immeasurable beauty.
I wish everyone could realize that the birds chirp in the Bronx, too.
And I wish everyone could experience the solidarity I have witnessed in this tangle of streets and blocks and buildings- which takes the form of Dominican meals brought to our apartment from a mama downstairs, laughter heard past midnight during impromptu get-togethers in the courtyard, a family taking in a teen who has nowhere else to go. There is an unshakable sense of community here, and there is little as appealing as just that.
Living here has forced me to confront my privilege, presumptions, and prejudice. It has made me deconstruct my understanding of mental illnesses, addiction and poverty. It has invited me to extend love and acceptance to those with whom I have little in common. It has forced me to accept I have much to learn in the areas of justice and community development.
Sometimes, when local news is grim or garbage is strewn across the lobby, I find myself wishing I lived elsewhere. I do. In such moments, I have to remind myself that living in community- especially when uncomfortable- is the way of Jesus. Knowing and loving the marginalized, too. And when I take a step back to consider such things, I see so forcefully that this has truly has been one of the most sanctifying experiences of my life.
I'd like to think that one day, years from now, I will come back to the Bronx, and I will reckon that I did much of my becoming here.
This wasn't the New York experience I'd had in mind- in fact, it's sweeter. Despite whatever grievances or heartaches it has fostered, I trust it has been an invitation to grow in Christlikeness. And this is a gift, even when the day to day may feel difficult, or like drudgery.
The birds chirp incessantly in the midst of brokenness here- gleaning beauty in the heart of chaos. If the birds sing in the Bronx -so will I.
An imposing edifice, composed of cream-hued weathered brick, stood before me. Rows of windows dotted its front facade, with worn air conditioning units protruding out of them. Litter marred the streets around me. Yellowed grass inside the courtyard wilted, woefully. Only mismatching blinds and curtains offered a glimmer of color in this largely decrepit scene. I jumped out of the car, uncertain. This was not exactly the polished New York experience I had in mind for my six months in the city.
Loud music floated out of passing cars. A group of men sat on folding chairs by the entrance, smoking stogies as bachata music surged from a portable radio. Children climbed out of ground-level windows onto the sidewalk for play. A cluster of young mothers, covered in toddlers and infants, spoke impossibly fast Spanish by the front gate.
I swiftly realized that every single person surrounding the building was a person of color. Other than my family that would be leaving me here the next day, I was the only white person present at the scene. I felt the double-takes as I walked by, with the insurmountable feeling I didn't belong -something I admit I have never felt before. Very, very rarely in my life have I entered into a space and been forcefully aware of my skin pigmentation. Growing up in the suburbs of Montreal, attending a rather elitist Canadian University and hailing from a largely monoracial family, I have never been the sole white individual in a room. Ever.
I was raised in a church with a large percentage of Haitian and West African immigrants, and was raised by culturally aware parents who ingrained in my sister and me a deep love for diversity and otherness. Never has being in a multicultural or ethnically plural setting been uncomfortable to me -until the day I set foot in my new home in the Bronx and was vigorously humbled when I realized it was I who was the other.
It is one thing to say you are a lover of difference when your ethnic heritage is consistently the dominant group -it is a whole other thing, however, when your ethnic heritage sets you apart.
A rangy iron gate towered over my sister and I as we approached the courtyard, my parents having gone off to find parking before we moved in my belongings. An older man, sporting a do-rag and chains, sat atop a fire hydrant in front of the gate. As I walked by him, he looked up at me and said, "You're new here." (This was an assertion, not a question.)
I nodded, silently answering "I am. Just moving in today, actually."
"Welcome to the hood," he said. "I'm Ansel."
And with that, I'd met my first neighbor.
The amalgam of emotions felt as I made way to the front door was vivid. I was assuredly overwhelmed, holding back tears at the mere thought of my family driving home to Montreal without me soon. The stark contrast of this neighborhood to all that I have ever known seemed staggering, and I doubted my ability to navigate the cultural barriers set before me.
Before entering the building for the very first time, I heard birds chirping, and noticed them perched on the branches of a nearby elm tree in full bloom.
Setting foot into the lobby, I took it all in: the scruffy checkerboard flooring, the tall ceilings and tethered moldings, the soggy smell of the elevator. The place seemed run down, but certainly had the bones of what might once have been a handsome art deco building.
Our apartment, nestled in the corner of the top floor, felt like a different world. Entirely renovated with polished hardwood floors, granite countertops, generous windows and an accentual brick wall, it oozed charm and coziness. Epitomizing the early stages of gentrification, the apartment had recently been fully remodeled and, assumedly, its previous tenants had been bought out by city planners who saw the neighborhood as nothing but a fixer-upper.
My roommates were kind and warm and, curiously, spoke of this neighborhood with such fondness. I was out of sorts: were they not seeing what I was seeing? was I ridiculous to feel such overwhelm and fear?
I couldn't grasp then what I see now, just a few months later. The notion that the Bronx would somehow make its way to a soft place in my heart was, just then, laughable to me. I wanted out.
I watched my parents and sister leave the next day, surely looking woebegone as tears welled up in my eyes. As I placed picture frames and fairy lights atop my bedroom window that afternoon, I heard the birds warbling again. Their song streamed into my space, filling the tangible loneliness within it, as if to mark their presence nearby. Looking back, I see there was a sweet familiarity to the birds. Though I was in a world miles away from my own, this was a music I knew. It brought me back to the back porch of my childhood home in Montreal, where I'd so often read and prayed and written as they chirped from our crabapple tree. It brought me back to my walks to the bus up the road, during which they serenaded me. It brought me back to our kitchen window, where we'd eagerly watch a northern cardinal hop along our backyard fence. It brought me back to a place I've known, though my feet were firmly set in a place I knew so little of -though I intended to learn as much as I could.
