jimmy - pam clements

The neighborhood I moved into was called “transitional” during the years I was in Charleston.  Gentrification was just becoming a reality in the city.  The streets just north of Calhoun Street had long been occupied exclusively by Black families, but white people like my landlady had begun buying the classic Charleston “single houses,” sprucing them up, and renting their attached carriage houses, originally slave houses, to other white people.  When I arrived, only a few houses on our block of Pitt Street were white-owned; by the time I left the peninsula four years later, over half the street’s population was white, and the value of these run-down houses was rapidly rising.  I was fascinated to be living in a racially-mixed area, and felt vaguely superior when colleagues expressed worry about me, a single woman, living in the place I had chosen.

From the house directly across the street, a large retired Black man presided over our two-block stretch.  He was called Jimmy, and he made sure the neighborhood kids behaved themselves.  He spent each morning, and many afternoons, sitting on the steps in front of his house, watching out for malfeasance.  He spoke to many of the kids stepping out on the way to school, admonished the rambunctious, sometimes yelling at them, or more often, simply gesturing to them to calm down or get out of the street.  

As houses along our street began to gentrify, the small alley between Pitt Street and Coming Street – named Duncan Street -- seemed to be caught in an earlier time.   Smaller clapboard houses ranged this street, and while they had side yards, those yards were mainly dirt, not grass, dirt that women swept daily.  Window shutters and doors were painted bright blue, an Afro-Caribbean custom I learned was meant to keep spirits, or h’ants, away.  Sometimes, for a party, there would be a fire lit in one of the dirt yards, with wooden chairs drawn up around it; there would be beer drinking and laughter.  The Charleston-Caribbean linkage was very clear here.  It could have been 1950; some dark nights, it could have been 1850.

It was exhilarating to see what had been and to witness the changes coming.  However.  Over a distance of years, I recognize with some sorrow that I never really got to know my Black neighbors; I made no real overtures.  My friendships were centered on the College, academia at best resembling a small town. 

The lessons of gentrification everywhere were ones I certainly could not see at the time.  In the middle of what could have been real diversity, I still lived in a bubble of privilege.

Outside the white family that owned my house, Jimmy was the person I had the most contact with on the street.  Every weekday morning, carrying a briefcase full of freshman essays, I’d hit the sidewalk and cross over to Jimmy’s corner, where he would already be sitting.  He’d look up, I’d look over, and we would smile.  “Hi, Jimmy, how are ya?” I’d blurt in my flat Buffalo accent.  And every day he would answer, drawling the words and merging them together,  “Aw---right.”  

Once in a while I’d follow up with, “The kids behaving themselves?”  

“Sometime’, sometime.  They all right.” 

He would nod sagely.  I never inquired after his family or his health.

To my deep regret, I never learned his last name.

Pam Clements’ writing has appeared in several literary magazines, including Kalliope, The Palo Alto Review, The Baltimore Review. She has published a volume of poetry, Earth Science, and has completed a memoir about five years she spent teaching in Charleston, South Carolina. Born in Buffalo, she now lives in Albany, New York.