As I sat on my bed that morning watching the towers fall, my mind drifted in and out, remembering. I was a shocked as most Americans, and people around the world; but perhaps not for the same reasons. First, I remembered watching them go up, I was carrying my son at the time and as he grew inside me the towers climbed towards the sky. It was fascinating to watch from a hole in the fence at lunch hour, or early in the morning as I walked to work just getting off the tubes from Jersey. Up and up they went and finally they were done. Much hoopla and celebration.
When my job moved closer, there were many lunch hours spent in the plaza, watching people hurry and scurry. I scurried too in the evenings to get to the Path Trains back to Jersey, we called them the Tubes back then as they were originally called the Hudson Tubes because they ran under the Hudson River between New York & New Jersey. There was always something to do inside the World Trade Center. In the summer time, there were concerts at lunch hour and sometimes in the evening. I remembered the nights they were filming King Kong and asked people to come and stand around in the crowd; then I heard one of the crew complaining that someone had stolen some of King Kong's teeth!! Hey, it's NYC what can we say?!! In the early days the shopping was more my speed, like the 69 cents store which became the 99 cent store before they went out of business. There were hot dog stands and cheap lunch places way before the Food Court and the more up-scale joints moved in. By the time my agency moved in after the first bombing, there was Coach, Nine West, The Gap, and just about every other high-end shoppe you could think of. One of my favorite places to eat, although, it was only on high days and birthdays, was Windows on the World. It was an amazing place to eat, all high up in the sky and the food was really good. I enjoyed the towers, every visitor from another place to my house would be treated to a view from the top of the world trade center and a trip on the Staten Island Ferry. That way my friends got to see most of New York, including the Statue of Liberty on the cheap!! The Ferry used to cost a quarter and if you stayed on the boat for a roundtrip, you got to pass the Statue twice for the low price of a quarter, doesn't get any cheaper than that. Without spending money I got to see the Aids Quilt, the Monks make the Sand Paintings, the Chi-Lites, and so much more that escapes my memory right now.
Yet, in the midst of it all, at some point, the homeless appeared. Homelessness hit the city in the late 70s like chicken pox and everyday you'd walk past the men and women who looked away from your eyes, unkempt and largely unnoticed by the greater society. When they deinstitutionalized mental health facilities upstate, they dumped, literally, thousands of mental patients onto the streets of NYC. The first wave were mental patients and then as gentrification grew and people lost apartments and homes across the city the homeless population took on a new face, many of them children. Then finally folks were coming to the city from other places because they thought there were homeless services in New York unlike where they were coming from. For two decades the homeless population disbursed throughout the city, all five boroughs, into the subways and city buildings, a constant daily occupation, some panhandled, some didn't, some had addictions, some didn't and there were little pockets of shanty town around the city where people had built makeshift homes from the building materials and other debris left at the curbs for pick-up. The most astounding one was at the exit off 125th Street on the West Side Highway. If you weren't into social services or a community organizer you wouldn't even know it was there. It was hidden in the trees off the highway, but if you ventured a look, it was like stepping back in time during the Great Depression.
I think citizens just grew weary of the homeless population. They never really demanded that something be done to help them. New York City and other cities across America just excepted homelessness as part of the landscape.
After the first bombing and I was fortunate, well, I think it was divine intervention; it was a pay-friday and I usually went to the bank as soon as checks were given out. Only, this particular friday I had a migraine to beat the band. So when my friend came to get me I told her to go on, I couldn't raise my head off the desk to go. She called me from the street (no cell phones then) to tell me that as she and another co-worker were approaching the doors to leave the WTC when a bomb went off. I had felt the building move, but we often had minor earthquakes in the city and I didn't think anything of it, I was concentrating on getting rid of my headache. When they got back, they were all sooty and shaky and scared. They had helped people get out of the buildings, because the workers had to walk down the stairs to the streets. Some had come down from the higher floors and needed assistance breathing and walking. Later that day I went to see what had happened and I couldn't get near the site for police and firefighters. But there were people everywhere on the ground and all over. It was February, there was snow on the ground and it was cold. I'll never forget the contrast of the black soot on the faces and clothing of the people against the whiteness of the snow. When I left work that evening it was a little past dusk and the skies were dark blue and eerie. There were only the fire trucks and police cars and most people had gone home, but I thought about how frightening this was and how close I was to the WTC - just one block away. I told myself that night that I wasn't going to stay in this city after I retired, this was when I begin to realize that I had to return to North Carolina if I wanted to feel safe in my old age. Looking back now I realize how naive that thought was, if you're not safe in one part of America, you're not safe in any other parts either. I suppose I was fortunate to have returned to North Carolina much earlier than I had expected to. Unfortunately though, a year or so after the bombing the building that I was working in was so toxic that myself and 4 other co-workers petitioned OSHA and other agencies to have the building closed. Every other tenant had moved out and my agency which occupied several floors had remained because the commissioner was not staying on and didn't want to be bothered with a move on her watch. The FBI and OSHA finally shut the building down and we were moved into the One WTC on the 92nd Floor where the Bank of Tokyo had been. Quiet as it was kept, many companies moved out of the WTC after the first bombing. I can't tell you the anger and hostility we got from the rest of our co-workers after we moved in. They wouldn't join the fight to get us out even though the building was found to be the hottest building ever tested for asbestos in NYC. I'm not even sure that it is occupied to this day.
