South End Stories

On the street where I spent most of my childhood, past Iroquois Pizza and the old gas station turned ice cream shop that stuck a fortune cookie in your milkshakes turned tiny car sales lot, two different houses burned down. One was an electrical fire at my sister’s friend’s house, and the other one toward the dead end ditch I always assumed was to do with meth or something criminal, from the way it stayed blackened and unfinished for so long. It was an unfounded assumption, but not one I was invested in – just passing speculation from neighborhood kids’ gossip as we went to go explore the half-constructed subdivision growing behind and above us.

Those are the things I think of when I think about the South End – the big hill that led to the nicer houses and the half-constructed subdivisions that were our playgrounds and the weird small businesses which I loved in varying degrees. I spent an obnoxious amount of time in high school waxing poetic about the geography and how it felt different and essential to me. Except for my sophomore year when I attended Doss because I no longer was receiving a scholarship, I went to Mercy for high school, where most of my classmates and all of my close friends were born and raised far east of I-65, and I crowed I told you so with righteous triumph when they went to college and realized that perhaps J-town is not the ultimate underdog pitted against to the “real” east end.

A lot of that was me being a teenage contrarian, but it was also borne of experiences like going on a field trip to the Cane Run power plant while it was still active an environmental justice component of junior service and hearing a lecture on how the plant’s toxic output affected the poor people who lived nearby. From my seat on the bus, I could see the house of a grade school friend and I had the sudden overwhelming feeling of being an impostor, an outsider, somehow alone.

 

Of course, the South End, like every other place in this city and this country, is built on inequality. In 2010, the year I went to Doss, they had no AP classes at all; I never took Algebra I because my elementary school didn’t offer it. Andrew and Charlotte Wade bought a house in Shively in 1954 and were treated to the highest order of South End neighborliness when their house was bombed because they had the audacity to be black. That same year my white grandfather turned eight peacefully in the house his father had built on Manslick Road. Two decades later my grandma watched the busing riots, and forty years after that I wrote a speech for English on Louisville’s desegregation bus problems in my East End classroom, thinking of my other South End school.

Describing the South End as being divided from “the African-American community to the west” without referencing the violent history that kept that line sharp is at best willful ignorance, just as is implying some kind of moral superiority because “South enders didn’t move to the area because they had to. It was a choice,” without acknowledging those who were quite literally not allowed to move there. We have to remember that communities are made of people and to tell a true story about a place, we can’t forget who those people actually includes. We have to be able to talk about the effects of coal emissions choking your neighborhood and unequal school opportunities and de facto segregation without it turning into the prologue to a boostrapping advocate’s wet dream. We shouldn’t have to justify our own achievements and lives against other areas’ dollar values, because wealth is not equivalent to worth, regardless of whether it’s boastful or not.

Being from the South End doesn’t make you an underdog, or an overachiever, or inherently more helpful to your neighbors or secretly better off or a better basketball coach. We become the people we are because of the places that shaped us, the people that moved us, the obstacles that did or didn’t stop us, and we deserve the chance to critique the stories told about us, even the ones we tell ourselves.

 

Here is one story: In the South End there once was a subdivision that once was a construction site that once was a forest we used to play in. After they leveled the forest but before they built any homes, there was the mud and gravel of a desert, an alien planet, a spy’s destination, anywhere we could dream it to be that was not the forest that had once been. My best friend and I and some other friends rode our bikes down the hill and I flew off mine when I took a turn too sharp. It was the second time that place had tried to claim me; I once lost an entire shoe to a deep pit of mud and had to be piggybacked to my friend’s house because it was too rough and rocky to walk barefoot. Splayed out next to my bike I was too shocked to feel much at all about having to pick the gravel out of my palm. Some of the pieces were small and wouldn’t come out of my skin for days.

The moral of this story is don’t let your kids play in construction sites unless you have no other options. The moral of the story is the South End is always becoming something unfamiliar. The moral of the story is we had nowhere better to go except through drainage pipes to the tiny green space at the bottom of the rich, steep subdivision across the street but that felt more like trespassing than this. The moral of the story is my best friend is my roommate twenty years later and sometimes we turn to one another and say, “Christ, our childhood was messed up!” for reasons no one else understands. The moral of the story is that I got back up, because what else is there to do but keep going. The moral of the story is longer than the story itself.

The moral of this story is that there is no moral, only more stories. The least interesting of all my scars is a little white line at the base of my right palm where a piece of the place I grew up got stuck and wouldn’t leave.