by Marge Piercy
They could make some connections between men who sat on the board of directors of Title and Trust and the agribusiness corporation and some of the central corporate kings they knew were behind renewal, but no more than they would turn up out of almost any business in the city that dealt with banks and interconnected with other corporations. The men serving as commissioners were not big shots—they weren’t the mayor’s favorite giants for committees with real power—just middle echelon men anxious to please and do their civic duty with distinction in the eyes of their superiors. It meant everything and nothing.
Tuesday the University administrators took the stand to state the needs of a great institution. A color film was shown depicting the contribution of the several institutions of the area to its economic viability. A vice-president reminded the commissioners how Inland served the community, the city and the nation. He cited potent federal officials and senators on the need for student housing and the expansion of educational and research facilities, the importance of advanced technology to our national defense.
“We have to shift our emphasis from the elimination of already existing slum jungles to something far more important, the use of urban renewal to develop our urban economy itself, to support our critical institutions and attract vital new industries and to create attractive neighborhoods in our city in which solid and civic-minded men and women can live safely and raise their children, neighborhoods in which normal cleanliving families want to settle and go to school and work. Inland University is ready to face its responsibility to its city and its neighborhood.”
On Wednesday the Corporation finished its exposition. Attendance from the neighborhood had fallen. “What can I say?” Harlan counted his flock. “A lot of them are just clerks and domestics. They took off the time they could, but they’re afraid they’ll get fired if they stay out longer.” Harlan had had enough trouble getting a leave of absence, while Rowley continued to work the late shift. He slept odd hours and never felt rested. Sometimes he fed Yente several cans of catfood and sometimes he didn’t get back to feed him for a whole day. Shirley was back home with the kids, and he hoped she would remember the cat with an occasional handout.
The last witness called by the Corporation was a spokesman for UNA. Rowley winced and shifted in his seat. Old Asher.
“On behalf of UNA I would like to state our reservations about the plan,” Asher said and did at length, dwelling especially on the lack of provisions for good relocation for those who would be displaced. Studies using the city’s own statistics showed that the relocated ended up in overcrowded, deteriorating neighborhoods and usually paid far more than they had. “However, we feel in the absence of any genuine alternative plan for preventing further decay, we can not do otherwise than to offer our support to the Corporation proposal. I don’t know how representative this Defense Committee claims to be—how many of them are here? fifteen?—but I would like to enter in the record that UNA has made repeated attempts to organize this area without finding interest on the part of the residents. Repeated attempts,” Asher said again as Harlan rose protesting.
Asher had documents too, results of surveys and studies and projections carried out by UNA. He had a trim helper bustling about him producing each document as he cited it, fluttering, perky, with a silken efficiency: “Scalpel!” “Scalpel!” There was Asher slitting their throats, droning on in his colorless but crushingly authoritative way while his wee houri danced around him. It made Rowley squirm to recall how Anna had ministered to Asher: Asher had a knack for getting women to wait on him. “Where’s my pipe, Anna?” “What did I do with that report?” “Did you get those films developed?” “I wonder if you could stop at the library and check a reference for me.” Nice legs. They were always something special, Asher’s women. Asher appeared not to see him.
Mrs. Samson’s three kids had had to give back the suits to whoever they’d borrowed them from. They were bored and angry and started horsing around till one of the guards reprimanded them and said they would have to leave if they didn’t know how to behave at an official city hearing.
On Thursday Vera came. She sat at the back sketching while her brother lolled beside her. She sketched with a spidery line, steel wire, and would not sit with him or let him sit beside her. Paul looked all legs in the narrow seat. He listened with his forehead frowning and his hands playing with his pen, his hair, his buttons. Their side-by-side heads balanced. He did not see them speak. When Vera looked at Paul her face tightened. She sat watching him, remapping, judging; while Paul stared at the hearings, hurt, obsessed, confused, during noon recess full of questions. There was plenty to react to.
One by one homeowners from the area got up to speak. “He can’t call my house decrepit,” piped a gnarled little man who worked for sanitation. “Why, I painted that house top and bottom, inside and out. Every inch two coats of good paint.”
Mrs. Samson with her six kids: “What have we done? What’s wrong with us? We bought homes here and fixed them up. I spent my life’s saving and my poor man’s insurance money on this house. We love this neighborhood with the grass and trees and flowers. It’s not overcrowded. Before we found this house we lived in two rooms. We had to look for months. Why can’t the University just buy a couple of apartment buildings? Why do we have to keep moving? Mr. Judges, why don’t you come home with me and visit my livingroom, and see if we live like animals the way they say. See for yourself.”
Finally Harlan took the stand with questions of his own: When would the University integrate the buildings it owned? When would their real estate combine allow black people to move into the area around the campus? If the Corporation really wanted to promote stability, why hadn’t the residents been allowed to participate in planning for their own area? The way he saw it, the whole urban renewal thing was a way to use public money, the taxes that sat so heavy on people like the ones in this room, to make life easier for those who had it easy already. It was a sort of socialism for the rich, to insure their investments and get them land cheap to make profits on. “When will the University and the redevelopers take the same chances I have to, of buying what they want openly?”
