Safe at Home

by Terri Sutton
Readers’ Choice Award, Fall Emerging Writers Contest

Collage by Anthony Afairo Nze

1.
Home from the Old English word ham is a dwelling place, a fixed residence or estate where people gather with the emphasis being on the people, not the building. Home is an abstract, a feeling, an easy partner in forming compound words: hometown, homeowner, or its opposite homeless. During the pandemic, homebound described not just the status of most people but also its involuntary nature. After Reconstruction, the Homestead Act gave thousands of Blacks a way to escape the Jim Crow South and finally to own land. They traveled west—where they hoped they’d be safe—first to Kansas, the nearest western state to the South then pushed onward to Oklahoma. In baseball, a homerun is when a runner completes a circuit of the bases without stopping and is called safe at home. My friend, who lives In Maine, feels safe at home so she rarely locks her front door, but I don’t feel safe at home, so I lock my doors every night.

        

2. Home but not Home

My mother and I sit on the front porch, watching the neighbor’s sons race back and forth as they make roaring engine sounds. We are talking about my home. Am I technically homeless since I’ve sold my condo? And by the way, where is my home? It’s a familiar conversation that started this time when I said, “I want to get home to watch the news,” and my mother said, “This is your home.” Meaning the house I grew up in. It’s an open-ended question, layered with semantics and feelings and our shared entangled stubbornness, and makes me wish we could agree to disagree.
        Before I moved back to Ohio, I would tell my Wisconsin friends, “I’m going home to see my mother,” and when I was ready to leave, I’d tell my mother I was going home to see my friends. Even now I have a bedroom upstairs where I sleep sometimes on a mattress that tortures my back and a closet filled with plastic-wrapped prom formals and yellowing bridesmaid dresses, leftovers from an earlier life. Even now I still love my childhood neighborhood. I remember the freedom I felt when I rode my bike for hours, going well beyond my mother’s view. Or when my sister and I felt free to join kids in hopscotch or jump rope, mindful we had to be home when the streetlights came on. It was a safe neighborhood of Black families who wanted the best for their children.
        Outside, the boys stop running. My mother opens the curtain and watches as they laugh and make “Pow” sounds.
        “They never close the damn gate,” she mutters, before turning her attention back to me. “Home is always home,” my mother says, reviving the argument. “No matter what.”
        I glance across the street at two abandoned houses, their once verdant lawns now choked by hearty weeds, their windows boarded. I still refer to them by the names of the people who lived there when I was growing up. Those families were gone, and my mother is the sole homeowner on our end of the block among vacant houses or rentals owned by nameless White investors who don’t cut the grass.
        In a way I know she’s right, but being “in a way” right won’t satisfy my mother. I shrug and try to wedge a compromise between us. “It’s my home…but not my home-home, anymore.”
        She lifts a hand and swats my answer away. “Like it or not,” my mother says “this is your home. “ 

        
 
3. Not Home

The first time I pull into the driveway of my new rental, I see a pile of trash that tells me the former resident had a big screen TV, a patio table lacking its base and lots of garbage, packed in black trash bags that conceal everything. I walk past the garbage pile and into the garage where its sticky floor grips my shoes like a cartoon character. The door leading into the house is smeared with dirt that reminds me of a child’s drawing destined for a refrigerator showing. Inside the vertical blinds in the master bedroom are missing three slats; the white toilet seat in the guest bathroom seems more a mushroom brown, and as I’d learn after a vigorous mopping, the grayish black hardwood flooring is actually light gray. After my tour, I call the property management office and yell, “This place is filthy,” and the secretary says, “Oh, I’m sorry,”
        I walk back outside, so mad I want to scream or cry until my neighbor approaches and says, “Welcome to the neighborhood,” and he’s wearing khakis and a tee shirt and looks so relaxed. Then I take a deep yoga breath, tamp down my frustration and ask if he’s satisfied with the management company. He smiles his approval, and takes out his phone to show me the app I can use to request maintenance. “If I need something,” he says, “they come right away.”
        But they don’t come when I email photos of the trash that remains in my driveway for days and they don’t repair the freezer that hurls chunks of ice whenever I open the door, and they don’t acknowledge my email asking why they removed my broken garbage disposal instead of replacing it. This leads me to wonder if my being Black is why my experience with the management company is different from my White neighbor’s. I’m used to having to think about this, weighing every possible explanation for these “differences.” It’s a troublesome question that’s always there, like the errant jarring notes of an otherwise harmonious song.
        In the meantime, I visit a renter’s rights website, start a file documenting all communication with the management company and take photos of anything broken or damaged in the house because I expect a future battle (there is often another battle) to get my full deposit back when I move because I know this place is not my home.

