The Cost of the Game

The Block Is Hot

The block is hot as it has been for nearly half of my life in Chattanooga. The expectation, unfortunately, is that when it gets hot outside, beefs or things will happen that will end in shootings and likely a young Black body on the pavement, or an unintended bystander. I look forward to the summer as a Pisces. I get to swim and see everybody after months of being cooped up during the wintertime. It's barbecues, family reunions, parties, pull-ups, and the city is just alive in ways we all enjoy. This part, however, is like a stain on a white shirt that will never come out no matter how many times we try to blot it out.

Gun violence in this city is not a blip. It is a pattern that elected officials and city leaders continue to sidestep while the rest of us absorb it. Shots fired on Brainerd Road. Road rage that ends with someone's child dead before they turn twenty. Young Black men killing each other over beefs that started small and snowballed into something nobody can fully explain anymore. Two dudes mad about a girl. Somebody said something. Somebody heard the wrong thing. And now there is a funeral, and a mother who will never sleep the same way again, and a little brother who saw something on his block that no child should have to carry.

The loudest voices in the conversation about what to do have largely been the same ones. Elected officials reaching for familiar faces. Older voices handed the microphone while the young men most at risk don't get a seat at the table. Not because they have nothing to say. Because nobody thought to ask.

Before you read any further I want you to set down whatever assumption you are carrying about who these young men are and why they end up where they end up. The story is not the one you think you know. I know because I sat across from one of them and asked him to tell it to me straight.

His nickname is Sinkko. I put it out there simply: if there was a young man who had been in the streets, found his way out, and was willing to sit down over coffee and talk honestly about what that looked like, I wanted to hear it. What came back was his name, tagged by peers, repeatedly, without hesitation. Not from an institution. Not from a résumé. From the people who were there and know who changed and who didn't.

He said yes. We met at Mean Mug Coffeehouse. What followed was one of the most honest conversations I have had since I started this publication.

From the Block to the Table: A Conversation with Sinkko

"She taught me how to be a man for real. That's the end of my parents' one to rhyme with."

He is talking about his grandmother. Her name was Jimmie Mae Marchman. She is gone now God rest her soul. He grew up in the part of Highland Park that sits just across Union Avenue from McCallie School, right on the edge of the Glenwood area, in the home she held together. When he talks about her you understand that she was the architecture. The thing the whole structure rested on.

His parents were trying. His father moved in and out of the picture, in and out of prison. His stepfather, in his own words, wasn't what the situation needed. Which left Sinkko, the oldest, watching a mother carry a household on wages that covered the bills but left the margins razor thin. A sister five years younger. Brothers eight and nine years behind him. He watched her call her own mother to ask if the kids could come eat. He watched her stretch what was not enough.

He was thirteen, maybe fourteen. Standing at the edge of eighth grade looking into ninth.

Now here is the assumption I need you to shed: what happened next was not about wanting chaos. It was not about some hunger to tear something up. It was about a teenage boy who looked at his mother's exhaustion and decided, without anyone asking him to, that the weight she was carrying was partly his to lift.

"A lot of men, especially, they're not going to admit it. But they see their mama's stress and they know. They don't want to stress her out more than she already is. So they try to get out here and do it by themselves. And they get messed up in the process."

There was no road map for how to provide except the ones already visible to him. His uncles were in the streets. His father had been. He had watched enough to understand the shape of it. He did not yet understand what it would cost.

"My first priority was like, I'm finna get out here and get some money. And you know what that come with."

Ask yourself honestly what you would have done at thirteen, watching your mother call her mother to ask if the kids could eat, with no road map in front of you except the ones you could already see. Sit with that before you answer.

"It's a snowball effect, really. As soon as you do one thing, this unlocks that, and that unlocks this, and this unlocks that."

What most public conversations get wrong is the belonging piece. There is a genuine social warmth to street life that does not get named honestly. A hierarchy that rewards presence and loyalty. Brotherhood, or something that feels enough like it that a boy already carrying more than he should cannot always tell the difference. Sinkko describes it as real and fake at the same time.

"Right now, with the status that I have, however people view me, even if I was to go against my moral codes and tell on one of my brothers, I could go to jail, come back out, and as long as I got some money, as long as I got some motion or some clout that everybody can feed off of, people still gonna mess with me."

He lets that settle.

"That's transactional love. It's fake."

And here is the part nobody says out loud: the young men in the street know it's fake. Sinkko knew. Knowing does not make the belonging feel less real when you are sixteen and your daddy is gone and your mama is tired and the only people checking on you are the ones who found you first.

His father was someone he describes the way a child describes a superhero who slowly became something else. A man he looked up to, who handed down codes and values, who represented something. And then the streets revealed him as less than what he had presented. Sinkko, a junior carrying his father's name, found himself inheriting both a legacy and a stain. Every time someone asked if he was his daddy's son he had to prove he was the opposite.

"I grew up looking at my daddy like, damn, my daddy the man. It's like seeing Superman become the villain and hurt you."

He reaches for a movie quote, half remembering it. Batman. You either stop while you're a hero, or you live long enough to become the villain.

