We pulled into the driveway in Brentwood, Long Island under a canopy of oak trees. Our new house was a statement compared to our two-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn; there was a cherry tree that wore its onyx bark with restrained dignity, honeysuckle bushes with bright yellow flowers, rabbits scuttling along the perimeter as though they didn’t have the good sense to be rats. The ground itself was a novelty, made of equal parts daddy long leg spiders and, as my sister would tell it, crawling things that slid out from under the bushes and into my ears at night. We didn't need the extra space, though we had it. Inside was a staircase, three whole bedrooms, something called a ‘den’, and even a one-bedroom apartment sectioned off on the first floor. And all was quiet. Even the placid shade of brown of the shag carpet and wood paneled walls lent themselves to the ease of nothingness. Both absorbed heat from the sunlight spilling through the bay window, making the atmosphere bullishly temperate. Life in the suburbs would be like being wrestled into a long, unexpected nap in the middle of the day.  

Hollow suburban air, as clean and fortifying as it was, made some days seem as long as two. With nothing to do and money to burn, some of our neighbors decorated their lawns with a hodgepodge of crap: statues of miniature jockeys holding lanterns, solar powered lights lining driveways, and at least one porcelain dolphin springing upright from a front lawn. Because of this, I likely dismissed the tall wooden frame in the adjoining backyard as decorative, if I had noticed it at all. A few years after we settled in, an atonal scream summoned my sisters and me to climb the treehouse and peer over the fence. The wooden frame was not for a hanging garden or some sort, but for a live goat, tied by its wrists and ankles, stretched like a starfish. The goat pleaded in a language intimated by all species, but its voice got tangled in the oak trees, flattened into oblivion somewhere along the Southern State parkway. Our neighbor was unmoved, neither by the goat’s human voice or our hanging jaws, as he prepared the tools for slaughter with the same casualness as he would butter a slice of toast. The scene was misplaced—it belonged among luminescent insects and spiky vegetation and hyper-regional languages. Still, there it all was: shock, steadiness, panic, focus, duty, maybe the faint whistling of an ice cream truck. The screaming stopped. The damned was skinned, broken, drained, fileted. The neighbors must’ve had meat for weeks. Same if they drove to the supermarket, a straight shot down Islip Avenue.  

There were many different types of kids in Brentwood schools. None of whom could pronounce my name, though I learned from theirs that sometimes the letter ‘J’ is pronounced as an ‘H’. Some of these children had parents from places in Central America or the Caribbean, which were governed by thuggish politicians or politically ambitious thugs. Brentwood was an uneventful refuge that didn’t force them to get comfortable with English. As for the teachers, there were generally two types in Brentwood public schools: the old white ladies who only exercised their atrophied smiles when the lanky thirty-something superintendent made his rounds, and the excited white recent college grads who kept locked drawers full of candy and fashioned reading nooks with bean bag chairs. Both camps saw their role in Brentwood as would the missionaries. 

When Blacks started immigrating to New York City, the neighborhoods they landed in were flanked and flattened to create an interloping series of roadways that would jettison whites from the five boroughs to more monochromatic townships. Eventually, Brentwood had become an enclave for Black and brown New York City workers who longed for the quiet and prestige of suburban homeownership. This drop of black, with its corona of brown, pushed the whites into a further surrounding radius, fashioning both a fortress and a noose. The proximity to whiteness is at once an ambition and a healthy fear.

 Many of the teachers came from these long lines of New Yorkers and in their storied, ancestral voices, taught me the regional dialect of Long Island: the word ‘all’ has a hard ‘w’, pronounced ‘awl’; the plural of ‘you’ is ‘yous’. Here’s how to use these words in action: “I could be teaching in Syosset right now! Instead, I'm here helping awl a yous!” In their voices was an echo of their grandfathers’ Brooklyn or Bronx accents, muttering about exactly when the old neighborhood went south.  

Some of the kids would hear this, look to their left and right to find mostly brown and Black faces, and gather that their inherent selves and above ground pools were the defining characteristics of a ghetto. By middle school, some of us strove to fulfill this prophecy by accessorizing with yellow and pink bandanas that were left behind by the real gangs, or by naming our cliques something ending with ‘mafia’ or ‘with attitude’. The kids in Ma’s residential neighborhood of Rosedale, Queens suffered from the same syndrome, dreaming aloud about when they could accumulate enough money from credit card scamming to “finally get outta the hood,” as they scolded their friends for walking on their parents’ lawn. As I saw it, if at any moment in your New York life you’ve been to Home Depot, you are not a child of the ghetto.  

