Soooooo, I’ll Move On

1.15.07, North Hollywood, CA

Eh, Soo, the Williamsburg real estate agent, never called back. Perhaps she smelled the i-don’t-know-when-my-moving-date-is-ness in my voicemails.

Eh, not to worry. There will be other Soo’s.

Recently, I was plopped on my couch in front of a documentary on the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. Seems that Al Capone was born and raised in Brooklyn and then settled in Chicago to run a gang.

I like knowing this. I like knowing things about Italians criminals. It makes me giggle for some reason and smile with a sort of knowing pride ... Although I know no mobsters and as far as I know, I am related to no mobsters. This, however, makes me sad. No mob bloodline. A mobster might have been influential in making the fallout relations between my father and me a little easier, if you get my meaning….

Again with the blogging tangent …

Anyway, …

Earlier that morning, I read in the Los Angeles Times CURRENT section a bit about how Whiteness defined itself in pre- and post-Civil War/Civil Rights days. There was some rhetoric about the ethnicities that rooted themselves in the South in the earlier part of the 20th century were skilled at Americanizing themselves and losing their whiteness. What was at once Italian or Lebanese or Polish, quickly became Not Black. The accents faded, the spices in the fried chicken softened, and everyone lived peacefully behind closed doors in wonder of the Other.

My own family: Interracial. It took me years to figure it out. My mother was first generation Italian. My father was run-of-the-mill white with pickin’-cotton parents finding respect and a pension in the Industrial Revolution working for the Light, Gas and Water Company. My father’s mother always seemed relieved that my mom was finally out of the picture, never quite sure how to deal with the remaining hysteria and passion from her half-Italian granddaughters. It’s not unusual (anymore) to me that my Granny would hurl insults at me in a fit, saying I was just like my mother. She obviously thought it would hurt me. I always took strength from those fights.

Thankfully, over a number of years, I’ve realized that my psychological struggles, my emotional demons, my incessant nightmares are not all caused by Memphis, TN. There’s something deeper, genetic - not just geographic, not just socio-economic - that has me replete with the wanderlust to Brooklyn, further exiled from my birthright.

It’s something in the history of Brooklyn, the birth of writers and criminals from Neil Simon to Al Capone to the current writers and filmmakers living there now. It’s something in the pavement, I’m guessing – some East Coast Loch Ness buried in the Naval Yard.

That undefinable something. Maybe it’s a color that I can live with and a sound that relaxes me. Maybe it’s the mom and pop stores that provide a certain economic transparency that was clouded by my subdivision childhood and privately funded education away from the real minority majority population of Memphis.

Soo, why was I depending on Soo’s helping me to define home/family/soul in some developer’s overpriced, fake marble bathroom condo?

This is probably the spin that was put on my own family when we moved into a house with no history out in a subdivision of Memphis.

Subdiving in a cell-splitting time in US history – post-Civil Rights.

No wonder people live such fractured family lives. They’ve been sold a sub-divided bill of goods.