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But danger was an abstraction to me then, not something I felt. In fact, I can recall vividly the first time I made the intellectual deduction that I might be in a dangerous situation – I was riding the subway in Manhattan well past midnight, and I noticed after just a few minutes on the train that I was the only woman in that car. At the next stop, I walked into the next car, which was also full of men, and so I began travelling the length of the train. I eventually found a car where a woman was sleeping with her head resting on the man next to her, but by then I was unsettled. I looked into other trains as they passed us in the tunnels, and I looked at the people waiting on the platforms. Women did not ride the subway alone very late at night, I realised. And as I made this realisation I felt not fear, but fury. Even now, at a much more wary and guarded age, what I feel when I am told that my neighbourhood is dangerous is not fear but anger at the extent to which so many of us have agreed to live within a delusion – namely, that we will be spared the dangers that others suffer only if we move within certain, very restricted spheres, and that insularity is a fair price to pay for safety. Fear is isolating for those that fear. And I have come to believe that fear is a cruelty to those who are feared. One evening not long after we moved to Rogers Park, my husband and I met a group of black boys riding their bikes on the sidewalk across the street from our apartment building. The boys were weaving down the sidewalk, yelling for the sake of hearing their own voices and drinking from bottles of beer. As we stepped off the sidewalk and began crossing the street toward our apartment, one boy yelled: “Don’t be afraid of us!” I looked back over my shoulder as I stepped into the street, and the boy passed on his bike so that I saw him looking back at me also, and then he yelled again, directly at me: “Don’t be afraid of us!” I wanted to yell back, “Don’t worry, we aren’t!” but I was, in fact, afraid to engage the boys, afraid to draw attention to my husband and myself, afraid of how my claim not to be afraid might be misunderstood as bravado begging a challenge, so I simply let my eyes meet the boy’s eyes before I turned, disturbed, toward the tall iron gate in front of my apartment building, a gate that gives the appearance of being locked but is in fact always open.