The Next Big Story: My Journey Through the Land of Possibilities
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My mother and father took no small risk when they decided to live outside D.C. back in Maryland. Just a year earlier, Mildred Jeter, a black Virginia woman, and Richard Loving, her white husband, had traveled to Washington, D.C., to get married, just like my parents. They went back to Virginia to live until police stormed into their bedroom one night and arrested them. They became the test case. The U.S. Supreme Court overturned the ban against interracial marriage in the 1967 case Loving vs. Virginia. By then, my parents had been married for nearly ten years, had moved to Smithtown, Long Island, and were raising six kids.
My mom doesn’t like to talk much about that period of her life. “You have to keep going in life, live every day and then the next day and then the next,” she likes to say. So she did and we went with her. She got pregnant with my sister Maria within a year of getting married and then had a second daughter, my sister Cecilia, before leaving Baltimore. My oldest brother, Tony, then Estela, and then I were born in Long Island. My youngest brother, Orestes, was born when we went to visit my dad’s family in Australia during a sabbatical. “With life, everything has to look forward,” Mom says.
Forward to them was Smithtown, one of Long Island’s classic suburbs, well-off and white, sitting along the North Shore, part of storybook America. On the surface, Smithtown is the living, breathing embodiment of why immigrants come to this country, the kind of place much of America aspires to become. The schools are good. The town is rich with history. One of the great things about this country is that we get to have a cumulative past. It doesn’t matter when or how you come here; the past of this country and its principles belong to you, good and bad. It’s what makes America special. It doesn’t matter how you look or speak; you get to be an American because you’re here. And I’m as much of an American as the eighth-grader or the photo store guy or anyone like them. I adopt their history and there’s nothing they can do about it.
There is a large blue-green statue of a bull at a key intersection in Smithtown celebrating the town’s founding. I’ve driven past it a thousand times and more, but I only recently found out he’s named Whisper. Legend goes that Whisper belonged to an early settler named Richard Smith, who won land from the Native Americans by betting he could ride on the back of a bull across a piece of land big enough to build a whole town. He did it and today there is a town named for him, and a statue of his bull charges mightily at its center.
The schools are named for those Native American tribes like Nesaquake, my junior high, where I was asked about having thick lips. The Nesaquake were among the tribes who scoured the waters off Long Island looking for clams to eat and to bead together to make wampum. Then Smith and the Dutch came along and the natives all but vanished. But the names of their ancestors have been emblazoned on towns from Montauk to Manhattan. And, of course, they lived on in our public schools, where we learn to memorialize our collective roots. It didn’t matter that the O’Briens were late arrivals to this history. My parents chose Smithtown as their outpost in this land of possibilities and opportunities. Smith and the Dutch and the natives that plied the Sound, even Whisper the muscular bull, now belonged to us, too.
I grew up unaware that there was anything significant about my parents’ flight to Smithtown. It was just our home. If you had told me they were political I would have laughed out loud—we were very typically suburban, caught up in figuring out the latest ways to make the most of our suburban town. I had no idea what they’d gone through to create our tribe, and as a teenager I didn’t much care. I knew they had joined a group of black families that pushed for integration and better housing. My mother thought it was a good way of meeting the other black families because there were so few. I remember it fondly. We would gather at a small park in Smith town. Today it has a colorful jungle gym that wasn’t there back then, but it had space to have a picnic, and well-manicured lawns and tables.
There weren’t really enough black families to form any kind of critical mass. But we met the ones there were. There was my best friend in school, Shevoy Onley, one of the only black kids who wasn’t related to me. She was also in constant motion. I met her in kindergarten, and our parents encouraged our friendship. She was considered different, just like me. That was part of what connected us, even though we didn’t talk about it much. Shevoy had it better in one small way. She was from Bermuda, which seemed more exotic than Cuba, where my mother was from. Plus, she could go back and visit her relatives and see the place where everyone looked like her. I was stuck here with just my five siblings in Smithtown.
