My closest friend, Mary English, is a resident of Georgia's Place, a home for formerly homeless people with mental disabilities. She's from Virginia, but has lived in Crown Heights since her teenage years. She served in the US army, and has three children with the man she still loves. Two of her children died by gunshot before the age of 25, the third lives not far in a different part of Brooklyn. James is from South Carolina, and he has eyeglasses that have little black writing in the middle of the lenses. He and his wife live about four blocks from me, and he has one daughter. He's lived in Crown Heights since he was a teenager as well and is now retired. When he found out I had an interest in making clothes, he immediately called his wife and told her I was going to call and come by for some sewing lessons.
Jerry is from Southern Georgia, but raised her 45-year-old son in Crown Heights. She is always kind and lives across the street from me. Mrs. Edna lives next door to me and brings a lawn chair on the stoop when she sits out. Jerome and Donna live in a homeless shelter about two miles away. They take a bus to my stoop everyday to spend time with their friends, from early in the morning until late at night. Yuna is originally from Guyana, and she moved to Brooklyn with her twin sister at age 18. Her twin has since died from cancer, and she and her boyfriend live in a building across the street from me. I have never seen her once without hearing the words I'm too blessed to be stressed come out of her mouth.
But the member of the stoop welcome committee most influential for me is a man from Tallahassee, Florida. He is the oldest of the group--he marched from Selma to Montgomery in the sixties, where he met his wife whom he had eleven children with. He has been homeless for about ten years. He often sleeps in the sheltered space beneath the stairs of Mrs. Edna's building. He works for the supers and landlords in the area, organizing their recycling and garbage, and repairing buildings as they need it. Most afternoons leave him covered in paint or black ash from welding and walking back towards the corner I live near to buy food from the deli on the corner or sit with the rest of the group.
He often calls out to passersby--"Hey, you dropped something!" only to laugh at his own old joke as they either fall for it or ignore him.
When he moved to Brooklyn from Florida, he was given the name Country. I met him through a series of you-dropped-something-esque jokes, after seeing him nearly everyday during my first month on the block. He never once asked me for money before I got to know him, and even then, he only asked that I pick up the makings for ham-and-cheese sandwiches when I went to the grocery store. Our friendship went like that for a long time--every two or three weeks, he pulled me aside and softly asked that I help him get something to eat, normally on a Tuesday before his payday on Thursday.
But one day I mentioned a news headline I had just seen--a woman had been mugged and robbed on Franklin Avenue. Franklin Avenue, the most gentrified strait of the whole area, is the last place I would have expected something like this to happen. The girl's face was badly bruised, and the entire incident was caught on a storefront's surveillance camera.
From the night I mentioned the mugging to him--something statistically common in Crown Heights, though never acceptable--Country began to meet me blocks away from my apartment when I came home from school or work. He began to walk me to my door, and watch me until I made it all the way inside. At first, I was annoyed--afraid he might have thought my kindness meant something that it didn't. But about a week after he started, he explained himself--After that girl on Franklin Avenue you told me about, I'm just trying to make sure you get in the door okay.
I will say, when I read the headline myself, my old boss's question echoed in the back of my mind, the question she asked me when I told her I was moving to Brooklyn--Are you sure you want to do that? Living in my neighborhood suddenly seemed like a physical risk. But the detail that statistics and caution leave out of the picture is that of the cohesive community that comes together to support each member in whatever way they can.
This is a photo of Country and his fiancee, Jerry. Country was telling me that he was going to run me down if I took his picture, and Jerry was saying, Oh, no you're not, turn around for her and help her with her school project.
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