But I know another thing. For the whole of my life I’ve been poor and have lived in or around ‘hoods, ghettos, and slums. Gunfire is a familiar sound to me, but so are firecrackers, soul music and RnB. I’ve seen sweet ice tea sunrises over the roofs of ruined projects, and graffiti to rival the Sistine Chapel, dandelions and daffodils pushing up through concrete. For me and so many others, the ‘hood is a locus of survival, resistance, one of the last bastions of Blackness, authentic and unfiltered through respectability politics. It is complex, varied, as multifaceted as the diamond studs gracing the ear of a young Black boy. From Bankhead to Oakland, to each and every MLK road, drive or boulevard, to the tallest of projects to the squattest of duplexes—it is home, it is culture, and it is bubbling with Gothic aesthetic, sensibility, and mood.
Often we equate southern gothic aesthetics with whiteness—white fears over freed enslaved people, down-on-their-luck cotton kings, crumbling plantations and the swamps that surround them. And while there is much to ponder about the south’s ugly-nasty history, the gallons of Black blood used to water the very same trees they string us from, I want to look at our more recent history, our present. Consider with me, the hood: the apartment complexes forgotten by the government, run by slumlords, decaying even as they house countless souls; the madmen and unhinged women that wander the streets, thrust into houselessness by the defunding of mental health care, or by drug addiction; consider the historic houses, dilapidated and abandoned, the trap houses and ‘crack dens’, the streets howling with ghosts both figurative and literal. See here, the neighbors telling ghost stories of little boys and girls being snatched up by who-knows-who, never to be seen again. Somebody’s cousin is acting possessed—too much crack, too much fent, too many pills to dull the pain of losing somebody dear to sickness, violence. The streets in this particular neighborhood are poisoned; bad air or haints, or maybe it’s the chemical plant down the road, the data center burping out hot toxins to sicken the children, weaken the elderly. Oh, we don’t go into those houses there—ain’t you hear? After Katrina, they left so many dead in attics, drowned or knocked flat from heat, it’s a wonder the city don’t rear up and scream.
