Louisville, KY: Year One (Ch. 5)

My first outing when I moved to Louisville, KY was a trip to the library. My father and I were living in a senior citizen high-rise at the time, and the library was within walking distance. I loved to read when I was younger and would sometimes finish a book in a day. I read one of the Harry Potter books in about 24 hours, staying up past midnight to finish it. Of course, this level of dedication to reading was pre–social media. The library we went to had a summer reading contest where, if you read enough books from a list, you would be rewarded with a basket full of different items.

My father and I walked there often since I was only allowed to check out three books at a time and I finished them quickly. One of the items in the reward basket was a small magnetic picture frame for the refrigerator. It was mustard-colored, rectangular, and said, “I SPY YOU READING.” My father put that magnet on the refrigerator of every apartment he moved into until he passed away. The photo inside is of him standing, with me leaning on his big beer belly, wearing a white and red hair bow. It was taken at a skating rink birthday party for one of my cousins. The two have aged into each other, making them hard to separate. I’ve kept the tradition of putting that frame on my refrigerators as well. It’s over 25 years old now.

Louisville was still doing desegregation busing when I started third grade. It was the city’s attempt to diversify schools since it was generally illegal to attend schools outside your district. Some of the kids in my neighborhood would gather in the parking lot of our neighborhood school, Coleridge Taylor, where buses would take us to different elementary schools. I was assigned to Lowe Elementary, which was about 20 minutes away. I attended for three years, where I learned Spanish, played the violin for a total of five years, joined a few in-school clubs, and always brought “cheese in a can” and crackers for lunch.

My school world felt very different from my home life. My neighborhood friends weren’t bused out like I was. They would say my “properness” sounded like “talking white,” and one of my friends once told me I needed to change out of my school uniform when I got home because it made us “all look bad.”

Sade was my best friend, and she lived in the building behind mine. We stayed friends for years and even wrote letters to each other after I moved to Chicago. I met Sade when my dad made me go outside to “make a friend.” He did everything short of locking me out of the apartment. I went to the park across the street where a kid was playing on a large climbing dome. We chased each other around for a while before realizing we were both girls. We both took our hoods off in the cold and said at the same time, “I didn’t know you were a girl!”

Sade’s mother was strict, so it took effort to get her to come outside or over to my apartment to make up dances to Diana Ross and the Supremes. I loved making up dances, and we had routines to every song on their Number 1’s album. My father listened to a lot of soul music, and that was one of the albums he let me have. Most of his CDs were blues or soul, except for one random Mary J. Blige album. Sade would sneak and talk to me on the phone when her mother was asleep if she couldn’t come outside. One time, I had to hide in her closet for what felt like forever when her mother came home unexpectedly. I wasn’t supposed to be there. The closet was suffocating because I had to sit on top of a pile of clothes—her mother was a mild hoarder.

I liked Sade’s mother, Linda, even though I was afraid of her. She was kind to me and never disciplined Sade in front of me. She worked at a factory that made magic water coloring books—ones that came with a clear marker that revealed colors like pink, green, and red when you used it. One of my favorite childhood memories is going to the Louisville Zoo with Ms. Linda and Sade for a Halloween event. I still have pictures of us wearing matching pink outfits and posing around the zoo. I think Sade’s outfit got lost in one of the piles at home because we never dressed alike again.

There was a place downtown called The Galleria on 4th Street. It was a two-story mini mall with fast food and stores. Sade and I would go there and ask people for a dollar until we had enough to buy a CD or something else. I don’t remember why I did this since my dad gave me what I needed and even made a habit of giving me a dollar a day.

I took it further by having Sade or another friend walk with me to the dollar store so I could buy candy and resell it in the neighborhood. I used the money to buy more candy or small items. I don’t know why I became a candy seller, but I would walk about half a mile, pick out what I thought would sell best, organize it neatly in a silver container, and go door to door collecting dimes and quarters.

My dad would give me about five dollars, and my friends and I would walk to Broadway Street to get food from Indi’s or dollar menu items from McDonald’s or Wendy’s. I would sometimes buy food for my friends, or someone would eat the rest of the meat off my chicken bones. Bacon cheeseburgers, fries, milkshakes, and spicy chicken made up most of my diet. My father cooked every day, but it was always the same meals. In the morning, there would be biscuits, eggs, and spicy sausage sitting in an old cake pan lined with paper towels. By dinner, it would be replaced with fried chicken wings. He was a good cook—he was raised in Mississippi—but he rotated the same dishes. There was always Sunny-D or Nesquik syrup in the fridge.

My father, whose name was Sharōn Cunningham, was born in 1934. His first name sounded feminine, so most people called him “Cunningham.” He was retired by the time we moved to Louisville in 1997. He picked up odd jobs like janitorial work at hotels but nothing full-time. His retired title was “glass maker.” Kids used to say, “Move, your dad wasn’t a glassmaker!” when you were in their way, and I got to say, “Yes, he was,” while still blocking their view.

Being retired meant living on a fixed income. Public housing was one of the few options for a single parent, aside from Section 8, which had long waitlists. My father and I made the best of it. He rarely spent money outside of buying beer, but when he did, he went to the horse racetrack. Most of the time, he watched races on TV or sat on the porch drinking with whoever passed by. He never had a girlfriend or brought women home, at least not that I knew of, even though he was attractive and looked younger than his age.

There were times I had issues with other kids in Beecher Terrace. My dad signed me up for a community center I didn’t like going to because some of the kids were mean. One day, while we were playing kickball, three girls told me they were going to beat me up after because I was helping my team win. The adults tried to intervene, but there’s only so much they can do. Even after I started playing badly on purpose, they kept threatening me, so I ran home as soon as we were dismissed.

My dad was furious when he found out how scared I was. He walked me back to the center to talk to the staff, but again, adults can only do so much. I ended up avoiding the block those girls lived on for a long time. Out of sight, out of mind. They never got the chance to fight me.

People ask me what it was like growing up in the projects and whether I was scared. It wasn’t as scary as people imagine, at least not in the 90s. Those “scary” kids were your friends or your friends’ friends. Those adults were parents you knew. Sometimes there were arguments or fights, usually over something small or someone not minding their business. Most of the time, things didn’t escalate because, at the end of the day, it was our neighborhood—our home. Some of us were just kids in households trying to mind our business.

(Updated April 7, 2026)