Candyman

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Zoot_Cat

My next door neighbors in New City were the remnants of the old Dutch/German farm families of Rockland County, and they were not happy about the changes around them. Family farms were split apart to make room for hastily-constructed tract homes, and the farm families who had long relied on those plots to make a living soon tore apart, too. Country life is significantly different than city life, as immortalized in the cartoons we watched as kids, like Tom the zoo-suited city cat who slickly tries to two-time good ole country mouse Jerry by stealing his girl. They were afraid of us, and deeply suspicious of our motives, as we were with them.

My dad got into property disputes right off the bat, and the folks up from the city were "coloreds"; just on our block alone, we had a Puerto Rican street preacher with a storefront church who never once signaled our existence to us. Not once, in all the years we lived there. The Italians next door were just as weird; Tino was a typical con artist of a jerk who hated everyone except Italians, including the black people he served pizza to in the Bronx, where he kept his store. The Evretts were African-American, and they had the last house built on our quiet country lane. They were extremely reserved as well, which only fueled the fires of our imaginations further. They kept a nanny goat in their backyard, which was so odd for the time, we joked they had "voodoo" rituals at night, hence the need for discretion and their relative distance from the rest of the pack.

There weren't many play options available for hip city kids like us, which led us to make a sometime acquaintance with the farm kids next door, though truthfully, they had a mental retardation that served more often as comic fodder for our bored country brains, rather than forming any real alliance between us. You did what you had to do. The nearest store was a mile walk away (and a hard one at that), to a tiny convenience store...sigh. So, sometimes when the country kids came a-knockin', we let 'em in, but the window was a very short one, since we'd passed them intellectually at birth. Eddie, the youngest, was so markedly effected that he couldn't speak real words, only a homemade kind of patois that his older sisters had to decode for us. "Drin" was his name for Kristine (she was the girl I played with), and "Grog" was his name for his middle sister Margaret.

He got into all sorts of trouble, the kind of trouble that retarded kids got into, like banging his head on the family tractor in their garage, causing a rush to the emergency room that only further hastened his decline of a lifelong condition that never fully cleared up. I re-connected with the sisters using social media to find out he had passed in his 30's, which didn't surprise me at all, though I expressed my condolences for our childhood friend. His nose always ran, and his eyes were either red or watery, giving his wide country face a streaked, mad appearance. They ran around without shoes or parents, which scared us, too. Who are they? Where are they? Their insular culture was only reinforced every time we saw their fat mama on the porch. She hated us on sight, preferring to team up with their uncle next door to strip our plot of its' rich topsoil, in retaliation for the humiliation of having to split up the family farm.

She was a tall, plain, fat woman with short mannish hair, who screamed at her kids to get back into their yard every time she saw them on our yard or playing with us, which freaked us out even more. The only time I heard her speak was when she came out of the old farmhouse to tell her kids that Elvis had died, and that was because my mom was in the yard with us, playing badminton with the family net we set up running parallel to their family plot. It was so odd for her to even speak to us, that I have never forgotten the event to this day. We saw her more infrequently after that, what with school and winters spent indoors. There were whispers going around that she was unhappy, and we kids just figured it was more redneck static about "city slickers" that they were expressing to our parents, because our mom and dad clammed up almost totally when we were at the kitchen table, giving each other silent adult-like looks instead.

The only other time I ever remember seeing her again was the next summer, when my mom told me she was pregnant again. I tried making out the swell of her stomach but honestly, because of her weight, cheap baggy clothes, and ugly demeanor, spying was hard, plus I really didn't care what women did with their husbands when playtime was to be had, however infrequent it was at times. After that, we waited for the baby to be born so we could see the farmer's wife at suppertime, when she opened the kitchen door to shout for her three kids, who may be anywhere in the vicinity, and we were not disappointed. Finally, one evening the screen door banged open loudly to reveal her large frame with a small swaddled bundle in her arms. The kids were in the yard with us again, with our family group playing badminton, and we were rewarded for our patience with a closer look, bolstered by the presence of my mom.

We creeped up to the line of tall bushes they planted to separate us from their view, a harsh property line to obscure the horrors of city-folk in close proximity to their sturdy farmer's stock, or so we thought. Emboldened by my nosey mom, we stood right next to the bush line to get a closer view of the baby in her arms, my mom telling us that she was indoors a lot because newborns needed a lot of attention (to explain her relative absence as a country housewife, which was weird in hindsight), to see tiny arms and feet moving. There's the baby! We've always been a child-loving family, so the sight of a newborn made us really happy, and for once, the farmers wife seemed proud to have our attention. You see, dear readers, as the baby squirmed in his blankie, he pushed down the part that was covering his face, a face that was not "white" in any way, shape, or form.

