Africaville

by Jeffrey Colvin

  Warner remains quiet. He looks around the room. A bold-print bedspread covers the bed and two cane-bottom chairs sit along one wall. A picture of Sibelus and a woman is on the bureau. But no sign of anything that reminds Warner of Gerrick.

  “It was awful what happened to Gerrick,” Warner says.

  “It put a hurt on me, too,” Sibelus says. “And on Gerrick’s daddy.”

  “Is he doing well?” Warner asks.

  “Well enough, I suppose.”

  Sibelus takes two MoonPies out of the bag. “Gerrick probably told you I liked these,” he says to Warner. “But most of the MoonPies that boy bought was for hisself.”

  “The Kwik Mart’s been done nice,” Minerva says. “You wouldn’t recognize it.”

  Sibelus picks up a glass of iced tea from the windowsill. While he drinks it with his MoonPie, Warner catches him up on his life in Vermont. Seated on the floor, Jennifer pretends to pluck the flowers painted on the linoleum.

  “I’ve been wanting to ask you something,” Sibelus says when Warner and Minerva are about to leave. “What did my grandson do wrong at the store?”

  “Nothing,” Warner says.

  “Well, he got let go.”

  “The store was closing.”

  “It ain’t closed though.”

  “He was a good worker,” Warner says.

  After a long breath, Sibelus looks at Jennifer, now hiding behind Warner with her arms around his thigh. When Sibelus waves, Jennifer giggles and patters over to Minerva at the doorway.

  “Pretty, isn’t she?” Warner says.

  “Sure is,” Sibelus says. “But you better watch out. They grow up before you know it.”

  At his office in downtown Jackson, Eldridge Littlejohn opens a folder, feeling frustrated at the scant cooperation he has gotten from Zera over the month he has been working with her. Not a single letter has the stubborn woman written on her own behalf.

  He knows Warner is not that happy that he has been unable to get Zera even a hearing for parole. He assured Warner that his friendship with the new congressman who represents Jackson was going to help with Zera’s case. And while his connections with the congressman and the new lieutenant governor have managed to secure Zera treatment by a renowned heart specialist, she remains in Peace Correctional, despite the help of an army of law associates, interns, college professors, philanthropists, and the staff at the Southern Law Center.

  “Perhaps it’s time to quit Zera’s case,” Eldridge’s wife had said. “You’re a partner now. Didn’t I hear you say that if things improved at the governor’s mansion or the state legislature, you would hand over Zera’s case to one of the young associates? Maybe it’s time.”

  Perhaps he took up Zera’s case too late, Eldridge tells himself, drawing circles in the margins of one document. Had he gotten to Zera in 1934, when prison life was harder, or in 1964 during the demonstrations, or perhaps in 1979, the year before she moved into better quarters—maybe.

  The human resources manager—the only other black employee at the firm when Eldridge joined over a decade ago—used to say that too many stalled cases was a sure way to get you off the senior partner track. But this is not an admission of defeat, Eldridge tells himself, placing a file into the box that will soon be on its way to a young associate.

  “Are you ready for Mr. Peletier?” the secretary asks from the doorway. “Or do you need a few minutes?”

  Eldridge raises his hand with his fingers spread.

  “Okay, five minutes,” the secretary says.

  Eldridge reaches for the folder containing copies of the paperwork for Zera’s burial plot. There are no plots at the cemetery in Jackson where Zera’s deceased husband, Matthew, and his parents are buried. Nor is there any space under the large oak at the cemetery that shades the graves of her parents, Patience and Floyd Bradenburg, and her grandmother Althea. And now Warner says this other cemetery claims that the plot Zera has purchased has already been spoken for.

  “Eldridge Littlejohn here,” Eldridge says into the phone, reading the note clipped to the document. “From Strum and Pearsons. I hear you’re claiming that Zera Platt’s burial plot is spoken for. Well, sir, my client doesn’t see it that way. I’m looking at paperwork that says Zera owns the plot. Sure, you can call me back, but you’re going to need to also call Congressman Levitt. He wants an answer, too.”

