No One Is Coming to Save Us

by Stephanie Powell Watts

  “What would you call it? Crack rocks. You believe that? The drug world has moved on, Sylvia. I couldn’t even get arrested right.” Every third news story around the area was about meth and now even heroin was making a comeback. Crack. How 1992. There’s a guy in there that was just in the same room where it was. I’m not trying to say that was me. I screwed up, man. But some of these guys. Like Tay. He needs to be in the hospital.”

  “You don’t have a choice. Understand that. I tell my son all the time, if you say something enough times it’s true. You have to be strong. You hear me, Marcus?”

  “How did he get over it?”

  “Get over what?”

  “Everything. This life, everything,” Marcus said.

  A memory of Devon at her father’s geese pen emerged. He was four, maybe five, a tall boy for his age, as tall as the geese. The birds became very still as the two of them approached. The geese stared at them with their murderous beads of eyes and hissed loudly, all of them in different voices like a pit of snakes. If Sylvia had before or since heard a more hateful sound she could not remember it. Devon stopped short, his boyish movements over. He screamed, too afraid to look back at her for the reassurance she wasn’t sure she could give him. She’d wanted to scream too.

  “What I’m saying is that he just keeps on trying, just like you have to. There’s boys your age and younger fighting overseas in a disgusting desert.”

  “Sylvia, don’t start with the boys overseas.”

  Sylvia heard the mocking tone in his voice her own children used when she pronounced mature with two oo’s or salmon with an L. “Now listen, smart ass. Think about how they feel. Everybody is struggling, Marcus.”

  “Please don’t say anything about the starving children in China, Sylvia.”

  “Well, there’s nothing wrong with your smart mouth.” If Marcus joked that was a good sign. For the first time in the conversation Sylvia felt a little relief.

  “I’ve never been strong like that. How pathetic does that sound?”

  “There’s more to you than you think? Hasn’t anybody ever told you that? You’ve got short time. What is it now?”

  “Fourteen months.”

  “See there! And you’re here near at home. You can make it, Marcus,” Sylvia said with as much conviction as she could, much more than she felt. If someone told her she had to be locked up for over a year she’d jump in front of a train.

  “Short time? Have you been watching Law and Order?”

  “I know what the kids are saying.” Sylvia laughed.

  “Sylvia, can you hear me?”

  “I can hear you.”

  “Sylvia?”

  “I can hear you, Marcus,” Sylvia said louder.

  “The phone is about to cut off. I’ll call you in a couple of days. Okay?”

  “Don’t get down on yourself. You have to fight for your life. Believe what I’m saying, Marcus.”

  “How long can you fight, Sylvia?”

  “Get a hold of it before it takes over, Marcus.”

  “I’m better. I’m better. I’m okay.”

  “Think about the next fifty years you have to live when you get out.”

  “I’ll try.” Marcus’s laugh hissed between his teeth.

  Sylvia wished she had some encouraging idea to add or a religious verse about Jesus’s enduring love.

  “Will you be there? I’ll call. Sylvia?”

  The line cut out before Sylvia could answer.

  3

  Sylvia tossed the phone onto her daughter Ava’s couch. Her daughter bought from IKEA everything she didn’t drag out of people’s trash. Ava called it Dumpster diving, but Sylvia had other names for it. Turns out there were plenty of good reasons to throw stuff away. Sylvia tried to get the image of Marcus on a chain gang being dragged by bigger prisoners out of her mind. Every visual she had about prison came from shadowy Charles Bronson movies with snarling men in gangs, the lead prisoner either a skinhead or a giant very black man with laughing minions in his wake egging him on. She prayed those scenes were from some pampered white writer’s Hollywood ideas and not what Marcus had to endure. What could she do about that? She had no say, no control, nothing at all to say about what happened to Marcus in his locked-up life. Instead of further frustrating her, his calls made her feel strangely useful though she knew she had done practically nothing. She had the same kind of feeling she used to get from working out at the gym. The gym. The word felt foreign and difficult in her mouth, like when she accidentally said porridge. She had forgotten the smug virtue she had felt going. Just telling somebody she was on her way to the gym or that she needed to go to the gym or finally that she missed her visits to the gym had a certain satisfaction. Virtuous was the word. Virtue without sweat was still satisfying, do not be misled.

