It wasn’t Vernon’s fault she’d ended up a gambler; she would never say it was. A few years after the divorce and her return home Lelah started going to Caesars in Windsor on her own, and that’s when the feeling found her. The stillness she hadn’t even realized she’d needed up until then. When she felt like she was flailing, back on Yarrow not doing anything worth anything with her life and tired of being alone, she could sit right here, put her hand on the chalky surface of the chips, and be still for a moment in the middle of all the commotion of the casino floor.
“No more bets.”
Lelah looked down. Her twenties were gone, gone before she even thought to admire the shiny redness of them. Cobalt and persimmon were left—it felt like forty dollars. Her watch said 11:27. Forty dollars was like no money at all, so she might as well let it play. Straight up on 27 twice and it was gone, and with it, the stillness. She heard the slot bells first, then noticed the stink of cigarette smoke in the air. Lelah found herself part of a loud and bright Friday night in Motor City once again.
One North
SUMMER 1944
A city had its own time and cruelty. There was cruelty in the country too, but it was plain. Not veiled beneath promises of progress, nor subtle when it manifested itself. Francis took in the high-domed roof, the glittering marble floors, and the multitude of corridors as he walked. One stepped into a place like this—a palace like the kinds that Abraham and his wife, Sarah, turned up in, he thought—and felt impossibly small. Just a dim light, easily blown out. Francis arrived at Michigan Central Station with a small bag, his only pair of shoes on his feet, $15 in one pocket, and a letter for a pastor in the other.
He’d hoped for a different letter from the one he carried. It did not introduce him as a clever young man worthy of apprenticeship in the Lord’s work. That letter and any chances of a preacher’s life were gone.
Reverend Matthews,
I trust that you will be able to assist Francis Turner, of my flock, with securing housing and a good word at one of the fabled places of industry in your city. He is open to any work available. He and I will both be much obliged.
With Faith in Our Lord,
Reverend Charles Williams Tufts
Spring of Faith Missionary Baptist Church, Arkansas
Francis had opened the letter as the train thundered through Kansas. It was early morning, and the sky out the window stretched wide and black and endless. That phrase, “of my flock,” was impersonal, as if he and Reverend Tufts had not lived under the same roof, as if they were casual acquaintances. He deserved more warmth than that, a few words to lift him from the ranks of ordinary congregation member to favored almost-son. The reverend could have called his friend ahead of time; he had a phone line in his house, and Francis was sure the other man had one too. Putting the letter in Francis’s hand ensured that he would have to look the man up, humble himself before a stranger, and beg his case. He couldn’t bring himself to use such a letter, especially not one so impersonal. He kept it in his pocket for the duration of the train ride. This was how it had been done since Henry Ford first took a paternal interest in Negro employment and the cheap labor it provided: manufacturers depended on Up North ministers to supply them with reliable workers, and those ministers reached out to their southern colleagues for help filling the positions. But that was before the war. Who needed a note of introduction in a city on the forefront of the war effort? Francis had read that there were more jobs available in Detroit than in the entire state of Arkansas.
Pride had always played a prominent role in the Turner psyche. Its source went back further than Cha-Cha and Lelah’s generation, past Francis’s too. Officially, Francis Turner Sr. died in 1930 from a rusty-nail puncture to the bottom of his left foot, but it was pride that did him in. He stepped on the nail walking back from the fields he sharecropped, and the soles of his shoes were so worn that nothing prevented the corroded metal from piercing him nearly to bone. He hobbled home to his wife and six-year-old son and let his wife dress the wound. Francis Sr. ignored Cynthia Turner’s pleas to go see a doctor for monetary reasons but also out of pride. There were no doctors in their town, and Francis Sr. could not imagine sending for a white Pine Bluff doctor over a cut on his foot. He doubted the doctor would be willing to even step inside his house, and he would not let any doctor tend to him in the yard as if he were an animal. His was not an arbitrary, selfish sort of pride; for Francis Sr., losing the little dignity he’d held on to as a black man in the South seemed a more concrete defeat than death. Two weeks later Cynthia was a widow, and the debt Francis Sr. left her led to eviction. She and her son moved into a one-room shack that was one bad storm away from being no more than a lean-to. After two years of scraping by, Cynthia found a live-in maid job in Little Rock. She entrusted young Francis to Reverend Tufts, a widower himself, and sent money when she could.
