Commentary: I loved living in a small town. But 'love thy neighbor' has changed in America

For more than two decades, I, a Black woman, lived with my family in a small Illinois town filled with white residents, many with a staunch fidelity to God, country and guns.

Although I don’t live there anymore, it was a delightful place because our family and several others in our small subdivision — particularly the family next door — worked hard to embody the tenet “love thy neighbor.”

We took baby steps at first, getting to know one another during impromptu barbecues and bonfires. Those moments would lay the groundwork for others to come that were far more consequential and far more meaningful.

Lately, I’ve been thinking: Would I even consider living in a conservative small town in today’s America? Absolutely not. And that says something painful about what my country has become, and my place in it.

To understand why we moved there in 1989 — back when the town’s welcome sign announced a population of 1,000 — you first must understand how foundational homeownership and upward mobility are to the American Dream.

David Trice, my husband-to-be, and I had come of age in the afterglow of the 1960s civil rights gains, believing we could live wherever we could afford.

In 1989, David told me he’d been dreaming about owning acres of land. He asked me to consider moving outside Chicago to the country. I was not keen on leaving my city. Although Chicago had its issues with redlining and massive disinvestment that left generational scars on some primarily Black neighborhoods, the small town ethos held little sway over me.

We were “Buppies,” Black urban professionals. Recent college graduates, we had grown up on Chicago’s South Side — he in a beautiful Georgian in the affluent Beverly neighborhood, I in a high-rise in a working-class section of the historic Bronzeville community.

As our wedding day approached, we’d made an offer on a century-old fixer-upper, a greystone in Bronzeville. But the owners were dragging their feet, which afforded David time to browse listings for homes for sale in the country, amid cornfields, red barns and silos. He found a brown brick two-story that sat on a nearly 3-acre wooded lot at the end of a cul-de-sac. Beyond the house was a pond.

We drove the 40 miles outside the city to see the house and fell in love with it. I agreed to move with the caveat that we stay for a year and then reassess.

Most of our family members thought we were nuts. Most, except my father-in-law who’d grown up in the Jim Crow South stealing sips of water from the “Whites Only” water fountain and who, like my own father, had moved to Chicago during the Great Migration. He’d dreamed of living in the Beverly neighborhood, which when they moved in was predominately white, or Pill Hill, a well-to-do South Side neighborhood and home to many Black doctors.

He walked our property with pride. His only caveat: “Let the police know Black folks are in town.”

Our neighbors had two young children, a daughter and son. The husband was a mechanical engineer and the wife worked in the administration office of the local Lutheran school.

We knew we could have spent years living side by side, barely acknowledging one another. But we dared something different.

We had the keys to each other’s homes, and we looked after each other’s property during summer vacations and winter breaks. We attended weddings and funerals and stood in each other’s driveway watching the kids go off to prom.

David and I were in our house five years before we had our daughter. At 14 months, she contracted a brain infection and nearly died. We were in the intensive care unit with her for 10 days, and our total stay in the hospital stretched well beyond a month. During our time away, our neighbors visited with us at the hospital, looked after our house and came over daily to feed and spend time with our cat.

You don’t have to be religious to understand the value of loving one’s neighbor. It shouldn’t mandate that we agree politically. But it does suggest that respect and kindness, at the very least, can form the backbone of any community.

We sold our house on Election Day in 2016. By then, David and I had been divorced for just over a year. He was living in the city, and I was about to return myself. Months before, I’d watched Trump signs sprout from the lawns of residents who surprised me. (But not from our immediate neighbors’.)

With America celebrating its 250th birthday, we seem to be in moral retreat when it comes to loving our neighbors.

The message from the leader of the free world is not love thy neighbor, especially if the people next door are a gay family, an immigrant family, a Black family, a family with a trans child. We are encouraged to indulge our delusions about replacement theory and white male superiority and to surrender to our instincts toward incivility and division.

America has never been a perfect union. But there was a moment not long ago when we seemed, however imperfectly, to be striving toward a broader idea of who belonged. Our country right now is mired in a level of bullying and intolerance that, for some, might feed their fears, but won’t feed their family.

There’s a quote I love from the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. that comes from his commencement address at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania in 1961 — eight years before America’s first lunar landing.

King contrasted the country’s technological expertise with its moral aptitude. He suggested that we should be as sophisticated, forward-thinking and progressive in our moral universe as we have been with our gadgetry.

“Jet planes have compressed into minutes distances that once took days and months to cover. … Through our scientific genius we have made of this world a neighborhood; now through our moral and spiritual development we must make of it a brotherhood. In a real sense, we must all learn to live together as brothers (and sisters), or we will all perish together as fools.”

In our democratic experiment, our most fundamental duty is to see our neighbors as wholly human. If we can’t do that, we lose our grip on who we are as a people and as a nation.

____

Dawn M. Turner is a former columnist for the Chicago Tribune and the author of the forthcoming novel “Majestic Hills.”

___