Dear Milwaukee,

With funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, you’ve planted your workers and giant crane smack in front of my house along the Milwaukee River. I look out at a 20 foot round hole that reaches deep into the ground, into the sewer. For weeks now your crane has been spewing diesel fumes as you try to fix the leaks seeping into the groundwater. As I sit in my sunroom with a laptop, I gaze at a worker taking a lunch hour nap in the cabin of the crane.

This is what you are to me, Milwaukee: a work-in-progress, recovering, and reinvesting, sincere, hard-working, and sometimes exasperating.

Growing up in Hawaii, I never imagined I’d end up here, so far north the winter sun can’t provide vitamin D, where I’m the only person of color on my block. But I’ve been here now for 23 years, the longest I’ve lived anywhere, with roots that have grown deep, despite the leaky sewers.

Do you know how I praise you to out-of-towners? A hidden gem, a well-kept secret, surprisingly hip. You are all that. So why do you exasperate me?

You are also a place of clear boundaries, deep-seated fears, and racial angst. A place where I will always be the “other.”

A place where neighbors call the police over a “suspicious vehicle” parked in front of our house.

A place where single Black women are being evicted from their homes in record numbers, deprived of jobs and affordable housing.

A place where a Hmong man gets pulled over for drunken driving and gets beaten up by the police because he doesn’t understand English.

But I’m giving you another chance, Milwaukee, and another, and another. Why?

You are also a place of possibility. A place where we can build almost anything we can dream up. A place of 2 degrees of separation, not 7. Small enough to know your alderperson and everyone at the food co-op, but big enough to hide out and reinvent yourself.

In 1987, you received me with my nascent poetic ambitions and a baby on my hip. A family town, everybody said, and two more babies were born here, with midwives, on the maple floor of our bungalow. You supported me as I organized events for peace, opened a nonprofit yoga school, put on shows, and grew deep and wide roots despite the obstacles.

You come around, Milwaukee, a little slow for my taste, but you come around, with your big old cranes and overhauls. I stay because I can’t stand to give up on you, hoping you will one day be the home I’ve yearned for.

pkh

Dear Milwaukee,

I can hardly believe it was 9 years ago you cast your spell on me. I came to visit my old pen-pal John and saw what you had to offer. I found a creative community making art, film and music combined with cheep rent and large spaces to work on projects. I was sold and here I've built my life. I have grown with you over this time. Moving from one neighborhood to another. Filling spaces and rooms with my work and others. I have started community projects that have been responded to by thousands. I have found my home. So why is it I have a sinking feeling in the back of my mind? Why can't certain things blossom here that can in other comparable cities. Milwaukee, I beg of you, please hold close the amazing resources you have. Please appreciate those who are making this city unique. Don't turn your head to those struggling around you because it's easier to look elsewhere. Remember that when small business after small business close their doors we have a future together of strip malls and sameness. That my dear Milwaukee is when I will give up on you. But there is still time to save what we have and I beg of you to not wait until it's to late. Don't regret you never went into that store to see what was inside, ate at that restaurant to taste a new type of food or stopped by that beautiful mural, now just a memory, another empty space waiting for a condo. Be thankful for what we have Milwaukee; your lake, your tight knit neighborhoods and amazing parks, your empty skeleton factories and corner bars. I will make a long list of all of these things and more that I love, fold it up and put it in my pocket knowing that you will be safe there, if not forever at least as a warm memory. I came here from far away and here I plan to stay. Milwaukee, let's keep growing into a better place so that more people will realize this can be their home. We can do this together and this is how we will survive.

