The Turner House

by Angela Flournoy

  Contents

  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  The Turner Family Tree

  Epigraph

  Trouble in the Big Room

  WEEK ONE

  Swelling Bellies and Wedding Tulle

  Almost a Quorum

  Motor City, Friday Night

  One North

  Two South

  WEEK TWO

  It Sure Ain’t Free

  Outta the Fields

  Memories

  Far from Any Pulpit

  Better Than a Burlap Sack

  WEEK THREE

  Downtown Sunlight

  This Was the Surprise

  Enter Doubt

  Corned Beef and Cabbage

  A Life to Get on With

  Gotham in Detroit

  WEEK FOUR

  The Lucky Boy

  Addiction Is Real

  Sometimes It’s Gotta Be You

  A Typecast She Couldn’t Shake

  A Prudent Wife Is from the Lord

  Let Her Say Yes

  Brave, or at Least Brash

  One Thing Was Clear

  Playing for Time

  Where Turners Had Been Known

  Up

  The First and the Last

  A Real Soldier’s Return

  Quitting Time

  WEEK FIVE

  When the End Is Near

  A Multiple-Man Operation

  Leverage

  To Let Go or to Hang On

  An Old Man in Faded Slacks

  How Three Went North

  Losing the Call

  Every Turner Dances

  For Better Things

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright © 2015 by Angela Flournoy

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  www.hmhco.com

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

  Flournoy, Angela.

  The Turner house / Angela Flournoy.

  p. cm

  ISBN 978-0-544-30316-4 (hardback)—ISBN 978-0-544-30320-1 (ebook)

  1. African American families—Fiction. 2. Domestic fiction. 3. Historical fiction. I. Title.

  PS3606.L6813T87 2015

  813'.6—dc23

  2014034423

  v1.0415

  A portion of this novel appeared, in different form, in The Paris Review.

  “They Feed They Lion,” copyright © 1968, 1969, 1970, 1971, 1972 by Philip Levine; from They Feed They Lion and the Names of the Lost: Poems by Philip Levine. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

  For my parents,

  Francine Dunbar Harper

  and Marvin Bernard Flournoy,

  for being real

  In loving memory of Ella Mae Flournoy,

  who saw more than I can make up

  and loved more than I can imagine

  The Negro offers a feather-bed resistance. That is, we let the probe enter, but it never comes out. It gets smothered under a lot of laughter and pleasantries.

  —Zora Neale Hurston, Mules and Men

  Out of the gray hills

  Of industrial barns, out of rain, out of bus ride,

  West Virginia to Kiss My Ass, out of buried aunties,

  Mothers hardening like pounded stumps, out of stumps,

  Out of the bones’ need to sharpen and the muscles’ to stretch,

  They Lion grow.

  —Philip Levine, “They Feed They Lion”

  Trouble in the Big Room

  The eldest six of Francis and Viola Turner’s thirteen children claimed that the big room of the house on Yarrow Street was haunted for at least one night. A ghost—a haint, if you will—tried to pull Cha-Cha out of the big room’s second-story window.

  The big room was not, in actuality, very big. Could hardly be considered a room. For some other family it might have made a decent storage closet, or a mother’s cramped sewing room. For the Turners it became the only single-occupancy bedroom in their overcrowded house. A rare and coveted space.

  In the summer of 1958, Cha-Cha, the eldest child at fourteen years, was in the throes of a gangly-legged, croaky-voiced adolescence. Smelling himself, Viola called it. Tired of sharing a bed with younger brothers who peed and kicked and drooled and blanket-hogged, Cha-Cha woke up one evening, untangled himself from his brothers’ errant limbs, and stumbled into the whatnot closet across the hall. He slept on the floor, curled up with his back against dusty boxes, and started a tradition. From then on, when one Turner child got grown and gone, as Francis described it, the next eldest child crossed the threshold into the big room.

  The haunting, according to the older children, occurred during the very same summer that the big room became a bedroom. Lonnie, the youngest child then, was the first to witness the haint’s attack. He’d just begun visiting the bathroom alone and was headed there when he had the opportunity to save his brother’s life.