Soon, I would learn I am one of four or five white people in an apartment building housing hundreds (two of which are my roommates). I have grown used to being the only white person in my subway car during my commute -I better grasp the isolation that classmates of mine experienced as the sole Latina, black or Asian person in a room. Yet, unlike them, not only was their skin color blatant to them, but they also painfully grappled with the notion that the cloud of whiteness surrounding them was a marker of power struggles and systems of oppression (whether present or historical). This is something I have never known, and never will.
Most nights, youth from the neighborhood spill into our living room for food, music, games, a movie, or some chats. That is to say: they come in hopes of a sense of belonging. My roommate is a youth worker in University Heights- a true testament of what incarnational ministry is. She moved into the area with the hope of building relationships with teenagers here, walking with them through current struggles and aches whilst pointing them toward avenues of hope, and humbly introducing them to the transformational love of Christ, in word and deed.
After work, I hear their robust laughter on the other side of the front door as I fumble for keys in my bag. They greet me with a chorus of hellos - some timidly, others with large beams. They help me unpack groceries or carry heavy bags. With grimaces, they ask me about the vegetables I cook with. One of them beats me at chess. The other tells me the Canadian maple syrup I had him taste was the best thing he's ever had. Yet another tells me not to worry about making dinner- he's making a feast and there is room for me at the table. My questionable dancing and inability to keep up with their local vernacular sparks guffaws around the room -but I increasingly feel they are comfortable with my presence. "Let's invite her to the bowling night," I hear one of them say about me to the group one night, as I walked out of the room. My heart instantly melted.
Many nights, they explain current trends to me, or introduce me to their favorite music. We don't understand each other on multiple levels... and I don't know that they fully trust me yet -a white woman, a stranger- but there is an unspoken recognition and respect between us. They make me think of the youth at my church back home -yet their contexts are so utterly different. Slowly, I become a bystander, a person who somehow comes to see and hear of the marrow of their lives.
And it is agonizing.
They speak of drugs and gangs and dropping out. They have come to know, too soon, such things as anxiety and depression and suicide. They have grown accustomed to the sound of brawls downstairs or gunshots in the distance. I learn of fatherless children and children becoming fathers. I witness their familiarity with such things as social workers and homelessness and visitation hours at prisons. I listen to teenage boys using such vocabulary as "when I get locked up" and "when I get killed." I see them carrying pain so excruciating that smoking and drinking and sex feel like the only tangible way out.
As these conversations unfold from the sacred spaces of our living room and kitchen, I hear the birds. Every day, they continue to remind me of their everpresent proximity. Their hymns are unchanging, steadfast. They sing on the day one of the boys celebrates his birthday over pizza, beaming over ice cream cake and candles alight; they sing on the day we hear of a murder on a nearby block, and a candlelight vigil in the courtyard honors the lost. How strange that a flame both marks a new year of life, and a life that is no more.
Regardless, I hear the birds chirping on both occasions, as candles flickered in joyous celebration and in weighty remembrance.
I am mad, often, by how detached and contradictory my life feels. Every morning, I leave the Bronx and make my way to a tall office building in the heart of Midtown, where I swipe a badge to get into an express elevator, where I sip organic coffee, where I stare at a large computer screen, where my colleagues volley ideas of future vacations and complement each other on their blazers. I spend money on outings around Manhattan and book tickets to London in the Fall without batting an eye. I work for an organization that fights for the end of poverty and that champions equality and justice -yet it is so easy to forget that such challenges are right in our backyard. In fact, the moment I step onto the platform at Fordham Road station on my way back from work, I feel as though I have entered another world. In this world, "marginalized people" are no longer a distant notion or category - they are my actual neighbors. They're the man who asks me how my church service was on Sunday, they're the little girl who smiles at me in the elevator and shows me her new sparkly shoes, they're the lady at the market who points me toward the best deals on produce. They're my friends.
I find myself frustrated when people ask me why on earth I chose to live in this neighborhood (I didn't, it just happened), or when they tell me they've lived in New York for years and have never set foot in the Bronx (they deem it unappealing, or just plain dangerous). It feels as though people are blind to the stark reality here -both the immense challenges but also its immeasurable beauty.
I wish everyone could realize that the birds chirp in the Bronx, too.
And I wish everyone could experience the solidarity I have witnessed in this tangle of streets and blocks and buildings- which takes the form of Dominican meals brought to our apartment from a mama downstairs, laughter heard past midnight during impromptu get-togethers in the courtyard, a family taking in a teen who has nowhere else to go. There is an unshakable sense of community here, and there is little as appealing as just that.
Living here has forced me to confront my privilege, presumptions, and prejudice. It has made me deconstruct my understanding of mental illnesses, addiction and poverty. It has invited me to extend love and acceptance to those with whom I have little in common. It has forced me to accept I have much to learn in the areas of justice and community development.
Sometimes, when local news is grim or garbage is strewn across the lobby, I find myself wishing I lived elsewhere. I do. In such moments, I have to remind myself that living in community- especially when uncomfortable- is the way of Jesus. Knowing and loving the marginalized, too. And when I take a step back to consider such things, I see so forcefully that this has truly has been one of the most sanctifying experiences of my life.
I'd like to think that one day, years from now, I will come back to the Bronx, and I will reckon that I did much of my becoming here.
This wasn't the New York experience I'd had in mind- in fact, it's sweeter. Despite whatever grievances or heartaches it has fostered, I trust it has been an invitation to grow in Christlikeness. And this is a gift, even when the day to day may feel difficult, or like drudgery.
The birds chirp incessantly in the midst of brokenness here- gleaning beauty in the heart of chaos. If the birds sing in the Bronx -so will I.
Comments
A touchingly emotional portrayal the Bronx , a neighborhood you reveal to us.