The Corporation lawyer had only a few questions. “Mr. Williams, you’ve stated your objections to our term ‘conversion by use.’ You’ve stated that housing in the demolition area is sound and is being increased in value by its present occupants. Mr. Williams, do you own property in the area under discussion?”
Harlan gave his address and described his house briefly.
“A single-family cottage. Now, Mr. Williams, how many families reside in your house?”
“Just mine. And a friend who rents the downstairs.”
“Mr. Williams, isn’t it true that you have rented the cellar as an apartment? Isn’t it also true that you rented the unfinished attic as another, to another family with children?”
“That’s my wife’s brother. It’s not unfinished.”
“Have you put in a bathroom?”
“There is a bathroom.”
“For your tenants? Or is the bath shared?”
“It’s my brother and sister-in-law and their baby. We have relatives staying with us because it’s a lot better for them upstairs then where they were. It wasn’t safe there. It’s not a permanent arrangement, and in fact I plan for my own kids to take over that floor when they’re older.”
“Three families occupying a structure intended to house one none-too-large family is exactly what we mean by conversion by use. Thank you, Mr. Williams.” The lawyer smiled.
When he brought the car around, Paul half shoved Vera into the back, leaping into the front.
He turned his head at the address Paul gave him. “Leon’s? So he’s the toad.”
“Vera likes people for strange reasons and dislikes them for plain bad ones … Is it true you used to go with Anna?”
Something in the kid’s tone made him bristle. “Yeah.”
“Yeah?” Paul turned limpid eyes on him. “Guess it’s
a stage girls go through.”
“While Leon is a very young man’s disease.”
Vera laughed sharply from the backseat.
“Leon is about the most generous person I ever met,” Paul said with hauteur and a slight whine. “It’s not just big liberal talk with him. Knowing him is an education in how people can exist with each other in a nonrotten way …”
Was Anna eating this up too? Leon always had a swinging line, that he swung till he tripped. Like saying he got married to save Joye from her home environment, to educate her. He married Joye because he’d been in the sack with her on and off for months and her family was fussing. A nice piece, maybe a little thin upstairs, but nothing to make up an ideology about. Bitter now.
“You disgust me,” Vera lilted. “Foul abstract words filling your mouth. Once you knew what it meant to talk. Don’t you spill over me the leavings of some fat fake’s lectures.”
“Talk? You mean we made up our own language. Any two kids can play games, Vera. What were we risking?”
“What are you risking with that toad except your own decency?”
“You just love shiny Jameson words like decency lately.”
“No wise man has been making me ashamed of where I come from, and who.”
They were pulled up out front of Leon’s storefront. “You’re so closeminded, you make me weep!” Paul flung himself out.
Rowley held that door open till Vera got the idea and moved up front. “Scared someone will think you’re my chauffeur?”
“In a VW?”
She sat straight with arms folded. Now and again a spasm of anger bit her features.
Perhaps it was like taming a unicorn. She had stopped jumping at his touch. She would let herself be kissed. She would even curl up on his lap if he kept talking or listened to her. Once he asked her as she waited under his kiss, “Didn’t anyone ever kiss you?”
Her amused face. “Do you think I come from Mars?”
So little trace. As little as he was leaving. Sometimes he grew sick with himself and thought he would take up molesting little girls. But she was a child only in stubborn pretense.
Friday he came to meet her where she taught in an ugly redbrick warren in the Black Belt, stinking, overcrowded, its dank halls and packed classrooms jangling like sore nerves. As he loitered smoking and waiting against the wire fence with the pitiful bleak schoolyard before him, he felt young, mean, truant. The wall was splattered with fucks and hearts, Candy Loves Willy, the names of gangs and would-be gangs. Someone had lettered carefully in purple PUSSY IS GOOD FOR YOU. A used scumbag fluttered off a spike in the fence.
The smell of fear choked him, continual buzz of the scatological sex of childhood, the warfare, the petty oppression, the unremitting oily boredom. The status world of the young hustler. Always someone to face down. Fear, fear. The bratty shrillness of the bells across the gravel yard made him think of the airraid drills of World War II. All of them sitting by classes crosslegged in the halls singing “The caissons are rolling along!” They had to sit crosslegged, their feet turned just so, because otherwise they might be comfortable. Still everybody enjoyed them so much the board of education had to issue a warning against too many airraid drills in certain schools.
Midmorning watery milk. Teacher prying, How many children brushed their teeth this morning? took a bath? The screws put on them to cough up dimes and quarters for defense stamps, for Christmas and Easter seals, for teacher’s favorite charity. The smell of the gym floor and hard gray mats. Whether baseball or basketball the team leaders were Al and Babalu, and they would choose up the other colored kids first. He was always one of the first whites chosen because he was tall and a good hitter, but it incensed him that they’d choose PeeWee, who was as little as the bat, before him. Even mild prejudice always got whites indignant.
