A Preposition: Nature Post #5

Before the earth was tilled into the urban hills of a city this place had three names. Like the city with three rivers running us through this borough, these hills have a past. This Hill District opens up from one central point on Kirkpatrick street. It splits, and those streets split, and we’re sent into the directions of every end of the city. You can see where you’re going up here. 

Birmingham, you and I, we weren’t here then. But I’ll tell you, the Hill District used to be three parts: Sugartop, Haiti, and Minersville. You see my friend, this Hill District used to be a country, a field, and a cave. The highest part was the tip, like a sweet, severe sugarcane, sticking out of the center of the city. Haiti was a lower, more vulnerable land: its own country in the midst of a city. Minersville, where it all began with the generic name of Farm Number Three, before it became more than dirt patches of earth, sold off acres of land. The city was once many towns. But that was then. 

Now The Hill is of one nation its own, a neighborhood undivided in itself, but so singular it’s own. It’s the heart of itself, the enemy, and the decay. It’s the outside factors imbedded in its soil, and the inside locking hands under the buildings as well. It’s the struggle so deep no one remembers where it came from. Maybe it’s even that no one knows. I’d like to know what happened between Minersville and The Hill District that made it so afraid of itself, that made us so afraid of it. We’re all falling short here, watching our backs. 

Birmingham, do you ever wake up with the gun shots and running teenagers down the Kirkpatrick hill and want to dismantle yourself from the concrete overseeing the Monongahela to steel-walk to the neighborhood and protect the youth from themselves? I do. 

So what do we do now? Is anyone in a position to save another? Why don’t you (please) detach yourself from your middle of the waters, no name part of the city reigns and go? Be a shield. Be a mark in the land. Be a wall high that separates The Hill from itself. I’ll stand with you.