The Front Porch Can Save America
Decorum was king and the porch demanded community
The American front porch is a unique space in the world. Wealthy or poor, the room or gallery built onto the front of a home, slightly elevated, thereby offering both a precise view of passersby and a certain amount of security, is where Americans most fervently become Americans — well, that is the way it used to be.
The things you would do or say on the front porch were almost always things you would never do or say off of the porch. Sitting up there, two strides removed from the innards of your home, one was free to use foul language, to drink, to listen to music, to sleep with a cool breeze falling upon supine form. The porch was every man and woman’s secret domain but in full view of the world and so required a certain decorum.
In my town, Freehold, New Jersey, on a street situated just between the white and black sections, the final warning to whites that at the corner the black section began, many black Americans would pass us by. I can still recall how my uncle’s eyes would rise up over the edge of his newspaper, silently drilling holes into the black kids noisily passing by the house on the sidewalk below. His eyes were escorting them along, “scooting’m outta here,” he’d say. Should a stray foot fall onto the pine cones or my grandmother’s flowers…
