The Street Sweeper

by Elliot Perlman

  ‘She got a life to lead. I don’t wanna hear ‘bout your innocence no more. Every dumb-ass nigga innocent in here. Think of her. Think of how things are for her. You leave anything behind for her? She the mother of your daughter but you left nothing behind for her. She gonna need more money as the kid gets older. She had a job when you went in but maybe she lost her job. She need take care of the little girl, your daughter. You in here. They out there. If she don’t have anything to eat she gonna have to go to welfare. What do they wait there – forty-five days, sixty days, to get somethin’? You say she live with her mother but maybe she don’t no more. Her mother want more babies?

  ‘What she gonna have to do? Listen to me, once you go to prison, people gonna look at her, especially her – she a fine lookin’ woman – you know, different. Now they look at her different. The guy in the store, the guy in the bodega, the super – everybody. Now she has a need, not because she wants to get out, not because she wants to party. She has needs, many needs, and you ain’t satisfyin’ none of ’em. You know what I’m saying? So she needs twenty dollars for milk and shit, kids’ stuff. So she gotta go see the landlord. So she gotta go see the super and you gotta live with this knowledge. You don’t know the “whens” and the “whos” but you know why. You did this. Lotta guys in here go crazy; call their wives “bitch”, “whore”. I hear ’em. I seen ’em. The woman’s wrong, the landlord’s wrong. Everybody wrong but you. Your daughter’s growin’ all the time. A good mother do whatever she has to. Credit will kill you. You know it. So think on it. How long you think it take ‘fore she reach an accommodation with the man in the bodega? An’ I seen her. All them things you first like about her back in the day – they speed up this man’s thinkin’.’

  This was the same man, Darrell, who on another occasion talked into the night about the joy he felt at seeing his own daughter when he came out of prison the last time. She was eight years old when Darrell was last out, about the same age Lamont’s daughter was as he made his way home after day four of his six-month probation period in Building Services at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. Darrell described the scene of that homecoming. His daughter’s school bus was slowing down to the stop at which she got off but Darrell knew it had to go a little past her aunt’s house first, the house where she’d been living, in order to get to the stop. As chance would have it she was looking out of the bus window and the look of surprised delight, of unadulterated joy, on the little girl’s face when she saw him waiting outside the house was something Darrell said he’d never forget. Then, he said, she ran from the bus stop towards him with her heavy bag, ribbons in her hair and eyes wide as the moon. She called out, ‘Daddy!’ and gripped him tighter than he’d ever been gripped; including the time the police caught him again a few months later. They caught him in an alley, having chased him from his daughter’s aunt’s front porch with his daughter chasing him too and the police between them. She had called out, ‘Daddy!’ then too. He was running and saw only what was ahead of him. So he didn’t see her face then. But the look she’d had when she saw him from the school bus the day he came back the previous time and the grip she put on him, Darrell said the memory of it was what kept him going. That was what you lived for.

  Lamont already knew what he lived for. When he got out of prison he was going to find his daughter, be with her and be a father to her. He was going to get a job and stay out of prison, he told Darrell, who took offence the way other people breathe, autonomically. He shot back, ‘Yeah, that’s right, you the smartest nigga ever drove the getaway car.’

  But Lamont had to talk to someone. His stream of visitors was drying up. Chantal wasn’t visiting him at Woodbourne any more and there was no one else to bring his daughter to see him. At first Michelle did come. She even brought her husband once or twice, the professor. On one occasion he came on his own, explaining that Michelle had wanted to come but had had to take care of Sonia, their daughter, who would have been about eight by then.

  Perhaps it hurt Michelle too much to see her younger cousin in prison. Perhaps she was angry with him. Maybe it had just been too hard to get to Woodbourne, too unpleasant getting there or too unpleasant just being there. She was a social worker. She had to see people like this all day, five days a week. But this was Lamont and he hadn’t always been someone like that, a case or a ‘client’. He had been a little boy without parents living with his grandmother, a little boy who had loved her so much, looked up to her, listened to her. No wonder she didn’t come.

