When Carolyn Huckabay walks into a room, time packs its bags and walks out. Cracks in walls clobber her with memories from past lives. Overlooked overtures provide her with hope for the future. On October 21st, running into Chapel Mini Mart, Carolyn is forced to deal with the present. The door swings open. She steps in. A jingle is heard. She moves through it. I follow her: past the peeling wall, towards the counter, to the man who looks right through us. “Have you seen a phone?” she asks, “I think I left mine here,” she says. “Without it I’m lost. I’m with the phoneless. I don’t like that life.”
Carolyn and I first met on summer’s last day. Sitting behind a commandeered table on Yale’s Cross Campus, I held up a sign which asked passersby to “tell me about [their] art.” There were painters, collagists, playwrights and Carolyn. She was a poet, not by profession but by philosophy. Her actual career was in sales. Exactly what she sold wasn’t important. “I’m selling you a version of myself right now,” she said. “I’m a remake and a remodel. The world has seen many Carolyns.”
The Carolyn of today is in that nondescript part of middle age where numbers mean as little as words. It was she who stood on Cross Campus and spoke on the art of living. “More people. More love,” Carolyn said. I believed her.
The Carolyn of yesterday is not Carolyn at all. She is Ms. Huckaby. She is a woman of little hope and fewer passions. She is justified in believing that the world is careless because it does not care for her. Her “dark” skin, her “dangerous” class, her “domesticated” gender work against her. They work against the world.
“But I’m Carolyn now,” she says, to comfort us both. “And that doesn’t mean things are easier. Only that I believe one day they might be.”
Carolyn will not leave the same way she came. With the mini-mart behind us and her phone still missing, she tells me this and more in a Starbucks that used to be a local coffee shop. We order nothing. She says that this is okay. “They’re doing fine as is.”
Born the youngest of seven on Dixwell Avenue, Ms. Huckaby was raised, schooled, married, and divorced. She was thrown into Dixwell, a community defined by hardship. Her mother worked three jobs, her eldest sibling Sheila made the meals, she cleaned the apartment or woke up to water on her face and a drowsy disappointed mother above it. “I didn’t mind,” she noted. “We all had a role to play.”
She climbed out of Dixwell, an isolated world defined by a “domestic situation.” I look up from my notebook and into her eyes. Her lips say, “It was bad. It was bad, but I got out.” Her eyes say that I shouldn’t ask more. They dart around the room, looking for something to hold onto. We sit in silence, until she finds it.
Waiting, I recall our second meeting. A week before, Carolyn and I had bumped into each other on York Street. She was raising money for victims of a disease pervasive enough to be important and obscure enough to be forgotten. “When did it begin?” I wanted to know. She told me about growing up in a duplex on Dixwell, about being raised in an apartment of eight connected to an apartment of five, about life in a cage. “The charity, I mean.” She sighed. All this was before her.
I try to imagine what was before me. Who Ms Huckaby was, what Ms Huckaby had seen, why Ms Huckaby had changed, but I can not. Real or realized, Carolyn’s optimism defines her life now. The past is with her, Ms Huckaby is in her, but the inertia of her life is forward-facing.
“I’m in Hamden now,” she says, bringing me back to the present, “I’ve got a balcony.” This means everything to Carolyn. When the weather allows, she brings her smothered pork chops, “or rice, or beans,” and her can of soda, “or water, or tea,” up with her. She sits alone and looks out into the world.
“What can you see from up there?”
“A parking lot. A parking lot and people. Everything is small.”
But the balcony’s minimization of the world does not alter Carolyn’s love for the tiny people in it. She believes that a change is coming, that we must welcome it with open arms. “Peace for me, for you, for everyone, please.” Hers is a world of infinite possibilities. She speaks in hidden hypotheticals.
“Sometimes you apply for a job and are rejected because they’ve met their melanin quota,” she snaps. I wonder if that’s a personal anecdote. “No.”
“It takes a single moment, a single rotation of the earth for one to fall off it. It’s all love, and then you’re all alone. It’s miserable,” she says. I ask if she’s ever felt like that. “No. I don’t care who you are. You could be high up and then you come down. At the end of the day, anyone can end up on the streets,” she whispers.
“Carloyn, I don’t mean to overstep, but has th-”
“No. But it could.”
Twenty years ago, her belief in the infinite spurned her love for the tangible. She began to write for Elm City Echo, New Haven’s non-profit literary magazine, and volunteer for the Yale Hunger and Homelessness Action Project. She saw the community that brought her up lose its soul and its people to the institution that surrounded it, and she wanted to thwart that. Outside, a couple walks past a man hunched over and wrapped in a blanket thin enough to plug one’s ears.
