Persy hadn’t known how to respond. Freedom Park doesn’t mean freedom for all. They’d been silent for several minutes until Hawk spoke up again. “We go to the playground at my school. It’s got a teeter-totter and a sliding board. Desmond likes the monkey bars.”
Persy said, “Oh, yes, your friend. You want to show him your bald spot.”
“Yep, that’s Desmond.”
Loraylee must have sensed the awkwardness. She immediately asked Persy how long she’d lived in Charlotte, and where she’d gone to school. She spoke with pride of her job at the S&W, how happy she was to be working on the serving line. Another connection. Persy had eaten at that cafeteria many times, had no doubt been served by Loraylee.
“They’ve got great banana pudding,” Persy said.
Hawk said, “The chocolate pie is the best.”
Persy had wanted to know about Hawk’s father, but there was no way of asking that wouldn’t have sounded nosy or rude.
The radio continued with updates. The fire was out, with the damage limited to one block of East Third and three blocks of Morrow Street. She got out a map of Charlotte and saw that the fire had not been near Loraylee’s house on Brown Street. But she wanted to talk to her, let her know she’d thought of her when she heard about the fire. She finally got an answer a little after three in the afternoon, a man who asked her to hold on. Loraylee came on the line.
“Hey, Loraylee. This is Persy Marshall, we met at the beach last summer when Hawk hurt himself.”
“Sure, Mrs. Marshall, how you doing?”
“I’m well, hope you are.”
“We all right. I guess you heard about the fire last night.”
“That’s why I called. I wanted to be sure you were okay.”
“We got smoke, but the fire didn’t cross the boulevard, and lucky we got power. Lines down everywhere from the ice and the fire. It’s bad. School’s closed, and Hawk likes that.”
“Of course he does. So I guess Mrs. Stokes is okay, too.” Persy had told Loraylee about meeting Roberta Stokes, but hadn’t mentioned the christening gown.
“Miss Roberta? Yeah, she should be. Might be without power, but the fire didn’t get to Myers Street.”
* * *
Blaire almost never brought his work to the dinner table, but that evening he had a file open beside his plate, hardly looking up from it as he ate, too involved in it to talk. The page he was studying had a graph with horizontal lines intersecting verticals, dots where the lines crossed, headings at the top, numbers down the side and across the bottom. She finger-walked across the table and tapped a nail on the label of the open file folder, “Renewal Dates.” She asked, “What is that?”
He closed the file. “Sorry, I shouldn’t be looking at it during dinner. There aren’t enough hours in the day right now for me to do all that’s needed.”
She put down her fork with a thump, louder than she’d intended. “I wish you’d talk to me about what’s going on.”
He looked at her with a flash of irritation he tried to hide.
“What did you mean when you said on the phone that the fire clarifies things?”
“Oh, that. Well, it clarifies our point that Brooklyn is long overdue for a clean sweep. It’s an indication”—he cleared his throat—“an indication of how bad things have gotten there.” He pushed his chair back, picked up the folder, thumped the tabletop with it, straightening the papers inside. “Sorry, Perse, I’ve got so much to do.”
“Wait a minute, Blaire. A story in the News quoted people in Brooklyn saying there aren’t enough fire hydrants, that water pressure was low, that the fire department was slow responding.”
Blaire’s eyes narrowed, his face flushed. “Multiple alarms went out. Seven trucks responded. Almost fifty firemen, Persy. Fifty. Some had to be treated for smoke inhalation.”
“What about the hydrants, the water pressure?”
“You shouldn’t trust the Charlotte News. They always want to stir things up, you know that.” He stood. “Those people in Brooklyn don’t have the means to take care of themselves. We have to see that they have decent housing and schools. We’ve got to step up and imagine a better way for them.”
“They don’t all need our assistance.”
“You’re talking about that seamstress, aren’t you, and that girl you brought home from the beach? I understand that some of them are doing okay. But if you’d seen what I have, you’d be the first to want more for them . . .” He went toward the living room. “. . . more than what they have now.” He closed the sliding doors behind him.
