Pride Quotes

It’s a truth universally acknowledged that when rich people move into the hood, where it’s a little bit broken and a little bit forgotten, the first thing they want to do is clean it up.

I pull back the curtains to greet my little corner of Bushwick and Jefferson Avenues, my very own way of stretching out my arms and yawning at the morning sun. This is where I see words swim in and around my neighborhood like dust from overhead train tracks. It’s all poetry. So I pull those words together and try to make sense of it all: my hood, my Brooklyn, my life, my world, and me in it.

“And please ignore my baby brother, he’s just grumpy that we had to leave Manhattan.”

“Dude, hey, I am not grumpy. It’s just an . . . adjustment,” Darius says, crossing his arms.

“What a hard adjustment for you,” I say, my curiosity about these boys turning off like a switch. I don’t appreciate anyone throwing shade at my neighborhood, especially from people who say words like “totally” and “dude.”

“Career before family? Como una gringa?”

“No, Madrina,” I say. “Not like a white girl! Like . . . a woman! Any woman.”

“You think this will make a good topic for my essay to get into Howard?” I ask. “How to save the hood?”

“It depends on how you frame it. What’s your angle, your thesis statement? What are you trying to say?”

I pause for a moment, thinking about my hood and how even though families grew up and changed, things essentially stayed the same, until now.

Sometimes love is not enough to keep a community together. There needs to be something more tangible, like fair housing, opportunities, and access to resources.

“That whole family might as well be white.”

“Listen, Zuri Luz. Let your big sister be. Let things change.”

“Is this . . . your thing? Art festivals in parks? Like, how come you don’t go to the park to play ball or something?”

He smirks. “You don’t leave that little corner of your neighborhood too often, do you?”

I lean back to get a good look at him. He stares at me, but he blinks first. “Just so you know, in this hood, you’re just like everybody else. The cops and all these white people will take one good look at you and think you’re from Hope Gardens Projects no matter how many tight khaki shorts or grandpa shoes you wear.”

Warren is smooth and easy. Warren is Bushwick.

“You want me to be a rapper while you’re a baller so we could be a dynamic duo stereotype?”

I recognize that look. It’s that same look people used to give us when Mama would get on a crowded train with a double stroller holding the twins, me, Marisol, and Janae with our messy hair, runny noses, and each with a bag of chips to keep us occupied while Mama quieted down the babies. It’s the look that assumes Mama is a single mother, that she’s on government assistance, that she beats us when she’s tired, that we all have different fathers, that we live in the projects, and that we’re ghetto. Everybody used to look at us like that—white, black, other mothers with kids who thought they were being responsible by only having two or three. I’d look back at them with defiance and a little pride; a look that says that I love my family and we may be messy and loud, but we’re all together and we love each other.

“He’s black, but he ain’t that black, feel me? The way we do it out here, if your boy gets into a fight, ain’t you supposed to have his back? But instead, his pops tries to get me kicked out of Easton.”

There’s no one here who knows me. There’s no one from the hood who’ll spread a rumor about me getting on the mic to spit some corny rhyme about love or the hood or my sisters. The last time I shared my poems in public was for the after-school performance in June, and even that was only for the kids who had taken that poetry class.

“Let me guess,” Darius says. “You thought those hors d’oeuvres at our party are what we eat for dinner every night?”

I shake my head and try very hard not to laugh again. “No, I didn’t think that at all.”

“Yes, you did, Zuri,” he says. “And do you eat those fried pork chunks for dinner every night?”

“No of course not,” I say, and let out another laugh because he’s right. And I was wrong. For the first time since meeting him, since hating him, I hear him laugh, too.

Carrie chuckles. “Why are you suddenly talking like that?”

“Talking like what?” I ask.

“Darius, you noticed how she just changed the way she talked, right?”

“No,” Darius says, shaking his head and looking dead at me.

“According to you, I should be doing all these things that’ll make me more . . . what? Black?”

“I can’t believe you would ask me out after what you did to both my sister and Warren. In fact, we shouldn’t have kissed at all. Now that was a mistake.”

“So you think I’m a bad person?”

“Yes! You judged them, and you turned your nose up at them. And me.”

I think that maybe I read the Darcys wrong. Maybe the Darcy mom has a bad case of resting bitch face. Maybe they were just in an argument and they went to that restaurant to patch things up.

I hold Mama’s EBT card in my fist. I really don’t want to pull it out in front of Darius.

You’ve got this whole white audience

Watching this fight like some sport

So to whom do I pledge allegiance

To my heart or to this war?

“You treated my sisters like shit, and I needed to call you out on it. And I can’t help that or change that.”

“But I wasn’t . . .” He pulls my hand toward him a little bit.

“Darius.”

“You judged me too. You treated me and my brother like shit too.”

“But he gets to stay, Papi,” I say quietly, and I realize that Darius will no longer be the boy across the street. He’ll still be in Bushwick, and I’ll be . . . somewhere else because the rent is too high in my own hood.

“So. And you get to leave. Him and his family are living somewhere new. They get to have new experiences. And you and your sisters, you’ve been in Bushwick all your lives.”

I have always thought of Bushwick as home, but in that moment, I realize that home is where the people I love are, wherever that is.

I don’t write a poem after all, but poetry helped me get my feelings out. My broken words helped me make sense of everything, so that when I pieced them back together in an essay, my truth was clearer.