  Though she tried to relax, Sylvia couldn’t get comfortable on the hard too-little couch. She would not say another word to Marcus about Devon. He had enough on his plate without thinking about a man he’d never even met and besides that too much had happened for Devon to return. The lie she told to Marcus was not easily untold. But nothing was easy about her relationship with Marcus. Not relationship, that wasn’t the word. Relationship sounded both too formal and too intimate at the same time. Friendship? Desperate collision of desperate people?

  Prisoners at the minimum security prison could make phone calls three times a week. Some of the very sad ones called random numbers to get someone, anyone to accept charges and get a message to a loved one. Marcus had used up his loved ones and improbably Sylvia had become his best and only friend. Why Sylvia answered Marcus’s call in the first place was a mystery. Why she accepted the charges that day months ago, she could not really say. All she knew for sure was the ordinary days melted into each other and the spark of the new thing drew her in. Boredom can be an answer. Wasn’t it always an answer? But the reason that nagged at her and threatened to take her breath was that growing certainty that she had failed her mother, her children, even her piece of man husband. A voice bubbled up like heartburn and popped softly in her head; you have ruined everything.

  Marcus had just turned twenty-five, young, black, and in that first five-minute conversation had told her that he was an ugly duck in a family of pretty ducks. No swans to speak of, none that he’d mentioned anyway, but a lot of pretty ducks. She imagined him chubby with a round schoolboy’s face. His hair too short for the current styles, his clothes neat and matching, like his mother picked them out in the mornings. He said that he was a father and hadn’t seen his daughter for seven months. He told her about his girlfriend who was disappointed now, but who might love him again. He wanted Sylvia to know that he was a nice man from good people who kept their houses clean, didn’t set cars on blocks in their yards, didn’t hang their oversize panties and BVDs on the clothesline for just anybody to see. He wanted her to believe that they were the kind of black people that whites saw some good in. They were a better, more acceptable subset of the race that spoke well and presented well, more and better than a cut above the great mass of regular black folks that they (whites and the special blacks) all looked down on, tolerated, and pitied. Get a message to his people, he asked. Come to see him. Write to him. Don’t forget him.

  If Sylvia were being completely honest she would admit that his need attracted her. So few people needed her exclusively and with so much heat that she was strangely flattered. But the calls had amounted to more than that. She liked Marcus. No matter how her conversations to him started, she now wanted to help him. She needed to help him. She might just show up at that prison on Sunday. Twenty minutes in the car was nothing. The gray squat building built against the wishes of the community was better looking than they expected (but that wasn’t the point) and just on the outskirts of the south of town. Sylvia could surprise Marcus with a pie and a couple of magazines. He would be glad to see her once she was there and the decision made. But she shouldn’t go, not as long as he asked her not to. Even a man in lockup ought to be able
to make some decisions without the imposition of someone else’s better knowledge.

  Sylvia dragged herself up to the sound of her popping knees. Once in the kitchen she fixed a tray with a pitcher of iced tea and two tall glasses. No limes again like she liked—another thing to put on the grocery list. Until Ava came home she’d sit on the patio in the backyard. Of all the spaces in her home the yard was the only area she worked on and primped like it was a loved child. What she’d inherited was scrabble ground, a few pokeberries, choking weeds, and honeysuckle rooted in among the high weeds, skinny sticks of maple trees sprouted up around the perimeter of a half-acre lot—not much land, she knew that, but enough.

  She’d grown up on a dirt road in the woods near the Wilkes County line. In her early years, they’d had no bathroom, no running water at all, and their heat came from a woodstove at the back of the house. Though the shack was surrounded by green rolling hills, a pebbled creek bubbled just out of sight, and the clearing where they burned garbage circled by rows of honey blond broom straw, none of them had thought to consider the place beautiful. Part of that inattention was just a by-product of being young and believing that every day had a possibility of being better than the days before. But mostly what Sylvia remembered about her childhood was the outhouse and the lingering smell of shit. No matter where she went in her life, Sylvia felt she couldn’t entirely wash herself clean. Even at her most accomplished she expected to find flecks of it on the soles of her good shoes.

  Sylvia’s new house (new though she’d lived there for over twenty-five years) was a small brick split-level (what a wonderful name for a house) with a carport on the side. Not a mansion by any stretch, but so perfect for Sylvia that she could not recall many details about the trailer to mind, a trick of memory she appreciated. Except for the occasional feel along the wall for a light switch, except for that nagging moment of muscle memory, that trailer in the woods where she and Don had lived had almost never existed.

