Black & White

by Lewis Shiner

  Michael heard an accent come and go. “You’re not from around here,” he said. “New York?”

  “Queens. I came down here after college because of RTP. I’m a programmer. I was, anyway, until my job moved to India without me.”

  “How did you get into this line of work?”

  “Answered an ad. I didn’t mean to stay, but this job has a way of getting to you.”

  “Ms. Jones used to say the same thing,” Charles said.

  “Something about Hayti?” Michael asked. “Or…”

  “It’s the people. Urban renewal, that’s just government jargon. We’ve got hour after hour of oral history in these files, and I’ve gotten to know some of the people that used to live here, and I’ve looked at every photo and piece of film I can find, and at some point it starts to become real to you. I can drive up there to Pettigrew Street and if the light is right, I swear I can see the ghosts of the Biltmore Hotel and the Donut Shop.”

  She reigned herself in. “What about you? You don’t sound like you’re from ‘around here’ either.”

  “I grew up in Texas. My parents left Durham at the end of ’69.”

  “You must have heard all the clichés about Durham from them.”

  “They weren’t exactly the Chamber of Commerce. Try me.”

  “W.E.B. DuBois—who is a pretty big hero of mine—said, ‘Of all the Southern cities that I have visited I found here the sanest attitude of the white people toward the black.’ He called Durham ‘the city of Negro enterprise.’ That was all because of Hayti.”

  “That was also a long time ago,” Charles said.

  Franklin nodded. “When they were through wrecking it, four thousand families and five hundred businesses were gone. It broke the back of the black middle class. Most of the families never found anything like what they’d had here—they went from owning their own homes in a nice neighborhood to renting an apartment in the projects, or living in a back room in somebody else’s place. Most of the businesses simply went under.”

  “And the city did it just to get some government money?”

  “There was government money, to the tune of 25 million dollars for Durham alone. And there was talk that some of the principals involved, like Mitch Antree, used what they knew to buy houses cheap and then sell them to the city for big profits, based on their own crooked appraisals. Then they’d collect another check for knocking them down.”

  “Mitch Antree did that?”

  “He had an expensive lifestyle. Fast cars, sharp clothes, rent for his girlfriends’ apartments.”

  “Wow. You don’t know what happened to him, do you?”

  “I seem to remember reading somewhere that he died. Some kind of accident, maybe?”

  “That’s okay. Go on.”

  “Well, the real question is, why was the government handing out money for projects like this in the first place?”

  “It was the sixties, right?” Michael said. “There was a lot of money around, and everybody was all about the bright new future.”

  “Urban renewal focused almost exclusively on black neighborhoods. Nothing was ever rebuilt, only destroyed, in city after city. Brown v. Board of Education was May of 1954, and three months later Congress passed the Housing Act of 1954, which was where it started. But it was 1959, the same year Prince Edward County up in Virginia shut down its schools rather than integrate, that Congress put up 650 million bucks for urban renewal.”

  “You say that like urban renewal was calculated revenge for integration.”

  Franklin let his question hang for a good two or three seconds before she said, “Would you like a cup of coffee, Mr. Cooper?”

  “No, but I would like it if you would call me Michael.”

  “All right…Michael.” There was that smile again. Was she flirting? Michael hoped so.

  Charles cleared his throat. “Was there anything else?”

  “A couple of things,” Michael said to Franklin. “I was asking Charles about the symbol on top of the steeple. Maybe you know something?”

  “The weathervane?” Franklin said. “Dr. Aaron Moore brought that back with him from the island of Haiti a hundred years ago. That’s one version of the story. Another is that he brought the workmen from Haiti, and they made it here.”

  “So there’s a connection between Haiti the country and Hayti the neighborhood? Beyond the name?”

