what love looks like in the hood

I stood on the corner of 123rd Street and 2nd Ave. Wagner Projects. On one side of me were the men selling crack rock. On the other side were the addicts getting their daily fix. I was there selling too, except what I had for sale was chocolate.

Anybody who ever needed to fundraise for something that they couldn’t just put money on knows about these chocolates. I had sold them, or some version of them, before. This time I was in AP Calculus in a public school in the Bronx and didn’t have the money to buy a graphing calculator. My sales were slow, so I figured dealers get hungry and have money in their pockets. Users also get hungry and if I could catch them before they went into the corner store, then they could be my customer.

My plan was genius! And if this world made it so that I had to hustle to meet my academic needs, then at least I could hustle with products that were wholesome. I sold enough chocolate to get 2 calculators and donated one of them to the school.

Then, one day my business got shut down and I was banned from the corner.

“Antoinette? What you doing on this corner?”
“I’m selling chocolate to buy stuff for school.”
“Get off this corner.”
“But, you’re on this corner.”
“I SAID GET OFF THIS CORNER!! AND DON’T LET ME SEE YOU OVER HERE AGAIN!!”

I was kicked off the corner by a woman who had come to buy drugs. She was also the mother of one of my closest friends. I knew she was a user, just never witnessed her in the belly of the beast. As I was leaving I turned back around to see her scratching and handing money to one of the dealers to get her fix. In that moment I came to understand that this is what love looks like in the hood.

What love she had; she gave it to me.