“You know you’re in the hood, right?” the twentysomething lady behind these gentlemen cautioned me, shortly after my pic was snapped here with Jimmie Jam & Hoop.
I acknowledged her with a shoulder shrug and tilt of my head, raising my eyebrows with a “what-other-option-is-there?” look on my face. With many out-of-business retail buildings, convenience stores with armored gates, and a neighborhood whose nicest homes may barely swim near the bottom of middle class rankings, it was obvious that Greensboro’s northeastern corner wasn’t the Beverly Hills of the metropolitan area.
After being cautioned by the well-meaning lady, some butterflies did begin buzzing within my belly, but I didn’t allow that to slow me down. At the same time, I didn’t want to appear to be nervously rushing through the area. A few blocks further, I stopped in front of a roadside church, meditated till I reached a strongly optimistic state of mind, and then returned to the road with a much happier and assured mentality and gait. Within the following five minutes, many curious passersby stopped to kindly inquire about the walk– some even insisting that I accept some cash to help me with food down the road. I was given fresh bottles of water a mile or two later.
Physical scars which I find most scary within any “hood” are: a high amount of empty, decaying homes; residential doors and windows with iron security bars; and a large amount of broken or boarded up windows. Aside from a cluster of vacant shops on my way into the neighborhood, I saw very little of the above.
While it’s true that as I was leaving the neighborhood, I walked a block from many parked police cruisers and TV news trucks covering today’s headline story in the Triad– a home where two dead bodies had been found earlier in the day– ironically, it’s also true that random people within northeast Greensboro were collectively friendlier than in any other Triad neighborhood I’ve walked.
The though belly butterflies may buzz again in a similar scenario, I feel a yearning to spend more time getting to know and appreciate residents of some of America’s “hoods.” The people living within these impoverished areas are no less human than the rest of us– yet sadly, they’re all too often despised, ignored and forgotten.
Hmmm…