Still, there were tidbits of clout that people from Brentwood could scrounge up to assert their roughness. There was EPMD, the eighties rap duo. It didn’t matter what they were rapping about, just the fact that they were rapping at all gave us the foundation we needed, the one drop rule. Also, there was the looming threat of violence, which at large was pathetically suburban. We would kill, so to speak, for a rumor of a gun in a locker, or a nineties subway-style razor to the face of some unsuspecting straphanger. In the ‘burbs, bomb threats were high fashion. After 9/11, someone realized they could give everyone a day off by calling the school claiming to have hidden an explosive. The ghetto-ass school did not have caller ID, so we would spend the day riding our bikes and enjoying wide, well-paved streets. Even with the news coverage the bomb threats invited, Brentwood schools were still much too good for a Michelle Pfeiffer intervention. Still, I salivated over the plexiglass gyms I saw at other schools while I played bench on the middle school basketball team. One in ten Long Island homes belong to millionaires, which somehow makes one lament about being a part of the nine.  

 For all the confusion we had about our socioeconomic place in the world, one thing many kids seemed sure about was their family’s cultural origins. The Puerto Rican kids attempted to make their distinction clear when they started taunting the Salvadorians by calling them “Salvys.” In response, the Salvys etched MS-13 tags on lockers and into benches, giving us the perverse prestige of assumed gang activity. The Blacks could be divided into those who spoke Creole, and the ‘regular’ Blacks: just here, being Black, with no home country or known ties to the American South. For those of us whose story only went back as far as the home they grew up in, we had multicultural units in class which ended with a potluck luncheon. Other than Black history month, this was the only time we didn’t learn about ‘Americans’. Social Studies was full of ‘Americans’, everyone from the Founding Fathers to Johnny Appleseed. Black history month, contrarily, was full of ‘Black’ Americans, and always the same few (I bet you know who invented peanut butter!) Hyphenated, prefaced Americans, not really African or American, although we live on the soil that our daddy’s, daddy’s, daddy lived on, tended to, made flourish.  

 To decorate the classroom, we were encouraged to create trinkets that reflected our ethnicities. I had an indirect feeling that they expected the non-Caribbean, non-African, non-Southern Black girl to fashion a drum because bringing turntables as my ethnic symbol somehow didn’t count. It was Sprite-commercial culture, fine, but was it culture culture? Culture was supposed to be ancient, grandfathered in and kept afloat by foreign words that infiltrated your speech when you were angry or surprised or secretive. Culture was the clothing you only wrestled into for pictures you took for the family newsletter, for that three-day wedding. Culture was a place you flew to every year, not a vacation but just a landing zone you had on some other continent. Even if that place was lush and had clear water and different rules, it wasn’t really a holiday, so it’s okay if you didn’t always enjoy it. Maybe my family could scrounge up enough culture to give it a name, but having to ask almost negated the purpose of the question. I never inquired and made at least one drum fashioned from a tub of Häagen-Dazs.

 We were also asked to draw the flag of our family’s origin as shown on a giant poster the teacher provided. Not all the countries were represented, just the cool kids: Western Europe, the major players of East Asia, the parts of South America that keep pre-Columbian languages hidden behind their ears. The American flag may have been on there, but the activity implied we couldn't use it to represent our families, customs, or culture. The culture Black Americans have is mixed into the dirt, not to mention that Black is not an ethnicity, only a word—black plague, black magic, black hearted. Blackness felt opaque and borderless, but by no means universal or normative. 

 I was not South American, not Caribbean as far as I knew at eight years old. My only references to draw upon were staccato anecdotes about Ma’s winding family tree: a little Gullah here, a little Nigerian there, the obligatory oral history telenovela about a Cherokee great grandmother. All of this and more mongrelized with lies and poor record keeping. My grandmother spun a tale of a German man floating around our gene pool to which Ma contributed her strong Nordic legs, only to be told by her mother decades later, “German? Where the hell did you hear that?” Daddy learned even less about his family from his mother, the kind of stiff-lipped parent who didn’t tell him about her life in Trinidad but did give him this gem: always order the cognac. Should the bar you frequent be raided by stick up kids, he could hide his jewelry in the glass of dark liquor. 

