COMMON GROUND : Places That Draw People Together Have Become Sites for Sad Eyes

I visited the black part of Cincinnati only briefly a skillion years ago. Local architecture appeared under the spell of Dutch Colonial influences. Boxy little homes stood high off the street, wide porches occasionally closed in by elaborate railing, potted plants and mesh-wire screens. It was my first experience with true autumn, seeing trees in bursts of flaming reds, golds, oranges and maroons. Everything was foreign except for those stoops. And the dark faces of the men and women who collected around them.

Back in South-Central, at 88th and Avalon, I’m struck by double vision. I will always see this scrubby park though my child’s eye--that Easter way back when my brother and I discovered our brand-new Buster Browns had been stolen while we played in the giant sandbox. I adjust my sight to take in the five moreno men in their 30s. They squat where the old baseball diamond used to be. One is mid-gulp, bottoming-up the brown bag that conceals the short dog.

Off the alley, not far from the old taco stand, near where Central crosses Manchester, is the designated spot. A gathering place. There are no signs except the dilapidated furniture that stays there around the clock, unmoved, untouched, yet clearly used. Sometimes when I drive through, it’s vacant. At other times, two or three old men sit, gesticulating, laughing. Intermittently, women join them, hands to hips, watching the progress of a card game.

The spring day’s moist with devolving thunderheads. Cruising south toward Century, I take a right and am struck by the broad expanse of an undeveloped block wild with foxtails and burs we call cuckabugs. In the middle of this unplanned Wyeth, a collapsible Formica-topped table hosts an ebony-skinned quartet playing dominoes, three men and a woman. As I pass them, one man makes that characteristic waffle of the arm that signals victory, slamming home the winning golden bone.

The Freedom Tree once stood by the tracks, bounded by Grandee, Beach Street and 102nd in Watts proper, on an ill-defined lot littered with empty oil drums and piles of wood. I came across it in 1968 when a teen-ager was killed in an officer-involved shooting. It was a bad place to die but a good place to congregate, a site of refuge, political debates and “catch action.” There was a constant flow of cheap alcohol and drugs, shooting craps--the kind of business that birthed folk songs like “Stagger Lee.” Nobody knew how long the tree had been there or how it had come by its name. Like the Watts Towers, it symbolized the community. When the police needed informers, they knew where to find them. When no one wanted to talk, there was no one under the tree. It’s gone now.

“What’s that all about?” I once asked a street-philosopher friend, sharing observations of what I suspected was a kind of communal ritual. It simply happened. People found each other. Swapped stories. Laughed and cried. Then went on. “Is this some holdover from Africa?”

He laughed. “I’ve seen it, too, not that I’ve been everywhere. And we aren’t the only ones. It seems to be something poor people do all across the United States. Especially in the South. And when they don’t have parks, they improvise. It’s like having a club without walls.”

Three hefty women preside over the ramshackle gray-blue porch on 89th Street, the older obviously the grandmother. Her two little granddaughters play on the patch of lawn behind the chicken-wire fence as the younger women chat, brown hair freshly pressed back against their scalps. Everyone’s gotten their hair straight-ironed this morning, including the young man. His hair is parted into a perfect gridwork of symmetrical, tightly bound nubbins fanning up from his scalp. With subdued pride, he rises from the stoop to jaw it over with an inquiring film crew. His red polyester shirt hangs to his green PJ bottoms, which threaten to drop from his hips.

Yeah. He’s a Blood. He fires a cigarette, leans into the fence, describes how his days are spent. Of course, the high unemployment, hours sitting around, smoking marijuana and drinking wine.

And, of course, nothing’s changed since the verdicts. It’s just the way things are.