And Now, A Word from Nic Esposito

An excerpt from a story as told by Nic, Corner Stories' Creative Director:

And then there are the stories of Philadelphia. The ones we can tell, the ones we can listen to, the ones passed down for generations to us, and the ones we can hopefully pass down as well. As I’ve come to realize from all of the stories I’ve told here tonight, and all of the lives I’ve lived, there were no set good old days. Each generation is full of stories of the good, of pain, of humor and of justice.

Before I finish, I’d like to tell one more story. Some years ago, while I was in high school, my English class in New Jersey took us on a research trip to the Walt Whitman House in Camden. It was raining that day, that damp cold March mid Atlantic rain. We were all impatient teenagers miserably wishing to just be warm and not doing a ten-page research paper. After standing outside for ten minutes, an old black man in an unassuming flannel shirt and blue jeans approached us. As he got closer I leaned into my friend Brent and said, “Look at this mulie (which is racist Italian slang for “black person”). He’s probably going to ask us for money.”

Not a second after I said that, the man walked right up to us, smiled, walked past us and opened the door to the center. I hope some of you just felt the apprehensive hollowing of your stomachs as I felt in mine. Needless to say, I’ve never referred to black people in such a context since then. In an instance, all of the xenophobia, ethnocentrism, ignorance and hate I was in some ways brought up with by the certain elements in my neighborhood had been dismantled. As I recall the old black man giving our class one of the most impassioned presentations of Walt Whitman’s amazing contribution to the human condition, I realize something about the world and literature, and my place in both. The art of story can connect an older black man from the city with a group of suburban white students through the words of a nineteenth century gay liberal man.

And that’s the sort of connection we are trying to make. To connect our community to the history of local story telling created around those first cave fires and still present even with the advance of global media. We hope you will join us in finding the worth of every story told in this great city.