Meet the neighbors

Irene Sege - The Boston Globe - Boston.com - Living / Arts - News: "Second in a series of occasional articles about blacks and Latinos living in metro Boston.

ANDOVER -- Rice and pigeon peas are simmering on the stove when the telephone rings.

Shaun Morgan stands at the counter, cutting the steak he just barbecued. Little Joshua, 1 year old, is in the high chair, and Shaun Jacob, age 3, fingers the whistles his dad brought home as a reward for Shaun Jacob's sleeping through the night. Lily Mendez-Morgan answers the phone.

''Hi, Michelle." Mendez-Morgan nestles the receiver between her ear and shoulder. ''What happened to your book club?" Pause. ''What are you reading now?" Pause. ''I want to be involved. When are you guys meeting?"

The scene is mundane, as unremarkable as Mendez-Morgan's first experience living in a predominantly white neighborhood was traumatic.

She was 5 in 1976 when her parents bought a house on Cushing Avenue on Jones Hill in Dorchester. By moving two blocks from their apartment off Stoughton Street, her Puerto Rican-born parents crossed a racial boundary and became one of the block's first families of color. ''My father," Mendez-Morgan says, ''was thrown against a chain-link fence and told, 'We don't want your kind here.' " She and her brother were playing inside when a Veryfine apple juice bottle came flying through the window, sending shattered glass to their feet. ''I was terrified," she says, ''and confused."

Almost 30 years later, Mendez-Morgan lives in a four-bedroom, half-million dollar home on a leafy cul-de-sac in a suburb where 1.8 percent of the residents are Latino like her and fewer than 1 percent are African-American like her husband. Soon after they moved here in January 2004, Michelle Galietti, the white neighbor on the phone, heard they also had a toddler and introduced herself. The white man next door welcomed them with a bottle of champagne.

''I was surprised. I shouldn't have been," Mendez-Morgan says. ''I had prepared myself to not be accepted."

At a time when the Boston area suffers from a lingering reputation of being a difficult place to live for people of color, the Morgans, both 33-year-old natives, navigate distinctly different courses through the subtle issues of race each says have replaced the overt racism of their childhoods. While she is acutely aware of the racial subtext of her surroundings, he is determined to move beyond it. They argue about how to teach their brown-skinned, curly-haired boys about racism.

In a metropolitan area where 2.8 percent of suburban residents are black and 3.5 percent are Latino -- lower than in most large American metropolises -- the Morgans moved to a town where, as in many Boston suburbs, demographic change has come slowly and more from an increase in Asians than people like the Morgans. In Andover, the proportion of residents who are black or Hispanic remained virtually unchanged from 1990 to 2000 while the share who are Asian rose from 4 percent to 6 percent. The Morgans struggled with their decision to settle here before choosing it for the house, the schools, the location.

At work, as at home, they negotiate predominantly white worlds, he as a staffing manager for a small high-tech placement company in Danvers and she as executive director of a small foundation in Cambridge focused on increasing political participation in low-income and minority communities. They have friends and mentors of all colors. Yet, despite all this, race, whether in the form of discomfort or disrespect or discrimination, still sometimes intrudes.

''I'm not naive," Morgan says. ''Boston is known for its under-the-rug kind of racism. I do think on some level, yes, it is still there, but," he says, ''I just refuse to get into that circle."

The Morgans' home is set on an acre lot, centered between a sweeping front lawn and a sweeping back lawn. The distance between houses can make it difficult to find the kind of close-knit community Morgan knew growing up on a compact block of brick houses and shingled two-family homes in Mattapan, where youngsters played in the street and everyone joined Pop Warner football. ''My best years," he says, ''were in Mattapan."

Yet the intimacy of the quiet cul-de-sac, the way it invites children to the circle in front of the Morgans' house, gives Morgan hope that he can find some semblance of the neighborhood of his youth here -- and that he can introduce his wife to experiences she missed growing up in racially charged Dorchester and, from age 11, in predominantly white Stoneham. His boys will have the anchor that he, as a Metco student in Melrose, and his wife, in Seventh-Day Adventist schools, never did of going to public school in the town where they live. And they, as the boys' parents, will enjoy the access to community life that comes with having children in the neighborhood school.

''I remember Shaun telling me we have to know our neighbors. And I'm, 'Why? As long as they leave us alone.' Now I see the value of being part of the community," Mendez-Morgan says. ''We've been able to forge friendships with people, and we look forward to doing more of that. We're coming here to be part of a community. And we're going to contribute to this community. That is what is going to enable us to make relationships."

Before moving here from nearby Burlington, where they owned a smaller house on a busy street, the Morgans seriously discussed returning to the city but balked at the higher crime rate.

''I remember walking down the street as a little guy and getting a knife to my throat because I had a gold chain. Those things stick in my memory," Morgan says. ''I'm out here and I'm pretty much at peace."

''I still feel conflicted," Mendez-Morgan says. ''If we all run out, then are we abandoning something? On the other hand, many of us who do social justice work, what we are working for is for everyone to have opportunity. For many people of color, professionals of color, it is not an easy decision."