Love,
Faythe

Dear Milwaukee,

       We glanced at a map, then Adolph accepted the job, teaching art at UW-Milwaukee. And in June, 1966, Adolph and I and our three pre-schoolers left Manhattan, a city of soot, concrete, and crowds, and landed here, on your East Side, streets so tunneled by elms that the sky was formed by spaces between branches.
       A rented house, front porch, yard, tree to climb, sidewalk for tricycle-riders, Frederick Olmstead's Lake Park three blocks to the east, further east Lake Michigan, we felt we'd moved to a year-round resort, even during the frigid winter. Dress warmly, that's all.
       We came for a year and never left. Dutch elm disease killed those arching elms; despite open housing marches, the city remained segregated; and the cultural scene was in its seedling stage. Yet we stayed. There was the park system, the lake, the public museum, the festivals, the family orientation, what made it all possible was the people.
       This is a city of activists, people with empathy working to make the world a better place, of artists, of creative thinkers open to new ideas. . .
       Lucy works for social justice, education, and culture in the inner city, sponsors black entrepreneurs, early childhood education, the arts. . . Peggy runs monthly salons to discuss issues that affect our lives in this science-fiction century. Julie's passion is peace, Else founded the Urban Ecology Center, Gretchen and Eric help people grow vegetable gardens instead of grass, the Wild Ones encourage native plantings, others educate people on pesticide risks, on water pollution, still others fight against water privatization. Godsil created the Milwaukee Renaissance website for them all, the gathering place of activists.
       The cultural scene has come alive: galleries and gallery nights, poetry readings, open mics, modern dance, ballet, theater, bands, night clubs. We can dance every night of the summer at free outdoor concerts. The MilwaukeeArtistResourceNetwork, with 1500 members, keeps artists, writers, actors, musicians, and filmmakers in touch with each other, online and off.
       Almost 44 years, and now I bike along streets populated by memories, house after house with a name in my head that no longer applies. And populated by people still here, who enrich my day if we happen to meet, so when I shop, go to the gym, look at the lake, I allow extra time. And I contemplate the strangeness of it all: we moved to a mark on the map, found friends who became family, found a caring, creative, playful community of people. And that community became our home.

Dear Milwaukee, 

 I know little boys who'll swear they've never known fear. But I have seen the angry tears welling in their eyes; Safe, powerful emotions that protect them from within its distant, invulnerable place of strength.
 
Their Sadness registers as anger and their fear as violence, their words allege, “i don't need you” and their eyes say, “keep away”. And they are never disappointed.
 
 I ask them children's essay questions of “How I spent my weekend and they reply with police procedural s of witness to crimes and parental arrest. They tell me stories of candy store visits turned to tense, racial interplay and their entrepreneurial endeavors, selling bootleg DVD s late into the night.
 
With unflinching honesty they rattle off tales of gunshots in the darkness, and your streets cordoned off for arrest, but eye my duck panang with wary scrutiny. I thumb through a proficiency test to find the question that ask, “Are you hungry?” or “Did you have a place to sleep last night?” Perhaps it is in the instructions on how to take the test.
 
 Milwaukee, this is what you are to me the edge of Harambe leading into Gentrifying Brewers Hill, boarded by River-west; neighborhoods in uneasily defined transition, East-side to the North-side but North-side to East-siders. 
 
 Your pit-bulls and Rottweilers howl like werewolves through the fog on Baskerville moors, at none to mythical sirens. While young men roam the night like conquering moors.
 
 Impacted snow rises like Aztec temples, glistening in the moonlight. By the light of day we can see it slowly diminishing, settling into stubborn mounds of black ice. I hurdle them to reach the bus-stop.
 
 Downtown at the protest against Jeb Bush and Scott Walker I see my neighbor. Milwaukee you used to have the best transit system in the country. Now I'd do just as well to rent my own limo. Your County Supervisor is providing wonderful service to suburbanites who don't use our once great park system or who'll never foot on a county bus.
 
 Down these streets houses and rear-view mirrors fly Puerto Rican colors. Schools filled with Latino children with white, Indian and black heritage. Forming further branches of the third root and making La Raza a commonplace reality. Parents who crossed boarders and whose ancestors had boarders cross them, all defying invisibility. The man at the corner gas station emigrated here from Iraq but that was in the early 80s, when they were the “good ones”. Soon he'll sell it to the man from Mumbai. Hey, we got our own UN right here.
 
 My Milwaukee does not know its own beauty and strength; you have your slangers and bangers second and third generation, with affiliations that have protected them in vicious fraternity, and a love mean and true. We know them and see them registering their kids for school but without our support they are only grooming their kids for incarceration. A tradition of desperate choices like a multiple choice test with only incorrect answers.
 
