us toward Bennett Street, and we’re on our way. Backing down Tokay can be a real trick at busy traffic times of day. It’s a chore anytime, fighting the high, broken curb, the blind corners where cars from Seagirt and Bricelyn pop into Tokay. Cars come at you shuddering down the hill, cars behind your back gun their engines for a running start up Tokay. In Homewood you still get points for laying rubber, for flying full blast down the precipitous, potholed slopes of streets like Tokay and Seagirt. People enjoy tearing up big, shiny cars. But early in the morning, at the hour we shoot for when we visit you in prison, the streets are relatively quiet.
Down Tokay, left on Bennett, seven blocks over to Braddock till it crosses Penn Avenue, and Homewood’s behind us. That quick. That little snatch of Bennett, then Braddock till it crosses Penn carry us past the heart of the ghetto. Or where the heart once was. Since 1860 black people have lived in a pocket of streets, dirt paths before they were paved, between Homewood Avenue and Dunfermline Street. Kelly, Hamilton, Tioga, Cassina, Susquehanna, Finance—Braddock Avenue touches them all before passing under a concrete bridge that launches trains into the sky of Homewood. The railroad tracks linking this bridge on Braddock with the one over Homewood Avenue separate Homewood from the once predominantly white neighborhoods along its southern edge. When we lived on Finance Street those tracks marked one border of my world. Across Finance the pavement ended. A steep, weed-covered embankment rose to the railroad tracks. Before you were born, my sleep was couched in the rhythm of trains. Some nights I’d lie awake waiting for the crash of steel wheels, for the iron fist to grab me and shake me, for the long, echoing silence afterward to carry me away. Homewood was a valley between the thunder of the tracks and the quiet hills to the east, hills like Bruston, up whose flanks narrow streets meandered or, like Tokay, shot straight to the sky.
Homewood’s always been the wrong side of the tracks from the perspective of its white neighbors south of Penn Avenue. On the wrong side of the tracks—under the tracks, if the truth be told—in a deep hollow between Penn and the abrupt rise of Bruston Hill. When we leave for the prison the five minutes we spend negotiating an edge of this valley seem to take forever. Traffic lights on every corner attempt to slow down people for whom driving is not so much a means of moving from one place to another as a display of aggression, fearlessness, and style. When you drive an automobile in Homewood you commit yourself to a serious game of chicken. On narrow, two-way streets like Finance you automatically whip down the center, claiming it, daring anyone to buck your play. Inside your car with WAMO cooking on the radio, you are lord and master and anyplace your tires kiss becomes your domain. Jesus have mercy on the chump who doesn’t get out your way.
The trip to visit you in prison begins with me behind the wheel, backing down Tokay then trying to run a string of green lights to get us quickly out of Homewood. No matter how skillfully I cheat on yellow, one or two red lights catch us and that’s part of the reason it seems to take so long to cover a short distance. But being stalled by a red light does not slow us down as much as the weight of the Homewood streets in my imagination. The streets had been my stomping ground, my briar patch. The place I’d fled from with all my might, the place always snatching me back.
Memories of the streets are dense, impacted. Threads of guilt bind each tapestry of associations. Guilt bright red as the black blood sealed beneath Homewood’s sidewalks. Someone had stripped Homewood bare, mounted it, and ridden it till it collapsed and lay dying, sprawled beneath the rider, who still spurred it and bounced up and down and screamed, Giddyup. I knew someone had done that to Homewood, to its people, to me. The evidence plain as day through the windshield of my car: an atrocious crime had been committed and I had witnessed it, continued to witness it during those short visits home each summer or for the Christmas holidays, yet I did nothing about what I saw. Not the crime, not the damage that had been wrought. I knew too much but most of the time counted myself lucky because I had escaped and wasn’t required to act on what I knew. Today, this morning on the way to visit you in Western Penitentiary, the rape of Homewood was being consummated, was flourishing in broad daylight, and nobody, including me, was uttering a mumbling word.
