Water Street by Crystal Wilkinson

We are almost Southern but not northern at all. There are white folks here like everywhere but Stanford's black children thrive here on this street. We are tucked snug down in these deep brown pockets. This street is our homeland.

In the summer you will see our cinnamon sons, our dusky daughters playing in the street or wallowing in plastic swimming pools in our backyards. Girls with Chinese jump ropes fashioned from a long string of rubber bands or hula hoops swirling around their hips. Boys playing peggy bounce or kickball. You will smell the smoke from charcoal grills. Hear the chicken and the steaks sear. If you peep through the shrubs you might catch us some sweltering afternoon with our sweet iced tea glasses turned up and our bellies full of saucy baby-back ribs, collards or kale fresh from our gardens, roasted corn on the cob or home-made potato salad. We'll even share some if you like. We are that kind of people.

There are flowers in our mother's gardens. Vegetables too. Zenias and okra. Big boy tomatoes and bright sunshine squash. Begonias and potatoes. Sunflowers and runner beans. Even in these times our mahogany and oak-cast children ride bicycles along our street. They take long walks into town to Durham's Grocery to feast on barbeque potato chips, red pop and fudgesicle bars. They are not bad children but they are accustomed to being shooed from neighboring fields. Still somehow they always escape with an acceptable stash of green apples or juicy red tomatoes. Our teenagers lay on their backs at night and talk to each other and the stars right out in the street up on the hill. Katydid and cricket symphonies sprinkle the dark of night here. We have street lights but we are not quite country. Not city at all. In the winter, grandmothers quilt the way their mother's mothers taught them to. Pots are full of home-made chili and vegetable soup made with summer's backyard bounty. Children sled and have neighborhood snow ball fights. We have hot chocolate get togethers and coffee sharing evenings in each other's living rooms.

Our men are one generation removed from farming but they still wear their farmer's clothes underneath work uniforms to remember where they're from. We still know the old folks' ways even if we keep it to ourselves. When the town trucks don't make it up here to salt our street, we are content with being snowed in, knowing we still have our father's fathers ways to keep us safe and warm and fed.

Water Street is a place where mothers can turn their backs to flip a pancake or hoecake on the stove and know our children are safe. We are a hardworking bunch. Each morning if you were a hawk soaring in our beautiful sky you would see the yellow bus that scoops up our children and takes them to school and you could see our cars departing to factories, to beauty shops, to offices, to the neighboring towns.

We are the people who fix the street lights, ring up the groceries or the new clothes. We keep the books straight. We nurse the sick. We sew buttons. We answer the phone. We deliver the mail. Deliver the truck loads. We keep the factories running. We type the papers. Run the office. We teach the kids. Because there is not always work nearby some of us migrate to Danville, to Somerset, to Lexington, even Louisville. Sometimes we are on the road for hours a day but feel at ease when we go home. It's a choice we've made because we love our clean street, pristine yards, comfortable porches. We are safe here. We are plain and we are fancy.

We love being close to the people we've known since we entered the world. And we hate it. Everybody knows your name here. Everyone has committed the long lists of your kin to memory.

We are a God-fearing people. Baptists mostly. We attend church every Sunday. Some of us still worship where our parent's parents received the Lord. On Water Street, every person has at least two stories to tell. One story that the light of day shines on and the other that lives only in the pitch black of night, the kind of story that a person carries beneath their breastbones for safekeeping.