"That really broke me down. And I was like, yeah, that can't be me."

When people meet him now and mention his father, he drops his head. And then they get to know him. And then they say: you nothing like your daddy. Your daddy needs to hang with you so he can learn something.

"It's really sad. But it's funny, though."

He laughs just enough. Not because it is funny. Because laughing is sometimes the only thing left when the alternative is something you do not want to do in public.

The years in the streets carried consequences that compounded fast. By the time Sinkko sat across from a lawyer weighing his options, the immaturity of those decisions was impossible to ignore.

He laughs telling it now. The version of himself who thought he could just run whatever offer they put on the table in court because he had not stopped to think about what he was actually facing. He owns that completely because the honesty is the whole point. He wants whoever is still standing in that place in their head to understand what is actually on the table when they think they are being bold. Boldness and math are not the same thing.

He spent years on supervised federal probation. He does not recommend it.

"Nine years, not to do anything, that's a loss. You can get a drunk driving, they send you to a class. But you get a drunk driving while you on fed paper? Imagine going to prison for drunk driving. It's almost like they holding you on a string."

A lie from a baby mama. A heated moment that gets called in. An ankle monitor that limits where you can take your own child. Years where the system owns the margin of error in your life. The people who know what you are carrying will use it against you. He knows because they did.

He just got off those papers in February of last year.

Partway through our conversation I told him about a young man I mentor. Seventeen years old, from Avondale, heading to Berea College on a full ride. One of the top 25 schools in the country. Two years of college credits already earned before he ever walked across a high school stage. Everything lined up. And he came to me bittersweet.

Why bittersweet, I asked. You have money. You have a future. You are almost there.

He told me he had run into an old friend not long before. They grew up together in Avondale, ran together, and then his mother moved them out to East Brainerd for a better school, and slowly, the way neighborhood distance works on people, they went separate directions. The last time they saw each other before the friend got locked up, they went downtown and got pizza. Sitting there my mentee told his friend about Upward Bound, about the stipend, tried to get him interested.

His friend asked how much.

And laughed.

He was sixteen years old. He said he was making more than that scamming.

When I shared this with Sinkko, he did not need it explained. He had lived inside that exact logic.

"When you're young, that's not a hard choice. Why would I go somewhere and work hard for this slow money, not even knowing if I'm going to be here to enjoy it, when I can get the money now and do anything I want to do?"

This is what comfortable people refuse to sit with. The streets are not irrational. They are the most rational response to a specific set of circumstances that we have collectively failed to change. A sixteen year old laughing at a stipend while making more scamming is not a moral failure. He is a child doing math with the numbers in front of him. The question is not what is wrong with him. The question is who put those numbers there and why we keep being surprised by the answer.

I told Sinkko what I told my mentee. The only responsibility you had was to present an option. You cannot make the choice for someone else. And the best thing you can do now is succeed. Because he is going to remember that pizza. Out of everyone who fell off and never looked back, you were the one who tried to put something in his pocket.

Sinkko nodded.

"All you can do is put good things into the atmosphere. And if people want to pick that up, they can. And if they don't, pray for him."

Two people doing the same work from different starting points, finding each other over coffee. That is what this city looks like when it is actually trying.

He has been at Mueller for almost two years now. He talks about the stability of it the way someone talks about solid ground after years without any. Steady. Predictable. A paycheck that arrives on schedule. The ability to build something on top of something, which you cannot do when the foundation keeps shifting.

Getting there was not simple either. Dismissed charges still appear on a record. Corporate still sees them. He had to submit discharge papers, wait, not knowing if they would approve him. A younger, less patient version of himself would have walked away before it resolved. He did not. They said yes.

And here is the thing I keep turning over about how that happened. Sinkko had hired his cousin when the cousin was out of options, out of money, close to going back to the streets. The cousin got himself together, landed at Mueller, and when he saw Sinkko needed a way in, he reached back. Paid it forward. One phone call. That is all it took.

Think about what that means. The same way people pull each other into trouble, access and opportunity can move the same direction. Quietly. Under the radar. No press conference, no commission, no program with a name and a logo. Just a man who got a break and thought to offer one.

And Mueller, for all the hoops Sinkko had to jump through to get approved, gave a man with a record a shot. They said yes anyway. There are employers in this city who will do that. Not enough of them. But they exist.

What Sinkko's story quietly asks us is this: how much of what we call a street problem is actually a workforce problem? A proximity problem? A who-do-you-know problem? A good blue collar job with benefits, stability, a check that clears the same day every week, that was enough. That was the whole thing. Sinkko did not need a miracle. He needed a phone call from his cousin and an employer willing to look past a dismissed charge.

We have been so busy asking what is wrong with our young men that we forgot to ask who is reaching for them.

He wants to go into schools. Not as a symbol. As a person. To sit with boys at the edge of a decision and translate what the math actually looks like from the other side. He wants to build something like the high school fraternity he found when his family moved to Nashville his senior year. Something that shows kids what brotherhood looks like when it does not cost you your freedom. He talks about the military not the way recruiters talk about it but the way someone talks about a door he wishes he had found before the others closed.

