Reflective Essay on "Altars in the Street"

Here is my first finished turn-in ready part of my Winter Term project:

I was born and raised in a quiet, safe neighborhood with no crime, with a mother and father who have been married for over twenty years and a brother who suffers from Muscular Dystrophy, a degenerative muscle weakness so severe he requires assistance to eat and even go to the bathroom. On Sunday mornings my dad and I sit outside, and he admires the yard, and our two gorgeous golden retrievers who play in it – “Laura,” he says often. “We are so lucky to live in such a beautiful place.” And he’s right.
However, my neighborhood is completely homogenous, a place where neighbors don’t know each other’s names, and where, thanks to a stringent community association’s ruling, we are only allowed to have white doors. This compared to the subject matter of Melody Ermachild Chavis’ memoir Altars in the Street: A Neighborhood Fights to Survive, which chronicles her struggles to get crack cocaine off her block on Alma Street, located in South Berkeley’s Lorin district, not even thirty minutes from my idyllic home in Kentfield.

I admit that I am naïve when it comes to street smarts, and that only in the past two weeks living in my brother’s apartment half a block from Telegraph Avenue have I gained any kind of handle on the Bay Area’s underground transit system, the BART. To get to San Francisco from Berkeley, something only possible by private car from my hometown Marin, you take the Fremont-Richmond line to MacArthur Station in Oakland, where you transfer to the SFO-Millbrae line. This trip includes stops in Oakland City Center, West Oakland, and San Francisco’s Civic Center, in the heart of the Tenderloin, an area riddled with homelessness, drugs, and prostitution. Yet it also takes me to Union Square, where Tiffany’s boasts a five-story mega-store and lies caddy-corner to a high-rise Saks Fifth Avenue. This juxtaposition exists in cities worldwide, but perhaps the Bay Area serves as a representative example. Marin County, north of San Francisco, is the eleventh highest-income county in the United States, (Forbes) but its residents exist within twenty miles of two of the country’s most dangerous cities – Richmond and Oakland (CQ Press). Despite this proximity, I have never been to either Richmond or Oakland, though I like to think that my family is somewhat less squeaky-clean than some – my Dad grew up on tough Prospect Avenue in the Bronx, and I was born in Berkeley, where my parents resided for over twenty years. But in reality, my Good Samaritan efforts, such as volunteering at Glide Memorial Church making sandwiches for the homeless have been short-lived. Half a block on O’Farrell Avenue, even at ten in the morning with my dad was enough for me. I feel cowardly admitting this, and thinking about how I’ve been carrying granola bars in my car to give to homeless people who hold signs at busy intersections for years, but I’ve never actually opened my window. I still remember seeing Fiddler on the Roof at the Orpheum theater near the Tenderloin when I was nine, when I spotted an old woman on the corner who I thought was actually already dead, and a bearded black man peered at my friend’s face and said, “Well aren’t you pretty?” I remember later finding a fishing hook stuck to the bottom of my Mary-Janes. I want to help people in need, and I donate to the National Alliance to End Homelessness and Save the Children annually, but there is only so much I can do without getting truly involved – and that probably includes volunteering in bad neighborhoods.

The constant dilemma for me, and for my mother I’m sure, is safety versus open-mindedness. Sure, it’s likely that 99% the homeless people on Telegraph Avenue are harmless, but what about that other 1%? Still I feel pangs of guilt for days after seeing one homeless man in a sleeping bag outside of the San Francisco Public Library. This dilemma is one that pierced every day of Melody Chavis’ life on Alma Street. Most of her neighbors were kind, giving people, and when she moved in, it was a quiet interracial neighborhood. But in the late 80s, crack became America’s newest drug of choice, sweeping the waves of addiction in its users to alarming new levels. Crack brought to Alma Street not only addiction, but violence – on the streets and in households alike. Melody’s sympathies went out especially to the children of crack addicts, such as eight-year old Gideon, who she and her daughter tutored. Gideon wanted to do well, but his mother Angela was an addict, and her boyfriend, Askari violent and daunting. Gideon went days without being fed, and when he collected $50 for a school field trip, it was stolen from underneath his head as he slept. Chavis, an advocate for social justice, took part in many committees seeking treatment for the parents, and activities to keep the kids out of trouble. But then there were guns, becoming more and more common as the years went by, until one night Chavis and her husband heard the sounds of a young man, Ian Freedman, dying outside their window, the shape of his body outlined in chalk on their sidewalk in silent memoriam forever. As the violence skyrocketed, her neighbors and friends of so many years began leaving the neighborhood – when did safety outweigh diversity, outweigh ones idea of home?

At the end of the book, when Chavis finally decided to leave, I cried for her, and felt that though I can’t relate to living in a dangerous environment, I understood that she was leaving her home. Hundreds of committee meetings, letters, and cases later, despite the relative success of her gardening program for youths, she was driven out by her own feelings of being in danger, when her fright and paranoia overtook her. This does not add any optimism to the plight of improving ghettos, or getting the impoverished off their feet. And in California, a state drowning in debt, the issue of homelessness can hardly expect much financial aid. For Chavis, the only way to “solve” these problems was to escape them.
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Last spring, I drove up to far Northern California to visit my friend Emily who I met at a summer writing camp several years ago. Her town, sleepy Ferndale, was a logging community, composed of a block of cute storefronts and expanses of beautiful hiking areas, where cliffs jutted out into strips of beach and ocean, where we saw a rainbow emerging from the clouds. Emily drove me through Eureka, the biggest city in Northern California, where all the signs on the 101 going north point towards, and as we drove past blocks and blocks of cheap motels, Emily told me that all the meth addicts squatted there. That the meth addicts were everywhere, and they sometimes ran into oncoming traffic, and you couldn’t go to Eureka after it got dark out. Like crack, meth is relatively cheap, and has replaced crack in many areas as the up-and-coming big killer for individuals and subsequent generations. Eureka is located in the one of the most beautiful areas of land in the country, and yet, like Alma Street, or the Tenderloin, is riddled with drug use and homelessness that threaten to destroy not only its reputation and economy, but existence.

As a street-ignorant, sheltered teenager, I have no experience of waking up in the middle of the night to gunshots, or watching crack trades from my windowsill. But in Altars in the Street, Chavis mentions a Buddhist principle: that while one man starves, a rich man is committing suicide. That all suffering is equal. Chavis chose to help alleviate the suffering in her environment, on her street, and so it is important for me also to help look to the suffering in my immediate environment, and try to do something about it. After spending two weeks straight with my brother, observing his difficult daily routine and dozens of medical devices – the Coughalator, the ventilator, the bi-Pap sleeping mask, the electric wheelchair my family spent three years customizing – I’ve decided that I will make a commitment to devoting my time and energy into looking for ways for people with similar conditions who are less economically fortunate to get the equipment they need. I don’t know how yet, but in between frazzled dreams triggered by Altars in the Street, I thought of this idea, and I imagined collecting hundreds of wheelchairs to give to people who need them. This is just a figment in my mind as of now, but even talking to Philip, who is incredibly lonely, and making him smile, perhaps I am doing a part to end suffering – in my own tiny way.