I scanned the poster for African countries, concluding that it was an obvious place to start.  I had no ties to Africa other than my given name, which could be argued as being more African-American in its fumbling association to the mother continent. My eldest sister is named Walida, Arabic for ‘first love’ or ‘newborn child’. Next is Khalila, Arabic for ‘intimate friend’. My youngest sister’s name is Imani, also Arabic for faith. My name was lifted from Walida’s pre-school classmate. It means ‘God’s friend’ in “some West African language,'' according to Ma and the O.G. Khaholi’s mother. I am yet to find it in any Big Book of African Baby Names, and according to Google, it means “Did you mean, Khahli?” Ma even renamed herself at one point to ‘Maatu’. It was around the time she became a soft-core Hotep and would answer the phone saying “Peace,” the foreignness of it all making my teeth grind. My first memory of Ma’s reference to Blackness as other than American was the beaded bracelet she sometimes wore. She pointed to the beads: “Green for the land, red for the blood, black for the people.” I thought of a green land made for/by Black people. It was some place too vague to be more than a daydream. 

I continued to scan the poster of flags. There was the Democratic Republic of Congo: landlocked and central, the heart pumping the rest of the continent with backwardness, but otherwise irrelevant. I knew this because I saw the incessant Feed the Children commercials with the dusty land, 80 million flies and the one cow and everyone in the country shared. I saw the flag of South Africa. I knew of that place, too. It had sidewalks and apartment buildings. As far as being African went, I would settle for either South African or Egyptian, the latter of which I could not pass for since everyone knew that Egyptians look like me in the hieroglyphs, but like Elizabeth Taylor in real life. I traced a picture of the South African flag above my name and avoided looking at it on the bulletin board over the next few months. 

The gray area I found myself lost in was forever widening, shrinking, and shifting focus. Before our fifth-grade trip to Ellis Island, we had a lesson on the brave, moldy people who crowded onto boats and sailed towards the land of opportunity. We saw black-and-white pictures of stoic faces patched with soot and imagined that these immigrants sat on their square trundles to rest their tired feet and to exchange rumors about streets paved with gold. In America they found not gold, but a blinding white. This whiteness was a warm blanket Anglo-Americans kept tangled around their bodies as these kykes, micks and wops went cold in dirt-floor tenements. These off-whites were posthumously integrated, and in 1990, a stone slab etched with some of their names was erected in their honor. The teachers gave us each a strip of paper and a pencil stub to etch the names of our families who made the voluntary passage to the New World. 

Once on Ellis Island, I found the slab with the last names that start with ‘B’ and traced my finger to a group of people with my own last name. ‘Bailey’, an English derivative of a French term, meaning a porter or one who resides on the outskirts of the castle walls. That is to say, a professional transient who spent their lives on the outside, to the exponent of slavery. My family may have acquired that name because it was an honorable profession before they elected to come to Ellis Island, but probably not. Using the paper and pencil I made an imprint of these names, thought for a moment, then folded the paper and put it in my pocket anyway. When it was time to leave, the entire fifth grade met up at the agreed upon location. We easily identified each other by our matching T-shirts featuring our town’s mascot, the Brentwood Indian: a wise old man in a feathered headdress who, though fictitious, was certainly not from India. 

As an adult I moved to Harlem, where the junkies think it’s still 1987 and the brownstones are priced for 2050 inflation. Where Hazel Scott played one song on two pianos, where Malcolm preached at Mosque #7, where ideas became literature, where Alpo Martinez and Rich Porter were illuminated and distinguished, where Malcolm died at the Audubon Ballroom, where American dreams are remolded. I moved to Harlem not because of its singular identity, or because my family had a hand in building it, but because of its equidistance from Central and Morningside parks, Restaurant Row and four (four!) different subway lines a few blocks away. I was only able to afford the apartment because the government gave my landlord a tax break for corralling the broke people who wish to live on Manhattan Island. Admittedly the housing lottery has a certain funk to it, just as when Harlemites protested the creation of a sewage treatment plant, they were offered the insidious compromise of building Riverside State Park directly on top of it. Instead of my apartment going to a local family who was priced out of their generational home, it was I who fit the comically stringent income requirements for a two-bedroom walkup stealthily described as being located in neighboring Morningside Heights.  

