What Homefulness Means to Me
I was born in Berkeley and raised in Oakland. My mother, a black woman and a single mother, worked for a decade for the City of Berkeley. She eventually bought a house in Oakland, but she lost it. She bought property back when a working-class person could still buy land in the Bay Area, before gentrification fueled theft and speculation. The house she bought was a “fixer-upper” on 59th street between Telegraph and Shattuck, what used to be a working-class Black neighborhood; she always had dreams of fixing it up, but she was hardly a handyman, and she didn’t know anyone who was. The house was what was called “income property” because there were units to rent in back, but my mom was a bad landlord; if people could not pay rent she would always cut them a break, and when she began to get sick there was no money to pay the mortgage. When she lost the place I grew up in, there was no public outcry, no bailout. This was in the early 80’s. I was 9 years old.
When I say bought, I don’t mean bought. The property my mom had that I grew up in never really belonged to us; it was always the bank’s. My mother engaged in a gamble when she assumed the mortgage on our house, a gamble that she would be able to generate enough money eventually to get to the point where the house was not owned by the bank anymore. What I understand now is that this game was rigged from the start; a woman of color is likely to have less job security and more likely to have crippling health problems like high blood pressure or mental health issues that will exacerbate income instability, in addition to making less money when she is working. So the inherent racism and sexism of this country’s capitalist system played a large part in me losing my childhood home… but more than all that, I think isolation was to blame.
When my mom bought her house her plan was to do it all herself; she had moved away from her family, who all lived in San Francisco, she and my dad divorced, and as I got older she stopped working outside the house, relying on rents generated from the property in order to stay home with me, so she was quite alone in the world in many ways. She had tenants who liked and respected her, but the landlord/ tenant relationship is set up to be exploitative and hierarchical, not fertile ground for friendships or even reciprocity. When she started to get sick there was no one around to help either of us.
My mother passed away last year, after having been homeless for more than a decade. I am and will always be proud of her as a strong and independent woman, but the drive to be alone and safe, for the sister to do it all for herself and take no handouts, the way her ties to community attenuated to the point where she had no one to turn to in her deepest extremity of crisis, wrecked the latter part of her life and the early part of mine.
My mom, like many of us in the African American community, distrusted not only government
intervention and assistance in her life, but assistance from other people as well. She chose to “do it herself” because she thought it was safer not to rely on anybody, not even her family. I have found this to be a typical attitude in our carnivorous American culture. I believe that capitalism authors so many of this society’s great and small betrayals, and undermines the trust we have in each other; it comes between sisters, between lovers, between parents and children, between new neighbors, between a mother alone and her extended family that could have helped her survive. In modern American capitalism human relationships come in a poor second to the prioritizing of individual economic gain and the parasitic enrichment of wealthy elites whatever the cost.
If my mom had had a home community with which to share the responsibilities and burdens of home ownership, of child-rearing, of life, she might have lived longer. I don’t know why she chose to separate from her birth family, but as an adult I realize that family can mean the family you are born to, the family of circumstance you find yourself locked up/in school/workin/playing or on the street with, or the family you create. This is the beginning of beloved community .
HOMEFULNESS stands in direct opposition to the cancerous American profit ethic, the paradigm that sends individuals fleeing from each other in the public and private spheres, fearful that if one assumes the geas of caring for another, one’s security/retirement fund/college experience/life plan/ ”me time” might be lost or greatly reduced or altered in some frightening way beyond individual control. The donations of participants and allies buy the land for the project: owning the land HOMEFULNESS stands upon free and clear will insulate the community from the vicissitudes of rent and land speculation, but the heart of HOMEFULNESS is the idea of people banding together to create stability through shared sweat, assets, and commitment to being not only our brother’s keeper, but our brother’s daughter’s keeper, and our sister’s boyfriend’s mother’s keeper, and the keeper of the Paki grocery store owner down the block.
HOMEFULNESS is a vision of intention, rooted in the idea that taking responsibility for each other in love and mutual accountability is a radical act.