I never witnessed him with his gun, but I remember when he told me how he was “dealing with busing.” He was so gleeful that the kids looked scared. I left his house that day feeling sick. I don’t think I really believed that racism was “that big of a deal” before that day. It had seemed abstract, harmless, and deep in the past.
Not everyone had a good experience, even the other kids in our class. In fact, seventeen of the twenty white kids held their own after-prom over on the West Side. The rest of us danced at Vel’s to “Atomic Dog.”
Many people still blame busing for “ruining” the Cleveland schools, but for me the experience of getting out of my neighborhood was life-altering and incredibly positive. I consider myself lucky. Being bused is the reason I live in a racially and socioeconomically diverse neighborhood and send my child to public school. It’s why I attempt to strive for equity and racial and social justice in any work I do. I am grateful, not to be white in America, but to know that I am.
JEFF Z. KLEIN
North Park, With and Without Hate
WALK DOWN HERTEL AVENUE AND see the mix of cultures: hipster cafés and old Italian red-sauce restaurants and halal butchers and louche interior design stores and pubs where young Americans have decided they’re huge Barça fans. Maybe even a rainbow flag here and there. Walk down the side streets. The houses are filled with young families, different cultures—middle class, not rich, not poor—fresh ground coffee, organic groceries, craft beer.
Funny, though—it still looks exactly the way it did half a century ago. All the two-story houses. The attics topped by the same triangular or square roofs. The little backyards. The narrow driveways just wide enough to accommodate a Model T (from another fifty years before, when the houses were built). The five- or six-stair stoops. The trees shading the street, almost as tall and domelike as the elms whose arching boughs formed vast, block-long ceilings, like a great green cathedral. Late at night, the train horns, blaring distant and lonely from the raised embankments on either margin of the neighborhood.
The winter. Walking to school on the snowbanks. Bombing cars with snowballs. Grabbing the rear bumper of some unsuspecting Dodge and pogeying down the snow-covered street.
Jew.
Buffalo, the United States, the world, was different. Pinched. Small. Mean. North Park was made up entirely of white people—Catholics, Protestants, and a significant minority of Jews; no one else—and that made it just about the most diverse neighborhood in the city. There were two cuisines: regular food (meat and potatoes) and Italian food (spaghetti and pizza). We had a third, kosher. Separate sets of dishes and silverware, no mixing of milk and meat, no pork, no ham, no bacon.
That was one of the things that set them off.
You’ve never had ham? You think you’re too good for it, don’t you.
I had two best friends when I was a little boy, James M. and Freddie C. They were cool with me, but their brothers called me Hambone, in honor of the dietary habits of the Jews. Freddie was a couple years older than me. He and I would debate who was better, the Beatles or the Dave Clark Five. He loved the Beach Boys, and we both thought “Help Me, Rhonda” might be the best song ever. James was a good football player, touch or tackle. We followed the Bills closely. Jack Kemp or Daryle Lamonica? Against the Boston Patriots, should they give the ball to Cookie Gilchrist on every play?
The other sport that mattered was baseball. James and his family liked the San Francisco Giants. My family and I liked the L.A. Dodgers. My father was from Brooklyn. My sister was born there. And I liked Sandy Koufax because he was the best pitcher in baseball and wouldn’t play that World Series game on Yom Kippur. I had his baseball card. So James’s older brother John is standing next to the stoop and asks if he can see my Sandy Koufax card. I hand it down to him. He takes it and rubs the face of it, hard, on the iron railing, up and down, several times. Here, he says, handing it back to me. Koufax’s picture is still there, but it’s got black streaks all over it.
The food especially seemed to get to them. The older C. and M. brothers simply could not get over their impression that keeping kosher meant Jews thought Catholic meat was inferior and couldn’t be eaten. One day when my mother wasn’t home, the M. brothers asked if they could come inside and get a snack out of the kitchen. I let them in and they descended on the fridge and cabinets like locusts, devouring all the Wise potato chips and Ritz crackers and Hershey bars they could find. But their real motivation was simply to see what the kitchen of Jews looked like.
“Not so different,” one of them said. “Where’s the kosher stuff?”
I don’t want this to sound like a bitter catalog of slights from the musty scrapbook of my childhood. That’s not my point. It’s just that we’ve gotten into the habit of extolling the tight-knit ethnic enclaves of long ago, conveniently omitting one of their distinguishing characteristics—they could be snake pits of hatred. It didn’t matter who the majority was, and it didn’t matter who the Other was. The majority actively hated the Other. That’s the way it was in most neighborhoods, in most cities. Yet, despite that, those neighborhoods could be wonderful. North Park—the old North Park, not