"Fresh out of high school, I wish I would have took my ass somewhere. Kuwait, somewhere. I would have been straight. But I had other stuff going on and my focus was on other places."

He pauses.

"I regret that."

A young man who clawed his way toward stability one dismissed charge at a time, whose deepest regret is that he did not find something legitimate sooner. Not that he got caught. That he did not leave earlier.

Near the end he said something I have not stopped turning over.

He talked about why Black men do not show vulnerability. How the culture weaponizes it. How if you have spent your whole life performing hardness, one human moment becomes ammunition. He is building something real specifically so that when he has a hard moment the people around him read it as a hard moment and not as weakness to exploit.

"That's why I try to build the rapport that I got. And I do the stuff that I do. So if I do ever have a moment where I'm not strong enough to keep everything together, people gonna look at me and be like, he's probably really going through something. Because I'm loved everywhere."

That is the work. Building something real enough that your humanity stays legible.

Here is what I want you to leave with.

Sinkko did not end up in the streets because he was broken. He ended up there because the community around him did not catch him before the streets did. And he did not get out because of a program or a policy or a politician finally paying attention. He got out because his cousin made a phone call. Because an employer looked at a full file and said yes anyway. Because somebody who had been pulled through a door turned around and held it open.

We have so much wrong about what we think we know about the streets, about the young people caught up in them, and about what it actually takes to change the direction of a life. Sometimes it is not a grand intervention. Sometimes it is access. A touch point. A moment of grace that arrives as a job tip from family.

That is the solution hiding in plain sight. Not in a press conference. In the specific, unglamorous decision to be present for a kid who has no reason yet to believe that anyone with options gives a damn about him. In the employer who looks past the file. In the cousin who remembers who showed up for him.

What would it cost you, specifically, to be that phone call for someone?

In 1889, construction began on what would become the oldest non-military highway bridge across the Tennessee River. The Walnut Street Bridge, designed by renowned engineer Edwin Thatcher and assembled by the Smith Bridge Company of Toledo, Ohio, was completed in 1891 and served for 87 years as the first physical connection between Chattanooga's downtown and the North Shore. It carried pedestrians, commerce, and an entire city's daily life across the Tennessee River before age and mounting repair costs forced the city to close it in 1978.

What followed was a slow deterioration that mirrored Chattanooga's own decline during that era. The bridge sat disabled and dormant for over a decade, a rusting reminder of a city that had lost its footing. By the late 1980s officials had moved toward demolition. The bridge that had connected a city was about to be erased from it entirely.

Before that could happen, Chattanooga Venture stepped in. The community visioning group that had already been working to reimagine Chattanooga's future established the Walnut Street Bridge Fund and helped organize a coalition of activists, civic leaders, and preservationists who refused to let the bridge go. They nominated it as a historic landmark, launched a public fundraising campaign, secured a federal Department of Transportation grant, and raised hundreds of thousands of dollars from Chattanoogans who believed what they were looking at was still worth saving. The vision was specific: not just preservation, but transformation. A pedestrian bridge and linear park that could help anchor a downtown renaissance.

In 1993 the restored Walnut Street Bridge reopened to much fanfare and quickly became everything its restorers had hoped and more. It is now the connective tissue of Chattanooga's riverfront, linking the North Shore to the Bluff View Arts District, the Hunter Museum of American Art, the Tennessee Aquarium, and seven miles of riverwalk stretching all the way to Chickamauga Dam. It hosts Riverbend, Wine Over Water, Octoberfest, and dozens of smaller gatherings every year. It is open year round, free to the public, fully ADA compliant, and yes, pets are welcome.

Chattanooga Venture's work did not stop with the bridge. The original fund eventually evolved into The Parks Foundation, expanding the mission beyond the bridge to enhancements, improvements, and programming across public parks and spaces throughout the city, working with both city and county to make those spaces accessible to the greatest number of people.

A city almost tore down its own symbol. A group of people who saw something different fought to save it and changed what this place became. The next time you walk across that bridge, remember it almost wasn't there.

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Change is a quiet and sometimes terrifying thing to reach for. It asks you to loosen your grip on what is familiar even when what is familiar has never fully served you. It asks you to believe that something better is available to you, which is its own kind of courage when everything around you has taught you to expect less.

Some of us have spent years shapeshifting. Becoming whoever the room needed. Trading pieces of ourselves for acceptance that was never really ours to keep. Shrinking, performing, contorting into versions of ourselves that we no longer recognize in the mirror. And we call that survival. Sometimes it is. But at some point survival has to make room for something more.

My silent prayer for every person reading this is simple. Stop trading who you are for love that has an expiration date. Stop making yourself smaller so that people who were never meant to stay feel comfortable enough to linger. The best of what this life has to offer, the real things, the lasting things, they cannot find you if you keep showing up as someone you no longer recognize.

You are allowed to reach for different. You are allowed to become someone your past did not predict.

That is the whole point.

— Marie

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