CHAPTER 21
My back bothering me again, has been since I was carrying Hawk, like being pregnant threw me out of whack. But what’s on my hips is probably the blame. Last week I saw myself in the window at Woolworth’s and wondered who is that big girl, about to tell her she could look better, but it’s me, dressed the best I can in Auntie Roselle’s hand-me-downs.
Uncle Ray sees me in something that was Auntie Roselle’s, gets quiet, and I know it’s a dress he remembers, or a blouse she wore when they went out for the evening, or a scarf he bought for her. He never talks about her, just gets quiet and I know she’s in his mind. I was a baby when she died, so I never knew her, though I felt like I did when I came on the trunk with her stuff in it. Some of it real old-fashioned, all of it exactly my right size. But I’d still like to have a dress bought new for me and picked out only because it’s pretty.
At supper last night he say, “You reckon rosebushes can be moved?”
He means the ones he planted for Auntie Roselle. “Why you asking?”
“Just got to thinking, the fire has made it easier for the city to run us out.”
“What?” Bibi looks like she’s about to cry. “Who gon run us out?”
I say, “We staying right where we are, for now, Bibi.”
Uncle Ray gets up, puts two slices in the toaster.
Last week I walked down Morrow far as I could, until I got to the barriers put up since the fire. Stood by Little Sugar looking at the burnt-out places people use to live, black sticks jutting up now. All the footbridges folks built across the gullies are gone, too; you couldn’t get to a house even if it was still there.
Most places when the city tears down a house or a church, they take every living thing, anything green—trees and grass and bushes and flowers—nothing left but a dirt field, and come the first rain, mud runs off into the sidewalk and streets, coating them with slippery red clay. But that didn’t happen where Dicker Phillips and his Morella use to be. For some reason when their house got torn down, the city people left a big oak that’s bent in the middle with a flat place you can sit on. Something must of got in its way when it was sprouting, and the tree grew up around whatever that was. Got to have been there a hundred years or more, and I like to think someone with the city had respect for it and let it be.
There aren’t yards, no trees or grass over in Fairview Homes or the Courts, where they send families whose houses are already gone, just buildings with folks living on top of each other, packed in like peaches in a can. Maybe you’ll see a dried-up bush or two and not a single real house, only what they call apartments but are really cells.
Bibi told me about where she was born, a mill house on Stonewall, lived with her mother, father, her brother, two sisters, and later on with Uncle Vester and their son. Hard to imagine all of them in one small house close to the curb on the boulevard, no yard to speak of, cars whizzing by day and night. And here we are only a couple blocks away, the four of us, a yard out front with a magnolia, and a backyard with a couple of trees, three rosebushes, and the falling-down henhouse by the stoop.
So many things will be lost when we have to move, nothing to do with the reasons the city wants to redevelop—what they’re calling it. Get rid of Negroes in downtown Charlotte—what it is. No way we all gon wind up in the same neighborhood. People I’ve known all my life won’t be nearby anymore. Won’t be able to walk to the doctor, the dentist, to
church, to school. To work. What will happen to the Savoy Theater, St. Tim’s, the Queen City Classic, Tocky’s, the library, Stone’s Grocery? Steadman’s Flowers will be closing soon; with Jonny No Age gone, his friend Joseph has tried to sell the shop, but nobody’s buying in Second Ward these days—the city will get it eventually—so Joseph’s gon move back to Raleigh quick as he can.
Lately, and maybe because of all the talk about how we’ll have to move soon, I can’t stop thinking about my mama and daddy, wondering what the truth is. Wondering, I guess, what the truth is about me, about where I come from. Mostly wanting to know so I can tell Hawk someday.
Daddy died at a place called Guadalcanal. I imagined it was like the Panama Canal, which I learned about in fourth grade. The teacher pointed to a map and said how important it was for boats to be able to go from the Atlantic to the Pacific without going around South America. I imagined my daddy on an important piece of water that was a cut-through to some other important piece of water. Uncle Ray, who told me about Guadalcanal, say he reckon that might be true but he didn’t really know. When I looked it up, I found out it was an island, not a canal at all, and that my daddy was in a terrible place early in World War II. Knowing that made him more real to me than he’d ever been, even in the few memories I have of him: a handsome man who tickled me, making me laugh, same way I do with Hawk. I want to know about Shushu, once and for all, and that means I have to ask Grand and Pap. Again.
