My mother’s paternal grandfather, Alfonso Pierce, a mixed black man born in Fayetteville, West Virginia, went up north to Ohio around the turn of the 20th century (1900s) to study agriculture, escape blue-collar toil, sickness, and the possible race struggle within the coal-mining town of his birthplace. From Ohio, he eventually migrated to the east coast, boarded a ship, and later landed in London, England where he met a red-headed dancer, Patricia Jones (from Ipswitch, England), on a commercial set. They married, bore one colored child, Orestes (my grandfather), and eventually migrated to Manhattan before the Great Depression of 1929. Their miscegenated coupling, in addition to economic strife, I believe, must have affected them as form of internalized violence. Patricia passed away in the 1940s from pancreatic cancer after suffering 1-½ years of screaming agony: proper treatment wasn’t affordable; Alfonso persevered, straight back (the most posturally correct person my father ever met), living well into his 90s; and Orestes went on to fight in WWII for a country which institutionally discriminated against people like him. Orestes’ grandfather, the father of Alfonso, I heard, had migrated to Manhattan seeking employment to build the subterranean subway system. 

The Underground Railroad (i.e., subways) and skyscrapers (“wolkenkratzer” auf Deutsch) act as two sides of a coin: modern behemoths with an edge: scraping clouds while tunneling into a subterranean subconsciousness.