  Three-year-olds are of a tenuous reliability, but to this day Lonnie recalls the form of a pale-hued young man lifting Cha-Cha by his pajama collar out of the bed and toward the narrow window. Back then a majority of the homeowners in that part of Detroit’s east side were still white, and the street had no empty lots.

  “Cha-Cha’s sneakin out! Cha-Cha’s sneakin out with a white boy!” Lonnie sang. He stamped his little feet on the floorboards.

  Soon Quincy and Russell spilled into the hallway. They saw Cha-Cha, all elbows and fists, swinging at the haint. It had let go of Cha-Cha’s collar and was now on the defensive. Quincy would later insist that the haint emitted a blue, electric-looking light, and each time Cha-Cha’s fists connected with its body the entire thing flickered like a faulty lamp.

  Seven-year-old Russell fainted. Little Lonnie stood transfixed, a pool of urine at his feet, his eyes open wide. Quincy banged on his parents’ locked bedroom door. Viola and Francis Turner were not in the habit of waking up to tend to ordinary child nightmares or bed-wetting kerfuffles.

  Francey, the eldest girl at twelve, burst into the crowded hallway just as Cha-Cha was giving the haint his worst. She would later say the haint’s skin had a jellyfish-like translucency, and the pupils of its eyes were huge, dark disks.

  “Let him go, and run, Cha-Cha!” Francey said.

  “He ain’t runnin me outta here,” Cha-Cha yelled back.

  With the exception of Lonnie, who had been crying, the four Turner children in the hallway fell silent. They’d heard plenty of tales of mischievous haints from their cousins Down South—they pushed people into wells, made hanged men dance in midair—so it did not follow that a spirit from the other side would have to spend several minutes fighting off a territorial fourteen-year-old.

  Francey possessed an aptitude for levelheadedness in the face of crisis. She decided she’d seen enough of this paranormal beat-down. She marched into Cha-Cha’s room, grabbed her brother by his stretched-out collar, and dragged him into the hall. She slammed the big-room door behind them and pulled Cha-Cha to the floor. They landed in Lonnie’s piss.

  “That haint tried to run me outta the room,” Cha-Cha said. He wore the indignant look—eyebrows raised, lips parted—of someone who has suffered an unbearable affront.

  “There ain’t no haints in Detroit,” Francis Turner said. His children jerked at the sound of his voice. That was how he existed in their lives: suddenly there, on his own time, his quiet authority augmenting the
air in a room. He stepped over their skinny brown legs and opened the big room’s door.

  Francis Turner called Cha-Cha into the room.

  The window was open, and the beige sheets from Cha-Cha’s bed hung over the sill.

  “Look under the bed.”

  Cha-Cha looked.

  “Behind the dresser.”

  Nothing there.

  “Put them sheets back where they belong.”

  Cha-Cha obliged. He felt his father’s eyes on him as he worked. When he finished, he sat down on the bed, unprompted, and rubbed his neck. Francis Turner sat next to him.

  “Ain’t no haints in Detroit, son.” He did not look at Cha-Cha.

  “It tried to run me outta the room.”

  “I don’t know what all happened, but it wasn’t that.”

  Cha-Cha opened his mouth, then closed it.

  “If you ain’t grown enough to sleep by yourself, I suggest you move on back across the hall.”

  Francis Turner stood up to go, faced his son. He reached for Cha-Cha’s collar, pulled it open, and put his index finger to the line of irritated skin below the Adam’s apple. For a moment Cha-Cha saw the specter of true panic in his father’s eyes, then Francis’s face settled into an ambivalent frown.

  “That’ll be gone in a day or two,” he said.

  In the hallway the other children stood lined up against the wall. Marlene, child number five and a bit sickly, had finally come out of the girls’ room.

  “Francey and Quincy, clean up Lonnie’s mess, and all y’all best go to sleep. I don’t wanna hear nobody talkin bout they tired come morning.”

  Francis Turner closed his bedroom door.

