'Round the Way: Inheritance

By Jasmine Hill

My mom, four siblings, and I lived in a rust colored brick apartment complex in a neighborhood sandwiched between Shreveport Regional Airport, where those with enough resources could flee, and Fair Park High School, where those with none could learn how. This middle ground was known as Greenwood Terrace to those in passing, GT to those with no plans to leave, and the hood to everyone in between.

We children usually kept to ourselves, inside our little complex, seldomly venturing outside without an adult or a destination beyond it, making our home prone to otherwise simple marvels, and our locales the subject of our curiosity.

From where I stood, the trajectories of our community seemed simple. Everyone in wanted out, and everyone out, never came back. It was a logic I spent years observing from my bedroom window, its seed manifesting in varying forms, from heaves of anger and frustration introducing teen runaways, to mounds of grief and sorrow following the knock of a badged uniform, and the flashing of reds and blues on his or her mother's windows not long after.

It seemed everyone wanted to leave for different reasons, but they all followed the same logic. They all believed what awaited them elsewhere had to be better than what they were leaving behind, a logic I could no more agree with than deny.

But even with everyone's desire to escape, no one could take away from the fact that, in spite of its apparitions, a sunrise in GT was worth a second glance.

Before Mom could make her rounds, first to my sister and my room, then to the boys' no more than three steps away from ours, if it were a morning worth observing, I'd already be awoken by the streams of sunlight peeking through the tattered tears of our burgundy curtains, fluttering about my eyelids.

I'd allow the sunlight to guide me through my home, its streams blazing through the sheer white and dark browns of the living room curtains, illuminating the corners of the apartment in ways light bulbs never could.

Even the two unemployed windows in the kitchen; the one above the sink and the other sandwiched between the refrigerator and the curio cabinet riddled with mis matched China sets could serve a purpose on mornings like these, ordinarily their only purpose as placeholders due to residents after residents never bothering to wash them.

     I myself had tried to clean them in the earlier parts of the nine years I'd lived there to get a better view of the neighborhood and satiate my curiosity, only to find that what my family and I had inherited was a forsaken window with a view blurred and fogged beyond repair.

But while the fine details of the neighborhood were out of view from behind the window, the light of sunrises never failed to shine through and illuminate the kitchen in golden streams that seemed to leap on and off the kitchen table and pranced about the China sets.

Back then, I'd have to sneak outside to witness the sunset because my siblings and I weren't allowed to wait outside with the other kids despite the fact that the bus stop was at the foot of our apartment.

"I wish I would let y'all wait outside with those Hades babies", she'd say, a string of giggles following as there's no way to say such a thing seriously. It was probably for the best as my younger and older brothers were prone to arguments and fight, and us to defending them.

Funny, maybe we would have fit in with the other kids.

Maybe that's what she was afraid of.

Nevertheless, most days I didn't mind, considering it a service to spare our worn brown pastures, and give it a break from trotting feet, the only greenery in sight in lowly disconnected clusters.