Meida’s Grandmother’s House
Some of my earliest memories are of my grandmother’s greystone building at 314 S. Spaulding. Her house was a gathering place for our whole family: my parents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. From birth through elementary school, I spent a lot of time at my grandma’s house, first through the Fifth City preschool, then at Faraday Elementary before I transferred to Skinner Elementary. As a kid, after school I took the bus back to my grandmother’s house and spent afternoons and evenings there until my mother was ready to head home. This left ample time for participating in afterschool programs, jumping rope, going to the playground or penny candy store, or just running the streets and being outside as children did back then. Fifth City Revisited begins with some of these memories integrating my grandmother’s house with other potent community anchors of the neighborhood, registering the importance of these spaces and places through a child’s eyes. Below I share one of the beginning monologues tracking these memories and their importance.
The community center
The shopping plaza
The preschool
The Iron Man statue
My grandmother’s house
I have been returning to these memories more and more. Fragments of childhood. Romanticised beginnings because pieces are all I have. My grandmother’s plastic covered couch and the small living room with big windows facing the bus barn in her 2 flat greystone off the corner of Jackson & Spaulding.
My Uncle Johnny’s room off to the left. My Aunt Mary’s laughter coming down the hall across from my Grandma’s room where she kept her TV with the good cable on it. Where she hid the sweets she brought home from work at the Leaf candy factory. My cousins and I would sneak in to watch shows on Spectrum and OnTV and sometimes steal the candy treasure tucked away...Lemonheads, Red Hots, Alexander the Grapes, malted whoppers, and sweeties.
And surrounding this space of my Grandma’s house existed a Westside neighborhood, Fifth City. A community set on rebuilding itself. I have partial memories of this space and place so pivotal to my beginnings...and that continues to echo its pattern of influence on my evolution.
These memories are bound up in the markers of space and place. In the space and place of collective action, power to the people, youth investment, and helping ourselves. These symbolic locations and the activities they inspired were gifts I now understand as lineage, passed down and embedded in my being.
It is also a space and place of deep sadness, a potential never wholly realized, a lesson etched in the residual history of urban space that is both mourned and modeled...But, that is for later...
I begin with these markers that bring me warmth. That hold me strong. That root me deep. That help me imagine possibility.
The community center
The shopping plaza
The preschool
The Iron Man statue
My grandmother’s house
The community center was a place for meetings, social gatherings, celebrations of rites of passage. I remember my preschool graduation there. Tiny me in cap and gown surrounded by other Black children being fed symbols and songs as tools to build a strong sense of self-worth and cultural identity.
The shopping plaza had a grocery, a laundromat and dry cleaners, a currency exchange, an auto shop, and a fast food joint. All Black owned and operated businesses led and guided by a cadre of local resident leaders: Verdell Trice, Lillie Fox, Ruth Carter, Bertha Pinkston, Lela Mosley.
Outside in the concrete square of this small 16 block enclave stood a tall Black Iron Man statue.
With arms and stance stretched wide, the Iron Man always felt like bravery, like strength, like foundation, like a mirror to remind us of who we are.
In memory space, the preschool was games and songs and learning letters and numbers and getting my hair braided on the playground and chocolate pudding and the secret flavor combination of graham crackers dipped in orange juice and armies of red-shirted Iron Man children chanting Black pride, Black value, Black love.
Black. Black. Black as it’s most beautiful...In becoming and being.
I was learning who I was, reflected through the teachings of adults who wanted to give us the strongest sense of ourselves. Who wanted us to internalize this love and stand on it. To reinforce this love through songs, through learning, through symbols and adornment, through the world we saw around us.
Fifth City remade a world that refused to acknowledge our power.
—Meida McNeal
