I am embarrassed to admit that I loved Levittown even when it didn’t love me. It was my first home, and like my first love, embedded while my tissue was still soft, shape shifting me, making me tough and nimble and maybe a little too paranoid. Running around in my development of Junewood and the neighboring ones of Kenwood and Dogwood, I learned early that people felt free to yell anything they wanted to out of car windows to little Black girls, and on the street, friends were as important as family.
When I was growing up, Levatown as we pronounced it, was a land of backyard fruit trees gone wild, alliterated street names—Jonquil, Jester, Jewel—and white people who escaped from or never had any intention of living in Philadelphia. We were among the early Black families to fight our way into that suburb that chewed up many of its young, the way places built on the promise of Summer will. I consider myself one of the lucky ones, protected by my scrappy brothers just as my father taught and embraced by friends who defied their bigoted parents.
My summer days were spent learning to do backbends and handstands on Linda’s[1] front yard, the cool grass padding our falls or choreographing dance numbers to Diana Ross and Cher songs. In the evenings we chased lightning bugs and then tore off their abdomens to make glow rings for each of our fingers. Race was there as it is, always. Like when Linda came out of her house as I stood on her front lawn in my bathing suit to tell me her parents didn’t think it was a good idea for me to come to her country club swimming pool. And so was the shadow of being raised by parents who had been in World War II, known hunger and ached for something they found it impossible to give words to.
As I watch American Horror Story, rich in shock porn, I think, but know it can’t be true, that it has nothing on Levittown in the 1970s. Against the backdrop of gas station brawls incited by rationing, and mosquito trucks spewing repellent, boys popped their dislocated shoulders back into place and teenagers walked around with fingers missing to the knuckle. No surprise then that by the time I went away to college, I was practiced at holding in my screams.
My father left the family house when, as my eldest brother tells me, I was five years old, but for many years after he still took us two younger kids to lunch at the Chinese restaurant with dewy white waitresses where we were forced to eat foods we did not know. Pressed duck. Broccoli in oyster sauce. And always an excursion after. Silver Lake to look at the ducks. The Neshaminy Mall to window shop. Then there was the annual fair held in the Levittown Shopping Center parking lot with a ferris wheel that lit up the night sky and kiosks that filled the air with the smell of burnt sugar and fried dough.
The summer I turned twelve and learned my red hot boy love would never be reciprocated if I stayed in Levittown, I held my little sister’s pudgy hand as we waited silently for our turn to ride the rickety roller coaster. All I wanted to do was land a ping pong ball in a cheap cocktail glass so I could bring home a stuffed alligator for her, but we stayed in the line that zigged and zagged and then went straight all the way to the cotton candy vendor to please our father who said we needed to get over our fear. He waited outside of the picket fence that came to his knees, his stare vacant, thinking about things that had nothing to do with us. I clenched my teeth and my little sister sobbed as the stringy haired carny watched us go round and round in matching cotton summer dresses our mother had made.
After, there was the haunted house that I stopped being afraid of a year earlier when my brother punched a kid dressed in a monster costume in the face as he jumped up and down on the hood of our slow moving kiddie car. That was one of the many times over the years that I was thankful for my brother’s violence. In fact, it was usually only at night when my brothers got into fist fights in their room, right above mine, that I would wish it were different.
In the Freak Tent my father paid extra for because, perhaps, he thought we were finally old enough to know these life truths, a formaldehyde-soaked baby with two heads floated in an over-sized pickle jar, fists clenched. Sepia liquid sloshed and the rigid baby leaned when the man picked it up to give us a closer look. Although it was dead, I knew it was real, and those little fingers and slitted eyes still make me sad whenever I think about it.
We never complained about the heads or being trapped on the ride because we didn’t think there was anything to tell, but eventually, as over the years the images layered into a kaleidoscope of terror, my younger sister stopped going on the outings. When my father’s visits became less frequent, I was glad to have the time to spend with my friends.