  The builder set the houses on half-acre lots on Development Drive, slung a handful of grass seed, spit with a go with God, and hoped that it would take root on the red clay hills. The seed promptly got carried by wind or washed down the sides of the yards into ditches. Grassy lawn or not both she and her husband, Don, had thought the place a miracle. Development Drive was a longish stretch of paved street with small houses owned by black families. This was once one of the nicer places for blacks to live in town. Somebody had thought ahead, thought big. A few black people would slowly move up in the world and would want homes without junk cars. A development for them would do the trick and keep them all on their own streets. The developers had not imagined a possible future with blacks and whites in the same neighborhoods. Enterprising builders created separate communities—no block busting necessary. But whatever was in the builder’s hearts, the new homes were remarkable steps up from ramshackle old clapboard houses, sagging porches, or old rusted trailers. Black people with a few dollars could get a half-acre plot with 1,000 square feet or in the deluxe model 1,250 feet, fridge, stove, ready to make your life in.

  What dreams they all had of progress! Each year the house would get a little better, the white linoleum the thoughtless builders put in the kitchens and baths exchanged for hardwood floors and porcelain tile. In the coming years decks got added to the rear of the houses, small decks sure, but big enough for a grill and a four-top table. They moved from all the poorest crannies of the county where people sat on porches and fanned themselves in the heat of the day and built fires to keep away mosquitoes and no-see-ums that anesthetized when they bit so the itch, the pain came later. They moved from dirt roads and clusters of men on front lawns playing cards, fighting again, playing music that’s my song right there much too loud. They moved to escape it all. Sylvia told her children about her own poor childhood days. She could see on their faces that her lack had sounded to them like fairy tales, like weaving straw into gold. Her feeling of triumph was like nothing else she had ever known, though her children could not share it. What was more surprising was that her children didn’t see her accomplishments as particularly triumphant. Their life was their ordinary life, their working class, regular way of being. That very feeling, freedom from the drag of poverty, was what she wanted for them. No struggle, no strangling scarcity, no wishing to be somewhere, anywhere else. Was it too much to ask that they feel a little pride for what she’d been able to wrest from this stingy world?

  Of course there were drawbacks. Douglas, the middle-aged man across the street, revved his motorcycle for his grinning friends. The neighbor Forrest kept a steady stream of down-and-out relatives at his place. Sylvia knew it wasn’t her business, but she was unnerved to not know who she might see puffing on a cigarette staring into the horizon from the next yard. But those were small pains. How soothing to have an answer to the young white women at the social services office when they talked about their own places and the hours they spent decorating, repairing, and improving. Before she’d owned the house that kind of talk hurt her, signaled her as an outsider. That little place with the too hot second floor gave Sylvia a way to relate to the women and share a lament about the high cost of this or that, a little taste of the pain at this particular lack, which she felt had scarred over more than less. One less fear in a life ruled by fear.

  Sylvia thought many times that she’d spent her whole life tensed and waiting for the worst thing to happen. The list of fears was long: spiders, snakes, and death were all reasonable and easily understood, but like her long-dead mother Mabel—Mabe to friends and family—she was afraid of everything else too. How could that have happened that she ended up like her mother who cringed in fear from the threat of rapists, popping balloons, the shrill horror movie sound of wind chimes. Everything. Mabe spent the precious years of her youth scared and mealymouthed, always too accommodating, especially when it came to men. Maybe her fears came naturally or maybe they were forged from her interactions with Sylvia’s father. Fear as a symptom or causation? Whatever. But men and the fear of them took up most of the thinking in her mother’s life. She’d been scared into being a good girl, scared into staying with a man she wanted but who didn’t want her. Scared to be by herself even when that’s what her life had amounted to anyway. She thought she wasn’t going to get anybody and she didn’t. No damn body. Nobody who was anybody anyway. Who had ever counted on Sylvia’s father and had not ended up alone?

