The Old West End

With a vein of Lucille Clifton’s “In the Inner City” Our mothers left for work before we woke for school in Toledo in 1975 and our fathers left us latchkeys on the windowsill or under the mat in the inner part of the screen door. Our city was marked by demarcation zones of avenues. We were the kids of Collingwood Ave. Your block was your judge. We weren’t like hard city kids scared of the real ghetto kids past Delaware Ave. We were mostly Black, some white like me with a Black stepdad—call it survival how we made our tribe. So many fathers had it brutal, burned hands and mandatory overtime shifts at the glass factories, barely home to scold their children. Mothers were teachers and nurses, students, or teachers’ aids. Some worked at the factories too. We weren’t poor. None of us said the word poor. But think free lunch. Think government cheese, think a few white kids in class like “salt sprinkled in a lot of pepper,” Ms. Robinson joked. Ms. Robinson, who taught second grade at Fulton school and lived on the corner of Melrose. Hand-me-downs. We were hand-me-down kids, passed from uncles, aunts, and neighbors as […]