        

4. Final Home

Home going from an African belief that death sent an enslaved person’s spirit to travel back to the safety of the African homeland. It’s also a term used at Black funerals to describe the destination of the deceased who is returning to a heavenly home, having left behind all earthly problems.
        Before my sister, Jackie, died from a heart attack, she complained about the medicine the doctor had given her. It gave her headaches, she said, made her feel dizzy or nauseous, and it didn’t fix what it was supposed it fix. I listened, but my advice to ask the doctor for something else seemed obvious and useless. Weeks later when I asked if the doctor had changed her medicine, my sister spoke to me as if I was an inquisitive five-year-old, “No,” she said, “these doctors give you what they want you to have.”
        In the end, Jackie’s non-effective medicine wasn’t changed. I don’t know if this led to her fatal heart attack, but studies by the National Academy of Medicine show Blacks are less likely than Whites to be given appropriate cardiac care treatment. They also reveal that as recently as 2016 a majority of doctors surveyed believed Black skin was thicker than that of Whites and because of this difference, Blacks could tolerate more pain than Whites. This leads me to wonder how often my sister complained to her doctor about the headaches and nausea the medication caused, and how often her doctor looked at her beautiful brown skin and decided she could bear the pain.
        On the cover of my sister’s funeral program was an amber sunset and the word Homegoing written in a swirling script. Inside a collage of photos: My sister sipping a beer while her daughter and granddaughter sit at the kitchen table laughing as if someone had just delivered a punch line. Jackie and I at a wedding reception wearing glossy dresses, her “cheese” smile is directed at the camera; my head is tilted slightly toward her.
        Near the end of his eulogy, the minister, his voice strained from the effort of pushing the congregation through our grief, delivered the same reminders I’ve heard at many funerals: “We all must run our race; to be present in the physical body is to be absent from God, and this is not our home.

        

5. Former Home

I was waiting at the elevator in my condo building, still stiff from sleep and filled with regret for having made an early appointment for an oil change, when the clicking release of a neighbor’s door broke the silence of the empty halls and captured my attention. Someone stepped into the doorway, most likely to retrieve a newspaper, and this part I imagined because when I turned and looked in that direction, I couldn’t see anyone. Then a familiar voice asked, “How long do I have to look at that?”
        Her harsh, disgusted tone of voice caused me to step back from the elevator and stare in that direction, the way people do when they hear a distant pop or yell. But as quickly as her door opened, I heard the latching sound of its closing, and she was gone. The elevator doors opened and I entered, certain the target of her question was the Black Lives Matter poster displayed by her neighbor across the hall.
        On the morning I heard my neighbor’s question, I had already watched George Floyd’s death scene, already heard the witnesses’ pleas for the police to release Floyd, already listened to Black and White politicians support or rebuke police policies, already watched the Black Lives Matter movement organize protests similar to those they led in 2013 following the acquittal of Trayvon Martin’s murderer.
        I lived in the building for eight years, one of five Black condo owners out of ninety-five units. By Wisconsin’s standards—as the fourth most segregated state in the country—my building was diverse. As time passed, her comment might have joined the mountain of racist comments I’d heard, but I realized she and I shared a common ground and were asking the same question, “How long do I have to look at that?”
        Maybe my neighbor wanted the discussions about racism to disappear because they were unpleasant, or uncomfortable, or unnecessary. Maybe she believed that slavery and its consequences ended when Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, that racism ended when President Obama was elected, and that America is the land of the free and home of the fair, so why continue to dredge up negative incidents. But I, on the other hand, looked at a litany of violent actions against Blacks: the burning of Greenwood, Oklahoma in 1921; the lynching in the South beginning in 1877 until the last lynching of Michael Donald in 1981; the beating death of Emmet Till in 1955; the beating of Rodney King in 1992; the shooting death of Michael Brown in 2014 and of Breonna Taylor in 2020, and I wondered how long do I have to look at that?
        This wasn’t my first or last brush with racism, but it was an awakening. I never spoke to that neighbor again, but her actions caused me to raise my radar about the other people in the building. Shortly after this happened, I felt uncomfortable and somehow less safe. Months later when I decided to move to Ohio, I was ready to leave because I knew this was not my home.

        

6. Safe at Home

After the 2016 election, my mother says the main reason she reads the paper is to get her assignment.
        “What assignment?” I ask.
        “For the ship,” she answers.
        “What ship?”
        “The one Donald Trump is going to put Black folks on to send us back to Africa.”

*

        

In 1920 Marcus Garvey introduced his Back to Africa program to encourage Blacks living abroad to return to their African homeland. Blacks, he believed, would never have true equality in the United States. Middle class Blacks living in the North were not enthusiastic about this movement, believing Blacks would eventually gain opportunities and civil rights. Ironically, in the following year, 1921, Blacks living in Tulsa, Oklahoma, many of whom had sought the safety of the West, were attacked by Whites who burned and looted their community, an area so prosperous it was called Black Wall Street, and killed approximately 300 Blacks. Approximate because the exact number of fatalities varies due to mass graves at various sites.
        In 2019, Ghana’s president invited African descendants to mark the “Year of Return,” and commemorate 400 years since the first Africans arrived in Virginia. The invitation prompted record tourism, and within a year about 5,000 Blacks had returned permanently to Ghana. CBS News reported that many of the émigrés said they left America because they never felt safe.
        This unsafe feeling is rooted in history and present-day fact. In 2020 the FBI reported attacks against Blacks increased by nearly forty percent from the year before. This increase makes Blacks the most targeted racial group by a wide margin.
        When I watch the news about Black joggers being hunted and shot, or Black athletes fired for taking the knee against racism, or state legislatures passing laws to eliminate Black voters, I worry about the direction the country is heading. There’s a new boldness to act against Blacks that makes me feel under attack in small or significant ways. Housing discrimination, health care or subtle racist acts, all add to my growing anxiety. I don’t feel safe in America. Sometimes I believe it would be easier to leave. But nothing about Black lives has been easy. So I brace myself for whatever comes next because, like it or not, this is my home.