For many years I blamed myself for not saying anything at that moment, but now I understand that I responded within the boundaries of the behavior that had always worked for me: I simply left the porch and walked away. They kept screaming at the Hasids, who kept moving their furniture in without responding to the taunts or the stones, and they were still screaming as I stepped through my front door. But something in me had changed. I never talked to the C.’s or the M.’s again. Not even James or Freddie, even though I thought then, and still think now, that they never shared the hatred that their older brothers spewed.
The Hasidic family moved away just a month or two later, and after another year, so did we, to Eggertsville. Officially we could be counted as part of the white flight fleeing Buffalo, like all the whites leaving cities for the suburbs across late-sixties America. But in our case, that’d be misleading. We weren’t fleeing black people, or poverty, or crime, or declining city services. We were fleeing the M.’s and the C.’s, to the northern suburbs, where the other Jews lived.
So the first week I’m at my new suburban junior high school, and a kid comes up to me and asks, “Are you Jewish?” Uh-oh, here we go, I think to myself.
“I am—does that affect anything?” I answer, challengingly. I think at this point I’m finally ready to fight.
But the kid is totally normal. “Oh no,” he says. “I was just curious.”
And that was it. From the moment we moved to Eggertsville, I never heard an anti-Jewish slur again. And in the five decades since, living in Manhattan and L.A., and now, just off Allen Street in Buffalo, nothing. I’ve heard Jews say bad things about other people, but never the other way around.
It seems like everything turned way back there, in the 1960s, thanks to Vatican II, which changed church theology to stop blaming the Jews for the crucifixion of Christ; and thanks, too, to the civil rights movement, the feminists, new immigration laws that permitted Asians and Africans to come to the United States, Stonewall and the gay rights movement, and, all in all, to the very slowly dawning recognition that everyone deserves dignity and respect.
I recognize that what I experienced in my childhood was not all that difficult, and certainly nothing compared to what most black people can tell you about their experiences—or First Nations people, or Latinos, or Asians, or those in the LGBTQ community. And as I write this, a guy running for president wants to ban Muslims from entering the country. I recognize that we’re definitely a long way from utopia.
But now, when I walk down Hertel Avenue, I feel all right. My old neighborhood may look the same, but it has definitely changed. No slurs, no hate, no threats. The only sounds are the music streaming from the bars, the happy shouts of the soccer fans, and the rustling leaves in the boughs arched high overhead, the great green cathedral that shelters everyone.
DAVID FAULK
Moundsville
THERE IS A STORY THAT has circulated my hometown like an intractable conspiracy theory for as long as I can remember. In the nineteenth century, so the story goes, the town elders were given a choice between hosting West Virginia’s state penitentiary or a soon-to-be-announced land grant university. These practical men, given the choice between free prison labor and a standing army of fuzzy-minded professors, leapt at the former. One is tempted to throw in “and the rest is history” here, but such historical determinism has its faults. There have since been too many possibilities at redemption for that choice to have dictated a destiny. And besides, the narrative is awfully clean cut, suspiciously so, even for that historical cliché. No, what makes the story so compelling is not its explanatory simplicity, or even whether it passes the smell test of truth, but rather that choosing a prison over a university is just the sort of thing that people where I come from would do.
Moundsville, West Virginia, lies on the east bank of the Ohio River, just a short barge and tugboat ride downstream from Pittsburgh. We drink the Steel City’s wastewater and brownfield runoff, in fact. This forgotten outpost of boarded-up smelters and steel mills lies just beyond the Pittsburgh Metropolitan Statistical Area per “the Feds,” as we liked to call them while playing Cowboys and Indians. (Even at a tender age, we usually identified with the Indians.) It does not matter much to us where we technically belong. Reality prevails here. Of the variety of industrial manufacturers that once lined the river before the economic apocalypse of the early 1980s, all that remain are the anus end of some coal mines, paint plants, and a few chemical manufacturers, which yield products similar to those which caused a disaster in Bhopal, India.
To be working-class in Moundsville was to be truly on the bottom of the slag heap of society. Shunned by Pittsburghers and Clevelanders for its southerness, and by the rest of West Virginia for its sundry north-of-the-Mason-Dixon Catholicisms (mostly Italians and Eastern Europeans, with an occasional Greek thrown in), the northern panhandle of West Virginia can even shun itself. This was most recently witnessed when country music star and favorite son of Glen Dale (just north of Moundsville) Brad Paisley went on Jay Leno to defend his song “Accidental Racist,” which is about how it has become unacceptable to wear a Confederate flag T-shirt. For the record, West Virginia entered the Union as a free state in 1863 and fought on the blue side. But most locals don’t know that. Whenever this neurotic northern sliver of West Virginia is missing from CNN’s crude election-night maps, moral outrage follows. Residents are flummoxed by assertions that this place does not in fact exist.
My ancestors were