  There was a part of Lamont that hadn’t wanted her to come, hadn’t wanted her to see him like that, like the people she tried to help every day. If she came would someone tell her not to bring her husband or her daughter or her disgust or disappointment? Or the Shogun Warrior action figures? Instead, tell Danny Ehrlich it was a misunderstanding. Tell Mr Shapiro there really were horseshoe crabs by the Hutchinson River. And bring our bikes. Bring some hope, if you come to the Visit Center. Would someone tell her, if she decided to come, not to bring that part of her that believed the prosecutor’s version of the events of that night when Michael and some new friend of his went into a liquor store, robbed it and ruined his, Lamont’s, life. He had always felt that she hadn’t believed him when he’d said he hadn’t known anything about it. Almost nobody believed him, not the jury, not his attorney, and not Michelle either; that was the worst. But if she ever did come he knew he wouldn’t be able to refuse to see her.

  It was best that she concentrate on her own life, on her husband Charles, her daughter Sonia, her career. Charles, the professor, was an important man, no doubt a busy man, whom Lamont barely knew. There was no reason the professor should trek out to Woodbourne to see his wife’s cousin. It was good of him to have ever come. But it was natural he wouldn’t keep coming. Lamont’s grandmother came as often as she could. But she was elderly and it hurt her too much to see him there. He knew that and didn’t blame her for not coming more often.

  Michael’s younger brother came to Woodbourne though, just a few times in the early days. They had never really known each other very well. What was he doing there?

  ‘How you doin’, Lamont?’

  ‘Fine, I guess.’

  ‘I could look in on your grandma sometime. You want me to do that?’

  ‘Sure, I guess. Thanks.’ What was he doing there?

  ‘You want me to look in on Chantal … and the baby?’

  ‘She’s two.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘My daughter is two … almost two and a half.’

  ‘Sure.’

  Lamont heard Darrell’s voice in his head and the words stayed there like a bad song, a stupid song that takes you prisoner. ‘Once you go to prison,’ Darrell had said, ‘people gonna look at her, especially her – she a fine lookin’ woman – you know, different. Now they look at her different. The guy in the store, the guy in the bodega …’

  ‘You want me to look in on Chantal … ?’ Michael’s brother had asked. Maybe she would have stopped coming anyway. He’d tried to remember and thought she’d already stopped visiting by the time Michael’s brother started coming. But as the months passed it became harder and harder to be sure of anything outside the prison or of anything that had happened outside the time he was in prison. Maybe they had overlapped once, come on the same day, taken the same bus. Who the hell knew and what did it matter any more?

  ‘You don’t know the “whens” and the “whos” but you know why,’ Darrell had said. Woken one night by the echo of someone screaming in a distant cell in Woodbourne Correctional Facility, a not unusual occurrence, Lamont tried to think of happy times. His mind went to Union Square, walking around, floating, blowing around like a tumbleweed, watching himself with her, Chantal, only a few years earlier. Chantal. Look at her! Look at that woman! She was hot. She was smokin’. She didn’t ever lean in.

  Darrell gave him the good news and he gave him the bad news. The good news was that there were facilities at Woodbourne to help him trace h
is daughter. There was a prison library, other prisoners who knew the law and even programs of visitors, qualified well-intentioned people who come and help you. You give them your daughter’s name and they’ll check the local hospitals for records of her. Start with the hospital at which she was born. If she doesn’t get sick or isn’t taken to hospital, it’s still possible to find her. Check the schools around the neighbourhood her mother lived in. It is possible to check school enrolments in other states. You can check school enrolments all over the country, if you have to. That was the good news.