A need to go slowly, to register each detail of violated terrain competes with an urge to get the hell out before some doped-up fool without insurance or a pot to piss in comes barreling out of a side street and totals my new Volvo wagon. Cords at the back of my neck ache. Street names trigger flashbacks. Uncle Ote’s laughing voice, the blue-flowered china bowl in my grandmother’s closet, Aunt Geraldine sneaking me a hot sausage smothered in peppers and onions from DiLeo’s late on Saturday night, hiding in the stiff weeds on the hillside, riding on Big Melvin’s shoulders. Melvin was a giant and twenty years old but played with us kids and was dumber than a stone and died under the wheels of a bread truck because he was too dumb to cross Tioga Street. Fragments. A blues verse fading in and out. Got two minds to leave here. Just one telling me stay.
The parkway parallels the Monongahela River. Below us, across the water, on the South Side are some of the steel mills that gave Pittsburgh its claim to fame. The smokestacks of Jones & Laughlin and United States Steel. People say better steel is manufactured now across the ocean in Japan and Scandinavia. Better steel produced more efficiently by modern, computerized mills. I don’t doubt it. J & L’s huge blast furnaces appear antique. Old, rusty guts that the ghost of Fred Willis, the junkman, will rip off one night and cart away. From the colonial period onward, steel determined the economic health of Pittsburgh and it continues to color the city’s image of itself. Steeltown, U.S.A. Home of the Iron Dukes and NFL Champion Steelers. Home of Iron City Beer. But for decades Pittsburgh’s steel industry has been suffering from foreign competition. Miles of deserted sheds, part of J & L’s original mill stretch below the highway. Too many layoffs and cutbacks and strikes. Too much greed and too little imagination in the managerial class, too much alienation among workers. Almost any adult male in Pittsburgh, black or white, can tell you a story about how these hulking, rusty skeletons lining the riverfront haunted his working life.
To get to the North Side of the city from the parkway, I exit at Fort Duquesne Bridge. After the bridge the car winds around Three Rivers Stadium. It’s a dumb way to go but I don’t get lost. Inside the concrete bowl tiers of orange, blue, and gold seats are visible. Danny and Jake always have something to say here. Danny is a diehard Steelers fan and Jake roots for the team closest to home, the Denver Broncos. One brother will remind the other of a play, a game in the series between the two AFC rivals. Then it’s put down and shout down till one silences the other or an adult short-circuits impending mayhem and silences both. I still live and die with the Steelers but I stay out of the bickering, unless they need a fact confirmed, which they need me for less and less each year as their grasp of stats and personalities begins to exceed mine. Even if I’m not consulted (and it hurts a little when I’m not), I welcome the diversion. I listen to them squabble and I pick my way through confusing signs and detours and blind turns that, if I’m lucky, get us off the merry-go-round ramps circling Three Rivers and down onto Ohio River Boulevard.
Again we parallel a river, this time the brown Ohio. To an outsider Pittsburgh must seem all bridges, tunnels, rivers, and hills. If you’re not climbing into the sky or burrowing into the bowels of the earth, you’re suspended, crossing water or looking down on a hodgepodge scramble of houses strewn up and down the sides of a ravine. You’d wonder how people live clinging to terraced hillsides. Why they trust ancient, doddering bridges to ferry them over the void. Why they truck along at seventy miles an hour on a narrow shelf chiseled in the stone shoulders of a mountain. A funicular railway erected in 1875 inches up Mount Washington, connecting the lower South Side to Duquesne Heights. Pittsburghers call it the Incline. Ride the rickety cars up the mountain’s sheer face for fun now, since tunnels and expressways and bridges have made the Incline’s service obsolete.
After Fort Duquesne Bridge and the Stadium, we’re on the North Side, an adjoining city called Allegheny until it was incorporated into Pittsburgh proper in 1907. Urban renewal has destroyed nearly all the original residential buildings. We skirt the high rises, low rises, condos, malls, the shopping centers, singles bars, and discos that replaced the stolid, foursquare architecture of Old Allegheny. Twin relics, two ugly, ornate, boxish buildings squat
