Black as Peach

Four days spent in Georgia's largest city have me wondering which city is more confusing: Moscow or Atlanta. Moscow was intensely difficult to find my way around in, especially at first. But at least Moscow did not show the total lack of creativity with which Atlanta invests its street names. For those of my readers who are not American, an old joke has it that in Atlanta, all directions start "First, go to Peachtree." I can now say from personal experience that this joke is firmly based in fact.

The first and most important Peachtree in Atlanta is called, simply, Peachtree Street. Strangely, since Georgia is the Peach State, the street is not named for any particular peach tree that played a role in Atlanta's history. Rather, the story goes, it was a trail named after the locally plentiful pitch tree by the Native Americans who lived in the area before white settlers arrived in the 1830s, but because the settlers didn't like the idea of a street named for such a foul-smelling tree, they changed it to Peachtree. Peachtree Street has become what Broadway is to New York or Market Street is to Philadelphia--the main spine around which the body of the city finds its structure. The street has also given its name to dozens of other thoroughfares in the city.

A block west of Peachtree is, not surprisingly, West Peachtree. Far to the north, near a wealthy district Buckhead, the original Peachtree Street becomes Peachtree Road. To the south, it becomes Peachtree Boulevard. Somewhere along the way, Peachstree Street crosses Peachtree Avenue. The map my hostel gave me also showed a Peachtree Creek, a Peachtree Battle, and a Peachtree Terrace. The Atlanta visitor's center, located close to the original Peachtree near the Underground Atlanta mall, has an intersection road sign with a good twenty Peachtrees.

I got to see a lot of the main Peachtree Street during my stay in Atlanta. My first day, I walked north along it, in 80 degree heat (maybe 25 Celsius, for my British readers), to the Margaret Mitchell House. Later in the day, I took a bus and did a lot more walking to reach The Temple. No, not the original temple in Jerusalem, built by Solomon, rebuilt by Herod, and levelled by the Romans, but Atlanta's main Reform temple, which bears that name. I was eager to go there for a Friday night service because of the Temple's role in the Civil Rights Movement. As portrayed in the film Driving Miss Daisy, the Temple was bombed in 1958 because its rabbi at the time was an active proponent of integration.

The following two days found me back on Peachtree as I searched for the Atlanta Civic Center, where I went to see an exhibit on "the African-American experience"--so called, I gathered, because its organizers wanted to emphasize not merely African-American history but the African-American contribution to America. As you might imagine, Atlanta is chock full of black history. It is also chock full of black people; at one point, a few years ago, two-thirds of Atlanta's citizens were black. This percentage has declined slightly as formerly fleeing whites have returned from the suburbs and whites from other parts of the country have come to share in the city's flourishing economy.

Nonetheless, walking through Atlanta, it is easy to forget that you live in a country where whites, not blacks, are the majority. When I visited Underground Atlanta, a downtown mall fashioned from some streets covered over by railroad viaducts and later rediscovered, I was the only non-black face in sight. Even the mall's Chinese restaurant was staffed by black people. Visiting the African-American exhibit described above, I had the same experience.

When I lived in Brooklyn, I made my home on the border between two neighborhoods, Clinton Hill and Bedford-Stuyvesant. Frequently portrayed in Spike Lee films, "Do or die" Bed-Stuy has been an important African-American community since before the Civil War, when it was one of the few areas in then-independent Brooklyn where black people could own land. Though situated between Bed-Stuy and the predominantly African-American neighborhood of Fort Greene, Clinton Hill was more racially mixed, mostly because Pratt Institute, a major school for the arts, was located there and thus brought in a more diverse community. So it is not as though I have no experience being in largely black areas.

Nonetheless, my visit to Atlanta was the first time I can recall being the only white person in large crowds of black people. Although I was, naturally, around a lot of black people when I took the busses in my neighborhood or when I went shopping in Downtown Brooklyn, I cannot recall having ever previously been in places in America where there were literally no white people present.

I guess this is a privilege white Americans have and don't usually realize: we are almost never in situations where we are the only one who looks like us. I imagine that, for non-whites, this experience must come more often and at times be much more frightening than my forays through Atlanta were for me.