Walk With Us

Triplet Boys
their Teen Parents
& Two White Women
who Tagged Along

by Elizabeth K. Gordon
dedicated to Joseph Scott Gordon

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 . . . caring asks doing. It is a long baptism into the seas of humankind, my daughter.
Better immersion than to live untouched. . . . Yet how will you sustain?
from “O Yes” by Tillie Olsen

Introduction

I came back to Philadelphia because I could not run away again. Twice I’d lived on the affordable

edge of its inner city, and twice left. The first time I was twenty and sharing a house with five University

of Pennsylvania students. Not a student myself, I was nevertheless learning. It was the late seventies. I

went to open mikes in storefronts painted Peter Max style, crashed a poetry class at Penn, and relished a

workshop at the Jewish Y with Sonia Sanchez. Money I earned selling leather coats at the downtown

mall.

I enjoyed the tree shaded enclave of the Penn campus, with its modern sculpture and fortunate

young people, but the streets drew me too: vendors and preachers, the suddenly shifting compositions of

fountain and child, spire and cloud, “angels in the architecture” (as Paul Simon sings it), genius in the

graffiti. A street musician played his plastic recorder out to the side as if it were a silver flute. When I

heard the same man’s music not long ago, almost thirty years later — Greensleeves echoing in the portico

of City Hall — I felt I knew Philadelphia well, and loved it.

But I did not always love it. The noise and the pollution, the poverty and my reaction to the

poverty, and most of all the racial tension made me eager to leave. Growing up white in South Florida I

had seen how violently many white people fought school desegregation, how the black students and

teachers endured. I knew our Broward County town had two halves, but only one police force, and that

one white. The race riots in nearby Liberty City and the rioting beamed contextless into our livingroom

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between Lost in Space and Gilligan’s Island left me fearing that the black people on that other, othered

side of town would come get us if they could. It seemed only logical. And nobody telling me about

King’s agape illogic, or showing me the few white people trying to trade in white supremacy for the

beloved community King called forth.

At twenty, oblivious to my white privilege and largely ignorant of America’s racial history, I yet

felt the fear those who expect to be held accountable feel, and guilt that made living on the edge of the

inner city a personal dilemma — one I wasn’t ready to solve. When it came, I welcomed the chance to get

away. The day my first love and I drove her VW bug out of West Philly, with Schuylkill the kitten

clawing at the windows to stay near his namesake river, I didn’t think I’d ever see Philadelphia again.

When I was drawn back for a visit a few years later, I supposed it was out of nostalgia for the college

relationship that by then had ended. With a heart more numb than ever to the relationship the city offered

I once again walked its streets. I like to think I crossed the paths of the young parents at the center of this

book, Tahija Ellison and Lamarr Stevens, who were just then beginning their lives, but it’s unlikely: They

lived in a neighborhood I would have avoided then, though it became my own and precious to me, the

very North Philly where this story takes place.

The second time the city of B. Free (Ben) Franklin reeled me in I was thirty. I lived in

Germantown, in a cooperative home where the writer Toni Cade Bambara had once lived. Across the

street was a rehabilitation program for women in recovery. There I met women who’d nearly drowned in

the flood of crack cocaine pouring into the inner cities through channels that seem to have had

government sanction, if not downright sponsorship.1 It was crack that stole the mothers of Tahija Ellison

and Lamarr Stevens, for a time, and stole their chance at a happy childhood forever.

Just as my roots were beginning to take hold, I felt the pull to leave. I told myself I needed more

time in nature, that the city was too expensive, that I should move nearer my family, but something else
1
For the alleged connection between the U.S. government and the crack epidemic, see “How the Contras Invaded the
United States” by Dennis Bernstein and Robert Knight, http://shadow.mediafilter.org/S40/S40.Contras.html. See
also the book Dark Alliance, the Story Behind the Crack Explosion, by Gary Webb.

