The Sunday Whirl-4/9/23- The Color of Trouble

The alter that the new family in the complex served at was one called victimhood.

The big switch was that they were white folks.
I watched and listened to their loud arguments like a fly on the wall in the Eastern apartment strip. Right away their ‘need to be livin’ here’ situation shattered the myth of white privilege for me, and when their complaints carried no extra weight, I was certain that it was a made-up thing.

It wasn’t long before every one of them took a turn at playing the martyr and, because of that, all of our lives were made miserable.
The drunken father went so far as to hit himself in the head with an empty whiskey bottle then claimed that his skull bones had got cracked in a battle with the ‘racist’ Jewish superintendent. It’s a good thing that I saw him do it and spoke up.

The daughter crawled onto the fire escape after dark one night and claimed to have been raped by my own big brother! Her story did not falter until she found out he’d been in the hospital with appendicitis for two days. Then she claimed to have sumthin’ called a multiple personality disorder to explain away her confusion.

As for the mother, she kept knocking on doors and gasping that she had been robbed every time she couldn’t pay the rent.

I learned a lot before they was all thrown out 7 months later. The biggest thing was that color has nothin’ to do with troublemakin’.