On my next Monday off, I decide to try one more time. It takes me almost an hour to get there, transferring at Johnson C. Smith, then walking another couple of blocks.
Grand answers the door wearing an apron, a delicious smell drifting out around her, making me hungry even before I know I am. “Come on in, girl. Long walk from the bus stop.” She puts her short fat arms as far around me as they’ll go, say in my ear, “Wish you’d brought Hawk with you.”
“He’s in school.”
“Course he is.” She taps her forehead. “My memory isn’t what it once was.”
“Your memory is great, at least compared to Bibi’s.” We walk into the living room. “What’re you cooking?”
“A roast for this evening. I get one from the A&P on Sundays because they reduce the price. Then we have two-three meals off it.” She starts to sit. “Where are my manners? Can I get you a cup of coffee? I’ve got a pot on the stove.”
“I’d like that, thank you.”
“Cream and sugar?”
“No, ma’am.” She always ask, and I always say the same thing.
She comes back with a tray, and lets out a sigh as she sinks into an easy chair, rubbing her shoulder. “Bursitis. Hurts something awful. And taking aspirin for the pain gives me heartburn.” She stretches her arm, moves it around. “All those years writing on the blackboard is what caused it, I reckon.”
“Where’s Pap?” I ask.
“Gone to his meeting at Tabernacle, a bunch of men who get together once a week. He says they’re doing church business, but mostly they share stories about how things used to be.”
I compliment her on the doilies she’s crocheted for the chair I’m sitting in, then it comes out: “Grand, I reckon you’d tell me if you’d heard anything from Shushu, but I have to ask.”
“I have heard nothing.” She gets that set look that say not to go into this again, so I don’t. We sit and sip and I like being here, being taken care of by my grandmother, even if she won’t tell me about Shushu, or can’t, maybe is ashamed she doesn’t know anything. When light hits her face in a certain way, or Pap lifts an eyebrow in an expression I know, I see Hawk in them. I’m not going to get what I want from them, so I reckon it’s best if I be grateful for what I got.
On my way home I stop by Clancy Tyler’s shoe repair, a small, bright shop that smells like leather and polish. I tell Mr. Tyler I need new half soles. He say it’ll be a dollar each and I get him down to a dollar fifty for both. New shoes be at least five dollars and that dollar fifty buys me maybe another year on these that are already broken in, important for somebody on her feet all day. New shoes could give me a month of blisters. While we talking a white lady comes in and Mr. Tyler motions to me to stand aside. He knows where his bread’s buttered. She say, “Mr. Tyler’s work is so good. I used to go to the shoe shop out Providence Road, but I’m glad I found Mr. Tyler. He’s better.”
I say, “Yes, ma’am,” but I’m thinking she comes here because yes, he’s good, but mostly because he’s cheaper than any Eastover shoe repair.
After she goes, he gets back to me. “She’s been coming here for years.” He picks up my shoes in his gnarly hands, scarred and twisted from arthritis, but strong. There’s a streak of black shoe polish smeared on the kinky white hair above his left ear. He’s got to be seventy, I reckon, but sharp. Wish Bibi was.
He looks out the front window. “Got my notice yesterday.”
“Mm-mmm.” My stomach hurts. “They say when?”
“Give me six months to relocate. Got my eye on a place over in Third Ward.”
“Don’t you reckon sooner or later they’ll get Third, too?”
“They’re not saying.”
“They’re not saying lots of things.”
“I’m thinking on it.” He picks up his hammer and taps the sole of my shoe. “Might close the shop. Don’t know if my white customers will follow me to Third.”
“You got lots of whites?”
“Enough. About like Roberta Stokes. She’s moving to Third and her ladies gon go with her. That’s what they’re telling her.”
