Yesterday between church services we drove out to the old house so that Jonathan could have band practice. Living in Cokato for a month and a half has already given me a new lens on my old habitat, and my scales of familiarity have dropped from my eyes so I saw with stabbing clarity what our visitors from more affluent neighborhoods have no doubt always privately noted. Peeling, battered, or boarded-up homes in scrubby trash-strewn yards, city scooters dumped on sidewalks. Unwell people. So much refuse and blight.
It all twists my heart with guilt that we left, even as I know we were mostly powerless to help things, and the little that we could do, we often didn’t. There stands our own house after all: a shabby, filthy shell in its weedy yellow yard littered with plastic and junk. Nevertheless, entering that cobwebby kitchen with its remnant dishes and stains, I felt a wistful swell as I cast my eyes around. It was quickly engulfed by weariness at the thought of all the cleaning and clearing and repairing that we need to do before we put it on the market and truly finalize what in many ways feels like our divorce from the North Minneapolis community.
And now I face the questions posed by Alice Walker in her criticism of an affluent family’s sincere attempt to invite a girl from a slum into their home for a few months: “What value has friendship that is content to see one comfortable part of the time? Indeed, is it friendship? What one yearns for (and must have if we are to share this earth as unashamed friends) is a Mallory family that is radically involved in changing society, not merely giving succor to its oppressed.”
And this: “One could share warmth with the Mallorys but one could really not depend on them in any radically meaningful way.”
That’s it, the crux of all our efforts to share our own small wealth with our Bryant Ave neighbors. After fourteen years, we still can’t “share the earth as unashamed friends” with the Trizells and Mishas and Isises and Anns and Sabrinas. We did content ourselves with seeing them comfortable only part of the time, and always at our own convenience. This diagnoses the vague sense of discomfort and, yes, shame, that we inevitably felt while trying to help.
The warmth and succor have value. Certainly they are far better than nothing at all! But they do not produce the unashamed friendship between equals which would be proof of a truly righteous arrangement.
Okay, but what does “radical involvement in changing society” actually entail for a family like ours?
We used to think we knew. We flung open our doors and pantries and bank accounts, and sincerely did not expect any recompense. Yet being radically available, as we strove to be for several years, did not appear to achieve any lasting goodness for the families we were seeking to befriend, and it left us scarred and guarded, in the graceless position of needing, for the health of us all, to walk back permissions and conditions that we had previously extended.
A critical facet of our North Minneapolis experience is that sharing our lives in this way was always a one-way street. This makes sense. We, with our abundance and security and wholeness, had not experienced the lack and insecurity and brokenness of needing to rely on strangers, or the rejection and humiliation that likely often attend that need. Were the tables turned, I imagine that I, too, would hold do-gooders at a distance.
But the friendship, the sharing of lives, needs to be mutual to be radical. My question for Alice Walker might be, “What friendship is possible where, while one accepts what warmth and succor are shared, one will not share one’s self? What value is such friendship? Indeed, is it friendship?”
My questions for myself are not easy either. “How can I, as someone in a position to help materially, signal my radical expectation of true friendship with someone who is struggling? Am I really ready to offer that?” and “Would I be able to risk such vulnerability, if I found myself in need of material aid from a stranger?”
True friendship requires trust and good faith on both sides. To depend on someone in any radically meaningful way requires wholeheartedly accepting care from others (in the belief that we are all intrinsically deserving) while we extend the gift of access to our whole selves. Because of this mutual access, both parties should be able to be at ease in their shared humanity and love for one another, despite whatever material and cultural imbalances persist. I think that is how we can share the earth as unashamed friends.
