“You seem pretty committed to staying here,” I note. “I mean, sitting out here in the snow?”
She shrugs. “They tryin’ to take our home. What else are you gonna do? It’s not like some of us can up and move. Can’t afford that. Especially not this close to the holidays.”
“But my understanding is that this building was purchased legally and –”
“Purchased legally or not, this is our home,” she laughs coarsely. “I didn’t sell it. I don’t recall the Santiagos next door or little old Mrs. Janosek on the third floor selling the building. We didn’t sign any paperwork. How would you feel if somebody came in and said they bought your home and you had to get out? I bet you’d fight like hell to keep it.”
I take a drink of the coffee she gave me, absorbing her words. I’ve never had to think about anything like that before. I grew up wanting for nothing – and I certainly never had to fear losing my home. It’s a concept as foreign to me as quantum physics.
“How long have you lived here?” I ask.
A wan smile touches her lips. “Forty-three years,” she tells me. “Raised my kids here. Truth is, I don’t remember living anywhere but here.”
“Forty-three years,” I murmur. “That’s incredible.”
She nods. “Hardly unique around here though,” she tells me. “We get our fair share of people just passing through, but most of the residents have been here more than twenty years.”
“I didn’t know that.”
She nods. “Gettin’ to the point where we ain’t gonna be able to live here anymore, though,” she laments. “New York’s changed. It ain’t a city for the common folk anymore. I was born and raised here. It’s all I know. I dunno what I’m gonna do if I have to leave.”
“Who’s this?”
I turn at the sound of a new voice to see an older Hispanic man approaching. He’s tall and wiry, with a wool cap on his bald head and a thick, bushy goatee that’s more gray than white. His eyes are dark. He just looks like a man who’s been around and has seen some things.
“I’m sorry hon, I didn’t get your name,” she notes.
“Oh sorry, I’m Sawyer,” I reply quickly.
“It’s nice to meet you, Sawyer, I’m Martha, and this is Julio,” she introduces the newcomer.
I shake his hand firmly and give him a nod. “Nice to meet you,” I tell him. “How long have you been here at the Jackson?”
He whistles low. “Going on thirty-five years now, I suppose,” he says, his voice colored with a light Puerto Rican accent. “Yeah, about that. Damn. Time really does fly.”
“Do you still work?” I wonder.
He nods. “Every day. I own a bodega around the corner,” he responds. “Almost time to turn it over to the kid. If I can ever force myself to give him the keys. I dunno how to do anything else.”
“You need to learn to relax and let those kids of yours take care of you for a change,” Martha scolds him.
He scoffs. “My kids can barely remember to change their underwear – how they gonna take care of me?”
Martha and Julio burst out laughing, holding onto each other as they crack each other up. It’s amazing to me that standing out here in the snow, in bone chilling weather, that these people can still find their sense of humor. That they can still laugh with each other. In their place, I don’t know that I’d find humor in anything.
“What about you, Martha?” I ask.
“Oh me?” she laughs softly. “I was a teacher for thirty years. Finally had to retire.”
“You don’t look like you live around here,” Julio comments as he looks me up and down. “Nobody around here wears designer clothes like that.”
Martha cackles. “Because they’d get rolled for those clothes.”
They laugh together like the old friends they are again. Over the next couple of hours, Martha introduces me to everybody who comes over to get warm by her trashcan. I spend the time talking to these people and getting to know them, hearing their stories, and I find that I’m surprised by them all. And it makes me realize for the first time, just how many deep-seeded prejudices I’ve carried with me for so long and didn’t even realize it.
Growing up in the circles I did, we just took for granted that the people who lived in projects like the Atwell or the Jackson were ‘low class’. We were steeped in a culture that looked down our noses at these people. We just believed they were inferior to us by virtue of economic status – never realizing at the time we were higher on the socioeconomic ladder because of what we were born into. Not because we’d earned it on our own, but something we’d inherited.
Hell, I think that’s one reason I’m so driven to expand Compass Development and make it a bigger financial success. In doing that, I think it will make me feel like I’ve actually earned my way instead of having everything handed to me.
But while we sat in our ivory towers, patting each other on the back for being born into the right families, we let ourselves believe the people who lived in the projects were all lazy, drug users, drunks, and every other form of degenerate there is out there.
It never occurred to me that these people might actually be hard working, decent people. It never occurred to me that these people made homes here – homes they took pride in. Homes they would stand and fight for. In my head, the people who lived in the projects were transients. I believed there was just a constant flow of human detritus flowing in and out of places like the Atwell and the Jackson.
So learning that people lived here for a generation or more has been utterly mind-blowing