  The mess was cleaned up, but no one, not even little Lonnie, slept in the right bed that night. How could they, with the window curtains puffing out and sucking in like gauzy lungs in the breeze? The children crowded into Cha-Cha’s room—a privileged first visit for most of them—and retold versions of the night’s events. There were many disagreements about the haint’s appearance, and whether it had said anything during the tussle with Cha-Cha. Quincy claimed the thing had winked at him as he stood in the hallway, which meant that the big room should be his. Francey said that haints didn’t have eyelids, so it couldn’t have winked at all. Marlene insisted that she’d been in the hall with the rest of them throughout the ordeal, but everyone teased her for showing up late for the show.

  In the end the only thing agreed upon was that the haint was real, and that living with it was the price one had to pay for having the big room. Everyone, Cha-Cha included, thought the worry was worth it.

  Like hand-me-down clothes, the legacy of the haint faded as the years went by. For a few years the haint’s appearance and Cha-Cha’s triumph over it remained an indisputable, evergreen truth. It didn’t matter that no subsequent resident of the big room had a night to rival Cha-Cha’s. None of them ever admitted to hearing so much as a tap on the window during their times there. The original event was so remarkable that it did not require repetition. Cha-Cha took on an elevated status among the first six children; he had landed a punch on a haint and was somehow still breathing. But with each additional child who came along the story lost some of its luster. By the time it reached Lelah, the thirteenth and final Turner child, Francis Turner’s five-word rebuttal, “Ain’t no haints in Detroit,” was more famous within the family than the story behind it. It first gained a place in the Turner lexicon as a way to refute a claim, especially one that very well might be true—a signal of the speaker’s refusal to discuss the matter further. The first six, confident that Francis Turner secretly believed in the haint’s existence, popularized this usage. By Lelah’s youth, the phrase had mutated into an accusation of leg pulling:

  “Daddy said if I get an A in Mrs. Paulson’s, he’d let me come on his truckin trip to Oregon.”

  “Or-e-gone? Come on, man. Ain’t no haints in Detroit.”

  Cha-Cha transported Chryslers throughout the Rust Belt on an eighteen-wheeler. The job was the closest thing to an inheritance that he received from his father. After his twenty-fifth birthday the old man took him to his truck yard, introduced him to the union boss, and ushered him into the world of eighteen-wheelers, all-nighters to Saint Louis, and the constant, cloying smell of diesel fuel. Cha-Cha joked with his brothers who’d joined the service that he was more decorated at Chrysler than all of them combined. This wasn’t a warmly received joke, but it was true. He held records in the company for fewest accidents, best turnaround times, cleanest cab, leadership, and dependability. He did this for over three decades, until, if what he saw was really what he thought he saw, the haint tried to kill him.

  Cha-Cha was driving a full load of SUVs to Chicago during a storm. His rig at full capacity was a sight to behold—five-ton gas-guzzlers stacked like toys in two rows behind him. One, supported by a metal overhang, perched right above the roof of Cha-Cha’s cab. He had reached the M-14, just past Ann Arbor, when, according to the police report, a deer darted onto the highway, causing a sedan to swerve into Cha-Cha’s lane. Cha-Cha, in turn, veered off the highway and into a ditch.

  “He ran me off the road” was the first thing Cha-Cha said when he woke up in the hospital.

  “Who ran you off the road, baby?” his wife, Tina, asked. She put a plaintive hand on his arm cast.

  “I knew he’d come back.”

  “Who? Come back from where?” Lelah asked.

  Cha-Cha put his free hand on the bed, made to sit up and see who else was in the room.

  “Just sit still, Cha,” Tina said. “I got the remote right here.”

  In the awkward seconds it took for the mechanical bed to raise him, Cha-Cha remembered the night before. He saw the car to the left of him swerve into his lane. And he’d swerved, true enough, but only onto the shoulder. Then blue light, that familiar, flickering, and fear-inducing blue from the big room, filled his cab. He couldn’t see the road to pull back onto it. He remembered clamping onto the wheel then, and hunching his shoulders forward as he tried to make out the road. He couldn’t do it, and just as he conceded this point, he heard a fluttering, similar to the fluttering of the curtains that had roused him from his sleep so many years before. A sound like a multitude of moths, then silence. His old haint had found him and almost destroyed him in a matter of seconds.