As teenagers, we were free balling, left to ourselves to swim in the quarry alongside the broken cement and rusted rebar, and ice skate on the semi-frozen canal, my brothers agile in their hockey skates. We got up to no good in the forts we built in the slim woods along that dirty water. And then it all got ruined when too many kids found out about them and got up to their own no good. We never knew what we would find when we pulled back the bedsheet that we tacked to the peeling gray limbs of the fort to keep the flies out. We used old tee shirts to sweep out chicken bones, and burnt matches and twigs to pick up used condoms. I stopped going to the forts when we found a stained mattress flopped into the too small space so that there was no getting around it.
Even though I tried hard not to be one of the kids called accident prone, I had broken wrist bones, deep cuts that left fifty-year-old scars, and a worry about tetanus and sepsis. We lived our lives outside (except for the older brothers who came home from Vietnam and stayed in their rooms, locking their hollow Jubilee doors). No homework. No piano lessons. No family gatherings for me and my friends. We hung around and smoked Marlboros and joints that didn’t make us that high. And then to combat the boredom of our idleness, we created eddies of physical danger.
There was Debbie who lived next door to the apartments, perfect for peering through the kitchen window curtains, lights out, as the fire trucks we called to put out imaginary flames raced to Building A. During a sleepover, we found a box of X-rated books tucked into the back of a closet and would stay up late into the night each of us paging through, looking for the exciting bits. I remember I asked, but she said no, I couldn’t take any of the books home. When Debbie fell through the late Spring ice of the canal as I walked along the edge, too scared to go to the middle, I became a little less enamored of her recklessness.
Brenda, who I tried to talk into taking the train with me back to my college dorm in Boston so she could get away from drugs, was a dear and true friend. She used to walk me right into her house, daring her mother, always perched on her stool, and her father with his strange neck tics to say anything about the Black girl. “Fuck them,” she’d say. She held my hand, too, as we made our way across rocks in the stream and talked me into climbing trees to limbs that offered perfect resting places. Later, her fierceness and loyalty did her little good when her brother Kenny was decapitated because he was not quick like her. Did not get down when their car was about to go under a truck on the freeway and she yelled, “Duck.”
Donna, who used to steal wads of one dollar bills out of her mother’s purse while she slept after coming home late from her waitressing job, ate pickles from the barrel at the pharmacy on Haines Road and red bell peppers like they were apples while I gorged on Entenmann’s crumb cakes. She was agile, and strong and always picked me for kickball and manhunt. We called her a tomboy and back then I wanted to be one, too and my envy made me shy.
The Bobbys were as different from each other as could be, one battling anorexia before we knew the word, the other so smart, telling Donna that her hard life now would make her a strong person later, or maybe a poet. We hung around under the streetlight near their houses which I never saw the inside of, telling each other our secrets while slapping mosquitoes in the summer and pulling our arms inside our shirts as the autumn sun went down.
I can still picture the miscellaneous kids like Tommy, who I had a crush on, but who paid me no mind until I put on the sleek pageboy wig of a friend’s mother for fun. When he saw me, he stared. Said something like, “You should always wear that.” His sister wore short shorts and my brother told me not to be jealous because she had dimpled thighs. Cindy next door became a nurse and married a doctor (or was that Betty, the younger sister). Jennifer, who had a scar in the middle of her chest from where her brother shot her with a BB gun, was never told when to come in for the evening and was the first girl I ever saw wear high-top Converse sneakers.
All the neighbor kids who weren’t my friends still figured largely in my life because of who they were and who I could never be in Levittown—children sure of their place like the Moores over on Junewood Drive or the Johnsons a few doors down. Even though our family was known and admired by some, mainly because my four older brothers were personable and athletic, I could never get over the thought that I was from that family. I knew what was expected of me. To not be so sensitive when someone made an anti-Black joke or be stronger when I was turned away outright at a friend’s front door. I was expected to toughen up and take it. And for the most part I did a lot of the latter and not much of the former. I don’t remember a time when I was living there that I felt comfortable in my own skin. Literally.
