CHAPTER FIFTY
2007 – If I Could Reach The Border
“Sak gen la, bredda?”
It was early August and I’d decided to familiarize Hopeton with basic Kreyol expressions. The way I saw it, if I was able to rock with Patwa fluently, then he could accommodate a little of my people’s language in his day to day.
“Anriyen,” Hopeton replied and tapped his fist against mine.
“I’m about ready to get out of my parents’ house,” I told him.
“Oh, really,” he replied. “What are you thinking of doing?”
“Actually, I want to move out by your way,” I said. “I mean, not, like, directly across the street from you or anything. But in that general area.”
“That’s a smart move,” Hopeton said. “There’s lots of Haitians and Jamaicans and there’s an excellent roti spot right around the corner from me.”
Hopeton advised me to take a few days to walk around the area. “Start at Sterling and Nostrand and just walk up and down the blocks until you get to Rutland. You should be able to figure out pretty quickly which blocks you like and which are trash.”
I took the next two weekends to do exactly that. I quickly narrowed my choices down to either Ocean Avenue, directly across the street from Prospect Park or Lefferts Avenue, a long boulevard with two-way traffic. One side of the avenue was lined with big pre-war apartment buildings and the other side was mainly small, two-story houses. And it was one block over from Lincoln Road, so if I found an apartment there, I was gonna force Hopeton to let me park my zo reken in his driveway.
In mid-August, I cracked open my laptop and went over to Craigslist to check out apartment listings. Within fifteen minutes I’d found four possibilities on Ocean Avenue and two on Lefferts Avenue. The apartment gods must’ve been smiling down on me, because I was able to line up viewings for all six in one day. I wound up taking a decent sized two-bedroom on Lefferts located at the end of the block, right before Bedford Avenue. Literally around the corner from Hopeton.
My parents were kinda shocked when I told them where I was moving to. When they’d first gotten married and discussed where they’d want to raise a family, they’d made a conscious decision to avoid neighborhoods like Flatbush. “We didn’t want to mistake cultural comfort for progress,” my mother had once told me. But that’s exactly what I did need. And they both got over it once I told them I’d be in Prospect Lefferts Garden, two block away from the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. That was culturally bougie enough to make them happy.
Even though we all agreed it was time for me to head out on my own, my mom was sad to see me go- she’d loved the opportunity to fuss over me. My dad told me he was thankful we’d had to time to rebuild our relationship but pleased to see me making rational decisions for myself- I felt the unspoken words “for a change” floating at the end of that sentence. I don't know, maybe I was just being overly sensitive.
I moved to Flatbush on September 1st and felt an instant sense of peace.