            Approaching my apartment building, I could hear rats scurrying underneath trash heaps, and inside my apartment I would hear the mice, their fear of my approaching footsteps merely performative. On top of constant squeaking, there was often screaming all around: of motorcycles revving and children playing and laughter spilling out of restaurants. In the wee hours, I could hear toothless couples airing out all their resentments for each other and the street life, sometimes unselfconsciously, other times pleading See me, only to find their voices absorbed by cracks in the concrete. But mostly, my block sounded like oldies blaring from the street corner at three a.m. on weekdays. I stayed up many a summer night listening to The Gap Band and Cameo, waiting for the old New York trope of an elderly woman in a babushka scarf to throw a small bucket of trash onto the unofficial neighborhood DJ. 

That never happened, in part because the DJ was part of the neighborhood’s charm. I learned this from a white couple who were on what looked like their first date at a sushi restaurant in the neighborhood. I was able to eavesdrop on their conversation because I had long stopped listening to my own date, an earnest white man who probably thought he did everything right, handwritten poem and all. The thing was he nearly broke out in tremors of indignation as we listened to a Black woman recite her traumatic American experience at the amphitheater in Marcus Garvey Park.  

  “I can’t move to a neighborhood and call the cops for music playing at two a.m.,” the woman said. “It's not my decision to make. I moved into their neighborhood.”  

Sucker. I haven't called the cops, but I have called 311—the non-emergency line for New York City complaints— at least three times and they are most efficient. But she was right. It meant nothing to me that the most popular music genre started in part from music played in public spaces, or that the music I sometimes heard meant that the ‘perps’ were likely in their fifties, or that a stoop or corner is a perfectly reasonable place to form relationships with your neighbors. There's nothing neighborly about the way I behave, nothing connective about how little time I’ve spent above the iconic and commercial 125th street. Still, to look at me is to see someone who fits in well enough, even if the racial makeup of the zip code is lightening. I reserve the right to cock my head at the white families leaving their single-family residences and think, thank you for attracting Starbucks, now go home. 

Still, Harlem was their neighborhood, and by racial right, ‘my’ neighborhood, though some Black people didn’t settle there by choice. It became home to many Black Manhattanites who were displaced by racial violence and commercial development in other parts of Manhattan, such as Chelsea. Some areas were flattened, overtaken, or literally drowned. While every body of water in New York City potentially doubles as a cemetery, remnants of Seneca Village, a Black settlement, softens in the depths of Central Park’s Jackie Onassis Reservoir. When empty tenements needed to be filled, a Black real estate agent promised to fill those vacancies. With fewer options than their white counterparts, Black Harlemites were still charged higher rents and more likely to be evicted. Harlem eventually became a sanctioned area for Blacks, meant to contain the people who bore the weight of the oppression, but pain tends to penetrate the air around it. Racism is a shape shifting spot on your back you know just may be the death of you, a rustle in the joints that you couldn’t imagine a life without. The residents may have been Black, but the revelers and profiteers were of every color. Harlem was sometimes treated like land where people visited on holiday with seemingly inexhaustible resources but whose economy rests on tourism. 

A local church shares this sentiment. They make use of their towering sign on the corner of a popular avenue with evermore brazen messages. In some other context, say, in a zip code where the writers are of a legacy of aggression instead of defensiveness, some of the messages would be considered monstrously divisive. But here, it was ignored or accepted as the ethos of an older institution that long earned its right to be cranky. Once, the sign read something to the effect of, “save Harlem from the gentrifiers and sodomites.” I read it just as I read ‘MS-13’ on a trapper keeper in the early 2000’s, translating it as more of a formidable cultural icon than a potential threat. But by 2013, according to the District Attorney, kids in Brentwood were recruited to the very real gang from their English as a Second Language classes, a satellite that orbited the rest of the student body from light years away in a remote wing of the same school. MS-13 seemed to change from phantom to fruition, and Harlem was becoming Chelsea.

I pointed the sign out to my friend, a native Harlemite, and I eked out shocked laughter. Not because the sign was funny, but because laughing was proof that maybe I belonged. I took a picture of the message as self-validation, to record this outrageous New York City sighting, to piecemeal a tribal sense of community. I thought about the people who passed by and read it: the fathers, the artists, the hard of hearing, the homeless, the teachers, the skaters, the red-headed, the bus drivers, the wealthy, the wives, nephews, coaches, screamers, readers, and the loud-music-players. Who did they think Harlem belonged to? I wondered if the people who wrote the message felt confident that they could identify who was who. This land is our land, but never at the same time; whether it's the rent prices or the new neighbors, some of us will leave to build a new home that will be occupied, eventually, by everyone else