If Francis hadn’t inherited enough pride from his father, Reverend Tufts supplemented what he lacked. The man had a congregation of fewer than three hundred poor people, but he indulged in frequent haircuts, a two-story house, and a new car every five or so years, even while paying tuition for his only daughter at Tougaloo College. His brand of pride—heavier on self-regard than Francis Turner’s, but still rooted in the same desire to feel a man when the world told you otherwise—extended to his pulpit. The reverend had three deacons and he would have preferred none, but these three were so old and respected, there before he even moved to town, that he couldn’t rid himself of them.
During his sixteenth summer, Francis stopped receiving Cynthia Turner’s small packages of neatly folded money and sweets. She had maintained one-Sunday-a-month visits with him up until then. She would take a bus out or hitch a ride, and the two of them would sit on the reverend’s porch and talk. A stranger driving past might have mistaken the two for teenagers embarking on a courtship via sanctioned Sunday visits. If they were lucky, the reverend would join them and fill up their awkward silences with self-congratulatory chatter. On her final Sunday, Cynthia said her white folks were moving to Dallas, where the husband had some sort of work lined up, and they had asked her to join them. Francis was not surprised that his mother had said yes; the white folks had seven children, and he’d long suspected that the line between blood and water—questionable water at that—had gone blurry for his mother. His sixteen-year-old pride prevented him from showing his disappointment. He took a long look at her smooth, wide face, the high eyebrows he’d inherited, and said a variation of something he’d heard the reverend tell many a congregation member when they moved away: “I’ll be prayin for you, Mama. You call or write me if you ever need a thing.”
Pride worked in mysterious ways on Francis, much like the God he worshipped. Pride prevented him from using Reverend Tufts’s letter of introduction to get a good job and maybe even free rent for a while. But he was not too proud to ask strangers for help. At the train station in Detroit he chatted up a porter who directed him to a janitor who told him to head to a house off Hastings and see about renting a room. He had a gift for conversation, for making people feel at ease. It wasn’t his words, exactly; Reverend Tufts always said that Francis was eloquent in his head but still too much a country nigger out his mouth. It was his looks, he supposed. He was tall and slender without lapsing into frail, and his skin was the color of baked-right cornbread. He’d learned early on that folks assigned all sorts of qualities to skin like his, and that a certain type of middle-aged woman would always consider a yellow boy somehow trustworthy. The sort of young man who would help carry a load of groceries and not run off with them. He asked colored person after colored person for advice until he climbed aboard a streetcar headed for Paradise Valley.
The best way to avoid feeling too small for a place was to pretend you’d been there before. It was Francis’s first time on a streetcar, but after the lurching claustrophobia of the train ride (another first), the wide-open windows were welcome. On Hastings, among so many citified Negroes, Francis tried to f
eel like one of them. He dawdled in front of a chicken shack he didn’t dare spend his money in. He stood in front of a vegetable cart and lamented the pallor of Up North tomatoes. He broke down and bought a plum, found it sour but ate it anyway. Poor folks and the better-off were out, couples shopping and mothers with children in tow. It was Saturday. He’d only had liquor a couple of times in his twenty years—a neighbor’s moonshine made his throat swell when he was thirteen—but he thought that after seeing about a room he’d find himself a nice place to sit and have a drink. There would be workingmen at a bar, and maybe he’d find his way into a job.
