A Good Neighborhood by Therese Anne Fowler

Author:Therese Anne Fowler [Fowler, Therese Anne]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9781250237279
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group
Published: 2020-03-09T18:30:00+00:00

* * *

Chris had called Valerie prickly, and we would agree that this was a fair descriptor for how she’d been behaving in recent days. She’d agree, too, and she didn’t like feeling that way. She hoped the lawsuit would be resolved in short order so that everything and everyone would more or less go back to normal. What she’d said to Xavier bears repeating: she knew the Whitmans would never be her friends and she was all right with that. She was okay with being seen by some as too passionate about her issues—surely there’d been people around Rosa Parks who wanted her to let well enough alone. Surely some of the Reverend Dr. King’s friends had told him he might be going too far. Not that environmental protection was quite the same thing as civil rights, and not that she was on par with any of the real warriors. But she had to do what she could, that was just how she was built.

See Valerie when she’d left home for college, high on winning a full-ride scholarship to nearby Michigan State University. Having nourished herself for years on Nina Simone’s sixties hit “To Be Young, Gifted, and Black,” she was now eighteen years old, a petite dynamo with chin-length Janet Jackson hair, oversized tees, baggy jeans, high-top sneakers, and a can-do attitude about saving the planet. She’d just spent four years with her head down, nose in her books, aiming for the grades that would carry her out of that duplex where “Uncle” Ray lived upstairs—with his mother now, probably thinking about his good old days of flashing Valerie and hoping for Mama to pass soon so that he could pick up where he’d left off; there was a new family of girls next door.

Learning, for Valerie, was like eating for most of us. It energized and sustained her. It gave her power on a lot of levels. It gave her purpose. Had she been born a decade or two earlier, her energies might have been put to the ongoing civil rights movement. As it was, she believed the cause that now needed people like her was the environment. She believed she could contribute more there. She was not prickly back then, she was sharp. Well—not sharp like fashionable. She’d never been that. Sharp like intelligent, energetic, ambitious.

During holiday breaks and summer vacation, she volunteered her time any and every place she could get to that needed kids who’d clear trash and pull weeds, who’d build and plant community gardens, who’d lead grade-school children on educational hikes, who’d count birds or deer, who’d sample water from creeks and streams, who’d chart data and write proposals that organizations could then take to politicians (back in the days when climate change wasn’t a partisan issue).

She’d been as terrified to be in college as she was excited to get there. Suppose she failed? Suppose she sat in those classrooms with their white professors and white students and made a poor showing?

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