LaFreda
Thomas, GPC Student
After I became an U.S. Army dependent in
1992, my family had changed bases twice by June 1995. Our first duty station was Schofield Barracks, in the tropical
state of Hawaii, and our second was Fort Stewart, Georgia, one of the most
rapid deploying Armed Forces bases in the Southeast. In June of 1995 we permanently changed stations, “PCSed” in Army
lingo, from Hawaii to Georgia after three years of being stationed away from
the continental U.S. On November 23,
2000, Thanksgiving Day, I had the chance to visit the place I had called “home”
for so many years, my childhood home of Fayetteville, North Carolina. It was the first time in almost ten years
that I returned there. After a long,
and what seemed to be endless, four-hour drive we arrived at my grandmother’s
doorstep in a low-income housing section called Campbell Terrace. When I
stepped out of the car and looked around, the entire place looked empty. It was a strange sight to me because growing
up it was never like that. Even though
it had been a high crime area it was always so full of life. What happened between then and now had
completely altered the place that had I once knew. As I contemplated what “had been” and what it currently was I
could not help but think about the good old days. Although it was not the most perfect place to live, I realized
that all the commotion was what made it an “experience” rather than just a
place to live.
As I paced the street, and looked around, memories came flooding back as if had just happened yesterday. Fayetteville was home to a lot of my family and had been for quite some time. My family and I had lived in Campbell Terrace for as long as I could remember. We lived in apartment 534, and, just my luck, it was all the way in the front of the community, away from my close friends and cousins, so I had to run just to get to buildings in the rear of the community when it was time to go out and play. We used to live next door to a woman named Joyce who had a daughter named Gail, but she was too tomboyish for me so I would never really play with her. I would always go to my grandmother’s house to play with my cousins, since we lived so close. We would play hopscotch until we were all dirty and sweaty and hula-hoop until our little bony hips were sore. There was also a jungle gym in the abandoned Pre-Kindergarten schoolyard, about fifty feet away from my grandmother’s house, that we would use when we counted during a game of hide and go seek. But even though that was our everyday routine, it never got boring. There were days when my sister, Tamara, my cousins, Demetrius and Bridgette, and I would get a brown and white one-dollar food stamp from our grandmother and we would run to the penny candy store for treats. Sometimes neighbors could peak out of the door and see us running through the street like wild animals trying to get to the corner store. We would all get there and huddle in a group to figure out who would buy what with their dollar. My sister would get 100 pieces of assorted candy, my cousins would get the Flintstone’s orange-flavored push-up pops, and I would get the 100 assorted cookies, then we would find someplace to sit down and divide the goodies. On the weekdays, after school, the community recreation center would open to give out free sack lunches and teach free karate classes. It was fun sitting in the all white building trying to “make a deal” with the person sitting next to me because I wanted their peanut butter cookie. Those are the memories that keep my heart young and alive.
Just
like any other place I had lived; Campbell Terrace had its ups and its
downs. There were also traumatic
experiences living there too, just like any other low-income housing project. When I was about seven or eight I saw a man
who had been shot in the abdomen. The
force from the blast had been so strong that it opened his body up and his
intestines were on the ground. Then a
few weeks later my friend, Claudette, and I were tossing a ball around
outside. One of us had missed the throw
and it went in the street. Claudette’s
little brother, who was about four years old, then ran after the ball and was
hit by a speeding car less than a split second later. But as bad as this all sounds, they both lived. Campbell Terrace was always full of surprise
police raids on crack houses, late night gunshots, and drug needles but it was
a learning experience. It taught me
about the real world and what I wanted for myself when I grew up.
Now
that I was standing there, where almost all of my childhood memories had taken
place, I was staring at a ghost town.
There were no children, no giggles, no hide and go seek, no hopscotch,
no tag, and no hula-hoops lying on the front stoops. It was just a regular place where people lived. It had been repainted to look more like a
retirement community and less like an apartment sector. The recreation center had boards up on the
windows and doors, as if it had been condemned, and there was no one in sight. Over the past several years police raids,
drive bys, AIDS, and people who just moved away had drained the life out of
Campbell Terrace, leaving it a lifeless corpse. The corner store had burned to the ground and everyone just
seemed to be confined to the walls of their apartments. Life had become just regular life and less
of an “experience”.
Since
the last time I visited Campbell Terrace a few years ago nothing has really
changed. It still remains as lifeless
as it was the day I returned there. I guess
with the changes that were made tolerance levels had reached zero. I know that it will never go back to being
the same, but there is nothing wrong with reminiscing about the good old days.