ELLA: FIGHTING TO SAVE A FEW
“All of it had to be”
Any life spanning seven decades is bound to have its share of twists, turns, and dreams deferred—maybe some which are never realized at all. After months of meeting with Ella, a petite and loquacious 72-year old woman, she told me, “You know, I didn’t really want all this stuff to be like this. I wanted that brick house, two-car garage and a husband and all that respectability. I always wanted that stuff.” Instead, Ella raised her two children alone and took on a career she hated, plumbing, to provide for her family.
Yet if you listen to her for long, you begin to realize that Ella has a different dream now,one forged in large part by her neighborhood’s seemingly endless struggle for resources and recognition over the last sixty years. A quick walk through Ella’s neighborhood, known as St. John’s, nestled in a small corner of northeast Austin, tells part of the story. Its narrow streets have few sidewalks and many contain overgrown vacant lots. A few newer brick homes with freshly planted flowers sit side by side with more dilapidated houses enveloped by chain-link fences sporting “No trespassing” signs. Less-than-friendly dogs roam the streets freely, often startling me on my periodic jogs through the neighborhood. Rusty old cars, tires, and discarded furniture are common fixtures in many front yards.
Statistics tell another part of the story. According to the 2010 U.S. Census, the neighborhood’s median annual household income was $29,237, compared to a city-wide median of $52, 453. Forty-three percent of children in St. John’s currently live in poverty, and twenty-six percent of the 16- to 19-year-olds are out of school or unemployed. Although Ella’s neighborhood now occupies less than 2 square miles, today it is inhabited by almost 10,000 people.
Ella, who wears her white hair closely cropped, and is perpetually searching for her eye glasses, is now retired. Every once in a while, a small hint of the almost inevitable fatigue that comes with age reveals itself in what Ella describes as her memory “glitches”. Most days, though, her energy still seems nearly boundless—in fact, each time we met she had another new idea to share with me, often related to her efforts to mentor a small group of black and Latino teenage boys in her neighborhood whom she feels everyone else has given up on. “Every time they come over to my house, I try to give them a new dream,” she told me as we sat together on her maroon plaid couch, where most of our conversations over the last year took place. It was Ella’s reputation as an active community member in this historically neglected neighborhood which initially led me to contact her—and from the very beginning, she was eager to share her experiences.
Ella’s stories are punctuated by infectious, boisterous laughter, often provoked by her own incredulity about what she has lived through. “I’ve had so many ‘firsts’ in my life,” she observed one balmy October afternoon. The walls of her home—one hallway of which she proudly calls her “gallery”—are covered with family photos and carefully preserved newspaper clippings of historic events, marking the passage of time. “It’s all about honor,” she told me, as she showed me a photo of her now deceased mother. Honoring her family’s past and the potential of her community’s future.
For Ella, the past and the present, her journey and her community, are inseparable. Every memory is a launching pad to twenty more. As she weaves them together she often jumps backwards and forward in time as recollections of different people and places come flooding back to her. “As I look back,” Ella says, “I feel like all of it had to be.”