  Nobody can say her mama hadn’t tried everything. They say there are only three reasons to go to South Carolina: to get fireworks, to get married, and to get dentures—or if you are having a good day, all three. They should have added to the list going to see people like Mrs. Janey. Once when Sylvia was just a girl she and her mother had taken a trip to get the potion that would make Sylvia’s father, Carl, love her mother once and for all. With ten dollars and the cost of gas, you could banish the darkness in your head, cast out demons, make him love like you needed. The old woman’s house smelled of cooked food and the coconut grease she put on her scalp, like most old women’s houses Sylvia went to. She had thought that she would be afraid of Mrs. Janey, but the woman was no more frightening than any other old woman she’d ever seen. The three of them sat at the small table in the small kitchen while Mabe told her story. Her mother wrung her hands, was teary eyed and softer than Sylvia remembered her ever being as she talked and avoided looking directly at Mrs. Janey’s face. Sylvia had kept completely still and couldn’t shake the feeling that she was someplace she did not belong, like she was watching someone on the toilet. Mrs. Janey shrugged her shoulders at Mabe’s terrible confessions of loneliness and lack. Mrs. Janey occasionally patted her mother’s hand like she was an old dog. No doubt she’d heard every pathetic tale, every permutation on the same sad themes many times. She gave Sylvia’s mother a cleaned jelly jar.

  “Put one of your little hairs in the jar here,” she’d said with her eyebrows raised so there could be no question about which little hairs. “Right after you go to the pot, you
hear? Make him drink it. Don’t wait too long. Two days at the most.” Mabe thanked Mrs. Janey and refused her offer of collard greens, though she and Sylvia shared a square of corn bread. On the road home, Sylvia held the glass between her legs afraid to touch it with her hands, though it looked no more powerful than watered-down tea.

  “Why don’t Daddy love you, Mama?” Mabe had not answered for nearly a full minute while Sylvia waited, afraid to speak again. Her mother was silent so long Sylvia began to wonder if she had spoken at all.

  “I really don’t know,” her mother had said, a cloud of wonder on her face like she really considered the question. The genuine interest in Mabe’s voice was the first and one of the only times Sylvia ever felt that she and her mother had a real conversation. Mabe had never again mentioned the visit or the little bottle, but if her father had any more love for her mother, he kept it to himself.

  Sylvia thought, like we all think, that she’d never be like her mother, but the man she chose for herself was just as sorry, did just as much dirt. Sylvia’s man, Don, was now shacked up with a girl much younger than his children. Sylvia was sure she could remember holding Don’s new girlfriend in the crook of her own arm when she was a fat toddler crying after her mother.

  If she and Don had not had a life, they did have a house. That’s something. Don’t let anyone tell you that’s not something. What you got and can count on your fingers can give you a cushion, a bank account, a security against universal losses. Nobody has to know the hollow spaces you shock yourself by living through. You can survive the shell of nothing that ordinary living produces. Buck up! Organs rearrange, the blood reroutes, and you deal with it. You think you can’t but you do. Sylvia thought of the house as her stake, her sacrifice, her due for a life of sacrifice. There are worse things.

  What was hers could be given away or at least rented for four hundred dollars a month. Ava and her husband, Henry, moved into the house with the idea that sometime, some year in the nearish future they’d own it outright. Sylvia was mostly glad that the house was becoming Ava’s by degrees. But old habits die hard or better said they don’t really die at all just lie low, waiting for the cloud cover to part and desperation to rear back up on its hind legs. Sylvia knew the house was Ava’s but she visited almost daily. Sylvia’s new home was supposed to be a one-bedroom apartment with builder-white walls and the stink of industrial carpet she couldn’t rid the place of even after five years. When she was a young woman she had dreamed of a cute version of that apartment. In it were knickknacks from her travels, avant-garde art she liked but didn’t understand, but liked that she had to think about it. In her imagination she was That Black Girl and her apartment told the story of her worldly and sophisticated life. Everyone she knew had wanted to be sophisticated, grown in a world of grown people with their own homes rented or owned, hosts of glittering parties in their form-fitting dresses, their dramatic jewelry jangling and glinting in the light, hair slicked back into a fist-size chignon mail-ordered for the occasion. She planned to have drawings of nudes and Persian rugs, books that lined built-in shelves, weavings made in countries where the brown people were not the usual black folk variety of dirt road North Carolina. It saddened Sylvia to see old women sick to be young, wearing too long hair and short skirts or worst of all wearing saucy words on their sweatpanted behinds.