Looking inside the store, they wave at Carolyn. She does not see them. Looking up at the couple, the man raises a cup and asks for spare change. They do not see him.
I think of a Kushner line about theory:
“show me the words that will reorder the world or else keep silent.”
Carolyn speaks of a moment rooted in reality:
“I knew a girl who slept outside a restaurant a few streets from here. Just the other week, she died of hunger…”
At this point, on a secondary level, the conversation takes a turn. Here are two people living different lives in the same place — two people sitting in the same store, engaged in the same conversation, taking different things away. Carolyn continues on about life and death in the city. I allow my mind to wander. She had given her all to New Haven. The city gave her nothing back. For twenty years, she has taken a bus three times a week to raise money for a small and underfunded organization associated with a larger, overendowed organization that caused the very problems she fought against.
Monday, Wednesday, Friday, Carolyn steps off the bus and onto Elm Street, Broadway, gentrification avenue — a road with forever empty stores that bought up and spat out once useful accommodation. It’s the rich man’s utopia: rent is up and taxes are down. The city crumbles, the students watch, the institution controls the wrecking balls.
Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, I step out of Introductory Microeconomics and onto a pre-carved path, an often-trekked road, a comfortable future. I will spend the next four years talking about the principles that could change the world and the practicalities that prevent them from doing so. I will stand on the viewing tower and watch the city fall below. And when the time is right, I will drive into another life, leaving Carolyn behind in my rearview mirror.
Here are two people who feel the same way about an issue but contribute to it in vastly different manners. Carolyn continues to protect New Haven and the life within it. I apologize for not having cash on hand and then forget to visit an ATM; I read socialist literature and think highly of myself; I know that change is my burden but I’m not forced to actualise it. This essay is a front. Here are two people who know that.
“…Everything goes down.”
A barista creeps over to our table and gently asks if she can get us anything.
“We’ll be alright.” Carolyn says.
“I’ll be here,” the Barista replies.
A minute or so later, she comes back with a mop and begins to wipe under the table.
“I’m sorry” she says.
“Don’t be,” Carolyn replies.
“If someone came up and said ‘here’s a million dollars, what you gonna do with it?’ Know what I’m going to do?”
“What?”
“I’d get some buildings, and gut them out for the homeless. We’d remodel them. Make them new. Make it feel like something finally belongs to them. I’d buy clothes for them – soaps, socks, and washcloths too. A million dollars could buy you a lot of soap.”
“And for yourself?” the barista asks.
“I’d get a car,” Carolyn replies, with more haste than she’s had all evening, “I’d drive it around and hand out the necessities to those in need. I’d go to Africa.”
“You’re going to need a boat for that.”
“Then I’ll take a boat. I’m rich.”
Dixwell Avenue is still close to the Huckabys. Sheila’s sixtieth birthday happened three blocks away from where her first one did. Things are different now. Their duplex is a multiplex. The younger siblings feed Sheila. (Carolyn brings a store-bought Macaroni. She tells me that it was dry. She shakes her head and declares that the chewiness would be excusable if the chef could learn from his mistake. “But he’ll never know”). Carolyn is a resident of Hamden; Sheila’s daughter lives in the apartment below her. Time changes all. Carolyn finds hope in that.
“I have faith in the world.” Carolyn believes that if her niece is Hamden, her niece’s niece will live in Greenwich, her niece’s niece’s niece will run New York, and her niece’s niece’s niece’s niece will usher in a world where all people can live in all places and all places are joys to be.
Carolyn yawns. The world cries. The raindrops on the window obscure time, it’s earlier than we think it is. “There are plenty of challenges, but you’ll be okay. Hold onto your thoughts, hold onto your mind, hold onto something and never let it go. You just do that and tell me how it goes, okay?”
I don’t know when or how I’ll see Carolyn again. I do know that I shouldn’t ask. I think of what will be after us.
Starbucks is closing now. They’re sick of our words. They round off the night with “Beat It,” a homage to the past and a gift to the present. Carolyn’s eyes glisten with wonder. They dart around. They look for something more. They meet themselves in the reflection of the window. It’s here they will stay. It’s here they are home.
Carolyn mumbles Michael’s words. In the window, Ms Huckaby mumbles them back. Carolyn will finish the song, crack open the door, and step out into the night with water on her face. She will clean the world. She will not complain. She has a role to play.
Carolyn stares at Ms Huckaby. Ms Huckaby stares at Carolyn. Tonight, like many before and many to come, they will go their separate ways. For it is written. “You wanna stay alive so do what you can,” they say to each other. “So beat it. Beat it.”