I was frustrated that I had thick bushy hair that was completely unmanageable. My mom would braid it, and I would take out the braids and pull them into a ponytail. Shevoy had hers pulled so tightly back, it seemed to be tugging at her eyebrows. That wasn’t as much about us having black hair as it was about looking like everyone else. But we were also aware of our race. Shevoy’s uncle once insisted on filling out a race question on a form by writing “Human Race.” She tried that a few times but it didn’t get her far. Shevoy and I didn’t get noticed as much as we got looked at. Even through high school, when our class schedules separated us for most of the day, we would catch each other’s eye and smile. No one really saw us. They just looked.
Smithtown was a wonderful place to be a kid, but like many American towns, it sometimes had a split personality. When my sister Cecilia was a teenager, she got an internship at a civil rights organization. It was a big deal, very grown-up. She was doing research about women in untraditional roles. She remembers stumbling upon some files on allegations of police brutality, cases in which black people talked about how the police treated people who looked like us. We never even spoke to the police.
We all had great friends. I would go all the way across town to ride horses at the homes of girls who were white, have dinner and while away an afternoon playing in the yard. Then one day at a friend’s house, I sit next to her little sister to eat dinner. “Why do I have to sit next to the black girl?” she asks, and suddenly I see another side of my hometown.
My siblings felt it, too. A guy comes up to Cecilia at school and says, “I saw your father and your brother on the highway changing a tire.” He’d seen some black folks and figured they must have been us. That was how limited their knowledge was of black people. They must all be related! When my parents first moved to Smithtown, white people wouldn’t sell their homes to black people. My parents had to buy land from a rich, liberal philanthropist. They saved every dime and built a small ranch house on it. Smithtown was close to Dad’s work at the state university and an easy commute. That was how we bought into this town with its dual personality.
But I did know that my parents on occasion marched through Smithtown’s narrow streets with some of the black families to fight for housing integration, singing and chanting and banding together. My mother says now she doesn’t think they accomplished much. My parents were involved enough that the group tried to recruit my dad to be a leader. My dad remembers thinking there were guys that would make better leaders than he. The lack of leadership meant there were squabbles, and my mom and dad eventually withdrew. They were raising six kids in Smithtown and they were busy. Maybe raising us was enough of a statement. We walked those streets. Sometimes people looked at us as if we had two heads and were completely out of place. We always ignored them.
The ugliness of what was quietly happening around us in Smithtown way back then has only been revealed more recently. The town began participating in a federally funded housing program in 1985. The program is called Section 8 and it allows low-income people to apply for housing vouchers that pay up to two-thirds of their rent. The program helps out poor people and also works to desegregate a town. But Smithtown required that you already be a resident to apply. The town was already more than 90 percent non-Hispanic white, so the residency requirement would mean almost no one of color would ever be given assistance to move in. In 1997, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development told the town that the p
olicy had a “racially exclusionary effect.” Smithtown did nothing.
By 2007, a group of civil rights lawyers felt they had a case and filed a class-action suit against Smithtown. The suit was filed on behalf of a group of people like Corinne Vargas, a Latina mother of two. Corinne had grown up in nearby Oakdale, a working-class town. She was the only child of Puerto Rican parents. Her father, George, worked in Smithtown for Animal Control. She remembers how her father’s coworkers would always steer him to certain parts of town. “Give that territory to George. He can deal with those kinds of people,” she remembers them saying. But he wouldn’t take that to heart. He would cruise around Smithtown and see a great place to raise kids. Her parents had grown up in Spanish Harlem in Manhattan, and moving to Long Island was for them a big step up. Once they got to Oakdale, they looked at Smithtown as the next rung on the American ladder, the place Corinne dreamed she would one day make a home. Her father figured working there was one pace closer to that dream.