In Shinto, Japanese ancestor worship, anything incredibly beautiful or incredibly ugly is believed to be evidence of the divine. Down Milwaukee streets, roadside shrines to the victims of violence, remind me of those outdoor Shinto altars and the little, random holy places you happen upon in Cuba. Mourners add icons and mementos, and I wonder if among them are remorseful perpetrators. The thought makes me embarrassed of myself. A parent should never have to bury a child but in each little structure I see a mother or a father, family and friends stripped of a loved one. I see a community made less trusting of itself, a Milwaukee made a little less cohesive.
 
 Identical corporate hip-hop blares from speakers all attesting their individuality. Chuck D said, “Rap can bring about change, but there's a poison going on. Hip hop is a beautiful art form that has narrow cast itself, to sell itself to the highest bidder”. Teenagers exit a bus, creating a chorus of obscenities, ten feet tall if ego were added to their measure. Looking as if the world had caught them with their pants down; the boys shout at women, in attempts at male bonding. They proclaim their heterosexuality but they seem more like Gangstalicious doing the homey dance. 

They speak to affirm powers they are not sure they possess. Looking for guidance, who are we to them? I must remind myself, they are not the cause of our problems but one result.
 
An older man looks at me as if to say, 'boys will be boys', but he himself was clearly not convinced. Our tolerance of such behavior allows it to continue, and a world to exist where our mothers, sisters and our daughters are not safe to walk down the street alone.

Placid clean snow gives way to such debris as alcohol bottles and used condoms materialize into view amid neighborhood side walks and the lines of foursquare games on schoolyard playgrounds. A recently completed house sports broken windows beneath its solar panels, jagged granules of glass sprinkle the ground like sugar rotting a brand new permanent tooth. They’ve boarded up the windows, so now it fits right in.
 
The N word fills the air like it was a Klan rally. Young men soon follow, mocking their bookworm friends to keep them in their place, least they be disappointed. But education can help us see through the fog and maybe if Mos Def were president we'd have a public option health care plan and free breakfast for all the children.
 
Milwaukee you are a place where fathers push their daughters in shopping carts at Lena's and Big Lots. But he is a three time loser in the game--- you say. Struck three times, he's shuffled back to cells overcrowded. Non-violent offenders elbow to elbow with angry, desperate men, blood on their hands. Rehabilitation and treatment the sentence for thicker wallets. You must know some of that bloods going to drip off on you and me.
 
 That father's children watch the winners roll by, strapped and shielded, in his car they seized. The drivers’ job is to see trouble. If he doesn't, you or I or he could come to harm. So trouble is what he sees. But those children, they are the only kids in their street who've ever seen the lakefront, thirty blocks away.
 
 While white kids from your “good” neighborhoods approach me to buy crack.
 
 They are my children everyone. 
 
Gil Scott Heron said no matter how far you go, you can always turn around. And he's walked down many a dark alley with the devil at his side.
 
 Milwaukee you are a place where a single mother of three has two jobs and is working her way through school. And post-adolescent fathers and mothers rebuild their lives without a road map. My Harambee neighborhood, you are home to college professors with PhD s and an Olympic gold medalist. Who knew?
 
Old mansions stand in defiant majesty lining streets that once carried horse-drawn carriages. This could be Havana or old Germany, judging by the architecture. And the Greer Gallery just two blocks west of Richards and Wright Street held some of our city's greatest works of art.
 
 Our children sing their new versions of We are the World but I am uncertain if they take the words to heart. 

Milwaukee in depriving people of family sustaining jobs with benefits, eradicating affordable housing, destroying public education and unions (means that marginalized people have traditionally used to pull themselves up). We are giving Birth to a consuming darkness, and leaving in its wake a Permanent American Undercaste. A faint light radiates through it. Our lives illuminate the barriers that separate us and can break them down. It questions how we treat each other, and in it is a battle for your soul--- as well as mine.
 
Sincerely yours,
 
Eric Disambwa