A room. The boardinghouse was crumbling. Ash-gray rotting wood showed through the black paint, and greasy sheets hung in the windows. The porch sagged as if it were sometimes tasked with supporting more than a dozen Negroes at once. The house sat on a street narrower than Hastings, and poorly paved. The smell of garbage and sewage made Francis’s mouth tingle with nausea. He knocked, and a sharply dressed young woman with a wide, pouty mouth opened the door. Too good-looking for such a place. Francis thought she might be a whore, and this place some type of cathouse. Still, he took off his cap.
“You a soldier?”
“No ma’am. I just come up from Arkansas,” he said. “You only rentin to soldiers?”
“I didn’t say that,” she said. She looked him over again. “You just look like a soldier, the way you stand. Not much the way you dress, though.”
Francis made a conscious effort not to adjust his posture. He repeated that he’d just come from Arkansas, added that he didn’t have much money, but if she had space for him, he’d never miss rent. The woman’s eyes dropped to his mouth as he talked, and Francis wondered if this was because he sounded so country or because she saw something there she liked, or didn’t like. He had a gap between his two front teeth, and people were often of two minds about it.
The woman suggested he split a room to save his money. He’d get the room to sleep at night, and during the day a Mr. Jenkins, who worked nights, would have it. She would hold his belongings downstairs.
“You’re lookin at me strange, but this here’s the best setup for a fellow like you.” She swept one arm in front of her like a circus ringleader presenting to a crowd. “You all keep coming up on every train and bus, and y’all find work, sure enough. But it’ll be a lot harder to find yourself a decent place to live. You wait and see.”
Francis didn’t believe her. He’d read about the race riots up here the year before. He’d read that on top of rumors of a black baby thrown into the river or some other specific injustice, the fighting had been over housing, and that the government had finally broken down and guaranteed space for Negroes in the city. Housing projects, they were called. He kept these thoughts to himself. Part of the job of being the mistress of a crumbling boardinghouse was to present housing as scarce, he supposed. He had no doubt he’d find a better place to live once he found work, so he left his bag with her. She introduced herself as Miss Odella Withers after he’d paid his rent for the week. He wandered over to Beaubien Street, back toward the heart of the Negro commerce stretch that he did not yet know doubled as the center of Negro nightlife. He passed over a place that two conked-haired men in suits entered and followed a man with rolled-up shirtsleeves and well-worn trousers into another. He sat at the bar and ordered a scotch, the only liquor he’d ever seen Reverend Tufts drink.
Viola was expecting a call. Francis imagined her sitting in Jean Manroy’s ramshackle house far down the road from her own, trying to be polite so that Jean didn’t change her mind about lending the phone. He’d said he would call when he was settled, but who could consider half a room and no job settled? Francis looked around the Up North bar and drank his scotch like the other patrons—slowly, carefully, as if it had been on his mind all day.
Two South
SUMMER 1944
The Reverend Charles Tufts left a message for Viola with her neighbor Jean Manroy. He said that his pastor friend Up North had not heard from Francis, and furthermore that it was not advisable for Viola to contact him about it again, seeing as how her husband was now in the business of turning his nose up at favors. Jean relayed this message with a nasally, phony-white accent meant to mimic the reverend’s intonations. It was a known secret that the reverend who claimed New York was originally from North Carolina and had trussed up his diction upon setting foot in town. Viola did not laugh. She left Jean standing barefoot in her raggedy front yard and walked back to her parents’ house to check on Cha-Cha.
Six weeks had passed since Francis left town on a bus bound for the train station in Little Rock, and local tongues wagged. Eventually the ones in Viola’s own house joined in. Her overworked father was too tired to care about gossip, but her mother, two older sisters, and four younger brothers took to aggressive whispering. Ain’t he have a job lined up? They got phones Up North, don’t they? Well, at least he married the girl, fore he run off. I heard they roundin up colored men at the train station and sendin em to the war if they don’t have no proof of work. He supposed to be preachin with Tufts, why’d he run outta here in the first place? He liked to do right, but with a mama like his maybe he just ain’t got it in him. When Viola entered a room in their two-bedroom shotgun house, voices retreated abruptly, like water from the shore.
