White neighbors surveilled a black family newly arrived on their street

Evidence

Working with FCS’s homeownership program, Mary and her husband took classes in budgeting, saved up their down payment and obtained a mortgage, and moved into their home—a four-bedroom one-bath that they converted into a three-bedroom two-bath to accommodate their children—in 2008. … “We was in our forties, and most people that lived on the street was a lot older. And we were black, and most of them white,” she recalls. “And they used to come down and walk down the side of my house, watching us. It was like they was keeping an eye on us—you know, are they going to be a rowdy bunch, or whatever?” — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 1273

Categorization

• STORYSTEM: Mary’s quoted voice, including grammar (‘We was in our forties’) is used raw and unitalicized — noting Brown preserves the speaker’s voice verbatim as dignifying testimony rather than correcting it.
• XREF: Echoes the surveillance-of-Black-space theme familiar from The Reluctant Fundamentalist’s paranoid watching and Things Fall Apart’s scrutiny of newcomers. — connects to: White neighbors terrorized Black families until they fled white neighborhoods. — Cyra Akila Choudhury, Racecraft and Identity in the Emergence…, 479