Nikki Giovanni was born on the wrong side of the tracks, in Knoxville, Tennessee, on Mulvaney Street, during the era of segregation. Now 80, she remembers her childhood in a red-lined neighbourhood, demarcating a cordon sanitaire separating it from prosperous white suburbs. “My grandfather was a Latin teacher. He’d sit on the porch [after school] and people would come by saying ‘Evening ’fessor’. Reverend Abrams lived on the other side of our street and Mrs Abrams raised chickens. We built a church and there was a real community but now … ”
Now, the neighbourhood has been taken over by gentrifying middle-class white people, a development that Giovanni, barely masking her fury, struggles to find a word to describe, before settling on “unfair”. More words will come in her forthcoming memoir, A Street Called Mulvaney.
