6, Uptown

“Gangstas of Gotham, hardcore hustlin’”- Mos Def

I take the 6, uptown. At 34th, the train is all white. By 59th, half of the suits are gone but caucasia still prevails in my car. After 86th, the change starts, and by 110th I’m one of two white people on the train. And this is strangely comforting.
I am a product of a Catholic, white, upper-middle class neighborhood. I went to a private boarding school in Connecticut. I go to a Jesuit school in Boston. All of these things influence my place in the world, influence the way I think and the way others think about me. I am guilty of elitism, even if I don’t know it. So when I stay on the 6 past Manhattan, headed for the Bronx, I know I don’t understand. I know I can’t fit in, can’t begin to understand the complexities of the environment that surrounds me. And when I listen to my homegirl, a teacher in Hunts Point, I can’t ever understand the problems she sees everyday.
Save my own, I don’t know anyone’s parents who were under 25 when they had children. I don’t know what it’s like to grow up in the city, to have drugs and violence around me in profusion. I don’t know what it’s like to be discriminated against by police and constantly marginalized by a government that wants to forget about me. But I can stay on the train past Manhattan, I can walk the streets of the South Bronx, I can listen with learning ears to Mos Def and Common and Nas and know, for certain, that if my life had been different I wouldn’t have been able to rise above it. But I am white, and I know I cannot understand. That is my one, incommunicable sin. I am an imposter.
The misconception of the ghetto in most Americans’ thought is that it looks scary, different, cold. That the people who live there are in some way different beyond economics, capable of different things. Bad things. That somehow ‘thugs’ are manufactured and perfected, trained as murderers and drug dealers from the start. They don’t realize that the most of the people they think about are kids, pushed into the hustle by money, excitement, and often the very people who love them most. It’s not a struggle, or a problem, or a disease – it simply is.
The man next to me on the six stands two or three inches taller than me. His beard two or three inches longer. His hair two or three shades greyer, his skin more than two or three shades darker. He’s talking to himself. I’m listening. “You think you free,” he says, “but you ain’t. Same old slaveowners, ain’t nothin’ changed. Ain’t NOTHIN’ changed. Nosah. Ain’t nothin’ changed.” No one else on the 6 pays attention. He stares out the window into darkness. He keeps talking. I listen for a long time, understanding some of it, missing most of it, but hearing every word.
“You go to school,” says the man next to me on the platform. I turn my ear and look at him as if I’ve misunderstood. “You go to school?” he repeats, this time with inquisitive inflection.
“ Yes,” I say, “in Boston.”
“Boston, oh.” He turns away. “I used to live in Lowell,” he says, and I see his smile for the first time. “Long time ago.”
We stay silent for a while. I’m in a city I don’t know. I can’t be sure of protocol when it comes to other people. Finally I give in to my curiosity. He seems affable.
“You from here originally?” I ask. He looks at me as if I’m kidding. I’m not.
“No,” says. He looks up at me and smiles, and I am struck by his balanced features and remarkably consistent skin tone. His eyes are piercing, his smile astonishing. “I am,” he pauses, “Dominicano.” He smiles broader, beaming with his declaration. I hear the word in my head for the rest of the trip. Dominicano. And what could I say with such pressing importance? What could I declare with such surety? Blanco? Gringo? Irish? Maybe. But despite my education and my economy and my freedom of movement, I won't mean it like he does.
Coming back, downtown 6, I get off at 103rd. It’s a little past 11 at night. Now, rising to street level from the stairs, I open my eyes to the darkness. It’s quieter than I would have expected, despite the figures that dot the street. At night the bustle gives way to the hustle. Eyes dart when I walk by, clearly out of place, and despite a confident walk a focused gaze I’m careful to remain carefully alert in this environment – searching the corners of darkness. Shit, I realize I’m as bad as anyone else – I’m looking for stereotypes – young black males with baggy pants and – there they are.
And there it is. They. The extension of my incommunicable sin. The other. The ghetto. I listen to the conversation as I pass.
“Damn she din’t call you back yet yo? Ya ass is done, she out right now son-” He laughs.
“Nah, s’ok. She’ll get at me, just wait. And who you waitin’ on anyways? Get outa here punk-”
They’re joshing, half laughing, sparring. In the group of four, the youngest is maybe 14, the oldest 16. At their age, my friends and I got jobs slinging papers in the neighborhood, playing and working like these guys are. The object is different, but the verb is the same. It’s what you do.
The next morning homegirl brings me to a restaurant around the corner. It’s a hallway, mostly, some tables in the front and a hot line beyond a thin curtain in the back. We order burritos and for the first time since Tijuana get what I’m looking for – a mass of shredded chicken, fresh refritos, and tart guacamole smothered in cheese and salsa verde. The tortilla is handmade. The two next to us converse in Puerto Rican Spanish, rolling and fast, shades of Portuguese and Dominican, far from the Castilian in textbooks. They get up and pay, handing the young cashier a 5 for their full meals and drinks.
We finish and approach the register, I pull out my wallet. She writes a slip, hands it to me. $15.95. I offer a 20 and smile, taking my four singles and replacing them in the fold. If only we could get the healthcare system to work like that, I think.
The problem, if we choose to think of it like that, is not the people but the system itself. Somewhere between 86th and 110th, the opportunities go away, the chances get slimmer, the obstacles bigger. Fewer people are going to make it out. It’s the difference between an invisible barrier that has nothing to do with color or heritage – only indifference and ignorance. Put me – white, male, of sound mind and body – in a project at 153rd instead of a brownstone on 65th and strip me of my education, my citizenship, my language, my income. Watch me falter and fail to get by, give up minimum wage for the risk and reward of the game. I don’t have the stock market anymore, I got the rock market – and it never goes down.
And so the 6 uptown becomes the channel that runs beneath the lines on the map, drawn in white and brown, rich and poor, that criss-cross the city, the culture, the nation, the world. It’s a conduit between two worlds, a single train that simultaneously separates and connects the down-town upper-crust with the up-town downtrodden. Opening your eyes and ears on the 6 is easy, but opening your mind to see the larger picture is imperative – you’ll see that the suit at 43rd, a lifetime New Yorker, isn’t lying when he says “ I’ve never been up that far.”