So here we were on the 92nd floor with all this security to get in and out everyday. We were given colored badges that had to be worn outside our clothing to be visible everyday and everytime we went downstairs for coffee or whatever. Each moring we'd line up in the roped off areas to pass the gauntlet of security guards to get to the elevators to go upstairs. I'd been out for a couple of weeks with bronchitis during the winter and wore the badge that I had on the way in my first day back. Suddenly a security guard grabbed me and threw me up against the wall, screaming that my badge was not correct. He didn't speak English very well and it was hard to understand him at first and I was upset about being grabbled and literally slammed up against the wall, so I was screaming back at him. Someone from my job summoned the Chief of Staff and he came downstairs to escort me up. I got a reprimand from the Commissioner and I told my supervisor that I was not sorry about anything I'd said, especially the cussing part. He thought I'd embarassed my agency, I thought I'd been treated unfairly in my own country by someone from another country making less than minimum wage to attack me. Later on, I asked my co-workers how they felt about the security in the building as none of the "rent-a-pigs" as I called them came from this country. This was during Adolph Guiliani's reign so most people were reluctant to talk about it. It made sense to me that given the fact that the building had already been bombed once, that the security should be in the hands of Americans who were concerned with protecting Americans. But that just fell on death ears. I don't have to tell you that after that incident the security guards all over the buildings knew who I was and were as polite as they could pretend to be the year and a half that we occupied the 92nd floor. Then we moved out and eventually in the spring of 1996 I was released from my duties as a Civil Servant for the City of New York and came back home to Carolina in the fall.
And so it was that I found myself sitting on the bed that morning knowing that the first plane was no accident. I called my sisters in New Bern and told them to turn on their televisions and from time to time I screamed, "Oh my God, thousands of people are going to die today, that plane is no accident!" As I talked to my sisters the second plane hit the second tower and the world knew that New York City had been hit. I thought many more would die that day, so I prayed hard and there were only three thousand and some deaths. I started to call my friends that worked in the area and couldn't get them. I spent a horrific day wondering and glued to the TV like most of us that day.
In the days that followed people mourned and spewed words of hatred and threats to Muslims and Arabs around the world. I was working in a convenience store and had to listen to people day in and day out about it. I kept thinking about the outrage that was shown these victims and justly warranted, but I also kept thinking about the tens of thousands of homeless people who lived and died in those two decades of neglect by the system. No one kept count, but during the winter months in the harsh snows and frigid temperatures of the city, many many bodies were found frozen to death along the river, in stairwells of buildings, over steam grates and in the subways of New York and no one said a word. These were throw away people. Evicted from the world and told to fiend for themselves. There were far more homeless deaths than deaths at the towers; but no one mourned. There were no wreaths or donations of money. There were no parades and no bagpipes. There was just the death of a population of people who for what ever reasons could not find a home. Some of the people who died that day in the towers would step over the homeless on their way to work in the mornings. They were everywhere and they were annoying. If there is an afterlife, did some of them meet up, were they recognized. Did anyone say, "Hey, didn't you used to sleep on the street in front of the WTC before the cops drove you away" "Hey I remember you, you gave me a dollar once!"
