In the Country of the Other

The legacy is invariable—a brief pang of guilt followed by overwhelming relief at my own escape from the northeast Bronx. I come off the Henry Hudson Parkway and where the traffic light flags me down, at the pocked and rutted joining of Gun Hill Road and Mosholu Parkway, I feel myself sucked back into old wars that seem so permanent a part of my memory. Only this is not my Bronx, I remind myself, as I stare at the massive battlements of Tracy Towers Houses, a state-subsidized medieval fortr...