Corinne’s childhood in Oakdale sounds a lot like my own, which is ironic since she assumed that Smithtown would be better. Her parents were Americans, like all Puerto Ricans, although their home was culturally Latino. “Why are you so dark?” they’d ask her in the hallways. “Goya O-boya! Spic and Span.” There were comments about her “big bubble lips” and people would constantly assume Corinne was from Mexico. “We kind of coexisted,” Corinne remembers. “It was all so weird and shocking. I have cousins who have blond hair and blues eyes. I felt like I was just like everyone else until someone came up and put me in some new category.”
Corinne left Oakdale and made a great life for herself, until she gave birth to her first child, Jasmine. She was born with cerebral palsy and spina bifida. She is a quadriplegic confined to a wheelchair. Corrine’s marriage fell apart and she moved to Florida to live with her parents, but the available health care wasn’t great for her daughter. She returned to Long Island with a well-paying job when suddenly her daughter began to have severe seizures and she ended up sitting by her hospital bedside for weeks. Corinne lost her job and her health insurance and became homeless in December of 2005. That’s when she put herself on the Section 8 list.
Section 8 was a way out of a very tough spot. Corinne couldn’t raise a sick child in a homeless shelter. She was unaccustomed to poverty and all the bureaucracy it comes with, the paperwork of social services and the humiliation of constantly asking for help. She was worn down by her situation and calculated that if she could get a Section 8 housing voucher, she could raise her daughter on child support and Social Security payments. She was told there were available vouchers in Smithtown and to get on the waiting list. A dream was about to come true.
By the following summer she was told she should come into the Smithtown offices because her number was up. She remembers the day. “I was so excited,” she said. She recalls walking into the town offices in Smithtown fully expecting to walk out with her housing voucher. She said she had every piece of paperwork completely filled out. She wasn’t in the office for more than a few minutes when a woman behind the desk took a thick black Sharpie and wrote “INELIGIBLE” across the top of Corinne’s form and circled it. She withheld the desire to lose her cool and asked a lawyer to join her. Robin Nunn, who was doing pro bono work for the firm of Sullivan and Cromwell, was working on a potential lawsuit and was accompanying people to their appointments. Robin explained to the Smithtown officials that residency could not be a requirement. But the town took a position that they held on to—that they could require applicants to already live in the town. They were sent on their way.
“I didn’t know what to do,” Corinne said. “I live for my kid. She is my life. She is my everything. I was living in a motel with a sick kid. And this place was denying me my one shot at life.” Corinne joined the lawsuit. The others in the suit included Keisha Trent, another homeless mother of two who is black, and Anne Smith, a disabled black woman who lives with her adult child. These are the people Smithtown was trying to keep out.
According to the suit, Smithtown had issued 102 vouchers. Seven had gone to black families and two had gone to Latinos. Together they made up half the waiting list. When the waiting lists got shorter, Smithtown would simply go out and recruit more people with Smithtown addresses, who were usually white, to fill the top slots. That suit revealed the housing issues my parents were marching about way back when. It chronicled the history of race friction in my hometown. In 1971, the local NAACP had asked the town to develop low-income housing, but Smithtown’s council had rejected the idea because low-income housing lacked “pride of ownership.” A board member named Robert Brady said publicly that the problems in Smithtown “had been caused by the new people that moved here. The only way to solve our problems is if [they] get back on [their bicycles] and move back to Jamaica.” Corinne was trying to make a jump from Oakdale, a town close by.
The complaint talks of cross burnings and home arsons in the 1980s. A real estate agent is threatened with death in 1995 for selling to a black person. The Trinity AME church had “Go Home Nigger” scrawled on its side. In 2004 a minority family got menacing phone calls and had a brick thrown through the window. The next year a black family moved because of racial epithets and threats stuck in their mailbox. This sour legal document painted an ugly picture of my hometown. Only last summer did a federal judge approve a ten-year consent degree placing Corinne and the others back on the waiting list and a $925,000 compensation fund was set up. After years of homelessness, they were back waiting for a crack at a life in Smithtown, Long Island. I knew none of this until recently.