  After hanging up, Eldridge almost puts the folder back into his in-box. When he realizes what he is doing, he drops the folder into the box sitting on the floor.

  Visiting Minerva at her parents’ house the next morning, Warner sits at the kitchen table for several minutes before he notices the samples of resin-based countertops and pictures of oak and maple cabinet doors.

  “These two look the same to me,” he tells Minerva, holding up two peach-colored tile samples from a box.

  “They’re not exactly the same,” Minerva says. “Look close. The tile in your right hand has more blue in it.”

  Warner doesn’t check out too much in the living room as he maneuvers past Jennifer’s playthings on the cluttered floor. He does, however, notice a new framed picture sitting on the television. In it, a man leans against the hood of a brand-new truck. Is he the fella from Crenshaw County he heard Minerva started seeing a few months back? Randy says the fella graduated a few years ahead of them at Woodhaven High, but he doesn’t look familiar.

  “I hear you’ve been seeing someone,” Warner says, accepting a beer from Minerva.

  “It was a while ago,” Minerva says. “What about you?”

  “Been busy with the job,” Warner says. “Not to mention my trips down here. Saw Eldridge yesterday.”

  “Zera, too?”

  Warner shakes his head. “She’s not feeling well. It would be nice if our daughter got to see her, while Zera still knows who she is.”

  Minerva reaches into a drawer at the counter. She returns to the table, not with a bottle opener as Warner expected but with the bill from Jennifer’s preschool. “I’m making myself a sandwich for lunch,” she says, handing Warner the envelope. “You can have one if you like.”

  Warner nods, thinking his daughter will be up from her nap soon. But Jennifer sleeps through their lunch and, to his surprise, he and Minerva seem to enjoy the stolen time together. In the bedroom later, Minerva’s naked body is another thing in the house that feels unfamiliar. So does the taste of her neck and shoulders. After a few minutes of kissing, Warner climbs onto Minerva, inhaling the aroma of a lotion she uses on clients at the rehabilitation center. Even before he enters her, Warner believes the sex will be good. After a few minutes, he is about to finish when he thinks of the last pregnancy. “Should I pull out?” he asks, continuing to thrust.

  Before Minerva answers, Warner empties himself with a shudder.

  Lying on the bed beside her for several minutes, Warner fails to come up with something new to say. He gets up and dresses quickly.

  On the way to the living room, he looks in on Jennifer, asleep in the second bedroom. Perhaps someday when he looks at his daughter he will not think immediately of her lost sibling. He was adamant he didn’t want to know the sex of the lost child. He thought that information would only increase his mourning. But during one conversation, Minerva lets the news slip—a daughter.

  Warner has tried to break out of his depression over losing the baby by throwing himself into his new job. He still thinks of the child often during work at the appliance store in Burlington. But lately, each time a customer signs their name to a new sales receipt or warranty, he has felt a renewed sense of accomplishment. Last month he got a bonus as the employee with the top quarterly sales. Successes in Vermont haven’t erased all his missteps in Alabama. But they have helped.

  Outside, three pecan saplings stick out of the bed of the truck Warner borrowed from Randy. “There are saplings growing for Etienne,” Warner says. “I figured why not plant a few for Jennifer.”

  Since Minerva looks pleased, Warner carries the trees to t
he backyard. Just before the tree line he paces off three spots he figures are fifteen yards apart. “The two saplings there are for Jennifer,” Warner says, dumping a bucket of water onto the dark soil at the base of the third sapling. “This last one is in memory of our other daughter. We don’t have to mention that to Jennifer, if you don’t want.”

  “Jennifer will appreciate that, when we decide to tell her,” Minerva says.

  Driving to the airport later, Warner checks the Alabama roadside for more saplings. But he gets distracted by all the newly cleared lots. Soon he is content to let the scenery pass. He thinks about the divorce papers he saw sitting on the bureau in Minerva’s bedroom earlier. Minerva did not dwell on the matter during this trip. When he peeked, he saw that the papers were still unsigned. Would it make sense to try to patch things up with her? It is hard to believe that the relationship could reignite, especially after seeing the man in the picture in the living room. The picture he can ignore, but not the colorful men’s T-shirt he saw in the hamper in her bathroom.