Other kids went to all white schools. His crowd learned that early. Something must be wrong with them. They weren’t as white as other kids. But the real white kids were stupider in lots of ways. They didn’t know the other language. There were many things they didn’t know. Though school was stacked against the colored kids—like for Auditorium they always had to be giving oral reports on Booker T. Washington, George Washington Carver and, by infection, Lincoln till the walls wept while the whites had Everybody—still something was exchanged. Soul, style. If he could explain about that, with his music.
One last bell and the volcano spewed kids. Landslides of kids. Hundreds, thousands poured out, they poured out. His first impulse was to run for his life. The building could not have held them. They must be jammed in six deep. As the hordes of children squeezed out the old massive double doors, he thought he heard the snapping of bones, he was sure little kids went down underfoot and were trampled to jelly. For ten minutes children thundered out, delirious to reach air. The pavement quivered. The air rang like metal with their cries. Finally the explosion dwindled to stragglers, and teachers began coming into the parking lot and through the door near him toward the busline.
A number passed before he saw her walking alone with small, tired steps lugging a black case as if it were full of bricks. He was amused how much a schoolteacher she looked, slight, spinsterish, weary. Then she saw him. Her head whipped up, her shoulders froze. He thought she would walk past without speaking and he swore if she did, he would forget her. With a twist of her lips she stopped in front of him. “What brings you around?”
“Thought I could give you a lift home.”
“Nothing like a little scandal to enliven these biddies. Is this doing me a favor? I’m too tired to know. Yes, I’m glad not to pack on the bus and stand all the way. But don’t do it again. I’m not a regular teacher yet.”
When he came upstairs with her she kicked off her shoes and let him pull her down on his lap. She did not sit on him as if he were a chair the way she usually did, but collapsed, burying her face in his neck. “One of my boys is in trouble for having a knife. He’s just a baby. I’m sure it’s his brother’s and he was showing off, but the principal’s treating him like a criminal.”
She taught, she attended evening classes at the Art Institute. She had a friend, an older Negro woman, Mrs. Hamilton, who went around with her like two nuns elbow to elbow in the museums, galleries and exhibitions. Mrs. Hamilton was earnest and admiring. With her Vera’s face was closed as the trunk of a tree. Afterward she would tell him the flashes of charlatanism, of pomposity she had seen.
For that she needed him: to share her sense of absurdity. When she made her masks of derision, of wit and even of wonder she must have someone to see them. He measured her need and moved in. No wonder his days had gone hollow.
Returning late from her that night he was coming down his street, walking from the parkingplace he’d found around the corner. One of the streetlights was out, had been broken all week. Trash scattered around the sidewalk. City was cutting down services already. He saw the kids coming toward him but did not think twice. Neighborhood kids. Perhaps he knew them. They split to pass him. When they were level, the one on his left lunged into him.
“Hey, Whitey! Get Whitey!” The kid on the right closed in, ricocheted off.
His thigh burned. Then cold air. He swung after them, his hand going down. Touched torn cloth, touched smear of wet. He let them go. They had not cut him deeply but the wound stung.
Yente rose stifflegged from under the steps yowling welcome.
“Hi, tuxedo-cat.” He stooped to ruffle his shaggy fur.
The door opened above them. “Rowley? Where you been?”
“With a girl. What’s wrong?”
“The commissioners voted this afternoon.”
“Already? They didn’t take long to decide.”
“No, they didn’t take long. They passed it two to one.”
“Shit. Look, I’ll be up in five minutes.”
“Don’t. I got no stomach for talk tonight. No stomach at all.”
“Tomorrow?”
“Maybe.”
I
n the john he examined his leg. A slash ran half the length of his thigh in a jagged seam. Maybe a froe? Some kind of broken knife. The blood rolled over the winter-sallow skin and dripped on the white toilet seat. With plaintive meows Yente rubbed against the leg he was standing on and nuzzled his boot querying, hey?
“What’s the world coming to, cat? The power structure deals and I get cut. Aw, tonight I feel rotten.”
Then he heard Harlan’s words and let the cap of the tincture of Merthiolate fall into the basin. They were beaten. They had made a good case, they were right and within their rights. But they had lost. A huge baffled anger formed in him as he went over the steps of their case again and again. The last thick syrup of bleeding oozed over his thigh.
Saturday, December 13
The breaking wave of her breasts against the white wall. Firm small breasts like fists. The musculature of her sleek back was marked and beautiful.
“I’m strong for my size. All those generations of farmhands.” The vaccination mark showed in the resilient flesh of her upper arm: bite of closeset pointed teeth. Shadowy hollows in her throat.
“Don’t keep saying I’m pretty, it leaves me cold. Bodies are jokes.”
“Then some jokes are prettier than others. What do you think you’re defending now?”
“I must be the first female Jameson to commit immoral acts in four generations, since freedom. Think of it, the shock among the elder saints up there watching.”
“If I think of that there won’t be an act. You’re fighting.”
“What you call fighting, I call breathing.”
“Breathe through your skin then.”
“It was silly mysticism to suppose I’d be any different when you got my clothes off.”