I don’t think I would’ve ever guessed what this place used to be. It was nothing but what it had been to me—a shell that rang with catcalls and hollow singing shots. A bridge of a place only meant to usher me to where I really wanted to go and, in a haste of fear, needed to be before the man with the crooked smile and weathered skin sagging at the bus stop could coo into my car while I was paused at the light. Because I didn’t know what he—or the other men with bulging brown bags and too-big clothes or the women with crispy gelled edges that didn’t match the plastic ponytails—would ask me for.

I’ve always considered myself too honest and curious to shift my eyes carelessly to my steering wheel. Such a deliberate act seemed self righteous. So I’d wind up in a stutter, pretending to root around my car or stare at the sky with a tensed neck and nervous fingers. Hoping that they wouldn’t think that in the one glance I had thrown, they could get something from me, like unrelenting kindness. It sounds wrong. It is wrong. Because I’d made this into a safari of sorts. I was passing through a foreign land and being told they were the murderous trespassers—being told what to do to survive. Passing through and gawking at animals, only to be surprised when they sensed my presence and acknowledged it. I’d made them animals in my head. And I was the civilized one. The one worth saving. The one worth time and effort. And they were nothing but a blemish. Even though I was the one stomping their grounds.

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At some point I forgot what stories were. Or, rather, their purpose. They’d simply become a source of entertainment, a way to pass the time. But lost to me were the relics of individual history that people carried until I stood before an oak tree in Tallahassee’s Frenchtown. I’d been wandering through the neighborhood on foot, trying to escape the stigmas that people had showered upon me about the area. And I realized that the oak trees here have a way of seeing stories. They are our grandmothers: big boned with deep wrinkles running through their skin like dry canyon rivers. Arms outstretched from one corner to the next, protecting her babies. And we’re all her babies. The Spanish moss and fern and ants crawl up and down her arms, soaking up her secrets until she’s ready to breathe into us her memories of what falls outside the pages of history. The oak trees here have a way of reminding us who we all are and where we all used to be—because they’ve been here longer.

This one stood at the corner of Carolina and Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard. She was old, but she held her ground, her spine stern and upright. I wondered who’d stepped on the soil she clung to—if she’d ever coddled little French children or saw Ray Charles stumbling out of Red Bird Café. I knew that she’d always been here and wondered what had spared her from new-world development. I imagined that Gilbert du Motier de La Fayette—the man granted the land now known as Frenchtown—had thrown himself at her feet, sobbing and protesting and pleading with the people he’d corralled from France to never tear her down. But I figured this French soap opera fantasy dramatic and overacted. Instead, I pat her trunk and left her to her thoughts.

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Somewhere around age 19, or maybe it was 20, I became aware of my skin. I was—am—black no matter how many people pointed out the things that made me “otherwise.” In the black community, I wasn’t archetypal, so therefore I wasn’t. But to the rest of the United States—to the Census, to my classmates, to my future employers, to standardized tests, to extra-credit surveys—I am black. Eventually, I was proud that I wasn’t archetypal, even though that meant I was left yearning for a thread of identity to tie to my community. Or at least the community that everyone pegged as stereotypically black. A community like Frenchtown. And in my awareness of my skin—both the physicality and the comfort that I found in simply being me, in being different—I found a startling awareness of elitism. Elitism that squared my shoulders and upturned my nose when I was in a place that seemed so stereotypical. Because I was better than clichés. Better than Frenchtown on a Saturday afternoon.

In Saturday-afternoon Frenchtown there was a soothing, yet jarring, quiet. I’d expected rowdy men coughing over a shared bottle of whiskey, half-naked women shuffling down the sidewalk. Maybe the whispering pop of a not-so-distant gun shot. I’d expected obliviousness and drunkards. But there was none. I saw a man sleeping on his knapsack—his face was ruddy, red, and wrinkly, like a rock exposed to the elements, his beard stiff and stringy, his clothes unrecognizable as such while bathed in dirt. Another man, no worse for the wear and no less, hovered above him asking if he was drunk.

“No, I’m just sleeping.”

It was a mundane conversation, only focused by us being outside, them only a foot or two from the road. If it had been somewhere else, I imagined the same exchange between roommates or frat brothers.

“Are you drunk?”

“No, I’m just sleeping.”

And as I passed by this and tried my hardest not to stare, I noticed the passing cars. And I prayed that no one saw me as a part of this scene, because I was in no way the same as the people here, sleeping on the sidewalk. I was different. They had to know.

But they didn’t, I’m sure. Or maybe they did. Because, for a split second or two or three, they glanced my billowing teal skirt and yellow scarf, my hair coaxed