  The bad news, as Darrell also explained, was that if Lamont’s daughter was too young for school, he was going to have to wait till she was of school age before getting any news of her. That’s if her mother didn’t want the girl to have any contact with him and it seemed that this was precisely what she wanted. So Lamont tried to keep his nose clean, tried to be a ‘model prisoner’, promising himself he would find his daughter as soon as she was of school age. He was successful in one respect. He was a model prisoner and the success was marked by a transfer to Mid-Orange Correctional Facility. It was less violent there. Prisoners there could almost ‘see the street’ so they tended to behave better.

  By this time Lamont’s daughter was of school age. He could have started to try to track her down. If Chantal had married and given their daughter her husband’s name it might well be impossible. But if that hadn’t happened, now that she was at school it was at least possible for him to find her. It would have been possible for him at least to look for her. But where this would have been possible at Woodbourne, it was not possible at Mid-Orange. He hadn’t realised that when he was transferred – the transfer being regarded by his fellow prisoners as an enviable improvement in the circumstances of his incarceration. He hadn’t realised that just as his daughter was reaching school age he would be transferred to a prison from where it would be virtually impossible for him to locate her even without Chantal marrying some other man and taking her new husband’s name for Lamont’s daughter. Mid-Orange didn’t have the facilities to help him track down his daughter that Woodbourne boasted. Things were tight for the Department of Correctional Services, resources stretched. They always were. Mid-Orange didn’t really need these facilities, it was said, because by the time you got to Mid-Orange you could almost ‘see the street’.

  So for three years in Mid-Orange, after three years in Woodbourne, Lamont Williams swept up the cigarette butts and mess left by the prisoners and imagined a day when his daughter would look at him the way Darrell’s daughter had looked at Darrell. But whereas Darrell’s daughter knew what her father looked like, Lamont’s daughter hadn’t seen her father since she was two and a half. Unless she had seen photos of him, it was very unlikely that she would recognise him. And under the circumstances it wasn’t likely Chantal had shown her any of the few photos of him she’d once had. Nor was there anyone else to show her a photo of him. Chantal had had no contact with Lamont’s grandmother. The child was eight years old. She wouldn’t know what he looked like and he wouldn’t know what she looked like. But he could try to imagine.

  In prison whenever he saw a reflection of his face – even in a puddle on the ground – he would try to fuse it and the image he carried in his mind of Chantal’s face into a photofit of the face of a little girl. But for how long can you look for your daughter in your own reflection in a puddle on the ground of a prison yard before somebody steps in it? As long as you can. He was right to think he wouldn’t have got the chance to explain it to another prisoner but wrong to think no other prisoner would have understood.

  Now he was out. He had a job. He had survived his fourth day as a probationary employee in Building Services at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. The trick is not to hate yourself for what you’ve done or what was done to you. He was going to find his daughter. Where would he start? He could start by visiting Chantal’s mother. He could go tonight. Surely she would know where Chantal was? Don’t go tonight, his grandmother told him every night. Get yourself settled first. Start by surviving the six-month probationary period of the job.

  Or he could visit Michael’s mother. He could go there to enquire after Michael. Then when Michael’s mother was assured he wasn’t harbouring hostility to Michael, he could casually enquire after Michael’s brother, who might or might not be with Chantal. Even if Michael’s mother wanted to lie about this, Lamont thought he’d be able to tell. He’d learn something from the visit. He would find Chantal. Just don’t go tonight. He would find his daughter sooner or later. And one day she would have that look on her face when she saw him coming, that look Darrell’s daughter had when through the window of the school bus she saw Darrell sitting on the stoop of her aunt’s house. He would take her to see her older cousin, Sonia, and to Sonia’s parents, Michelle and Michelle’s husband, the professor. Just don’t go tonight. He would read her stories. He would tell her stories. Make them up. Just a matter of time. Get settled first. Wait just a little longer so you can start looking from a position of strength.