Even in a town as white as this, there are signs of a community within a community. Andover's black families hold a picnic every year if weather permits. A Puerto Rican barber knows how to cut African-American hair. The once-moribund Andover Baptist Church has surged in size and diversity since a black pastor took over in 2004. The Morgans were among the 200 people at a barbecue last summer at the home of an African-American neighbor.

''Fifty percent of the people there were African-American friends and family. The other 50 percent were white people from Andover. I remember thinking, 'I don't think I've ever seen something like this before,' " says Mendez-Morgan.

''I process it as, gee, we haven't become a problem yet," she adds. ''We're still a novelty. I've been in neighborhoods where it's OK when it's one family, when you say, 'Oh, that's the Bill Cosby family.' But when there are three or four families or a whole street goes, then a neighborhood, then all of a sudden, gee, we have a problem."

Two little boys scamper through the backyard. The better life their parents envision for them focuses not on material wealth but on breadth of experience.

A father ever ready to toss a ball with his 3-year-old hesitates when asked if he'll coach his sons' teams. The former high school athlete -- football, basketball, and track -- wants more than the traditional avenue to college and social acceptance for his sons. He remembers the racial taunts and playground fights of his first years as a Metco student in Melrose, before his athletic prowess created a buzz and ''a way for me to cope."

''I don't want them to go down the route I went down. I knew that the only way I was going to college was to get a scholarship. I had to punch that ticket," Morgan says. ''Everybody plays basketball and football. I want my kids to go rock climbing, go into nature. My wife likes to take them to the library. How many times did I go to the library when I was growing up? Not too many."

A mother ready to join a neighborhood book group for moms with preschoolers hopes her sons will be less instinctively cautious around white people than she was. She's a former high school class officer who balanced popularity with wariness. She remembers the ''zoomobile" nickname her white classmates gave the van her father drove from Dorchester to her Christian school in Stoneham.

''I don't want to be hurt. I don't want to expose myself unnecessarily. Yet I don't want my children to be that way," she says. ''You can only live if you are open to people, instead of segregating yourself and being afraid to have relationships with folks who don't look like you."

If opportunity is the American dream, then race is the American dilemma. Something as simple as a family outing to buy a refrigerator can yield a perceived racial slight. While Morgan watched the boys, Mendez-Morgan approached sales clerks. In two stores, she recalls, she was steered to the least expensive model. ''When they size you up, what do they think they see?" she asks.

Her husband, on the other hand, is a proactive shopper, who through experience and a gregarious personality has learned to help white strangers he encounters show their better selves and, in the process, reinforce his own optimism. ''When I go look for something, I say, 'What's your best here?' Then we go from there," he says. ''I don't let them stereotype me. I always try to think one step ahead so I don't get bogged down in that situation."

In raising their sons, the Morgans face their own dilemma. They disagree about how to help them deal with racism.

She: ''How do I equip my children early so they don't get thrown a loop?"

He: ''What I don't want to do is make them too conscious. I want them to be themselves."

She: ''I don't want them to be confronted with racism and not know what it is. That's when you start questioning yourself. I want them to understand there is systemic racism and when they're confronted by it they are to question the system. They're not to question themselves. A lot of us, growing up, that's when inferiority starts rearing its ugly head."

He: ''I don't want him to say, 'Oh, that person will hate me because of my color.' When and if they ever do have an incident, we will sit down and cross that bridge."

She: ''When I was confronted with issues early, I never told my parents, and my parents and I have a very close relationship."

He: ''I don't want them to automatically assume and trigger off."

She: ''You don't want them to be bitter."

He: ''That really is a fear of mine."

She: ''This comes from our experiences, me coming from a more immigrant story and him coming from an African-American family that's experienced racism and had more time generationally to really process it. I'm the first generation born here. My parents were confronting it for the first time. How do you teach your children when you're processing it at the exact moment your children are going through it?"

And so they seesaw, seeking the balance between his reaching for the world as it should be and her grounding in the world as it is.

They are disappointed that good friends, an African-American family in Shrewsbury, are thinking of moving to North Carolina, for lower housing costs and to live near more middle-class black people. In the Charlotte area, almost 11 percent of the suburban population is black, nearly quadruple the percentage in Boston's suburbs. ''And you've got the Atlanta story," says Mendez-Morgan. There, more than a quarter of suburbanites are black. ''All those stories filter up here," she says. ''I can't imagine what it's like to buy a house and not worry are the neighbors going to want you there."

Yet she and her husband are here to stay, to build on deep roots that include parents and siblings and friends dating to his childhood in Mattapan and Melrose and networks dating to her years as the young chief of staff to former state representative Charlotte Golar Richie. They spend a hot summer day on the beach with the family of a white man who's been one of Morgan's closest friends since seventh grade. At home, they eat in a kitchen whose refrigerator decor includes a postcard for Linda Dorcena Forry, the Haitian-American woman who won the seat once held by former House speaker Thomas Finneran and whose campaign Mendez-Morgan helped.

''Maybe it's because I haven't lived outside Massachusetts," says Mendez-Morgan. ''I agree that it's not an easy place for people of color. For those of us who have stayed and dug deep and committed ourselves, what we get in return is just amazing. A sense of belonging. A sense of identity. Hope."