Experiment
My Mother’s Experiment: Cisco, Bananas, and the Geography of What We’re Allowed to Have
My mother did an experiment once. In Pittsburg, California.
She walked into the corner liquor store — the kind that sits on every block in a Black neighborhood, right next to the laundromat and the church. She bought a bottle of Cisco. If you’re from the 80s and 90s, you know. They called it “liquid crack.” A fortified wine that hit you fast and hard, gave you the same kind of high as crack cocaine but came in a bottle with a pretty label. It was cheap. It was strong. And it was sold in community liquor stores in predominantly Black neighborhoods like ours.
She didn’t drink it. She bought it to show me. “Look what they sell us,” she said. “Look what they think we need.”
That was the experiment. Not chemistry. Truth. She wanted me to see how place works. How a bottle like Cisco didn’t show up in the well-to-do communities. It showed up here. In the pockets. In the ghetto. On the shelf next to the loosies and the lottery tickets.
In the 80s, I learned another lesson. Bananas. I learned the difference between brown and green bananas. In our store, the fruit was already turning. Spotted. Soft. The milk was close to the date. The bread, too. A block over, in the whiter part of town, the produce was fresh. Bright. Crisp. The expiration dates had room to breathe.
That’s when I understood: it wasn’t just Cisco. It was everything.
Certain communities got the Cisco. Other communities got the farmers market. Certain communities got the brown bananas. Other communities got choice. And it wasn’t an accident. Liquor stores on every corner, but no grocery store for miles. Payday loan places, but no banks. Pawn shops, but no bookstores. They build a world around you, then blame you for living in it.
My mother’s experiment stuck with me. She was teaching me to read a neighborhood the way you read a label. Ingredients: disinvestment. Side effects: addiction, diabetes, hopelessness. Keep out of reach of children. But we were the children, and it was all within reach.
Cisco disappeared eventually. Lawsuits. Bad press. But the logic didn’t. You can take the bottle off the shelf, but the shelf is still there. The store is still there. The system that decided we were the market for liquid crack — that’s still here.
I think about that every time I walk into a grocery store now. I check the dates. I look at the produce. I can afford the green bananas today. But I remember who couldn’t. I remember who can’t.
My mother didn’t need a lab coat to run her experiment. She just needed to live here. She needed to show her daughter that geography is policy. That what they sell you says what they think of you.
They sold us Cisco. They sold us brown bananas. And they called it convenience.
I call it evidence.