  “Oh, absolutely. Dr. Moore was the one who named it, supposedly. You’ll find neighborhoods named Hayti all across the South. Because of Toussaint L’Overture, of course, and the first independent black nation in the hemisphere, and the only successful revolution in history by slaves of African descent. Did you know Britain sent more troops to protect their slave trade in Haiti than they sent to fight the American Revolution? It was only after the Haitians beat them and the French both that they finally started to pass laws against slavery.”

  “Did you know that your ‘weathervane’ is a vévé?” Michael asked. “A voodoo symbol?”

  “I’ve heard that theory,” Franklin said.

  “It’s not a theory, it’s true. It represents Erzulie, a sort of love goddess.”

  “How do you know that?” Charles asked. The question carried a larger freight of hostility and suspicion than seemed appropriate, and Franklin looked at Charles curiously.

  “I’m an artist,” Michael said. “I’ve used those symbols in my work. Were there a lot of Haitians here when they were building the church?”

  “Nobody knows for sure,” Franklin said. “There was probably a small community—artisans, wives, families.”

  Michael leaned forward. “So was there—is there—voodoo in Hayti?”

  Charles snorted. “Sure, all us colored folk practices that hoodoo.”

  “Did I do something to piss you off?” Michael said. “If so, I apologize.”

  Charles declined to back down. “Look, we get people coming in here every few months—newspaper people, students—all busted up about poor Hayti. They shed a few tears and then they’re gone again.”

  “I’m not claiming to be here for anybody’s benefit but my own. I’ve got a personal interest. If you don’t want to help me with that, that’s your call.”

  He and Charles stared at each other for a while. As much as Michael disliked confrontations, Charles’s sniping was getting on his nerves.

  Franklin said, “I’m worried that we may have left Lateesha up there on her own for too long. Charles, would you go relieve her?”

  Charles got up, turned his glare on Franklin briefly, then slouched out.

  “So how does this all tie together?” Franklin asked. “Voodoo and your father and Hayti?”

  Michael went over the high points: his father’s cancer, the missing birth records, the body in the concrete. Franklin nodded. “I saw that in the paper this morning. I was devastated.”

  “They haven’t confirmed that it’s Howard, yet.”

  “But from what you say—”

  “Yeah,” Michael said. “It’s him.”

  Franklin got up to stand by the window, though Michael doubted she was seeing anything. Eventually she said, “If I’d lived through this, maybe I’d be tougher. Sometimes the frustration just overwhelms you.” She turned around. “How much difference would it have made if people hadn’t believed that Howard sold out? Worse yet, if they knew he was murdered? Would it have changed history? At the very least there would have been riots. They might have burned Durham to the ground.”

  “Would that have been a good thing?”

  “I don’t know,” Franklin said. “We’re supposed to take consolation in the fact that the evils of urban renewal ended up in a new interest in historic preservation. And the betrayal of black people by politicians started an upsurge of black people running for office. To me that’s like saying I should be grateful for slavery because otherwise I’d still be in Africa and might not have a car. It’s too little, too late, at too high a price. And that goes for this ATC business too.”
<
br />   “What business is that?”

  “The old American Tobacco Company factory downtown. Now known as the American Tobacco Campus, part of the American Tobacco Historic District. I’m sure you’ve seen it—that’s the chimney and the water tower with the Lucky Strike logo on them. This outfit called the Black Star Corporation is reopening it as a multi-use complex. Shops, offices, concerts, high-end apartments. You may remember that the Black Star Line was Marcus Garvey’s steamship company, which was supposed to take us back to Africa. Anyway, it’s a consortium of black businesspeople, and two of the board members used to have stores in Hayti. They’re straining for a historical connection, trying to make this out to be a rebirth of the ‘spirit of Hayti,’ trying to recruit black-owned restaurants and so forth.”

  She gestured at the chaos on her desk. “They want photos, quotes, and artwork for the grand opening—basically they’re using me as an unpaid employee. I understand they made a donation to the Center, but they’re getting more than their money’s worth.”

  “That kind of publicity has to be a good thing in the long run.”

