East of Western Avenue

There is a town called Ford Heights twenty-five minutes from the house I grew up in, and until this spring, at thirty years old, I had never been. I had never avoided it; in fact, I never considered it. It had never once arrived on any list of places to go, which is the stranger fact. You can decide against a place. You cannot decide against a place that has never entered your mind as a place at all. That is the shape invisibility actually takes, and it is worth being precise about whose failure it is.

I used to say, with the warm vagueness these sentences invite, that I wanted to spend my life on the people the world overlooks: the invisible. It is a phrase that should be examined before it is let out of the house. Invisible to whom? Not to themselves; they get up each day and live lives that are entirely visible from the inside. Not really to the state, which sees them well enough to police them. The honest answer, the one with an indictment folded into it, is that they are invisible to me: an artifact of having been raised in a white, middle-class pocket that sits physically adjacent to places like Ford Heights and is sealed off from them by a wall you cannot photograph. Adjacency means nothing when the boundary is conceptual and a hundred and fifty feet high.

So I drove it, with one rule: I would not go looking for what I already expected. I had made the list anyone makes (the currency exchanges, the dollar stores, the empty lots) and then deliberately put it away, because to go confirming it would only have confirmed it. The thing worth watching was not the town. It was me: where my shoulders dropped and where they tightened, where I felt I belonged and where the belonging thinned. A friend had asked me how you even get to a place you have never thought to go, and the only true answer I had was that you have to borrow a stranger’s eyes, because your own have already drawn the map without you.

The drive is mostly a lesson in boundaries you did not know were drawn. The forest preserve works like a moat; you take an interchange to cross it, as if leaving a city. A Greek Orthodox church and a cemetery full of Greek names sit in what is now an Arab neighborhood: the eastern Mediterranean laid down in sediment, one community moving into the streets the last one left. Down Harlem, around 85th, everything becomes Arab and stays Arab (Palestinian, and then unmistakably Yemeni) for blocks, the way Tunis is Tunis and then suddenly you’re in the medina. Past new, pleasant majority-Black suburbs, you cross Western Avenue, and within a block I was the only white driver on the road and the road itself changed: grass over the curbs, brick, the dark ghosts of letters on signs whose letters are gone, rust on rust on rust, and the only people not inside cars standing at a post waiting for the bus.

Ford Heights, when I reached it, was not different in kind from what came before, it was only intensified: two businesses, a dollar store and a liquor store, not even a currency exchange, and so small I had crossed it before I understood I was inside it. I want to be careful here, because everything I could say about how it looked is a sentence about my looking. What I can report without lying is the inside of the car: that a color-coded crime map that I saw before departing had told me to be afraid, and that the fear was real and arrived on schedule, and that it was an artifact, capital playing the nerves directly, the map doing to me exactly what it is built to do. The danger in such places is real and it is also manufactured, and I passed in twenty minutes through the thing other people are made to live inside, and then I was out the far side in an exurb that “felt fine,” and the only honest difference between me and the map’s red was a single afternoon and a return address.

I did not come back with the poverty as my discovery; it was never hidden from the people living it, and to treat it as my finding would be its own small theft. What I came back with was the wall: that it is mine, that it was built early and well, and that the work of a life might be less about helping the people on the far side of it than about the slow, unflattering labor of taking down the side I am standing on. And one question I could not put down on the drive home, that I still can’t: a wall like that does not build itself, and it does not stand for nothing. Somebody is kept comfortable by my never having thought to go. I don’t yet know how to name him. I suspect I have met him in the mirror.