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was happening, something simple and human, yet complex and mystical. I was waking up to my

membership in the dominant majority; I was hearing a call to change and to work for change. I have met

people as young as twenty and certainly many at thirty who have heard and answered such a call. I was

not like them. What I heard, faintly, I had neither the confidence nor the hope to respond to in a

meaningful way. And so I ran away again. But the people I’d met and the stories I’d heard clung to me

like wildflower seeds patient for a chance to take root.

I moved to New York’s Hudson River Valley and found part-time work at a community college

teaching writing and literature. That’s what I was doing when I met the woman who would lure me back

to my first city. It was 1997, and I was nearly forty. I didn’t know exactly what it was I had been running

from all those years but I knew enough to know that, like Jonah, I ran at my own peril. Philadelphia is

not, however, my Nineveh; Philadelphia’s the whale. And the shore that whale spit me out on is this

book.

Sometimes when I’m out walking everything my eye falls on seems luminous, and I give praise

from the moment. Sentences stream though my mind, pacing me like a long-legged companion. By the

time I reach home I have a list, a litany of gratitude, “For the daffodils, fake or not, on the porch of the

yellow house / For the birch sapling bent like an arch / For the bright five o’clock” — like that.

Eventually I had a poem for every month of the year, except September. It was August when I moved into

“the badlands” of North Philadelphia, where, just a few months before, the Presidents’ Summit for

America’s Future had brought one sitting president, his vice president, two former presidents, a former

first lady, a bevy of CEO’s and retired General Colin Powell Jr. to pick up trash and whitewash graffiti.

I confess I did feel a perverse pride at moving to a place whose very trash and graffiti so many

dignitaries had failed (as I could plainly see) to prevail against, but I didn’t expect its redbrick beauty to

yield a September poem. Then one afternoon, with the back wall of a muffler shop, it began. In

September I felt gratitude for,

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 For shadow and shade on a cinderblock wall, and the spray-painted word,
the word or name Tokay
For two boys playing catch and a yellow butterfly passing through
For in the night a car alarm calling, “I have been tampered with I have been tampered with”
For the sullen look of a passing youth, for the appeal beneath the sullen look
For sneakers dangling by their laces from telephone wire, turning like a wind vane in the wind
For sycamores with dignity lining a street
For a recitation in Spanish from the prophet Jeremiah
For the Spanish word Zion, so much gentler than the English “Zion”
For the pigeon grooming itself on a wire, pulling me as ably as did the great blue heron
down the groove of tension into immanence
For a mother calling “Hakim, Hakim”
For the surf of sound around homes as around homeless shelters,
around the sullen youth sitting on a cement wall
in the dapple of late afternoon, North Philadelphia, early fall

September has more people and signs of people in it than all the other months’ poems combined,

for in the city inspiration reached me mainly through the people, through three in particular — Damear,

Mahad, and Lamarr. I first encountered those names on three strips of masking tape their mother had

placed on three blinking, beeping heart monitors. After they were born I shared a house with them and

their mother for nearly two years, with their father all but living there too. By the time they moved out,

they had moved into my heart, moved in and rearranged all the furniture.

This book is based on my memories, journals, conversations, and written interviews with the key

players. I am aware of the myriad mistakes, distortions and thefts white writers, musicians and artists

have perpetrated on black individuals and communities. I pray I have not added to the ignominious

history of expropriation, or, if I have, that in reflecting upon myself and my motives light is thrown on the

modus operandi of that expropriation.

When the narrative enters the thoughts of someone other than myself it is to depict events those

who experienced them described to me many times and which I felt I could risk retelling without

undue distortion. Many of the conversations are composites built from several conversations. No

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person is a composite; all are my attempt at accurate depiction, attempts that demanded

examination of all that limits and distorts my vision. I realize that while I might unblinker my

eyes, to some extent, and strive to own and expand my perspective, actual transcendence of it is

achieved in rare, heightened moments of openness that the rest of life is but an attempt to be

faithful to. In the end, this book may be a failure about failure, but it is a failure I did not flee. I

can only hope that the light of the people described shines through the clouds of my limited

perspective and as the sun does a morning fog, burns it away.

Purchase the full book at www.CDDbooks.com