Africaville

by Jeffrey Colvin

  Warner lifted his eyes from the picture and met the eyes of his wife, someone he had known since elementary school. There was an odd expression on Minerva’s face. The expression cemented itself in a part of Warner’s brain where he doubted it would ever be erased. It was the look of someone uneasy about an unfamiliar sight that has entered their view. Minerva’s face twitched and the look vanished.

  On this, his first return to Burlington since the burial six months ago, a faulty light in the backyard is not the only thing Warner plans to repair. On the many phone calls he has had with his mother since his father died, he has mentioned the relatives in Halifax but not once has he pressed the subject to ask why nobody told him about them sooner. Well, six months is more than enough time to respect a widow’s period of mourning. He and his mother need to have a serious conversation. He finds it a bit odd that his uncle Berto in Montreal never mentioned that the relatives in Halifax were black. But then he never asked. And why would he have? His father is no longer here to confront. There is only his mother to explain why no one told him. And Warner has decided that she has some explaining to do when it comes to her part in the deception.

  I’m sorry he didn’t tell me about this problem sooner,” Jocelyn says, sitting with Warner at the kitchen table after dinner.

  “What problem are you talking about?” Warner asks.

  “The problem with Andrei at his cemetery. That business.”

  “Oh. I thought you were talking about something else.”

  Jocelyn is quiet for a moment. Then she shakes her head. “And what is Andrei asking for now, a birth certificate? I tell you, the way that man runs paperwork through the business can be exhausting for customers. Just ask my aunt Sylvia.”

  “Through the mail, it will take six weeks to get Pop’s birth certificate,” Warner says. “But if I show up in person I can get it in a day.”

  “I don’t expect you to spend your vacation days chasing down paperwork.”

  “I’ve been thinking I need to get off my butt and take a drive up to Halifax,” Warner says. “Now, I’ll finally meet Luela.”

  Warner unfolds a map of Nova Scotia, feeling the last bites of corned beef and cabbage turning in his stomach. The bag he packed for the trip sits by the sofa. Minerva will not be getting up at four in the morning to accompany him on the drive. Though the baby is no longer bawling, Minerva insists the baby’s not feeling well enough to travel. Thank God he did not start another argument with her before dinner. He now thinks it is better if he goes alone.

  Another reason he kept his tongue earlier was because he knew Minerva was still angry with him for hiding the fact that he has been job hunting in Vermont. Jocelyn must have heard their argument yesterday in the backyard. He was turning a bratwurst on the grill, irritated to hear Minerva suggest for the tenth time that he ask her father for a job at the bank in Montgomery. And for the tenth time he said he wasn’t interested in working for her father. After she spat out the news that she knew about the job interviews he was trying to set up in Vermont, the discussion rose to shouting.

  Warner studies the yellow insert on the map showing the streets of Halifax. Why bring up the subject of an interview for a job he might not get, he wonders, as he orients himself to downtown Halifax. And besides, Minerva has kept her own secrets. They agreed she would remain on birth control pills until after they were married. Yet two months before the wedding, he found her vomiting in the bathroom.

  “Has Andrei changed all the paperwork to say Etienne was colored?” Warner asks, refolding the map.

  “Heavens, no,” Jocelyn says. “Everything’s been changed to white.”

  “How did the forms get mixed up in the first place?”

  “Who knows? Your father purchased those plots a long time ago.”

  “Did you agree with Pop when he decided to not talk about his family in Canada?”

  “I’ve told you many times, your father felt his family was his own business.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with having colored relatives.”

  Jocelyn brushes aside a few strands of her wavy, just-starting-to-gray hair. “Your father being colored—or black—wasn’t the problem,” she says. “The problem was your great-grandmother. She’s in prison.”

  “Up in Canada?”

  “No, in Jackson, Mississippi.”

  “Have you visited her?”

  Jocelyn shakes her head.

  “What’s her name?”

