Which Maplewood Do You Live In? Choose A, B or C.

You know we live in the Two Towns, right? I live in Maplewood; my neighbors live in South Orange. But did you know that Maplewoodians actually choose among three different towns? 

It may not be news to you, but I had never heard this before: Maplewood is unofficially divided into MapleGood (roughly, above the Ridgewood Road dividing line), regular old MapleWood, which, in school-zone terms, seems to be the Tuscan district and some of Jefferson. And then there's MapleHood, the parts of town along Springfield Avenue and bordering Irvington. 

Since I'm a sucker for word play, my first reaction was to laugh. I had never heard these obvious divisions so neatly described. I overheard some CHS students using this, and I figured it was their invention. Turns out, the terminology has been around a while. It's familiar to the good folks at the Coalition on Race, to many residents, old and new, and to most real estate agents.

And that made me shake my head. I moved to Maplewood (the Jefferson district) in the mid 1990s, after growing up in South Orange, racing to escape and spending years elsewhere. But back in the 1960s, I was a white kid living on Audley Street and going to the almost all-white South Mountain school. One of my favorite features of life was the Fair Housing Picnic. This was the annual get-together of activists like my parents who were working to stop red-lining. They wanted Realtors to show and sell properties in any neighborhood to black families, to get neighbors to welcome them, to get shopkeepers, principals and township officials to treat them fairly. It was slow going. My mother told me recently about calling an acquaintance to invite her to dinner with one of the first black couples, who lived near us on Maplewood Avenue. Her invitation was declined.  

We've come a long way. We've got black teachers and principals, MLK Day celebrations and storekeepers of all ethnic groups. The kids I heard using Hood, Good and Wood were casual and matter-of-fact, not whispering, not talking with malice. A white friend who lives in M-Hood laughed when I asked about it; she loves her part of town.

But I have to wonder. It's 2009, and our picnics, living rooms and school cafeterias, are almost as divided by race as the 'hoods. There's still a right-wrong divide, even if it seems more complicated (class is at least as big a factor as race).  Just listen to the CHS kids in "Mind The Gap,'' the radio documentary about the achievement gap just released on NPR by South Orange-based reporter Nancy Solomon (friend but not related).  Just because the problems are nuanced and the solutions elusive doesn't mean we can minimize the problems or throw up our hands about solutions.  

And it  was just a few years ago that a neighbor of mine trading up to a bigger house in town asked me whether I would "mind" if she sold her house to a black family. Excuse me? Which town does she live in?

Jolie Solomon has worked as a writer, reporter or editor at The Wall Street Journal, Newsweek and More magazine, among other publications. She lives in Maplewood with her daughter. You can read more of Solomon's work on the Money Watch blog.