Our snobbish uptight farmer's wife had just given birth to a beautiful and obviously "black" little boy, and that was the last time we ever saw her again. My mom couldn't wait to run indoors to tell my dad, and neither could we. Gossip this good didn't break 'round there very often, and when it was as juicy as this, no one could refrain from talking about it. After all, the indiscretion was already out, right? She'd cheated on her farmer husband with a black man, and their wasn't enough land in all of New York State to cover up that fact. They moved away after that, the kids with the mom, with the father alone in the house for sometime on his own. I kept in touch with the oldest girl via "Pen Pal" letters for awhile, but given how little we had in common besides proximity, the friendship died out. None of them would attend college or attain the status that was always my destiny to reach, leaving little besides New City goings-on to message each other about, which is exactly what we did during my brief foray into common social media.

As hard as the break-up had been at the time for their family, the girls enjoy (to this day) a happy, healthy relationship with their younger biracial half-brother, choosing to have a loving family instead of perpetuating the typical prejudices of the day, a rare but very beautiful ending to the beginning of this witching hour that is the start of our traditional Samhain season (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samhain). Get ready for the real bugbears* of this world. It's Halloween.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bugbear

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candyman_%28film%29

Rock you like a hurricane

http://www.himandus.net/hofh/chauvin/richard/richard_00_acadian_history.html

I planned on writing a piece today about minority culture, when a casual conversation with my neighbor directed me towards another key issue affecting impoverished Americans that's a tie-in with today's "Hurricane Joachim" conditions, and that is this: flooding. It's no secret to my Acadian, Cajun, and Creole peoples that oppressed minorities who threaten the status quo were (are) pushed into marshlands and swamps (what up, Zydeco fans?), conveniently "resettled" during occupational wars with not-so-hidden agendas. Richly fertile island nations with beautifully exotic women were suspiciously targeted the most often. 

To this day, "white" Canada disparagingly refers to any native person as an "Aboriginal", in a clear attempt to marginalize their First Nation status by wrongly placing them in the same category as the people of Australia, who are seen as less than attractive by the European Penal Colonists sent there without choice. Obviously, each human tribe on Planet Earth has a range of beauty from the ugly to the more comely, but it is no secret (see me in pics) that the Métis figured something out: French (or Scotch/Irish) guy mates with squaw = an "OMIGOD, how do I get my hands on that?!" level of attractiveness that my sweet Norman Barese grandmother from the Abruzzi region of Italy called "Oo la la!" in a loud voice whenever she thought it was wise to remind her family about me and my key "factor", and she was never wrong about anything. Like, ever.

The Canadian government recently officially recognized that the enforced separation, murder, and ethnic cleansing of Acadian Métis was "unfortunate", which is kind of like saying that the Serbian Croatian War was "bad". Yeah, you think? Ripping families apart based on eye color has become such a taboo subject in my culture, that deeply ingrained prejudices about it remain in place to this day. My Québécois/Irish-American college boyfriend from Bay Ridge, Brooklyn told me a few times that he had qualms about my "marriageability" because I have brown eyes (strikingly coal-black eyes are a trademark Métis feature) and he has blue eyes, and, ahem, you know, well, maybe he wanted blue-eyed children. Me, looking like what you know to be true, and he is no supermodel. It was a petty little head game he played with me to parlay my supposed insecurities about my looks into his hands, which...well, you see where I'm at with him today. Nowheresville.

Race continues to define the descendants of a culture that took American ideals at face value when it came to openly assimilating different cultures. French with Africaine? No problem: you Creole now. European with a Native? Okay, we are Métis. Ditto with your Irish, Scottish, British, and Dutch ancestors with us. Now you tribe, too. Twenty-five percent is all you typically need to get in, barring any serious medical conditions like violently anti-social paranoid schizophrenia (which is kind of a "no-no" in any human community), and we just might let you in for life. All we ask is that you accept my brother and my sister, who may or may not share eye color or the exact same skin tone, but we have a wide range. You follow me here? 

The Acadian Deportation (Le Grand Dérangement) is exactly what got you stranded in an area below sea level, ami. Homeboy, you sinkin' in Red Hook right now ("Hoek" in Dutch, New Amsterdam) because they don't like you and your kind, especially if you get along well with your neighbor, who may or may not be the same color as you. Ya dig? You're the "problem" they want gone. "But, who exactly is 'they'"? "Who", indeed. Now you're asking the right questions. See you on the other side, friends. And take swimmin' lessons in the hood, mes Cajuns et Creoles. Hurricane season is officially here.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_Hurricane_Katrina_in_New_Orleans 

http://portsidetanker.blogspot.com/2013/02/red-hook-sandy-surge-map.html 

https://umaine.edu/canam/publications/st-croix/acadian-deportation-migration-resettlement/ 

Loosey Goosey

When the bottom fell out of my life financially and economically through spiteful intent and malicious design, after my supposed friends and family abandoned me, I found that abandonment embodied in a ramshackle tenement, in what was also supposed to be one of the "best" neighborhoods in New York City: Park Slope, Brooklyn. By no coincidence, it is comprised mostly of white out-of-towners who ask to be resettled there through their also-wealthy realtors and big money companies, so that they can feel some sense of security living in a town with a really bad reputation, much hyped as it is on t.v. and in movies. It is not my native New York.

