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I grew up in a household filled with tales of "home." Tales of life in Trinidad and St. Kitts, the countries in the Caribbean where my mother and father were born. And the East Harlem neighborhood where they raised us children was a pastiche of languages and cultures. The sounds and smells of many of the faraway places I learned about in school were right outside my tenement door. On my block there were African-Americans with southern roots, Puerto Ricans and other West Indians. A few blocks east were the Irish and Italian communities. Jewish merchants owned most of the stores. I was surrounded by a world of different dialects and languages, and as I grew older there were some even I found surprising as French-speaking Black folks arrived from Haiti and Spanish-speaking Chinese migrated from Cuba.
One doesn't grow up hearing about wondrous places without wanting to visit...