Yesterday was three months since we first got our keys to the new place. Living here has felt tenuous (for me) because of an unshakeable sense that I didn’t deserve or was unqualified for the job I have. Like it would only be a matter of time before they figured me out and the bike rides to work across the Harvard Bridge, the endless interesting sidewalks, the light in our apartment would all come to an abrupt end. I think we’ll soon miss all those things, but now the reason for the tenuousness has changed.
Last Friday I was verbally threatened on my way to the gym in the early morning by a black guy who yelled in no uncertain terms that I was not supposed to be there: “What the FUCK you doin? Get the FUCK outta here CRACKER! You ain’t supposed to be here! Pow! Pow pow!!” He kept it going with the gunshot sounds till I was almost a block away. It was unnerving, but I get it. This is Roxbury after all, his neighborhood. Where Malcolm X lived for seven years after moving here from Michigan with his half-sister when he was 14. Where Martin Luther King Jr. once preached in the Twelfth Baptist Church right across the street through the windows of my gym. Where so many blacks moved from the South and again after displacement from Boston’s other neighborhoods, including (and especially) where we live in the South End. A Roxbury that still struggles against the legacy of enduring and systemic racism. Fucking crackers. Out of respect and a little fear, I’ll be taking a different way to the gym.
But if there’s a fear of things really going pear-shaped, it doesn’t come from my black neighbors. It comes from white followers of Donald Trump and Steve Bannon and Fox News who are intent destroying their perceived enemy with no apparent idea of what should come next except wielding their corrupt and merciless power. Fuck those guys. The insurrection is already underway (hello Jan 6) and will only get stronger as the economy tanks and climate effects worsen. I don’t know what the coming civil war will look like, but I expect bombings and lots and lots of gunfire. Protests will turn bloodier after provocation, public officials will be assassinated, and no one will know how to stop the mounting tit-for-tat as our freedoms and rivers evaporate. It won’t be safe to walk about anywhere, let alone on Shawmut Ave in Roxbury.
So if I’m going to lose my job and everything goes to shit, it’ll be because science and people stopped thriving, not because my bosses found me out for being incompetent. In the meantime, how to best prepare? Volunteer maybe? Buy a refuge maybe? But not move. Being here still feels too good to be true.
Chris Bell's Journalismo 