Written by GELT Participant – Dan Tompkins
It was an afternoon in summer. Me, this guy James, and a girl named Marion walked down the middle of the road. We were in a rough area. It’s called Highland Park.
The three of us were working with GELT, a community organization that wanted to get some energy efficiency to houses that needed it most. It was a local nonprofit that believed in a green economy. The headquarters was just down the street.
James was tough. He seemed to approach the situation like he had seen the worst of human nature and come back from it unscathed. He moved like a man who had transcended arrogance and conceit and replaced those lesser emotions with pure independence. He talked in clipped, information filled, sentences. One of the first things he said was something like, “If I could get away with it, I would threaten the life of every single person who ever knocked on my door. I would make it so everyone interrupting me during my favorite show would fear death.” He then alluded to intimate knowledge of the abandoned buildings around us.
I laughed and repeated the last thing he said. I’d only met him that morning and was still trying to get a read of his sense of humor. When in doubt, I look for the humor. Maybe he sensed my tension, because from there on out he kept insisting that “people are just people” and regardless of where they have a house, they are just as angry, just as sad, and just as friendly as the rest of us. He was talking about the people ahead of us. They gathered in driveways around barbeques and in loose circles close to their porches. A lot of them wore do-rags that I had come to associate with rap culture, ghetto culture, and crime. It seemed like there were kids everywhere.