  “Zera Platt. She sent her son, Omar, your grandfather, up to Canada to protect him. Your father was trying to protect you, too. Your father said that if your playmates knew you had a relative in prison, they would have teased you.”

  “But look at the trouble we’re having now,” Warner says. “The cemetery here in Burlington is white-only, isn’t it? We’re lucky Andrei’s willing to fix the paperwork. Do you think he considered moving Etienne out of the plot?”

  “Certainly not,” Jocelyn says. “This is Vermont, not Alabama.”

  Up in Halifax, Luela enters her living room, where Chamberlain is watching the evening news. “That was Eh-tinne’s son on the phone again,” she says, sitting down on the sofa.

  “Where the devil is he?”

  “Nearby, so he says.” Luela holds a teacup with a dollop of freshly baked rice pudding in it. “I told that young man I wasn’t feeling well,” she says, stabbing the pudding with a spoon. “Like his father, he doesn’t seem to have any sense of other people’s time. If he doesn’t get here soon, I’m going to bed. You can direct him to the spare bedroom.”

  “Must be dying to see you if he drove all this way.”

  Luela studies the television screen with temperature forecasts for the next few days. “Yesterday he told me he was bringing his family. Now word is Minerva and the baby have stayed back in Vermont.”

  “The baby’s ailing, you said.”

  “A baby can travel with a head cold. They could have left the child with the grandmother, too. Wonder what the real reason is that Minerva’s not coming.”

  “You’re not going to bother him about that, are you?”

  “I will if I can work it into the conversation.”

  The bite of pudding feels cool on Luela’s tongue. Why didn’t she set the cup in the warm oven with the lamb stew while she took the call? Warner is no longer in a rush to get his father’s birth certificate. So what on this planet does he want in Halifax? When she mailed the letter sending her regrets about not attending Etienne’s burial, she sent him everything she was willing to part with. She sent along his grandmother Kath’s college yearbook and the two Lucy Kirchner in the Mountains books. Clearing out the house in New Jamaica after her mother, Shirley, died, she cried for a solid minute when she discovered those items. She might part with the photograph of Kath and Timothee at their tenth anniversary dinner, or the church announcement of Etienne’s birth. But no way is Warner getting any of the money Kath left.

  Kath didn’t actually leave Luela the money. Luela found it inside the lining of a hatbox that arrived in a trunk six months after her sister’s funeral. Tacked against the wall of the hatbox were rows of fifty-dollar bills. The haul was five hundred dollars. Timothee insisted Luela keep the money as payment for the months she spent taking care of Kath’s baby while Kath finished her degree.

  Reluctantly, Luela had acquiesced to Timothee’s generosity. What she did not tell Timothee was how much she loved the weekends she spent on the bluff taking care of her sister’s boy, little Omar. Here was another person in the world, she had told herself, who would be eager to carry the Sebolt family’s history. A pity that when the boy grew up, he had other ideas.

  When Warner had called from a pay phone to say that he was running late, Luela sounded annoyed at him for keeping her waiting. Now, after she has fed him several helpings of her lamb stew, she sits before him on her living room sofa with only a slightly more pleasant demeanor. His great-aunt looks older than he imagined. In the green-and-gold dress, smelling faintly of
perfume, Scotch, and mouthwash, she hands him a stack of photograph albums with barely a smile.

  “It’s hard when all you have are a few photographs,” Luela says as Warner leans in to look at one picture. “But that is the only way you will get to know your grandmother Kath and your grandfather Omar. And, of course, Shirley and George.”

  “I am starting to feel like I am getting to know them well.”

  “That’s because they are what we call the Almost Gone,” Luela says.

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means the persons are deceased. They are gone. But there are still people walking the earth who knew them well. People are like that for a while.”

  “Like my father.”

  “Like a lot of people.”

