Living in the Hood

Mother’s Day Commentary for Minnesota Public Radio
05/06/05

I moved to the Northside of Minneapolis a little over two years ago. Forty-nine murders and three accidental killings ago. All but two were racial minorities, overwhelmingly kids and young males. We blow the rest of the city’s statistics out of the water.

Recently, a five year-old boy was run over and killed by his own school bus, two blocks from my house. Immediately the familiar death rituals of the Northside began. That day I passed by the spot and saw that the film crews were out. The next day I noticed the impromptu memorial of flowers and stuffed animals. The inhabitants who live on the Northside have struggled with how to talk about this loss. The way we struggle every time death touches our community as it too often does.

In most people’s mind we carry the dubious title, “Least safe place to live in the Twin Cities.” Who knows, maybe even the entire state. The murder statistics certainly back it up. Last year of the 54 homicides in Minneapolis, 29, more than half, were on the Northside. Overwhelmingly minority, either Black, Native American, Hispanic or Asian descent. Each one too young.

One thing mothers have in common is that when a child is killed, they need to make sense of it. They need to be able to come up with a reason, or they will be haunted by the arbitrariness of the event. To have a reason for death is to somehow control death. To keep it at a distance. Away from our families. Away from our children.

People live here for a multitude of reasons. Economics is certainly one. Some love the diversity. The possibility of making the world a better place is another reason. For me, it reminds me of the South—where people live out in the open, on their porches and in their front yards and on the sidewalks, rather than behind fences. I like it because it takes forever to walk around the block, there are so many people who stop you to say, “Hi.”

Most of us who can afford to leave, have been asked by our friends, “How can you live there?” It’s a particularly hard question for mothers. After all, a mother’s number one responsibility is the safety of her children. What is really meant by the question is, “How can you put your children’s lives at risk? A good mother wouldn’t do that.”

But when you live on the Northside, the definition of what it takes to be a good mother changes. Someone outside our area asked, “What was this child doing riding a bus, when he only lived a block from school? Wouldn’t it be safer to walk?”

Maybe in your neighborhood. But here, we have stray bullets, the occasional unleashed pit bull, 24/7 drug transactions, police chases, speeding getaway cars. We’re the city’s number 1 dumping ground for sex offenders because most of our residents don’t have a political voice. I ask you, Just what would a good mother do?

To live here, you have to operate under a different set of rules. You live on a block where at one end the dealers have taken up permanent residence. Up and down that same street, children play.

Tell me, what would a good mother do?

I know a black middle-class family who can afford to move to the white suburbs but who choose to live and raise their children on the Northside. They say they have lived in other whiter, areas, but their children were growing up not seeing themselves reflected in the culture, in the aesthetics around them. They choose to contend with the bullets and the drugs so their kids will grow up not as strangers to themselves.

What would a good mother do?

Others say they live here instead of the suburbs because white kids don’t need any more positive role models. It’s the kids in our Northside neighborhoods who need to see that there are other options than drifting out of childhood, down that straight path to the corner.

I don’t know. What would a good mother do?