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There Goes the Neighborhood

by Imani Perry
Spring 2007

I was 11 years old when my family stepped out of the international society of Peabody Terrace and into academic New England on Parker Street, a block nestled behind Radcliffe’s Bunting Quadrangle. There, the floors were cold on winter mornings. The foundation had settled over the years, so the doorframes were askew. The hardwood floors sloped. The tub had feet.

Mrs. Ward, the sixty-something landlady, watched my comings and goings, bent on keeping me safe. In our first conversation, she told me, “When I came here, this was our street,” and by that she meant us black folks.

In 1983, when I arrived, some 36 years after Mrs. Ward, there were just two houses still owned by African Americans: Mrs. Ward’s, and diagonally across the street, the one belonging to a lean, copper-hued old man who wore short-sleeved Oxford shirts and had an easy smile. I watched him walk his dog in the evenings.

Mrs. Ward also said, “I know you have your grandma down in Alabama. But I can be your Northern grandma.” I silently assessed her. She was different from my beloved grandmother, Neida Mae Perry or “M’deah” as we call her, a Southern contraction of “mother” and “dear.” When Mrs. Ward got excited, her voice reached a fever pitch that ended in a delighted cackle. M’deah’s quiet tempo ended in a chuckle. One was always on the go, the other understatedly occupied. But they both had smooth skin over high cheekbones, sharp wit, God’s grace, and soft hair like a baby’s. Yes, I thought, and my face must have shown my agreement, because Mrs. Ward looked satisfied and made her way upstairs without my having said a word.

I needed her. As a black child raised by a Southern intellectual mother in an affluent Cambridge neighborhood, I often felt a yearning for the traditional comforts of the working-class black community where my grandmother lived — crowded rooms, grits on the stove, nylon hose and rayon slips, raucous debates, and the scent of Ultra Sheen hair pomade.

At that age, I was trying to make sense of who I was. Southerner or New Englander? Academic brat, or salt of the earth? Nothing fit easily, and Mrs. Ward was something of a bridge. She reminded me of the largely black enclaves of Boston that I visited on Sunday mornings and missed as soon as I left, and of my Southern roots. Even though she was a Protestant and we were Catholic, the gospel hum, the call-and-response, the gracious brunch and warm greetings after services, were the same for all black transplants.

Second-generation migrants can feel displacement and longing, particularly if the move is a transformative one. Mine was. So I decided to write a high-school term paper on Parker Street. I started at Cambridge City Hall, where I found my Northern grandma and her husband among the handwritten index cards: “Property Transfer, Monroe and Lillian Ward, 1947.”

From there I went to the Cambridge Historical Commission. Pictures of City Council members from the 19th and early 20th centuries were sprinkled with dark faces, hailing from Parker and Healey streets. I pieced together a story: A row of multi-colored old colonial revivals trafficked by scholars and maids, activists and academics, Parker Street had been the center of a flourishing African American community in the early part of the 20th century, but eventually property values went up and people were bought out.

My story was supplemented with legend and fantasy. I heard that Maria Hawkins Ellington, the wife of Nat King Cole, grew up in the very house where I lived. I imagined her sleeping in my room as a girl, slippers neatly tucked under the bed. I pictured muckraking anti-lynching activist Ida B. Wells riding past my house in her coach as she made her way to the nearby home of Thomas Wentworth Higginson.

Later, while I was away at Yale, Cambridge City Hall put an African American Heritage Trail marker in front of the house I’d grown up in. It announced that 30 Parker Street had been the home of Emery T. Morris. I had never heard of him, but soon learned he was a druggist, porter, and stationary steam engineer. Most importantly, he had been one of the founders of the Niagara movement, W.E.B. Dubois’s forerunner to the NAACP. Later, he joined the more militant National Negro Political League. Morris wasn’t college-educated, yet he amassed an anti-slavery library so impressive that Harvard professors reportedly sent their students to research his collection. He was both an everyman and an intellectual.

I wanted a gorgeously sundry, diverse life like that. And so the conflicted strands of my identity surely and steadily changed in my own eyes. My displacement, viewed from a new perspective, was something different altogether: It was a source of insight.

By the time I learned my husband-to-be’s great-great-grandparents had lived on Parker, I knew where the street fit in my story. My part came after the heyday of Parker Street as a black enclave. My part came after the civil rights movement. My part was the 1980s, when there was a movement in African American intellectual life to recover and recall the stories of foremothers and fathers who had been neglected by the past — people like Emery Morris, M’deah, and Mrs. Ward. People who had journeyed and struggled, seeking something good and humane out of life in a society that often refused both for African Americans.

In researching Parker Street’s past, I connected to history and nurtured my identity. That was my street.