To neighbors, she was “Miss Anna,” and to her children, she was the strictest, strongest woman in Kirkwood.
Anna Thornton stuck with this neighborhood four miles east of downtown through decades of decline, determined to help spare from jail the local kids she’d once babysat. Anna watched over her beloved Warren Street like a one-woman police force and benevolent monarch. Her kids say she liked to cut loose during Saturday night parties, watching children imitate James Brown on the living room floors she kept gleaming like mirrors, her eyes peeled for mischief outside.
By early 2014, when my family moved in next door, Anna was in her 80s and had withered to a shadow of the robust teacher and nurse she’d once been. One night I watched paramedics wheel her down her driveway—a common occurrence, other neighbors told me. She wore a silky red nightgown that hung loose on her emaciated frame, and beneath her wispy hair, her face was filled with pain. In the seven months we were neighbors, Anna and I spoke just once. Her feebleness kept her inside, and I never took the initiative to walk next door and chat. One day as I was rushing to an appointment, she was sitting outside in her wheelchair.
“What you got?” she said.
“Excuse me?”
“What you got in there? That little baby?”
“Oh!” I said. “It’s another girl.”
Our second child had just been born, and I joked about being outnumbered by women. Anna bashfully held her hand to her lips, as if I’d told a dirty joke, and I went on my way. I didn’t stick around to hear what Anna would, sooner or later, tell anyone who visited her home at 51 Warren Street about her stubbornness to stay put: “I’m-a die at 51,” she’d say. And that September, that’s exactly what she did.
Anna had been a widow, so her death left her property in the control of her youngest daughter and primary caretaker, Anita Banks, who sold Anna’s house at “lot value” before it even reached the market. I knew the deal had closed when Anita—a 54-year-old grandmother who’d always been affable and warm, wearing an eyebrow ring and calling everyone “darlin’”—became quiet and ducked conversations that autumn. The sale of the family’s Warren Street house would bring Anita a windfall, but offloading it would sever deep ties to the neighborhood and drive a wedge between Anita and some of her siblings.
The moving truck showed up a few nights before Christmas. We were coming home from dinner when Anita saw me. Across the fence, she wept while recalling her wedding in the backyard, her mom’s glorious rose bushes, and how her dad used to drink coffee in his shed—his sanctuary—all year long. And then she mentioned, for the first time, that my land—a lot that used to belong to Anna and her husband—had once been a bountiful urban farm. The farm had been a food source for families that had fallen on hard times, which were many during Kirkwood’s post–Jim Crow nadir. I suddenly felt that I was standing on sacred ground, which I’d barely been able to keep green with grass. I realized I had to know more about this little farm and the family who operated it. It was obvious that Anita and I were experiencing gentrification on the most human level that night—quite literally from opposite sides of the fence.
As I came to know more about Miss Anna after her death, my sense of what can only be called “gentrifier’s guilt” intensified, as the opportunity to know my neighbor and hear firsthand her version of local history was lost. Maybe the guilt was unreasonable in the first place. Some metrics say my zip code, 30317, is already too wealthy for the household income of my wife, a tenured Atlanta Public Schools teacher, and me, a freelance writer and author, to technically be gentrifying it. The arrival of middle class families in formerly downtrodden areas has been called the last phase of gentrification, after the trickle of “urban pioneers,” often artists or gay couples. And waves of white newcomers have been planting roots in Kirkwood for nearly 20 years. Still, it’s hard not to feel like an interloper after you’ve moved into a historically black (well, after it was historically white) neighborhood with a blonde wife and two Nordic-looking cherubs, and your brand-new soft-modern house towers over the prewar brick cottage next door. The guilt intensifies when you realize that your one-sixth-acre slice of Atlanta had actually belonged to the family next door for longer than you’ve been alive. I never really got to know Anna because of that guilt. I figured she valued the chain-link fence between us and preferred to quietly coexist. I could never shake the feeling, however ridiculous, that she resented me for taking over her former land. And I’d made the ignorant assumption that we’d have nothing to talk about anyway.
The truth is that I, like many, had also been part of Atlanta’s ongoing cycle of displacement, though it left my family in more a state of discomfort than dire need. We’d outgrown an Inman Park condo and couldn’t afford a bigger place in that neighborhood. In Kirkwood, though, we found a 2,400-square-foot home that was twice the size of our condo, solidly within our budget, and squarely in the middle of a vibrant, diverse, and walkable community .
It wasn’t so different from what Anna herself had found in Kirkwood, 50 years earlier.