  He told Minerva he wasn’t seeing anyone. But a few months back, he had met an older woman. It was raining the day he and Jocelyn were driving back from dinner at a new Italian restaurant in Winooski. Maneuvering around a car stranded next to the road with a flat, he ignored Jocelyn’s advice to keep on driving and stopped to help the woman driver. Dating her, and a few other women, has required a lot of hustle—but perhaps not as much as trying to find a way back to Minerva.

  When he first saw the word dissolution on the divorce papers, it sent him to Jocelyn’s basement to seek out the heavy dictionary he hadn’t used since college. On many occasions up in Vermont, he would be chatting up potential customers, sitting in a bar watching a baseball game, or lying on the sofa eating fries and a burger when his mind would grow numb, trying to name the many threads that had unraveled during his marital catastrophe. Was he too young to marry, as Etienne had once said? Was he too preoccupied? Had he ever loved Minerva? Of course, he loved Minerva. Why else would he still feel so scarred?

  Warner had planned to drive by the new paper plant. But that exit is miles behind him now. He thinks again of the saplings on the Cumberland campus and those he planted for Jennifer. The adolescent trees will one day be as tall as the adult pines along the roadside. When the pines thin out, Warner has a momentary sense of knowing where he is. But too soon the familiarity falls away. There are red clay hills where he thinks the land should be flat, new townhouses where, as a child, he imagined the trees would always rule.

  Who Is North American?

  Part Five

  Tract East 128

  A Northern Aurora on the Bluff

  Halifax, Nova Scotia, March 1992

  This morning downtown, city workers arrive to find a small two-bedroom trailer parked on the lawn of city hall. A hand-painted sign leaning against the trailer says CITY DISPLAY: NO ENTRY WITHOUT PERMISSION.

  Throughout the morning, staff and visitors who arrive at the building heed the words. However, around one o’clock, a facilities clerk inspects the front and rear doors of the trailer and finds that both are secured with padlocks. A van carrying four constables arrives several minutes later. One of the constables knocks out a front window on the trailer and drops in a canister of tear gas. After the smoke has cleared, the constable cuts both padlocks on the front door. But when he attempts to step inside the trailer, he can move in only a foot or two. The front room is packed—floor to ceiling—with household belongings.

  “We’ve towed the trailer out to the facilities lot,” the chief of staff in the mayor’s office tells Marcelina Higgins-Pitts when he telephones her home in Simms Corner. “It might be one of the trailers from the bluff. Can you break away and take a drive over and look at it?”

  An hour later, on a gravel lot at the public works facilities complex, Marcelina climbs the cinderblock steps to the front of the trailer and looks inside. A strong smell assaults her nose and she steps back.

  “Where are the contents?” she asks, holding a wad of tissue to her nose.

  Bradford Nesbitt, the mayor’s chief of staff, stands down on the gravel, sweating in a dark suit. He points with his cell phone in the direction of an aluminum-sided warehouse. “One half of the trailer had furniture in it,” he says. “And the other half, just random stuff. Most of it looks like mining gear. There was nothing in the trailer to identify the owner or tell us who owns the material.”

  “Somebody out on the bluff ought to know who the trailer belongs to,” Marcelina says.

  “If they do, they are not talking.”

  “Can we go take a look?”

  “Facilities might not let us into the warehouse—at least not until the inventory’s done.”

  “They may if the mayor gets here,” Marcelina says. “Where is he?”

  “En route.”

  Bradford bounds up the steps without spilling a drop of coffee out of the fancy take-out cup. At twenty-nine, he is three years younger than his boss, the recently elected mayor. “You called the mayor several times last week,” he tells Marcelina, “but you never told the secretary what you wanted.”

  “The mayor knows why I was calling.”

  “Can you tell me? Maybe I can help.”

