We Were Once a Family by Roxanna Asgarian

Author:Roxanna Asgarian
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

* * *

Nestled between two infamous Houston neighborhoods, the Third Ward and Sunnyside, the strip of Scott Street where Nathaniel Davis lived wasn’t quite in the bounds of either. In some circles, this neighborhood was called either OST—short for Old Spanish Trail, a major boulevard that ran through it—or South Union. But in the neighborhood, I had heard some people call this area Southlawn, for the notorious 242-unit apartment complex butting up against Cullen Middle School, which was the subject of a gang injunction filed by the Harris County Attorney in 2015. The injunction attempted to ban ninety-two Black men from a two-mile area surrounding the complex, which was known as a hotbed of gang activity. The idea of gang injunctions was widely promoted in Los Angeles in the 1990s, when anti-gang task forces proliferated in police departments across the country. But the tide had turned against them, as groups like the American Civil Liberties Union pointed out that they violated the civil rights of those targeted, who weren’t able to visit their families who lived in the targeted zones without the threat of jail time. In 2016, amid a public outcry, the Southlawn injunction was dropped.

Scott Street, which runs from downtown through the Third Ward, along the University of Houston campus, changes in feel as you cross Brays Bayou. The street becomes more alive, with people walking—a relative rarity in sprawling Houston—toward fast-food joints and check-cashing spots and Black beauty stores.

Nathaniel Davis’s gated complex is across from Navy Seafood, a tiny fish-fry place with its name hand-painted in yellow letters on a bright green background. YOU BUY, WE FRY, it says above the glass door, reinforced with burglar bars.

I found Nathaniel’s door and knocked. He answered, and invited me in. He was tiny, his back hunched over, glassy eyes set within a face worn down with age. Clean cut, Nathaniel kept his gray hair clipped close to his head and his shirt tucked into belted jeans; he wore sneakers.

Nathaniel spoke in a slow drawl, his Black Texas vernacular morphing at times into a kind of unique shorthand. People sometimes have a hard time making out what he’s saying, and as I sat with him, I concentrated hard on his words, asking him things several times and trying to parse from his various replies what he meant to say.

Nathaniel made it clear to me that he wasn’t the biological father of Dontay, Devonte, Jeremiah, and Ciera but was the only father they had ever known. “My name is on their birth certificates,” he told me. (He is listed as the father on Devonte’s, at least.) As he spoke about the children, tears pooled in the inner corners of his eyes, darkening the creases alongside his nose. He told me that after he lost the children for good, he had several heart attacks.

Nathaniel took out some photos of the children that he’d kept in the house. Dontay, maybe five years old, standing at an easel with an apron over his white shirt and khaki shorts, a paintbrush in his hand.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.