After I leave the shoe shop I walk past Myers Street School. Something going on there this afternoon, maybe that PTA thing Uncle Ray’s been doing. He say he’s enjoying it. “I am the only man in that group, and the only one over fifty. Those young ladies were astonished when I first joined them, but now I’m one of them. I make them laugh, and we’re getting things accomplished. Gon get a new sliding board for the playground, and we’re talking about how we might persuade the school board to get us a bus.” I’m pleased that Hawk has family in the PTA.
A woman comes toward me on the boulevard, carrying a shoebox. Medium like me. Medium height, medium hips, medium brown, her heels clacking on the pavement. Could be my mother passing me by, same way she left me all those years ago. I want to ask, “Aren’t you ashamed you left your baby?”
I wonder have I passed my mother a dozen times, don’t have to go to Chicago to find her. Maybe she’s right here in Charlotte, just not eager to see me. Or maybe it’s not me she left, but my daddy. Everyone’s always saying what a good man Ronald Hawkins was. Could be he hurt her bad, she had to run, but that doesn’t explain how she could leave her baby girl and never look back.
“Shushu,” I wish I could ask her, “didn’t you like me? Was I ugly?” I’d touch her face, so like mine, put my nose in her hair, pull her smell into me. She didn’t just rob me of a mother when she took off and left her squalling baby girl. No, not just that. She took with her the chance I would ever have a brother or, more what I would want, a sister. I do think on what my sister would be.
If I could talk to Shushu, I’d tell her about our house, about the backyard and how Hawk has made it his own private jungle, about his swing from the maple tree, the rosebushes Uncle Ray planted for his Roselle, the henhouse. Ask her did she know my great-auntie? Uncle Ray got one picture of Roselle. Fair-skinned and pretty in an old-fashioned way, in a black dress, shoulder pads, a white flower in her hair, like Billie Holiday. The way I’d want my sister to look, if I had one.
CHAPTER 22
Eben sat on the bench in the tiny Myers Street park, tuning out the faint rumble of traffic on Independence Boulevard. He sought a rare moment to enjoy the fall colors across the street: the maple he thought of as a flaming tree, if not a burning bush. And the brilliant yellow of the ginkgo—the only one in Second Ward as far as he knew. He hoped he’d be here the day it dropped all its leaves in a golden flurry so unlike the measured shedding of nearby trees. D
id whoever planted it live long enough to see it become such a star?
Every so often he caught a whiff of the fire. The smell of burned wood, wet ashes. Even after eight months, he would wake in the night in a terror, thinking he heard Oscar’s voice calling out to him. The charred rubble had been cleared, leaving three blocks of blackened flatness along Little Sugar, a block of East Third in ruins. He’d walked down those streets last month, saw the dead ground. But at the creek he was relieved to see the banks covered with grass, cattails, flowers, several hopeful saplings. There’d been an official sign admonishing anyone from trespassing the vacant land. What municipal moron had come up with that idea?
He sat in the sun, twisting his wedding band, a habit since Nettie first put it on his finger. He could see himself walking down the aisle, newly wed, twisting the ring. She’d teased him about this unconscious manipulation, had asked whether he really wanted to wear it, or if perhaps he felt it restricted him in some way. He laughed at her nonsense while he nudged the plain gold band round and round. Almost five years now since her death, he wore it steadfastly, and never once considered removing what was as much a part of his identity as his clerical collar.
From his seat by the sidewalk in the minuscule park—ten by twelve feet of grass, one bench, an azalea, a plaque dedicating the space to Rufus Talford, who voluntarily swept the streets of Second Ward for forty years—he gazed at Myers Street School, thought of all the hundreds of small feet that had traipsed those halls, his own included. A rich history there, with its Jacob’s Ladder fire escape where his sixth grade posed proudly for a class picture, the only photo he had of his elementary years. He was struggling to accept the inevitability of bulldozers tearing up Brooklyn, the looming probability of the cemetery being violated; he knew what the community meant to the people he’d vowed to comfort, and ached at the thought of it disappearing forever.
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