Country, Part II (and some Turkey Day thoughts)

In thinking about writing about Crown Heights, my mind returns again and again to the people that surround me here. So, I'm dedicating three posts to telling the story of one man named Country who has been hugely influential on my experience here. If you haven't already, it might be helpful to read Part I before you read this one.



Country reminds me of a man I knew growing up. His name was Turkey because he was born on Thanksgiving Day. He lived with his family near the farmland my grandfather owned in Selma, Alabama, and he would help my dad prepare the land for hunting season. Every Thanksgiving, he'd drive up to the house wearing a pastel yellow suit, with a decorative cane and sunglasses, and we'd tell him happy birthday and invite him to stay for lunch. But my dad was the only person capable of understanding his dialect: it was unlike anything I've ever heard anywhere else. He'd come by and ask my dad to lend him money for future work, and they'd stand out with a plate of food talking for hours about the weather and the land and family. They told jokes together and laughed hard.

Country doesn't remind me of Turkey because he's a black man or because he's an old man or because he's a poor man or even because of their names. But because both men repeatedly defied expectations that many people maintain of old, black men that live in poverty in rural Alabama or in Central Brooklyn.  

People warned my dad about trusting Turkey too much--they said he might steal from us if we made it easy for him or if he realized how often no one was at the farm. But our relationship with him proved the exact opposite. He knew the hidden driveway to our farm, the one that didn't have a gate and a locked chain, and he knew that our primary residence was in Birmingham. He knew where we kept our equipment--things that he could have really used for getting more work, like chainsaws and lawnmowers and other tools he couldn't afford. But in the 20+ years we knew him, nothing ever went missing. And even when Turkey had gotten too old to work, my dad maintained their friendship and we saw him every Thanksgiving until he passed away.

People warned me about talking to Country too much--they warned me that he would take advantage of me and my generosity and that people in the neighborhood would think less of me if they saw me interacting with him. Just a month ago, I watched him reach over to a guy in the deli we frequent and tell him to stick his wad of cash back in his pocket. You should know better than that in this neighborhood, he said. The guy should know better, and if he had noticed it for himself, he probably would have looked around and seen Country and felt elated that he had caught his mistake before Country had the chance to seize the day.

And last week, Country asked me if I knew a woman a few doors down from me, a woman about my age with long dark hair. I didn't, but he was asking because the night before he had seen her stumbling home drunk at about 4:30 in the morning. He was out about to start organizing the recycling for the landlords he works for, and he heard two young guys trying to take her to their apartment to "help her out." Country ran up and punched one of the guys in the nose and then walked the girl to her address, the opposite direction from where the two guys had been leading her. Again, if the woman had been more aware and seen Country that night, she might have straightened up her coat and crossed to the other side of the street, thankful that she was almost home.

When I buy him food, he shares with the rest of the people that hang out on our block. He'll call out and invite people to his "picnic." When an apartment in my building was broken into last year, he started sleeping on our stoop for a few days to make sure it didn't happen again.

I am steadily refreshed by his joy and optimism and gratitude and generosity and love. These things don't come out in this photograph--what does our current culture tell us to assume about the man in that chair, if we're really, really honest with ourselves and really, really aware of our subconscious minds?

There's a part of me that wants to end this post with some general statement about how we can't generalize about the homeless people we see begging in the streets of urban places--we can't assume that they're all ungrateful and rude like that one guy in Midtown that we bought a halal kabob for who just barked I'M VEGETARIAN! back at us when we offered it to him on a cold night. I think that's a point that needs to be made, and a point I'll most likely return to in Part III.

But another point is this, and, I'll warn you, it's even more clichéd than the first: there are really surprisingly marvelous people in these little corners of the world. There are people in Selma and Brooklyn and Nigeria and Syria doing really terrible things right now that will be on the news at some point in our near future, and then there are other people in those places that are doing small, good things that will never be in the news in all of their life.

I'm really thankful for these people. I'm really thankful for their ability to surprise the people around them with the things they do and don't do. I'm really thankful to know them and to have the opportunity to tell their stories.