America was embarassed by this attack, it took her by surprise. I'll admit that I was upset too, that my country was not prepared to take care of it's citizens in the ways that had been promised. Yet, America is America, excessive and flamboyant in the face of the world, bullish in the face on the enemy and ready, willing and able to choose the wrong path. There was so much money raised, so many flags flying and patriotism out the wahzoo. But did we delve into why people around the world hate us enough to do us real harm. Did we teach our children any lessons afterwards about the universality of humankind? Seven years later and people are still homeless, Bin Laden is still at-large and Adolph Guiliani has dissed community organizers (who were the very first ones on the scene to help victims and their family deal with that tragedy). I don't think America has learned the lessons yet. Six months after 9/11 I had a weeks residency at Benson Middle School to conduct a quilt project for 7th graders. It was supposed to be about the history of the school in the current building, as they were building a new school and in one year they would be moving into it. The project got out of hand because there was more students than I originally contracted for. A whole other class! Three classes a day is not my way, but I went ahead and did my best. I spent money on supplies and did photo images on fabric for them because I wanted it to be a good product to take to the new building. In the middle of the week when I presented my receipts for reimbursement, I was told by the teacher that there were no monies for supplies, she thought I understood that from the beginning. I said that supplies were to be reimbursed according to my speaking with the coordinator. Well, you know how verbal agreements go. So I was out over $400. I was a little angry about it, but I didn't want the children to feel anything I was feeling so I sucked it up and carried on with the week. I noticed that instead of doing blocks, we were drawing and painting on fabric, instead of blocks that told the story of the activities at the school, the students were drawing flags and the Twin Towers and the Latino children were drawing hearts with tears and roses. "Heeeeyyyyyy!! What's going on here, let's dialogue." We pulled our chairs into a circle and started to talk about the quilt. When I asked them why they were going off subject and drawing the flags, etc, one kid said, "We're scared!" "Scared of what?" They told me collectively that they were scared that some people from foreign countries were going to come and try and kill them. So I asked them, "Show of hands, how many of you live in trailer parks?" and half the class responded. I told them that the terrorists in their lives was the trailer parks where they live in poverty, with hopelessness, drive-by shootings, drive-by drugs, teen-age pregnancy, and so on. I told them that it had taken me two days to get them to calm down enough to begin seriously working on the project. And that the "diaper heads" they were talking about were sitting on rocks with slate & chalk learning more than they ever will, because they had the desire to learn and understood the globalization of the job market going on. It was a heavy day for me, and the teacher was none too pleased. But I felt that I had to tell them because no one else had.
Finally it was Friday, and as I was packing up to go home, the teacher was giving me feedback on the class and said that the children were really traumatized by the 9/11 tragedy. At one point she said to smiling and bragging, "We collected over $5,000 in Benson Middle School alone to send to the firefighters in New York!" . . . . .Sometimes God is with me more than at other times, this time he took his hand and put it over my mouth so I couldn't speak. I smiled back at her and gathered my things and said it had been fun and walked to my car and cried. When I got home, I called my sister and told her that I did infact serve a living God because he stopped me from looking her dead in the face and saying, "You mean to tell me that you could raise money for firefighters who were getting money from all over the world and you couldn't reimburse me the $400 I spent bringing supplies to teach your children." My sister let me rant about how this tragedy had all of us with mixed up priorities and how sad it was that this community could be concerned about NYC and not have a decent after school program for their own children. Somewhere we got sidetracked with that tragedy. Bush got us into a war that in no way related to the perpetrators of 9/11 and he lied in order to do it. Even with that, Americans sent him back to the White House. And during his administration Katrina happened and that was equal in depth to the tragedy on 9/11, except they went in right away to get the bodies out of the towers and people lay dead on the streets of Mississippi and New Orleans for days and weeks. Not only homeless people were neglected during the eight years of the Bush/Cheney regime, all Americans suffered and suffer still.
We have a chance now for Change with Senator Barack Obama, but just as many of us had mixed up priorities after 9/11, we still have no sense of the right thing to do. If some of us insist on voting for a woman because she's a woman and not look at what she stands for, we still have no sense of the right thing to do and how to prioritize the needs of the many over the needs of the few. If we can't find it in our hearts to vote for a black man and still fly our confederate flags because he'll bring jobs and health care to Americans, we still have no sense of the right thing to do and how to prioritize the needs of the many over the needs of the few. I pray daily that this election will have the right results. That it will not be stolen from us, they justice & truth will prevail and that Senator Barack Obama will be elected and we can all work together to right America again; to find the pulse of this country and move into a new era of living & progressing once again.