It should then also come as no surprise to us, as New Yorkers, that we awoke Sunday morning to a loudly trumpeted double murder and suicide luridly served up and gleefully splashed across every local "news" program, a horror that was supposedly committed in response to "racism" (a divisive concept I do not believe in, because it is a human construct that does not actually exist in our blood that flows freely), but which is actually madness in the guise of evil. I was not fooled by the gunman's racist exhortations online, a mockery to all of us during this season of glad tidings and one very special birthday, but isn't that the point, the very hell that we women relive each and every day? We give birth, only to watch men and boys kill each other (our children) in each others' name. One life is given, and two are taken away, or two are taken and one is murdered, but the result for a woman is always the same: grief, pain, and mourning, as we watch our children taken away from us, after laboring so hard to keep them alive and safe under our charge, brief a time as it is.

And so it was with me, when I was forced into poverty and homelessness by the very people who pledged to give me life and succor it gladly in G-d's name, in His House, and standing on His alter; a move I made done in quick fear to a rotten, filthy hole of a building with horrors inside that also existed in full view of one of the wealthiest neighborhood's in the world, like a sacrilege to any who dared enter it, in the form of a roach-filled, rat-infested tenement that was the only thing I could afford to pay at the time before another corporate job started (at half the salary and below my level, you know, to fully take advantage of my vulnerable status). My labor only encouraged the tenants who lived there, beneath me in every regard, to feed off my body and blood as I worked unholy hours every day and night for them. I gave them everything: first as my money earned through my labor which is made from my honest and good hard work, my few scant hours of free time filled up with their petty tricks lies, deceits, and nonsense, all my best advice and attentions, my good wishes, all my richest and most worthy gifts freely given to them, and still it did no good. They still choose each day to waste G-d's precious riches.

The man who introduced me into his world and environment was recommended this dirty place through the local bodega, the very same place that sold him "loose" cigarettes, an unknown element to me before I came first to sleep on his floor in his sleeping bag and then, after I paid he and the super to help me empty out another filthy room adjacent to his little cell, was the same place I made clean so I that could sleep in that chamber of horrors that was padlocked with a chain instead of a doorknob before I went to work in the city, earning more for them to take from me cruelly, as they devised. 

This focal point of crime disguised as just another local bodega served as the community hot spot for criminal endeavors, because I asked my fallen friend to tell me about it. The same bodega owner who sold him cigarettes one by one in a small paper bag also took advantage of his derangement and continued poverty by directing him to an illegal tenement where he squatted, until the rich old white lady owner from Long Island found out that super was also in on the take, and kicked us out through some rich white lawyers working the city housing court system, because we hadn't given her enough to stay in her illegal building. After all my battles there were won, I actually paid what is considered "fair market value" for the privilege of staying in her squalor.

They told my mentally ill friend at the bodega (because he was new to this place that he always aspired to be, susceptible as he was: a broken ghetto kid from Brownsville) where to buy pot, and they advertised in their store window how they could illegal hack into your iPhone for a $50 fee (which was locked because you couldn't pay your phone bill) through something also unknown to me at the time that's called a "jailbreak". My friend and a neighbor had to teach me how to do it, where to go, and which man to ask for at the bodega for these services. They were that unknown to me at the time; these strange, foreign, shadowy, secretive underworld concepts that baffled me and still do, like the criminal who spends ten years plotting a crime that's over in ten minutes, never recouping his actual loss spent planning such hopeless endeavors. That's how wasteful and stupid it was to me, emotions not dulled or diminished today through the time and distance that has passed.

So the next time some carnival barker (with his obvious freckles and slick pompadour) appears on t.v., the same one who refuses to pay taxes in our home state and city where he also resides, tries to convince you that we exist in a society that's as flat and dull as any generic black and white cookie bought in a corner bodega that can easily be broken in half, remember my words here as you read my true life tale, before you rush to judgement about who is the criminal and who is the thief. Chances are that when you look in the mirror, it's you, and that this current tired rerun being played out on t.v. for sport and amusement is a phoney crusade made from fool's gold.

http://www.withsprinklesontop.net

Merry Christmas to you during His Holy Days
of Peace, Prosperity, and Love.