This is one of the reasons my town was split in two, a landing place for the American dream had slammed the door shut on anyone new. That is not what being American is about. Our communities thrive because they renew themselves with people who bring in new ideas and refresh our culture. Smithtown could have only gotten better by welcoming people aspiring to make good. The duality of my town didn’t have to exist. They had the choice to embrace new people and encourage change or reject newcomers and limit growth. My parents had so much to contribute to Smithtown, including six children who appreciated the obvious benefits of where they lived and went on to succeed. We are proof that a choice to welcome newcomers can help a community thrive. My parents still own the house where we grew up. They go there summers. I go visit and I bring my kids. The joy I feel there, as the joy I felt way back when, conjures up the promises of my hometown.
I remember a totally different Smithtown from the one denied to Corinne Vargas. My family embraced Smithtown’s typically suburban lifestyle and became a part of its DNA. My father taught mechanical engineering at the local state college. My mother taught Spanish at one of the local high schools, Smithtown West, and then at East, where I also studied. My parents were focused on education. They wanted us to study whatever they were teaching us and bring back good grades. They were religious and strict and kept us kids tightly controlled. I couldn’t watch TV during the week or stay out late with friends. My mother’s child-rearing prescription was this simple: “Studying is what children do, study hard, and the parents provide them with three meals a day and very little TV, like three or four hours only on weekends. That’s all there is to it.” It was never hard to figure out what was expected of me. “Do your work,” my mother said so many times.
In so many ways, we seemed to fit right in. My mom dressed very simply and kept her hair cut into a short Afro. My dad dressed like you’d expect a college professor to dress and kept himself neatly groomed. We all saw ourselves as unremarkable and uncomplicated. It only became apparent we were different when we stepped outside our home. Not everyone ate rice with every meal, sometimes with guava jelly and fried plantains. There is a photo of the six of us that spells out who we were. We are wearing 1970s shirts with stripes and flared pants with stripes going the other way. We all have giant Afros and big smiles, and we are leaning against our VW bus. There was no way we could avoid looking a little different
when we stepped out onto the streets of Smith town. I sometimes wonder if that’s part of the reason my parents encouraged us to be a tight gang of six. We needed one another. We became one another’s closest friends.
I have great memories of our life in Smithtown. I remember the evenings when we piled up the dinner dishes and retreated to a double-wide hallway that we had converted into our place to play. We were never allowed to go out after dinner. I remember our dance parties, our funny gyrations, how we would collapse into giggles to the sound of a 45. I can still hear the monotonous lyrics of “Billy, Don’t Be a Hero” as we shook our heads and shoulders to the sound. We created a Television Constitution for the weekends, when we were allowed to watch. We got to vote on Star Trek or The Waltons, though I was too little to stay up for The Waltons for the longest time. Every now and then, one of us would just get our night to pick to avoid a tyranny of the majority.
The vast lawn outside our door and the labyrinth of trees that lined our property was our refuge, a place of endless games of softball and tag and hide-and-seek, of tree climbing. These are the things that Smithtown means to me. Holding on to those memories and the psychic peace they forged in my soul is part of what makes me press on. That’s the home my family created in this promising little part of the globe, because they got the opportunity.
When I was little, my oldest siblings were like this gang of four. They were born one right after the other. The oldest is Maria. She is crazy smart and somewhat bossy. She vacuums without being asked. She kisses up to the teachers at school. We are all in awe of her. She is short, energetic, and driven. Her strategy is to be better, kinder, faster than anyone. The teachers love her and respect her intelligence. They call on her when they want the right answer. Maria opens a door of opportunity for all of us by getting into Harvard. The next three siblings go to Harvard, too, as if they are walking right in behind her. As one is going off to college, the next one is working on his application.