Children of the White Flyers

We were the children of the white flyers. There is no doubt in my mind about it now. I’ve seen the maps, and I know the people, and I remember the conversations. In our weird little corner of suburban Philadelphia, the neighbors were mostly mixed Irish and Italian, then mostly Greek, and then everything else from Egyptian to Czech to Japanese. But the one thing they were not, was Black. I got asked all the time ‘what are you?’ and felt obligated to ask the question back, but never understood the meaning behind the question, or cared what they said back to me. I think now that some kids knew and justified it like they were in on the plan all along. Those kids would have screamed as loud as anything about someone changing the rules in tag or having too many kids on a street hockey team, but its really taken me until now to see how the rules of our reality were stacked. We didn’t the ability to question the abstract contradiction all around us, from the time we started watching Sesame Street and The Electric Company.

There are twenty-four row homes on Clinton RD in Upper Darby. We lived in one of the middle ones. My mother was not on the deed. Clinton RD is a one way deadend street that ends at the back of someone’s garage but runs the opposite direction toward Long Lane. The only way in is from Radbourne RD. Radbourne and Clinton break the grid and form a triangle because of a movie theater that was abandoned probably longer than it was open. A retaining wall separated our homes’ alley from the alley of the row of homes behind us. We took turns walking and balancing on it as it went from inches on our side to about 20 feet on theirs, pivoted and walked back to inches on our side and 20 feet on theirs. No parents, no nets. This row of homes was built in 1927, and covered the bases well enough; a garage, a basement, a laundry, a living room, a dining room, a kitchen. The kitchen had an elevated rear deck that you shared with your neighbor. Sometimes from the deck I could talk to the neighbors’ kids when they had to go to bed early. My brother’s bedroom was at the back, and my bedroom had the window over the back deck. Our bathroom had a window at the top that you had to open with a chain instead of a fan. We had a small front porch and a smaller front yard, if you could call it that, but who needed it anyway? And when the first kid knocked on the door and asked come out and play, I was gone until dark, playing in our closed neighborhood circle.

We moved to a 1950‘s style small single home in the Drexel Hill part of Upper Darby in 1978, when I turned eight. The bait for us kids was a yard, but my brother and I never played in it - it was only a source of work we didn’t want to do. Now, I had to make new friends, and it took a lot of effort because playmates weren’t on the same block. I had to cross all kinds of busy streets to see one person, and if that wasn’t working I had to walk home. I felt trapped and bored just a mile and a half from the place I considered home. I asked all the time to go back, but I was told all my friends were moving away from the old neighborhood. It didn’t make sense. Terri’s family raised six kids in the end house. They were rich - they had glass chandeliers and plastic over the furniture. She was my age and had a white fur coat. Why would they leave now? Sometimes, I just went to the drug store across the street instead after they got air conditioning and looked at magazines. When I grew up I knew I was never going to be placated by acreage, or garage spaces or microwave ovens. The new house to me was a source of misery and my Mom poured herself into cleaning and redecorating and gardening when she wasn’t working. She was finally on the note.

My great grandparents on my dad’s side were both orphaned by the Great Influenza that leveled Philadelphia like the Plague. Great Grandmom was from upstate Pennsylvania Dutch country. She met my Great Grandfather in a Philadelphia orphanage and they moved to the Olney section when she turned 16. He worked in a factory and was a deacon at his church. Great Grandmom never went on Sundays, I can only assume her faith was shaken. They had two daughters, Ruth and Lois. Ruth, my Grandmother, had two kids and was divorced from my Grandfather, so my Dad, his sister and my Grandmom all lived with her parents in Olney until they died. Grandmom never talked about her marriage except, that he was a Southerner and a drinker and a cheat. She literally hit him on the head with a frying pan one night and he was gone. She was a pioneer of divorce and of working women and she retired from the telephone company in 1986, a year after they brought in computers - that was the year I moved in with her.