  She sighed. “It is, and I shouldn’t be so cynical about it. I wish it wasn’t keeping me from my other work.”

  Michael saw the hint. “As am I. I really appreciate your taking the time to talk with me, though.”

  “That’s okay. I enjoyed it.”

  She sounded like she meant it. He stood up and said, “Do you have a card or something?”

  She produced one from the chaos and held it out to him. Michael’s mouth was dry. “Does it have your home number on there?” he asked.

  The smile stretched one side of her mouth as she held his eyes, then slowly took the card and wrote a number on the bottom of it. “That’s my cell. That’s your best bet.”

  “Do you…is there…”

  “You’re not very good at this, are you?” she asked.

  “No,” Michael said. “I’m trying to ask if you’re involved with anybody.”

  “That’s a complicated question. We can talk about it sometime, if you want.”

  He took the card and put it in his jacket pocket. “Thanks.”

  Denise held out her hand again, gave his a small squeeze. “Good luck,” she said.

  *

  Charles didn’t look up from his book as Michael left. For his part, Michael had no desire to get into another pissing contest. Instead he sat on the steps in the cold wind and got out the pocket-sized sketchbook he always carried. He drew Denise Franklin’s face while it was still fresh in his mind, spending a while getting the mouth right.

  He’d never dated a black woman. White flight had shaped the Dallas neighborhoods of his youth, and Thomas Jefferson High School had been as affluent and Anglo-Saxon as its North Dallas surroundings. He’d seen his first real diversity at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. At that point his sense of adventure was completely exhausted by the process of getting safely back and forth between campus and his apartment near the Navy Yard.

  And in there somewhere was the knowledge that his parents would never have approved of an interracial romance. If he’d come home with a black woman there would have been awkward discussions later about “cultural differences” and “fighting uphill battles.”

  Charles’s bitterness notwithstanding, Michael could still see the remnants of what had moved DuBois about Durham. At the big Harris Teeter on MLK Boulevard, virtually all the employees were black. Michael had taken his parents’ rental there two or three times a week, usually late at night. As he got to be on a first name basis with them—Shawn in produce, who worked nights so he could spend his days on the golf course, and whose brother was in Iraq, Dwayne in the bakery, whose new Expedition had electrical problems no one could seem to fix, Charlene at checkout, in her fifties and playing a series of boyfriends off against each other—he felt his constant awareness of color, for the first time in his life, begin to fade.

  What had it been like in 1961, with Hayti proud, strong, and confident? What had his father been part of?

  He put the sketchbook away and walked to the edge of the overpass. True to his word, Bishop had shut down the northbound lanes of the freeway and cars had backed up on the access road. A flatbed truck had parked under the overpass and a crane was maneuvering into position behind it. Meanwhile, workmen had run a steel cable through the ring bolts and were connecting the loop of cable to the crane’s massive steel hook.

  Michael stayed to watch, remembering when those machines had held the promise of magic and transformation for him, unable to say exactly when his feelings had changed. Certainly by high school and his one summer working for his father, when it was all noise and dirt and the constant threat of injury to his hands.

  At the hotel, he ran a few laps around the two story parking deck and adjacent lots, up to the roof and down again. He showered and worked and ate, and at nine that night, when he couldn’t stand it any longer, he dialed Denise’s cell phone number.

  “We can’t take your call right now,” her voice said. “Please leave a message.”

  He hung up before the beep. There was, apparently, a “we” there. The situation was probably not that complicated at all.

  Thursday, October 21

  An eight-foot high chain link fence topped with razor wire surrounded the impound lot and the dozens of cars for sale inside, from abandoned wrecks to drug dealers’ souped-up rides. The long rectangular warehouse of the NC State Surplus Property Agency, filled with dead computers and gray metal desks, ran the length of the lot to Michael’s left, half outside the fence and half in. Extending from the back of the building were several metal sheds, like mini-warehouse units, each with its own rolling door.