  Though her elderly knees are giving her trouble, Marcelina does not accept Bradford’s arm to help her descend the steps. She agreed to come out here only because Bradford said the mayor would stop by on his way to the airport. But for all she knows, the mayor could be in the air heading to Ottawa. Since she was appointed co-chair of the city’s housing task force—the first black woman to hold the position in the history of Halifax municipality—she has gone right to the mayor, rarely needing to bother with his chief of staff.

  “The city manager is still giving me the runaround about the repairs to the apartment building at 920 Gottingen Street,” Marcelina says, when she reaches the gravel. “Residents want to know when they can move back in.”

  “The ruptured water main flooded an entire floor,” Bradford says. “That’s a lot of work.”

  “A little bird told me the repairs are finished.”

  “The mayor was hoping there might be room at 920 Gottingen for some of the people living in the trailers,” Bradford says.

  “Unfortunately, there are building residents ahead of them on the waiting list.”

  “Perhaps not all the displaced residents will want to move back into their apartments.”

  “Young man, do you really believe what you’re saying?”

  “The mayor might hurry the release of the repaired apartments if you will stop fighting his plan to move the cemetery off of Woods Bluff.”

  “I have nothing to say to the mayor about the cemetery. A judge will settle that fight.”

  “Weeds are invading the cemetery.”

  “You haven’t visited the cemetery lately, have you, young man?”

  “We would be respectful when we transport the remains.”

  “The judge will decide if you can haul off even a single headstone.”

  “The district court’s been very supportive of municipalities,” Bradford says. “It may well decide in the city’s favor.”

  “The Friends of the Cemetery has a good lawyer, too.”

  Marcelina steps off for a tour around the trailer. The deferential look on Bradford’s face as he made his arguments was a surprise. If he is showing respect for his elders, Marcelina thinks, it’s a rare occurrence in this town recently. Her term as co-chair of the housing task force concludes in a few months, but not a single colleague has encouraged her to run again. She’s well into her seventies, but that does not mean her opinions are no longer of value to the city.

  Marcelina has said plenty downtown about Basinview Baptist cemetery ever since a military plane crashed on the bluff several years ago, flinging debris that mauled half a dozen headstones. When sinkholes disturbed eleven graves, nobody cried foul when city officials offered to put the caskets in storage until the sinkholes could be i
nvestigated. But then three of the caskets came up missing. During the recent mayoral campaign, candidate Jonathan Maryse demanded the missing caskets be found. Since becoming mayor, however, he hasn’t mentioned them once.

  What the mayor will not shut up about, Marcelina believes, is his economic development plan. Halifax has no chance at hosting the Olympics. But the city’s bid to host a future North American Sailing Regatta could be bolstered by the addition of a high-end hotel and retail complex on the bluff. The alternative is a high-tech industrial park. Either project would mean making a final clearing of the area city officials now call Tract East 128.

  Tract East 128? The first time Marcelina read that description of her former neighborhood in one of the city’s planning memorandums she wanted to throw the document into the basin. But now, as she reaches the backside of the trailer, she thinks, why not let the city move the cemetery? Despite what she said to Bradford, the cemetery could use a bit of sprucing up. Reliable volunteers for weeding and pruning are getting harder to rustle up. It is true that members of her family, not to mention her former neighbors—the Sebolts, the Penncampbells, the Ovitses, the Cauldens, the Delarojos—are buried in the cemetery. But do the dead complain?

  A metal plaque on the back corner of the trailer has rusted, but on close inspection the manufacturer’s name is faintly visible: Northern Aurora.

  Marcelina had written the name in a leather-bound day planner years ago. But when she arrived in the Hindquarter on that afternoon in 1986, the trailer she found parked near the Higgins family home had a beige exterior. She almost called the constable to evict the family from her property, but was dissuaded by the sight of three girls playing out in front of it. It also helped that the occupants offered to pay a seventy-five-dollar-a-month hitching fee to be allowed to run an extension cord from the trailer to her house. For years she feared an electrical fire might scorch the house. Instead it was a skillet-oil fire. The kitchen was only slightly singed, Marcelina recalls now as she moves farther along the side of the trailer. City officials didn’t have to condemn and demolish her house.