My first outing when I moved to Louisville, KY was a trip to the library. My father and I were living in the senior citizen high-rise at that time and the library was walking distance from there. I loved to read when I was younger and would sometimes finish a book in a day. I read one of the Harry Potter books in about 24 hours, staying up past midnight to finish it. Of course this level of dedication to reading was pre social media. The library that we would frequent had a summer book reading contest where if you read so many books from this list, you would be rewarded with a basket full of different items.
My father and I would walk there often since I was only allowed to check out three books at a time and I was finishing them so quickly. One of the things from the reward basket was a small magnetic refrigerator picture frame. It's a mustard-colored rectangular that says, "I SPY YOU READING." My father put that magnet on the refrigerator of every apartment he moved into up until he passed away. It's a picture of him standing and me leaning on his big beer belly with a white and red hair bow on top of my head. The photo was taken at a skating rink birthday party for one of my cousins. The two have aged into each other, making then hard to be separated. I've kept the tradition of putting that frame on my refrigerators as well. It's over 25 years old now.
Louisville was still doing desegregation bussing when I started 3rd grade. It was the city's attempt to diversify the schools since it's generally illegal to go to schools outside of your school district. Some of the kids in my neighborhood would be rallied up at the parking lot of our neighborhood school, Coleridge Taylor, where there would be a bunch of yellow school buses ready to take us to different elementary schools. I was assigned to Lowe Elementary which was 20 minutes away. I attended this school for 3 years in which I learned Spanish, played the violin (5 years total), participated in a few in-school clubs, and always brought "cheese in a can" and crackers to eat for lunch.
My school world was very different from my home one. My neighborhood friends weren't bussed out like me for some reason. They would tell me that my properness was "talking white" and one of my "friends" once said to me that I needed to change from my school uniform when I get home because it made us "all look bad".
Sade was my best friend and she lived in the building behind mine. We maintained our friendship for years and even wrote each other letters when I moved to Chicago years later. I met Sade when my dad MADE me leave our apartment to go "make a friend". He did everything but lock me out of the apartment to do it. I went to the park across the street where there was a kid playing on a big climbing dome. We ran around chasing each other for a long while before we realized that we were both girls. It's such a random thing. We both took our hoods off in the cold weather and simultaneously said, "I didn't know you were a girl!"
Sade's mother was strict so it would take a lot to get her to come outside or come over to our apartment to make up dances to Diana Ross and the Supremes. I loved making up dances and we had choreographed ones to every song on their "Number 1's" album. My father listened to a lot of soul music and this was one of the albums he let me have. He had nothing but blues/soul CDs except for a random Mary J Blige one. Sade would sneak and talk to me on the phone when her mother was sleeping on days that she couldn't come out. One time I had to stay hidden in her closet for what seemed like forever when her mother came home unexpectedly, and I wasn't supposed to be there. The closet was suffocating because I had to sit high up on a pile of clothes since her mother was a mild hoarder.
I liked Sade’s mother whose name was Linda even though I was afraid of her. Ms. Linda was nice to me and never disciplined Sade in front of me. She worked at a factory that made magic water coloring books. They were booklets that came with a clear marker that you would use to color. The area you colored would turn from white to a pink, green, red, etc. One of my fondest childhood memories was going to the Louisville Zoo with Ms. Linda and Sade for one of the halloween events. I still have pictures of Sade and I wearing matching pink outfits and posing in different parts of the zoo. I think that Sade’s outfit got lost in one of their piles at home because we never dressed alike after that.
There used to be a placed called The Galleria that was in downtown Louisville on 4th street. It had fast-food restaurants and shopping stores that came together to form a 2 story mini mall. Sade and I would go there and ask people for $1 until we had enough money to buy a CD or something else. I don't know remember why I did this since my dad would give me anything that I wanted and he had made a habit of giving me $1 a day.
I took it one step further by having Sade or another friend walk with me to the Dollar Store to buy candy to sell in the neighborhood. I would use the money I made to buy more candy or other little things. I have no idea why I was a candy pusher. I would walk about half a mile to the Dollar Store, pick out what I thought was the best candy, place the pieces neatly into a silver metallic organizer, and then walk around the neighborhood opening it up to collect my dimes and quarters in exchange for a piece or two.
My dad would give me $5 or so and my friends and I would walk to Broadway Street to order chicken from Indi's or $1 items from the McDonald or Wendy's menu. I would buy food for my friends or someone would eat the rest of the chicken "off the bone" from my chicken flats or drums. Bacon cheeseburgers, small fries, milk shakes, and spicy chicken is what my diet mostly consisted of in my younger years. My father cooked daily but it was always the same thing. During the morning there would always be biscuits, eggs, and spicy sausage sitting in an old cake pan that was lined with paper towels. By dinner time that pan would be swapped for fried chicken wings. My father was a good cook since he was raised in Mississippi but he made the same dishes on repeat. It was always those items and a jug of Sunny-D or Nesquik syrup in the fridge for me.
My father, whose name was born Sharōn Cunningham, was born in 1934. His first name was feminine so most people just called him “Cunningham.” He was retired by the time we moved to Louisville, Kentucky in 1997. He did odd jobs like janitorial work at hotels but nothing full time. His retired occupation title was “glass maker”. There was a phrase that kids would say when you were blocking their view: “Move! Your dad wasn’t a glassmaker!” which I got to reply: “Yes he was!” as I continued to obstruct their view.
Being retired means having a fixed income. Living in public housing was one of the few choices for a single parent other than Section 8 which always had a wait list. My father and I made the best of it. He rarely left home to spend money on anything other than beer, but when he did he would frequent the horse racetrack. He usually watched horse racing on the television set or sat on the porch drinking with a friend that had been walking past. My father never had a girlfriend or a woman stay over to my knowledge and didn’t date, despite him being attractive and looking younger than what he was.
There were a couple of times that I had issues with other kids living in Beecher Terrace. My dad had signed me up for a neighborhood community center that I didn’t care to go to. I didn’t like going because some of the other kids in my neighborhood were just mean kids. There was a time when we were all playing kickball at the center when all of a sudden three of the girls on the other team told me that they were going to beat me up when the day was over because I was making my team win. The adults tried to stop them from bothering me but grownups aren't always able to do as much as they would like. The girls kept saying how they were going to jump me even after I started making myself play poorly, so I ran home as soon as we were let out for the day.
My dad was furious when he found out how much I feared the other girls so he marched me over to the Center to talk to the people who were in charge. Like I said, adults aren't able to do as much as they would like. I ended up just avoiding the block that they lived on as much as I could for a long time. Out of site, out of mind. They never got the chance to beat me up.
People ask me, "what was it like living in the projects? Weren't you scared?" It's not as scary as you would think (in the 90s). Those scary kids are your friends or friends of your friends. Those adults are parents of those kids. Your parents know each other and sometimes they will argue and fight about something that their kids might do or some form of, "people need to mind their business!" Most times things didn’t escalate much because at the end of the day it's our neighborhood; our home. Some of us were just bad ass kids in households trying to mind our business.
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