Beauty Remembered

Today I drove the familiar route of Hwy 52 through the out skirts of Darlington, pass the Darlington Race Track...home of the Southern 500 into Hartsville. Following my little half sister's directions, I passed boarded corner stores and run down homes that I remembered being very much alive as a child.

Then I passed Lincoln Village. The place where I spent the first five years of my life and countless summers visiting my Grandma Sara. She would braid my hair outside on the stoop all the while holding conversations only meant for the adults to take part in. It was there, sitting at my grandmothers feet that I saw a gay man for the first time with his strange accent, overly femimine gestures, wearing make up occasionally. It was there, in Lincoln Village that I ran and played with my cousins and bought icees at the corner store for 10 cents. It was there that I can remember the smell of collards, corn bread, rice, taste of very sweet kool aid and my stomach rumbling. In Lincoln Village I learned the truth about inappropriate sexual attention in hushed conversations, clouded shame, the quiet acceptance of the reality and that I was not the only victim. In my grandma's house we would play "Trouble" for hours, listen to her old 45's, or the preacher on the radio. In Lincoln Village few apartments had air conditioners so there was the ever present fan in the living room pushing heat from one side to the other. In Lincoln Village I knew the life of the poor and the forgotten because I was one of them. In my memory it has always been a place of beauty, full of color and life because the first 5 years of my life when I was an avid learner, a sponge, Lincoln Village was all I knew.

The Lincoln Village I knew is no more. It is now a shell of decaying buildings, dark windows, weeds, disrepair...a place forgotten like the people who once lived there. A great saddness set into my heart, a finality to my grandmother's death and a closing on my childhood. As I passed in my car I looked at the building my grandmother once lived in, the summer heat all around me, a slight breeze in the air and I remembered beauty.