Can you go home again?

I recently moved back to a town where I had lived decades ago. At first, as I drove by the house I lived in when I was a young teen, it seemed like little had changed. The house was pretty much the same, although the vegetation was different. The trees were taller, but there were none of the rose bushes my mother had cultivated so happily years ago. The junior high I attended looked the same, although a little worse for the wear. The church my father preached in was still standing, although the parsonage we lived in had been torn down and replaced by a much nicer looking duplex. The parking lot next to the church where my father chased a guy he caught trying to rob the church’s petty cash had been turned into a social hall. The church now announced services in Spanish as well as English.

Somehow, however, this town was not at all the same. The main street which used to be the crummiest part of town was now filled with upscale restaurants and boutiques. The VandeKamp’s restaurant where I had my first job had disappeared, as had Bob’s Big Boy where we used to go for a burger and milkshake after a football game. The mountains that often were obscured by smog were now clear and the air was breathable once more. The more I drove around, the less I could remember about how it used to be. And the feeling of being “home” but not really, began to be disquieting.  Were my memories fading because of age, or maybe even something as simple as the fact that I left town before I began to drive, and if you don’t drive, you don’t have the same memories?

The memories I do have are of a time that has fortunately changed. for the better.  For example, when I lived in this town, there was one street that clearly marked the boundary between whites and blacks. If you were white, you didn’t go past a certain street at night, or so they said.  It didn’t occur to me at the time that I was living in one of the most segregated towns west of the Mississippi. My school was about 90% white, while the school across town was 90% black.  I didn’t realize that housing covenants and income inequity created the contrast between the wide streets and stately homes of our neighborhood and the smaller, poorer homes on the other side of town. It was not until a lawsuit was brought in 1968 that our school district was ordered to desegregate, and some of the housing restrictions began to ease, but by then I had married, gone away to college, joined the Peace Corps and lived in Africa and South America.

I am back in this town again and where I live now is a more mixed neighborhood. There is no one street that marks a tight racial boundary. Whites, blacks and hispanics live more side by side, although the size and cost of the homes is still evidence of income inequity.  Yet, as recently as 2018, only TWO of the public schools in this town qualified as “integrated.” Since the current population is about one-third white, one-third Hispanic, and the last third divided between African American and Asian residents, how are the schools still so segregated? The answer is complicated. Many white families and those with higher incomes send their kids to private schools. The population has aged, so there are not as many school-aged children to support neighborhood schools. A lot has changed. Unfortunately, a lot has not.

I suppose you can’t really go home again, in the sense that the town where you grew up will have remained the same. Change is inevitable and that’s generally a good thing. Hopefully, the places where we all lived so long ago have improved. The things we miss may not be as important as the things that have changed for the better. Still — it leaves me wondering if we should even try to go “home” again. Best to keep moving forward.