Francis could have stayed in their tiny town, devolved into a drunk and a whoremonger, and Viola’s family would have supported them with fewer complaints. Aspirations to leave set her and her new husband apart. Ever since the Budlongs of Brunswick County, Virginia, had found their way west to Arkansas, no woman in her family had left for anyplace farther than Pine Bluff, which was less than twenty miles east. She had two brothers in Cleveland and a third in Omaha, but they were men and their lives their own. And Francis was supposed to be preaching. Viola had met him in church when she was thirteen years old, shortly after she stopped going to school. He was already tall at fifteen, golden and thoughtful. He usually read the opening scripture for Reverend Tufts on Sundays, and Viola noticed that he knew most of the Old Testament by heart. A more impressive feat than memorizing the new one. The Reverend Tufts was not a tall man, but he was handsome and imposing in his Sunday robes. Viola imagined that Francis would one day look even better in those robes because he would be more humble, and not clutter his sermons with flourishes like Tufts did. When you got the call like that, so early in life, what was there to do but preach? You didn’t necessarily need a college degree like Tufts had, you just had to know the scripture and feel the pull of the pulpit for admirable reasons.
When Francis said they were moving to Detroit, that Tufts had given him a letter of introduction and a little money to send him on his way, Viola had insisted she wouldn’t go. “Just cause somebody tells you to up and move don’t mean you move,” she’d said. “This time it do,” Francis had muttered back. They were in his room in Tufts’s house, on the first floor behind the kitchen, their makeshift honeymoon suite, and they could hear the reverend creaking around upstairs. It was the first time she’d sensed that she ought to hold her tongue with Francis, that she should tamp down the flurry of questions in her throat to spare some part of her new husband’s pride. A difficult feat, but she managed it. Francis left two days later.
On her way back from another fruitless visit to Jean Manroy’s telephone, Viola saw her sisters, Lucille and Olivia, standing on the porch of her mother’s house. Lucille carried Cha-Cha, just four months old, in her arms. When she came closer she saw that Olivia held a white envelope in her fist, so tight it looked like she meant to crush it. Viola ran up the walk and snatched it out of her hand. Its seal was intact, and it had an incomplete return address.
Dear Viola,
I am in Detroit. Grateful enough I have a job and somewhere to sleep. I am saving my money and will find a way. I do miss you.
F. Turner
Francis had enclosed $7. Seven dollars! Not enough, not at all. Viola had left school to work in the fields with her older brothers a
nd sisters on their father’s sharecropping plot. The boys picked cotton and the girls held out the stiff burlap sacks for collection. The longer Francis stayed away and kept sending such little money, the more the fields called her. It was either that or housework for white folks, which is what Olivia and Lucille had opted to do a few years back. She tried to think of which job would spare the most of her dignity and afford her time with the baby. A preacher’s wife shouldn’t be forced to choose between field work and white folks, she thought.
“So he ain’t dead,” Olivia said.
“No, he ain’t dead,” Viola said. “Who thought he was? I thought the goin rumor was he run off.”
“Well he ain’t said he’s leavin you for good, or you’d be cryin,” Lucille said. She handed Cha-Cha to Viola and put her arm around them both. “You oughta be smiling, girl. Plenty girls sittin around waitin for a letter like that, and it ain’t never comin.”
Viola tried to see it that way.
WEEK TWO
SPRING 2008
It Sure Ain’t Free
With the exception of his graduation from navy basic training—all those white uniforms, the green lawn, the crisp rows—any time an event reminded Troy, the twelfth Turner child, of a scene from a movie, things turned out poorly. Occasionally on his beat when he pulled someone over or responded to a call he’d have this cinematic déjà vu, and trouble always followed, be it an irate arrestee or a senior officer with brass on his shoulder who barked in Troy’s face. This evening had all the makings of a scene from a white-collar crime thriller, and Troy’s nerves responded accordingly.
The Turner House Page 6