No one knows much about my Mother’s family except for this: she was Korean born in Japan. The Japanese took her family’s money and kicked them out of the country during WWII. They moved in with a huge extended family on a family member’s little farm and slowly almost everyone died during the Korean war. My mother, her grandmother and her younger brother were forced from the farm to a refugee camp when she was nine. She got a goiter in her neck there that they had to lance with a knife while she was awake. Her brother caught a virus or infection that inflamed one his testicles until he died. She left the camp and was sheltered by a family that let her live in their barn and raised silkworms that she ate for protein. Her last year of school was in the third grade. The rest is sketchy but she met my dad who was a 17 year old GI at a party where drunk, she tried to kill herself. He was not allowed to bring her back and my brother back to the states, because he was underage and my Grandmom would not grant permission for them to marry. He re-enlisted, got married and was immediately sent to Vietnam. She visited Korea once in 1976 to try to figure out what happened in her childhood and find her brother’s remains, but the visits to her extended family all ended with them asking her to send them a color tv from the US.

It rarely shows itself but on a clear day, from the high point near Upper Darby High School you can look from Lansdowne AVE and see Center City. In all the years of walking around, I only remember a few magical times when it revealed itself through the haze like the Emerald City in the Wizard of Oz. From that spot its a mere six miles east, and you don’t even have to walk. The trolley at Landsdowne AVE and Garrett RD can get you to the 69th Street Terminal, and from there, all of Philadelphia is yours if you can read a SEPTA schedule. From Clinton RD, you could walk to 69th Street, but kids didn’t go downtown in the 1980‘s; we went to the blissfully air conditioned Springfield Mall. It was the last trolley stop in the other direction, and a complete manifestation of suburban flight; the first in a series of moving goal posts that took grown ups further and further away, into larger and larger more isolated homes because of the ever present threat of having to live with people who were once slaves.

The City of Philadelphia was born of its creators as a City of Brotherly Love. A beautiful Quaker hot pot of people, even before the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution were written there. William Penn welcomed settlers and natives, former slaves, and people of all religions. Philadelphia’s holy experiment progressed in advance of the Civil War in the deeds of Quaker abolitionists in Upper Darby too, like Thomas Garrett - who I knew nothing about growing up there, even though I went to a school named for him. The 20th Century was harsh on the experiment though to say the least. A surreal World War followed by a pandemic that went through the city like the plague, a Great Depression and another World War all worked together to create a rigged system of economic racism. The map with the red lines runs a big one through Cobbs Creek, with West Philadelphia on one side and Upper Darby on the other. The line placed there to protect the investors of banks after the Great Depression was removed in 1968 with The Fair Housing Act. There was no longer any reason to have the word ‘Caucasian’ in a deed.

The Philadelphia of the 1980's was hard to love. Parts of the city took you through your fears like a Haunted House. You’d see drugs and homeless people, and all the misinformation about AIDS would fill your mind. No one cleaned up after their dogs, or recycled or smoked in designated spaces, so it stank. And even though people had been moving out of the city for years, the evidence of the corruption remained blocks after block of huge Victorian and Queen Anne homes that had been bisected and trisected in ways that were clearly not up to code. The red lines had for years been forcing a growing population of non-white residents to fit into the same overcrowded neighborhoods, while the ‘Caucasian’ areas grew more spacious as people moved to out. Retail investors weren’t much better, just letting buildings fall away until they got sued. Chaotic surfaces fed a racist narrative about Black people. Mayor Rizzo used control and fear and racism to his advantage. Even Mayor Goode who was supposed to be the antidote to the demagogue dropped a bomb on his own city because the narrative and the appearance was powerful no matter how untrue. The MOVE compound on Osage Avenue, was closer to most of Upper Darby than to Center City and most of Philadelphia’s residents.

For decades, the banks did the dirty work of discriminating, but at this time to protect every dime of savings invested in their homes people felt justified in resorting to flat out racism on their own. They watched who moved in, who moved out and chattered about how many people of color were at what places and at what times. There were campaigns of harassment, but individuals can’t do the same amount of harm as institutions when left to their own devices, especially when flight is a viable option and most of them flew, further and further away. I did the opposite and moved my body into the city. Philadelphia is still a beautiful experiment though it remains one of the most segregated cities in the US. My old neighborhood in Upper Darby is on average more integrated today than Philadelphia.