The Town of Babylon by Alejandro Varela

Author:Alejandro Varela
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Astra Publishing House

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The house was only a half mile from the schools, markets, gas stations, and restaurants, but that distance served as a daily reminder of the true distance it measured. The neighborhood, to its credit, had more trees than the rest of the town, which kept it a few degrees cooler in the summer and warmer in the winter. Their home was a one-story ranch-style structure with two bedrooms and a moderate-sized backyard where Phyllis and Wesley put up hammocks and planted tomatoes, peppers, garlic, squash, and strawberries. The neighborhood was as Rodney, the security guard, had said, exclusively Black, and of those Black people, there was an even split between the African Americans whose ancestors had been forced into this country hundreds of years before and those who’d had a more recent arrival, primarily Jamaicans, Haitians, and Trinidadians, along with two Garifuna families from Honduras, and one Senegalese couple. All of whom had lived in the city and eventually made their way to the town. At least twenty of the neighbors could be traced back to George, a bus driver in the city, who had told as many Black people as he could about the neighborhood within the town.

Many of Wesley and Phyllis’s neighbors were working-class people whose schooling had ended at seventeen or eighteen. There were also factory workers, salesmen, security guards, police officers, plumbers, and electricians with college degrees. And there was a banker, a pediatrician, a professor of economics, a pilot, and an engineer who worked on HVAC systems for mid-level businesses, all of whom could have afforded to live in much bigger houses and in nicer neighborhoods, but who had, just as Wesley and Phyllis, contented themselves with having yards and living in a suburb with a simple commute to the city.

After six years, and after growing tired of the confined space—“A house with two academics should have a study,” Wesley insisted—they sold their home to a young, childless couple (air-traffic controller, nurse) and moved to the west side, an area whose divisions between Irish and Italian had long since wavered, but which remained resolutely white, apart from the few families who, through pride, optimism, or obliviousness, had breached the boundaries.

Phyllis and Wesley had, again, endeavored to find a home in another town, but they’d faced the same manmade problems as before. Realtors only showed them houses in the few scattered Black neighborhoods between their current home and the city, areas that had fallen into deep disrepair over the previous decades. Abandoned homes on ruined streets where, if one looked closely, they could see the lost potential.

“I’m not raising a child in a place where corners are a leap of faith. Frankly, I don’t want to live in a place like that either.”

“You know what your problem is?” Wesley poked. “You’re more comfortable with white nuisance than Black nuisance.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“Whites are on street corners too. They’ve got their own ways of menacing. But you’re okay with them?”

“I’m not okay with anything.

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