There were three or four families at the other end of the street, who I can’t remember in detail because we had nothing to do with them. In 1959, shortly after my father bought the four-bedroom house, a Jubilee, for a little over $11,000, they started a petition to try to keep my older siblings and parents from moving into the neighborhood. (I would be born the next year and my younger sister four years later.) Now, I wonder if the developer, William Levitt, who had a whites only policy written into the standard lease that stated homes could not “be used or occupied by any person other than members of the Caucasian race”[2] had a hand in starting or encouraging that petition. Even though they weren’t successful, they still had some say in my life; when I came upon their houses while riding my bike on the sidewalk, I would cross over to the other side just to be safe, and I spent my childhood feeling indebted to the Clarks and Campbells who stood up to the petitioners.
The kids who lived outside of the Ranchers, Jubilees, and Colonials in odd shaped houses on streets with no sidewalk were even more enthralling than the ones close by. One of them, Johnny, was a hero to me because of how nonchalant he was about his half foot. One hazy August afternoon we were hanging out by the tracks on their side of Levittown, sooty reed grass tucked into the corners of our mouths, when he pointed to a freight train rolling through.
“I loved doing that,” he said, “but I won’t do it again. Too slow now. You should try it.”
Another friend told us how good Johnny was at catching up to lumbering trains and how he would give the finger to his slower friends as he disappeared around a bend.
I imagined running alongside one of the cars with doors wide open and grabbing a handrail like Johnny had done a hundred times until that one time he missed. It wasn’t until many years later after I had left Levittown, but not yet started to lie about where I had come from, that I would think of myself as an athlete. And then I would dream about making that leap.
When I lived in Levittown, I wanted what Levittown offered. To be loved for hip bones accentuated by brass belt buckles, and hair that swung across my face. To be carefree, shooting cigarette butts into the air, and irreverent, willing to joke about inappropriate touching or racist taunts. Even though I would never be or look like that, I still embraced my home town. The land of my first home. What made me give up on her and lie about where I was from for the better part of forty years was how others perceived Levittown.
In college, my roommate pointed out a passage in her psychology textbook in which Levittown was given as an example of a “behavioral sink”. As I remember it, the term was defined by images of rats trying to drag down other rats who had succeeded in making it from the bottom of a crowned floor to the top of a container, close to freedom. It did not take me long to understand that saying I was from Levittown was yet another status marker. “Oh, Levittown,” they’d say, but most often mean the planned community in New York (and not the ones in Pennsylvania, Delaware or New Jersey), “what was it like there?” At first, I’d try to mitigate the disapproval by saying that no, I was from PA. Later I learned to say, “Philadelphia,” even though I had been there fewer than five times while I was growing up just 30 miles to the northeast.
Not too long ago, I asked my eldest brother who was born in 1949 if he was sorry that they moved away from Steelton, a borough outside of Harrisburg that he remembers as being majority Black. (Today, according to the World Population Review website, Steelton is about 45% Black and Levittown, Pennsylvania is a little over 4% Black.)[3] He was ten years old at the time and what he remembers most is his dog, Rudy. People remembered him, though. When my mother died in 1992, Steelton friends and neighbors, all of them Black, who my brother had not seen in decades came to the funeral to pay their respects. I remember how expectant they were and how ashamed I felt because I knew we were not as good as they thought we were.
Sometimes I consider the possibilities. What would it have been like to have been raised there instead of Levittown? But honestly, I cannot even imagine it. My flesh has grown over the name calling, and even though it was close, my brother was not kept in jail for the robbery he did not commit and although there were warnings with guns, none of them were shot. I am left with a feeling of pride in our familial rage, remnants of our earliest resistance.
[1] All the names have been changed. [2] https://www.nytimes.com/1997/12/28/nyregion/at-50-levittown-contends-with-its-legacy-of-bias.html. [3] https://worldpopulationreview.com/us-cities/steelton-pa-population
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