  With the sound of Chamberlain’s light snoring wafting in from the bedroom down the hallway, Luela studies her corduroy house shoes. She gives a slow nod and for some reason thinks of Clemmond Green, another former neighbor now among the Almost Gone. One year she tried hard to get him to notice her. But the only person on his mind then was Kath.

  “Every few years or so I go over to the cemetery in Montreal,” Luela says after a while. “I carry a bouquet of bugnets. Those were Kath’s favorite flower. Our mother, Shirley, tried to grow them behind the old house, but the soil was all wrong.”

  “I’ll go with you to Montreal the next time you visit,” Warner says. “I’d be happy to buy the flowers.”

  Warner has barely lifted the cover of the next album when Luela sets down her drink. From the very first page she takes a picture out of its plastic sleeve and presents it to Warner. It is of two baseball teams gathered on Nobody’s Acre.

  “On this side of home plate, those were members of the Hindquarter Rockets,” Luela says. “On the other side are the New Jamaica Wildcats.”

  “Did we have any family on the teams?”

  Luela shakes her head.

  “I only ask because you look a bit shook up.”

  “I guess that is because I wish I had been there. Those boys are getting ready to play the last game before—”

  “The last game before what?”

  “The last game on that field. The last game before hard trouble began in Africaville.”

  “I want to see Africaville.”

  “Not much to see anymore.”

  “Be nice to see what’s there.”

  Luela picks up her Scotch and ginger and sits back in the sofa. Can a town be an Almost Gone, too? Foolish is what she must be to think that way about Africaville. The place is down, but not yet out. Two houses still breathe on the bluff—the same number of houses that were there when the town began in 1792. That counts as life, not death. Doesn’t it?

  “Your father was born there. But he didn’t care too much for the place. Did you know that?”

  Warner nods. He sets down his beer and takes a sheet of paper out of his pocket. “There’s plenty more I want to do in Canada,” he says. “Do you want to see my list?”

  Warner unfolds the paper and hands it to Luela.

  The family in Halifax.

  The family in Montreal.

  Shirley and George’s graves.

  Grandfather Omar’s grave.

  Apartment in Montreal where Pop grew up.

  Pool in Montreal where Pop learned to swim.

  The cemetery in Montreal where Kath and Timothee’s ashes are interred.

  “I also want to bring my daughter to see Saint Richelieu,” Warner says. “Etienne had lots of good things to say about the school.”

  “Did he now?”

  “Yes, but I figure that can wait until she is older.”

  Luela gives a chuckle; then her face looks serious again. “The first time he went to the school, Etienne stayed with me. That was the summer Kath and Timothee went to Italy. His parents were glad to leave the angry boy behind.”

  “They were probably happy to be going on a vacation.”

  “True. Although they were having a few problems then, as I recall.”

  “Problems?”

  “In their marriage.”

  “Every relationship has some trouble,” Warner says. “Minerva and I have a few. I imagine you and Chamberlain sometimes have problems, too.”

  Luela lets the comment go without a response. Most of the remaining pages in the last album are of people from the hotel. While Warner looks at it on his own, Luela goes to the spare bedroom to turn down the covers. She folds a fresh towel at the foot of the bed, feeling put off by Warner’s remarks about her marriage. Did he know about the months she and Chamberlain lived apart? He’s a bit brash, like his father. Yet as an adult, Etienne would not have come right out and asked a rude question like Warner had. The young man has been in Halifax less than a day, but already he has the nerve to eat her lamb stew and rice pudding, and then criticize her marriage.

  “Come here and look,” Luela tells Warner when he enters the bedroom. She points at a nick in the bedpost. “Your father did that.”

  “How?”

  “That’s what I asked him.”

  “What’d he say?”

  “Said he knew how he did it. Then he said he wasn’t going to tell me.”

  Warner throws his head back in a big laugh and now Luela is finally ready to take him in. His hair has fewer waves than Etienne’s. And his eyes are light brown instead of grayish blue. He’s a few inches shorter and perhaps thinner than Etienne was in his early twenties. But while Etienne’s laugh was always guarded, this young man just let out a good one. If Warner is carrying any worries, you’d never know it from that laugh.

