My mother and father were liberal in their own way, blanching at the notion that color made a difference; sympathizing with grass-cutters and garbage-men who looked dog-tired long before they were able to quit working. But like most people who had money enough, they gravitated toward the edge of town, where young people were buying houses and raising families. I vaguely remembered our first Kansas City house, with its slide-away doors and swing-set in the backyard. Houses like that didn’t exist until after WW II.

When my father was transferred to Memphis, he and my mother chose to live in a sort of Levittown community near the city’s Eastern frontier. I saw the first big shopping center come in. And watched a skyscraper rise from the tarpaper roofs and azalea-rich yards of old Boxtown, which sold out, some years ago, to corporate America. Ours was a neighborhood of one-story houses laid out in cookie-cutter fashion along a two-lane road which, when it got hot, was sticky to the touch. I could walk to the store, but big shopping trips were done by car. We went downtown for the finer things – and for movies. In those days, there was the Lowe’s Palace and Warner Theatre, among others. The Malco was my favorite, with its palatial interior, plushy seating, and uniformed ushers.

To get downtown, you had to drive past neighborhoods like these: somewhat dog-tired places that housed the garbage-men and grass-cutters who generally took the bus to wherever they were going. They were somewhat unruly places that were inadequately trimmed, though prodigiously gardened. On the weekends, people cut through boundaries and partied from house to house – as very few people did in my neighborhood. On Sundays, the streets were color-mad with the great, wide-brimmed hats and other human foliage East Memphis had effectively sloughed off – or banned by the restrictive covenants that made certain types of real estate, among other things, unavailable to people of color. Church with us was an obligatory affair, done with little joy and managed with facial expressions that ranged from dour to disappointed. In these neighborhoods on the way to downtown, church was so important that the joy element had not yet gone astray. I sometimes heard these churches rollicking from within and wondered: how on earth that could be?

This question was not answered for some time – and may never be answered fully. But, when I became an adult, I, through easy choice and agreeable necessity, began to live in areas that had both horrified and fascinated my parents. Areas that weren’t as keen on image as my old neighborhood was. Areas that stayed awake a bit longer and lived somewhat on the windy side of politeness and propriety. Areas that wore their happiness on their sleeves – even as they happily licked whatever wounds they got in whatever way they got them. There were fewer right angles in these areas, right-thinking having been retired – or never allowed.

A very good, if somewhat erratic, artist lived near the site in this painting. In his name was the plain and Anglo-Saxon: Charles, or Charlie. His little house was a kind of liberty hall that attracted every lowdown character who had nose enough to sniff the marijuana, which was its native scent. I met a yardman there who was an excellent comedian, if incorrigible drunk. Great African drummers passed through Charlie’s doors, as well as wannabe artists and blues musicians par excellence. The light was always on, beer was in the fridge, and, if he came to the door, Charlie motioned for you to come and stay awhile. When I was a kid, I took accordion lessons around the corner, in a place that had morphed into a cut-rate grocery store.

My street-scene suggests little of what went on in that neighborhood on the way to Downtown, but its wide traffic-lanes and clapboard houses speak volumes to me. They speak of a way of life I craved when I was a child – and still crave, as a middle-aged adult, unto this very day. They speak of freedom, danger, chance. They speak of color and spontaneity. They speak of possibilities that were not present in the East Memphis neighborhood I grew to like for what it could offer in the way of comfort and propriety; of grass evenly cut, cars in good repair, and people who were very sure of who they were and deviated not a jot.