  A uniformed cop in a wooden booth by the gate copied the name and number from Michael’s driver’s license onto a yellow legal pad. “Do you know if Sgt. Bishop is here?” Michael asked.

  “Try that second shed over there,” the cop said.

  “Thanks.”

  The metal door was open a foot or so, enough to let a swirl of dust motes out into the morning sun, along with the sound of hammers and chisels. Michael tapped on the door, then gently lifted it to chest height and crouched to look in.

  The bowl-shaped lump of concrete, ten feet across and four feet high, rested on a gray canvas tarp and filled the space nearly from one corrugated wall to the other. Three high-watt utility lights were clipped to the channels at the top of the walls. Perched on wooden stools and wielding hammers and cold chisels were four college-age kids. They all wore sweat clothes or coveralls and had dust masks over their noses and mouths. Bishop stood next to one of them, listening while the woman pointed and talked.

  They had already made considerable progress. A pile of rubble had accumulated by the door, and the four stools clustered by a hollow they’d dug into the smooth surface.

  Bishop turned as Michael stepped inside. The clinking stopped and Bishop said, “Found us on your own, did you?”

  Michael didn’t answer. The kids had straightened up, and now Michael saw what looked like a body trying to crawl out of the concrete.

  Except for two funerals, Michael had never seen a dead body before. This one was a shock, like something from a horror movie. Only the head, left shoulder, and left forearm were exposed. The skin of the face had dried and wrinkled to an oily brown color, now dotted with cement dust. The nose and cheeks had collapsed, the eyes sunken shut, tufts of hair disappeared, the lips pulled back in a kind of buck-toothed rabbit mouth.

  The shoulder and arm were literally skin and bones, the skin having shrunk as the flesh melted away underneath.

  “Wow,” Michael said.

  “You shouldn’t be here, Michael,” Bishop said.

  “Is it Howard?”

  After a second Bishop said, “Yeah, it’s Howard. One of the retired cops from the department identified him about an hour ago.”

  “Who are all these people?”

  Bishop seemed unable to resist answering the question. “Gra
d students from the UNC Anthropology Department. It was the Medical Examiner’s idea. It saves the city some money and gives them something different for their résumés.” He made quick introductions, and Michael and the students nodded at each other.

  “Isn’t Duke closer?” Michael asked.

  The woman Bishop had been talking to was named Jennifer. She was big-boned, with long brown hair in a ponytail and nice eyes. She said, “Duke has cultural and biological, but they don’t do archeology.”

  “He’s mummified, right?” Michael asked her.

  “That’s what it looks like,” she agreed.

  “The cement would have sucked all the moisture out of him,” Michael said. “I worked at my father’s precast plant one summer, and my hands always looked like that at the end of the day.”

  After a moment’s consideration, Bishop said, “As long as you’re here, let me show you something.” He beckoned Michael over and pointed to the left arm extending from the block. The skin was several shades of deep brown, with a texture like unevenly stained hardwood. A faint sweet smell came from the skin, like burned sugar, not entirely unpleasant.

  “You mentioned knowing that voodoo symbol on St. Joseph’s,” Bishop said. “Do you recognize this?” He pointed, not quite touching the back of Howard’s wrist. “There’s some kind of tattoo there.”

  It was like an optical illusion, there and not there at the same time. Michael stared, blinked, and finally saw it, fine purplish-black lines barely distinguishable from the skin. An inch above where a watch might be, and not much larger than the size of a watch face, was a cross with arms of equal length, emanating from a circle at the center. There was another, smaller circle at the end of each arm of the cross.

  “I don’t know what it is,” Michael said, “but I know who would. The writer I work with, Roger Fornbee. He knows everything about symbols and folklore and that kind of thing. I can ask him.”

  “I don’t want too many people to see this,” Bishop said.

  “Roger can keep a secret,” Michael said. “He’s all about secrets.”