  His truck dragged along the brush for several hundred feet before slamming against a tree that was big enough to hold its ground. His seat belt did not catch the way it was supposed to in such an accident, and Cha-Cha’s body bounced around the cab—up to the roof first, then hard against the driver’s side door. He broke six ribs, his left arm, his collarbone, and, as if someone somewhere saw fit to initiate him into old age, his left hip.

  Once propped up in the hospital bed, Cha-Cha gained a better sense of the owners of the voices in the room. His mother, Viola, stared at him from her wheelchair. Her neck muscles looked tense, as if the strain of supporting her head was getting the best of her, like a newborn baby. He wondered how long she’d waited for him to wake up. It annoyed him that someone, likely his sister Lelah, considering her proximity to Yarrow Street, had put Viola through the trouble of an unnecessary hospital visit. His boys, Chucky and Todd, leaned against the bathroom door. Francey was there, as was Troy, still in his police uniform. And someone else, too. Someone male, and white, and professional-looking, presumably the doctor, by the door.

  “You said somebody found you, Cha?” Viola asked. Her voice sounded weak, weaker than the last time he’d heard it.

  “The haint, Mama, remember?” Cha-Cha asked. “There was that same blue light from the big room.”

  “Cha-Cha, you’ve got a lot of painkillers in you right now,” Francey said. She put her hand on Viola’s shoulder, looked around the room in a way that made Cha-Cha nervous.

  “Francey, don’t look at me like I’m crazy. It was that same haint in my cab, I—”

  “Dad,” Chucky cut in. “Not. Now.” He and his brother wore the same
nervous expression. A half smile usually reserved for police officers—and, Cha-Cha recalled, schoolteachers.

  The man in the doorway cleared his throat.

  Perhaps it was his over-starched dress shirt, or maybe that he’d displayed patience few doctors could have mustered during the previous exchange, but Cha-Cha realized this man could only be one person. The INSURANCE MAN is here, he thought, and then, Oh, hell.

  Milton Crawford was not an unpleasant man, but Cha-Cha quickly decided he had no sense of humor. He was fond of peppering sentences with actually, even if he wasn’t clarifying anything.

  “Actually, GM Life and Trust takes its employees’ state of minds before accidents quite seriously,” he said.

  “I’m sure they do,” Cha-Cha said, “but what you heard wasn’t me before the accident, it was me after surgery, and sitting here getting this”—he reached unsuccessfully for his drip bag—“put into my bloodstream for a few hours.”

  “I do understand that, Mr. Turner, but actually what you just described, a vision of a ghost, has to be included in the report. It may actually amount to nothing, but I’m obligated to transcribe our entire conversation here.”

  “But he wasn’t talking to you,” Lelah said. Her hands moved to her hips. “He’s lucky to be alive right now. Can’t you come back tomorrow?”

  “Lelah, let Cha-Cha handle this,” Francey said.

  “Lelah’s right,” Troy said. “He didn’t even notice you were here. He thought he was speaking in confidence to us. You can’t go holding him accountable for that.” Ever since joining the police force, Troy was quick to become litigious.

  Cha-Cha cleared his throat.

  “Look, Milton, truth is, I’m tired. If you have to include it in your report, feel free to do so. I’m sure it’ll amount to nothing, like you say.”

  Actually, it did amount to something. Three weeks into his Family and Medical Leave Act insurance, a letter arrived from a Mr. Tindale, who claimed to be Milton Crawford’s boss. He said Chrysler would offer Cha-Cha his normal wages for the duration of his recovery, on the condition that he see a company psychologist, who would determine whether he was “personally culpable” for any aspect of the crash. All drivers had to submit to drug testing after an accident, and often a trace amount of alcohol or cocaine (used by the younger guys to help them stay awake) would be the reason they didn’t get the money they thought they deserved. Cha-Cha had never heard of a driver being required to have a psychological evaluation.