Across the Street
written by: Lamont Neal
1970s and 1980s, North St. Louis, Missouri
K did not seem to have as much as I did. I noticed it back then, and I still remember it now. It was never a central part of the story, just something I observed in contrast to my own situation. I did not know the details of his parents’ finances. I could only make assumptions, and none with certainty. In truth, I did not know anything about his parents at all. I never saw them, and I was never inside his house.
He lived across the street from my grandparents. I did not see him often, but when I visited, he would sometimes play with my brothers and me. I was around nine or ten at the time, and K was a year or two younger. Whatever he had or didn’t have, I never saw him without that quick smile of his, the one that seemed to radiate from the top of his head down to his toes. I’ve never had that kind of smile. For those who do, I hope you never lose it. It’s a rare gift.
Back then, we did not think in terms of money. Maybe he did not either. Why would he. That kind of awareness only arrives when you reach for something and find it just out of grasp. If he had food in his belly, a roof overhead, and enough toys to keep his hands full, that might have been enough. He was not much different from the other kids who lived in my grandparents’ neighborhood, maybe a little better off, maybe a little worse, but probably not by much. I remember him as a happy kid. Always smiling. Always ready to play. So we played whenever he was available, and I was at my grandparents’ house.
What I did not understand then was the world forming around us. While the crack epidemic of the 1980s helped spark a West Coast musical shift, its real legacy was far darker and far more widespread than the return of social commentary to hip hop, now also incorporating late 1970s P Funk. The same West Coast gangs that were reshaping Los Angeles found a ripe market on the North Side of St. Louis.
My first suburban awareness of all this came through the voluntary desegregation program. Early in the morning, I would see a group of kids, laughing and full of energy, playing “Colors,” inspired by the movie, in the concrete space between the bus drop-off and the side doors of the school. Many of them lived in neighborhoods that were not affluent but had once been fairly safe. Soon those same neighborhoods would become battlegrounds for rival gangs most of us had never even heard of, and a harvesting ground where literal children, forced into premature adulthood, lost their lives at ages when they should have still been playing tag on the playground.
My suburban experience was nothing like their day-to-day reality. But I knew enough to understand that when I visited my grandparents or went to the barbershop a couple of blocks away, the atmosphere had changed. The safe bet, as an essential neighborhood tourist, was to avoid wearing anything blue or red because you never knew which trouble you might accidentally step into.
I remember one visit during my college years. I was walking toward the front door of my grandparents’ dark brick shotgun house in the Wells and Goodfellow neighborhood when I turned and saw the barrel of a shotgun sticking out of the rusty side door of a slow-moving car. Its muffler rattled, and its body was painted in three obviously non-factory colors. The passenger, the one holding the gun, yelled something indecipherable out the window and kept rolling. I froze. I could not move or speak. In that moment I was completely helpless. But within a couple of hours, I would get back into the car my parents bought me, drive to my safe neighborhood, and go on with my day.
For me, the terror was a moment. For others, it was a dark thread knitted into daily life. And I still wonder how much of that backdrop shaped K, even if I never saw it happening.
Years passed. Children grow up. And I do not remember what happened to him. My best guess is that one day, he just moved away. It is like that sometimes. People ease out of our lives as gently as they entered. No goodbye. No explanation. But I remember him. I still wonder how life has treated him since. I never asked my grandparents about him later on. That is how the friendships of convenience can be. You only think about each other on sight.
Before and after we played, I would leave my grandparents’ home and go back to mine. The houses were bigger. The lawns were wider. The sidewalks cleaner. I did not notice it then, but the differences between us were already speaking.
My family stood on a different side of the equation. Same color, but we were financially better off, thanks to my parents’ jobs and careers. Though my grandparents lived across the street, I was born into a generation that was one step ahead. K still had another one to go. That difference was not visible in the moment, but it mattered. It would shape the opportunities and the course our lives would take.
I look at my own kids. Their college savings started before my daughter was born. They have plans, resources, safe places to play. A roof over their heads, and beyond that, dinners out, movies, trips. These are things they never had to reach for. They were just there, waiting. I wonder if K decided to go to college. If so, how would his experience have been different from my own, let alone my kids’. Would there have been savings for him. A path to financial aid. Would his schools have placed him in a position to meet the criteria necessary to be accepted at a decent school. Or would he reach and find it was just another thing outside his grasp.
Eventually, K would have looked toward a future. For reasons I do not fully understand, I often find myself a collector of random statistics. I believe it is my way of making sense of a world that constantly shifts. Where I lack certainty, I try to fill the gaps with informal probabilities and likelihoods. The cost of that habit is a cold sense of realism that can slip into pessimism.
People say hard work brings success, but where you start matters. We love the fairytales, but the numbers tell a different story. The share of income held by the top has grown dramatically, while middle- and lower-income households have remained largely stagnant. Intergenerational mobility has declined. Even short-term mobility has become more difficult.
The reality is that most people do not end up much farther than where they began. The hardest-working people I have ever known were born poor, lived poor, and died poor. Hard work may be essential, but the results can differ greatly. I imagine countless people giving it their all, holding onto hope, even when it never seems to carry them forward.
Money is not just opportunity. It is forgiveness. It is a second chance. You can make mistakes, but if you have the right resources, you can recover. If you do not, you are disposable. Written off. Those second chances vanish before you even know they existed.
I like to believe life unfolded differently for K.
I like to believe that K’s family, like so many who came north to St. Louis in search of something better, eventually found it. That they saw the changes coming and moved before the wave hit. That opportunity, in whatever form it arrived, gave them a way out, a safer neighborhood, better schools, steadier ground beneath their feet.
I like to believe that the dream that brought their family north in the first place kept going. That K got the education he needed, found his way forward, and built a life where his children, maybe even his grandchildren by now, stand a little farther ahead than he did.
But that version of his life exists only in my mind.
I do not know what became of him. And even if that story is true for him, it is not true for many others. There are still countless Ks who remained in the path of that wave when it came.
Still, I hold onto the belief that the dream itself was never fully washed away. It may bend. It may scatter. But it does not disappear. It is carried forward, piece by piece, by people who refuse to let it go.
The damage is done. The question is how we undo it. How we make a difference. Maybe we cannot rewrite the scoreboard. But we can change how we coach. How we invest. How we show up for the kids who are still reaching.
There are people who do not understand that the score was tilted in their favor. One of my favorite quotes is that some people are born on third base and think they hit a triple. As long as that mindset persists, all we can do is hope that those who know the score keep doing what they can.
Where you start is an undeniable factor in determining what is within your reach and what you will have to find a way to bring closer.
- Across the Street - July 25, 2026
- Ascension - March 25, 2026
- Bonfire of Resolve - December 8, 2025