  That Saturday afternoon in the fall of 1968 on Nobody’s Acre, the victorious Hindquarter Rockets shook hands with the defeated New Jamaica Wildcats in front of the largest crowd ever gathered to watch a baseball game on the bluff. When the spectators left the field, they crowded into Basinview Baptist to await the arrival of a representative from the Halifax Regional Council. Many in the crowd held copies of the newspaper with the headline “Regional Council to Hold Hearings on Urban Renewal: Africaville High on the Agenda.”

  “Forget urban renewal,” Marcelina Higgins-Pitts roared from the pulpit. “This upcoming hearing is about urban razing, specifically, tearing down Africaville.”

  One of the Steptoe brothers led the crowd in the singing of a Negro spiritual when the city representative entered the church. As the official came up the aisle, the youth brigade in their green-and-red jumpsuits leaped to their feet and began a shout that continued for several minutes.

  “That newspaper article is pure hogwash,” the representative said when the crowd finally let him speak. “We have no plans to evict residents from the bluff, no plans to tear down Africaville.”

  By the end of the following week, however, three houses had been abandoned in New Jamaica. The following Tuesday Luela was awakened at three in the morning by a rumble so loud she thought a battalion of military tanks was invading the bluff. The next morning, eight bulldozers sat in the yard of one of the abandoned houses. Four had huge hydraulic arms and gaping metal jaws that seemed capable of chewing up anything in their way.

  The newspaper article had shown a picture of the house before it was abandoned. Few on the bluff could deny that it could have used a coat of paint. That was true of many houses in Africaville. But most residents had decided that new exterior paint on their houses would have to wait until more pressing repairs had been made. The week before, the Africaville Yard and Garden Club had held a yard sculpture contest open to the students at the elementary and secondary school. All over the bluff, the children had made wonderful entries out of found rocks and fallen branches. Why didn’t the newspaper cover that?

  The bulldozers sat quiet for two weeks. In the meantime, teams of men visited the bluff. Each man carried a bucket of small, paint-filled latex sacs. From the yard of designated houses, a man would throw a sac with a pitcher’s precision, hitting a mark just above the entry. At first they marked only abandoned houses. Soon, they d
id not care if the houses were empty or not.

  The evening Luela returned home to find her house desecrated, she was unable to leave the porch for several minutes. The dark paint had streaked down her front door. Up close the metallic flecks in the paint looked grayish or dark blue. She entered the house hearing noises—the memory of her father George whistling in the back room, of Shirley washing Kath’s hair on the back porch. Having let go of her desire to have a child, Luela felt this house—the Sebolt home—was her legacy. Property her ancestors had earned protecting the city of Halifax. That evening she did as Marcelina instructed and searched for her ownership papers. The next day she carried them down to the regional housing office, determined that she would not be leaving her house no matter what.

  The next evening the sound of breaking wood jolted Luela awake. She dressed quickly, but by the time she got to Centervillage the old schoolhouse was a pile of rubble.

  Neighbors who walked along Dempsey Road and saw the demolition were too stunned to speak. So this was how the notices came now? No warnings in the newspaper about plans to build luxury hotels or expand the rail yards. No notes in mailboxes or slipped under the door with weak offers from the city. Just a splatter of paint to say good riddance.

  Misdemeanor summonses got some residents to leave. The threat of a felony citation ran off several more. But most residents stayed. For several days people sat on their porches, daring the work crews to displace them. When a bulldozer entered one yard, a group of teenagers climbed onto it. The driver made a few jerky turns then killed the engine and walked off the bluff. People took turns sleeping in Basinview Baptist. Whenever a public official visited or a constable car patrolled, people chanted, “Where is the electricity your bosses promised? Where is the running water? Where are the paved roads? Where? Nowhere.”