White Gentrifier Guilt

Over the past couple of weeks, I have been tooling around Teh Intarwebs and the real world, getting a feel for real estate. Watching my mom, aged 80, continuing to grapple with the question of whether to leave the home she shared with my stepfather (answer: almost certainly not) has me thinking about what I'd like my own old age to look like, and it's possible it might not look best in the house I've got.

When I purchased my home in July, 2001, I never imagined being in it 18 years. It was meant to be starter equity, to be traded in when I found some hapless victim man - really very nice, but nothing I meant to become permanently attached to.

Well, my equity is now old enough to vote, or to die in a foreign war (but not drink!), and I find myself wondering whether it might be best traded on at some point. The house is two steep storeys, AND has a full basement: and the laundry is located all the way down there. Being of a moronic and stubborn nature, this means I regularly huck hundred-pound loads of clothes up and down stairs in varying states of safe clearance. Oh, in my fantasies, some engineer appears magically and offers to build a motorized dumbwaiter in a convenient spot. But then, in my fantasies I also have a slate-floor screened porch, a brick car port with electricity, and the house is suddenly not located in a super-white neighborhood either.

Yeah, I am 51 years old, and have realized that MOST of my life has been lived in a White Flight bubble. The schools I went to were named for old white politicians, proponents of Massive Resistance (we could have been Edgar Allen Poe high, but ohhh no - must be a politician!). The suburbs I spent most of my time in were without diversity.

So I don't really want to live my entire life in the economic, cultural, and personal bubble that is White Fragility Comfort. If I do sell, I'd love to see my place go to people who don't look exactly like me. When I bought, I was still a little afraid to buy in neighborhoods with bars on the windows.

Now, I'm more afraid to buy in those neighborhoods because, inevitably, those of us who grew up like I did are seeing how nice the houses were, that our parents or grandparents left behind in heading for the suburbs ... and they're coming back, displacing historically Black neighborhoods, denuding beautiful homes of vintage architectural details (white shaker cabinets that do not reach the ceiling and theoretically high end finishes that clash with and poorly cover older homes' interiors - what I call "stick on" kitchens), falling for ugly and disrespectful flips. Gentrification is killing family businesses and families, pricing people out of places they have lived maybe for generations.

I don't want to be that person. The notation "yoga studios and coffee shops are popping up everywhere!" in a listing, translated, means "don't be scared, lil' white folks, you can come back to the city because we're papering over what it used to be as fast as we can destroy lives!" It also means ramping up economic inequality - and, cringe-ironically, sending those who'll no longer be able to stay to cheap apartments ... or maybe the midcentury ramp crappy flips we're leaving behind now that they're no longer fashionable.

In just a few weeks' looking at my own future and driving around trying to suss out the worst of the gentification, I haven't figured out how to puncture the white economic bubble I've spent an awful lot of my life in, versus avoiding landing like a lummox on an even more delicate neighborhood ecosystem without damage.

One thing I know: whatever comes, I'll have zero use for boo-teeks, coffee shops, or yoga studios, so at least I don't have to feed THAT aspect of economic flux.

But I don't really know if there is an answer. It's entirely possible the answer is, "Sit down and shut up" - and, the fact is, I'm entirely willing to take that answer. Eighteen years in, I let my eye rove, and what I find when I come literally home is, home is a really nice place. Maybe I ought to hope my own environs might diversify with time, and save money for that dumbwaiter, that porch, that car port. A person could do far worse.

For now, I'm educating myself, and it's already working. I'm getting a feel for what the real priorities would be, what it would take to take me away from the house where I have loved my Sweet Siddy La and Pen and Goss, where I endured my father's and my stepfather's and my best friend/sister's deaths. Where I felt Mr. X's hands across my back as he held me, the day dad died, the first time he ever visited here. It wouldn't be easy to strip my home and leave these walls, these bricks, these good bones.

Maybe at some point I'll figure out the balance. Maybe (it's remotely possible) Mr. X and I might even find a home together someday.

Eh, maybe I'll be hit by a bus tomorrow. It's unlikely. But in the meantime, I gotta live.

And my place isn't a bad one for doing that...

Collection

The Pee Dee river runs through the small South Carolina town where my grammaw lived. It's not one of the most famous American rivers, but it is one of the most fun names, and spoken with a good southern accent, it's charming into the bargain. Three cannon have been raised fro this river, and the story of the gunboat Pee Dee is an interesting one for American history buffs. Scuttled at one month of service, the craft's short life was nonetheless a part of Civil War history.

An interesting look at landscapes. Blackfoot art depicting encroachment upon Native American mineral rights at the British Museum. The British Museum blog is focusing on cultural dialogues; this one is especially striking.

The History Girls' Eleanor Updale has a particularly personal post about the Foundling Museum, London. Taking not only society's but artistic perspective on the state of  a woman of damaged virtue, here is a contemplation of the Victorian attitude - and the real history of a foundling's family.

The historical sewing and costume blogs I follow focus, almost necessarily, on the fine and the exceptional in textile history - because it is most often the fine and the exceptional that survive. Mojourner Truth has found a cache' of half century-old clothes we are both hoping he can find someone to preserve. His job has always been cooler than mine.

Back at The History Blog again, we have the unexpected evidence that mummification was more common on ancient Britain than might seem quite obvious. Mummification outside of desert climes: not just for peat bogs anymore! Beware, this does include phrases such as "putrefactive erosion", which I think would make a splendid name for a terrible band.

Local honey is good for allergies. Poison honey is good for exterminating your foes! "This actually works." Eep.

Collection

Does Janet Reid have the recipe for The Secret Sauce of Acceptance in publishing?  Tune in to find out!  (Side note:  "the glacial embrace of rejection" is the best phrase any of us can expect to read today.  She's a good writer herself, this agent.)

Pour La Victoire has another wonderfully detailed (with photos!) post about her latest preservation effort.  This time, a pair of very shiny silver evening shoes from the 1920s.  This will bring me shortly to my next fashion/style post, on metallics.

Hopewell Hopes Went Well

Okay, feels very good to have been some tiny part of this success in preservation.  How gratifying!

Even more so, you can still contribute - and, now, without the fear that it will be for nothing.  Here is the PayPal-enabled link.

Quoth The Raven: Kickstart Me

The Poe Museum in Richmond, Virginia is housed, not in a home of Edgar Allen Poe, but in the oldest home remaining in the city where he did live.  It's a smallish place, whose pretty back garden is sometimes a venue for weddings and receptions, in a busy stretch on the side of a historic hill.  Someone once called me from that place, and I had "EDGAR ALLEN POE" on my caller ID, tenaciously loved and preserved, until the day I moved out of that home.

The Poe Museum is a place I have visited; not as immediately impressive a museum as the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts perhaps, nor the Science Museum, the Children's Museum, nor even the Valentine Museum.  It is, however, one of many of Richmond's homages to its favorite son.

Image:  poemuseum.org

In the Poe Museum are to be found some of the most fantastical illustrations for The Raven.  It is a pleasure to see that these illustrations are subject to a Kickstarter fund for their preservation.  I've seen the state of preservation described in The History Blog's article, and to see them saved would be a pleasure.  I may have to learn how to contribute to a Kickstarter myself.