Where You're Not Supposed To Go

My dad tells me that one day he found me sitting in the window with my legs dangling outside. I think I was three. This was when we lived in the projects in Brownsville/East New York before moving to 201 Linden Boulevard in Flatbush. No one knows who opened the window. I was too small. My little hands couldn't manage it. Daddy crept up behind me slowly so he didn't startle me into falling. He grabbed me. Kept me safe. I shouldn't have been sitting there, but I was. I wonder what had captured my mind that day and called me to the window?


I guess all kids are drawn to the things they're not supposed to do, and the places they're not supposed to go. The signs say Keep Out!, and my mind wants to know Why? What don't you want me to see? What don't you want me to do? What don't you want me to know? Is that Adam and Eve's curiosity about the wrong tree pulling on me? Maybe. But what if it's not?

Imagine little eyes looking outside, wondering. Little hands up against windows curious about that space behind the buildings. The space I could see from the hallway window and my brother's bedroom, but couldn't get to because of the big, black, ornate locked gates. Back there where there were fire escapes. Back there where I could see my friend's window on the fourth floor of the B building from our apartment on the second floor of the C building. What was that back there? A handball wall? Seemed like a place to play, but why was the gate locked? Hmm. Little watching eyes figured out that it wasn't always locked. Sometimes they forgot and I'd go back there and run! Run the whole length of the block and hope there was another way out so I didn't have to go back where I came from. I saw the back of 179 and 221 Linden Boulevard, and even the apartment buildings on Lenox Road. I felt free and wild and scared and breathless. Lots of broken glass and trash, true, but man it was fun. Sometimes I was with other neighborhood kids. Sometimes it was just me. Just Afrika, as if the whole continent that is me could be "just" anything.

Always curious.

Always jumping over fences, even in Kaisha's building on Fenimore.

Going into Downstate Medical Center's student lounge, playing video games, throwing rocks, walking that road behind King's County Hospital, passing the J building where they kept the scary people. Buying Now and Laters, Swedish fish, lemon and chocolate chip cookies from the jar, Lemonheads, Alexander the Grape, Big Bol candy gum, candy cigarettes, Sugar Daddies and Sugar Babies and that weird wax candy with the juice in the middle.

Saying goodbye to Fiona as she made the left turn on Nostrand Avenue toward where she stayed.  Wondering what new adventure the next day would bring. 

I love watching movies like Crooklyn and shows like The Get Down because they capture that New York City before gentrification changed everything. It'll always be like that in my mind even if it's not like that anymore. 

As I'm creating my characters, I'm wondering where are the places they'll end up because they wouldn't let anyone keep them boxed in? Most of the time when I write, my characters go to places I wish I had allowed myself to explore if I hadn't let other people draw borders in my mind - not let other people colonize Afrika. There's been far too much of that for far too long.