  When he got to his grandmother’s apartment he saw she had the Rice-a-Roni she used to make for him when he was still at school ready to heat up. She asked about his day. It was fine, he told her. Before going in to take a shower he took a photograph of his daughter from the time she was two that he’d had with him in prison and placed it carefully on the mantle so that it formed part of the shrine of photographs of family members his grandmother had created years ago. There was a photo of him still at school, a photo of his late grandfather, several of Michelle including one as a child with Lamont and one from her college graduation ceremony. There was a wedding photograph of Michelle and the professor. There were two photos of Lamont’s mother. Leaning against one of these was now another member of the family, Lamont’s and Chantal’s daughter. He would find her. Don’t go tonight.

  Over dinner he told his grandmother that he thought he might go to see Chantal’s mother after dinner. As usual, she didn’t want him to go. Not that night. He didn’t ask her why. He didn’t want to make her say that as long as he didn’t go he could always live in the hope that Chantal’s mother might lead him to his daughter. Once he had seen Chantal’s mother that hope was likely to vanish and his grandmother wanted him to have hope. He didn’t want to make his grandmother say all that. He wanted to spare her telling him she thought it was futile to look for his daughter. So he asked her about her day and answered her questions about his. He told her about the strange old white man he had talked to, a patient. He told her how they would be increasing his responsibility over time, giving him more tasks and more demanding ones. He volunteered to clear the table and do the dishes. His grandmother accepted his offer and went to her room to watch television. She listened out and observed that he didn’t go to Chantal’s mother’s place that night. She was relieved.

  She usually slept well but that night she was awakened by a sound and after a few moments she got up to confirm that it was Lamont. It was around two-thirty in the morning. He was having a glass of apple juice in the kitchen. The fluorescent strip light hummed from the ceiling. He couldn’t sleep but he assured her he was fine.

  ‘Work okay? Really?’

  ‘Yeah. It’ll be fine. It was fine.’ He started going over the events of that day in his mind. There were six months less four days to get through the probation period. His grandmother poured herself a tea cup of apple juice. She said they should both try to get some sleep.

  ‘Grandma, what’s a death camp?’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘That old white guy, the patient, he said … he said there were six death camps.’

  ‘I guess that’s where they take the deaf kids. Like a summer camp or something for deaf kids.’

  ‘No, no, a death camp,’ he said as she was washing her cup.

  ‘I don’t know. Sounds crazy,’ his grandmother said and then she leaned in to him to kiss him on his forehead. ‘Get some sleep,’ she added, leaving the kitchen to go back to bed.<
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  On her way back to the bedroom she noticed a photo of a tiny light-skinned black girl partially covering one of the photos of her daughter. It took her a few seconds to realise the identity of the child in the photo. This shamed her just for a moment.

  Lamont had finished washing his cup and was placing it on the draining board when he heard his grandmother’s voice from the hallway near her bedroom.

  ‘He’s prob’ly …’ she said almost to herself.

  ‘You say something, Grandma?’ Lamont called to her.

  ‘Prob’ly … That old white man … the patient in the hospital … He’s a Jew.’

  part four

  ‘LISTEN CAREFULLY. A young man – a very young man – lived in a house with his elderly father whom he loved very much. His father had grown unwell to the point of being bedridden. The young man shared the responsibility for taking care of the ailing father both with his mother and with a long-time and loyal servant of the family. His care extended to giving his father the medicine he had been prescribed, even compounding different drugs at home when the situation required. He sat with him, dressed his wound, massaged his legs and generally did everything within his power to comfort him. He took pleasure in this even though, being a serious student at that time, he might have been forgiven for begrudging time away from studying in furtherance of his own future. It was all the more remarkable given the added stresses on him as a newly married young man living upstairs in the family home with his even younger pregnant wife. The desire to be a dutiful son competed with the desire to be a dedicated student and a devoted husband to his very young wife. Still, the young man loved taking care of his father. Is any of this true?’ Adam Zignelik asked those of his students who attended his ‘What is History?’ course at Columbia University that day.