Class photo from Buena Vista Twp, NJ (Mark Demitroff)

When I moved to Maplewood in the summer of 2005, I was looking for a pool. I took the bus and train up from South Jersey and was without a car. I walked over to Columbia High School, famous for graduating Zach Braff & Lauryn Hill (the same year), Elisabeth and Andrew Shue, Roy “You’re going to need a bigger boat” Scheider, Alfred Kinsey, Max Weinberg of the E Street Band and Ahmed Best (Jar Jar Binks), hoping they’d have an indoor pool. There was none. However a man and his young son noticed I looked lost and asked me what was up. After a back-and-forth, he told me to hop in his car and he’d drive me to the community pool on the other side of town. It wasn’t the fact that he was black that made me leery of getting in his car; it was that, in my experience, strangers of any race don’t make that casual offer. But I figured he was with his son, so why not?

I got in and during the ride over, the man described why he made the offer. Maplewood and South Orange were special places, he explained. They were historically integrated towns and he wanted a good community for his son to grow up, with reputable schools. (Years later, even that infamous New Jersey stereotype map was kind to this area calling it, The Melting Pot.) As the man dropped me off, I thanked him and checked out the pool. After that ride I knew I was in a unique place, but surprisingly, a familiar one.

Maplewood/ South Orange was like my hometown of Ewing, the people up here just had more money. They were places where blacks and whites (along with a small, but growing population of Hispanics and Asians) lived together and for the most part, got along. Today, I realized that I might have grown up in a bubble though. Through my research, I’ve found that there are few places like these in the state.