Slavery. Did there ever exist a more annoying way to try to make a modern-day black man feel like his troubles were insignificant, that he should be satisfied with the sorry hand society dealt him? Cha-Cha thought not. The line of reasoning was faulty; it was precisely because his grandfather’s father was born a slave that he should expect more from life, and more from this country, to make up for lost time at the very least.
“I’m not comparing anything to slavery, Francey, come on,” Cha-Cha said. “And I don’t know nothin about thresholds. Let’s keep it simple: Daddy was sad a lot. And he drank too much. Can you admit that?”
Francey threw up her hands.
“I don’t know, Cha-Cha, sure. But he wasn’t no raging drunk. He wasn’t in the house raising hell, hitting his wife and children. You make it sound like he was abusive.”
“I never said that.”
Cha-Cha’s plan had been to come to Francey’s, hook up her filtration system, and ask her about his haint. He’d even brought a book, Zora Neale Hurston’s Mules and Men, which the Internet told him mentioned both black folks and ghosts. He hadn’t come here to talk about depression, or Francis Turner. Now Cha-Cha was irritated. It was frustrating, the way his siblings worshipped their parents. What part of their worlds would crumble if they took a good look at their parents’ flaws? If there was no trauma, why not talk about the everyday, human elements of their upbringing? Call a spade a spade.
Cha-Cha drank down the rest of his water.
“Alice says my role in the family is kinda like the prime minister of England.”
Francey chuckled.
“Cha-Cha, if this woman is helping you, then great. But I don’t know if I can stand to hear any more of her ideas.”
“You gotta let me explain before you laugh at me. Now, she says I’m like the prime minister cause I handle the everyday business of the family, but when people think of who runs the family, who is the symbol, they think of Mama.”
“As they should,” Francey said.
“Okay, but the thing is, being the prime minister means you handle all the ugly stuff that the royal family doesn’t really get into. Like, me and Daddy worked together, remember? So you would think that back when I still lived on the east side we would carpool when we both were doing short runs, but we never did. He said he liked to drive alone. But Mama stayed on me to make sure he came straight home after work. Daddy knew I tailed him home in my truck. What he’d do is park across from the basketball courts on Lambert and throw back a couple of those small bottles of Miller Lite, remember he used to call them short dogs? Then he’d drive home, and I’d follow him into the house like nothin happened.”
“But what does that have to do with anything?”
“Why do you think Mama made me do that?”
“You know why. So that everybody didn’t have to see him drinking.”
“Exactly. But what about me, Francey? Wasn’t I his child too?”
Francey made a sound somewhere between a chuckle and a snort.
“You know, I took a psych class or two in school, and I can tell you this much: if this Alice person is encouraging you to do anything other than get over it, she’s wasting your money. You were already grown, Cha. And what does it matter to you now, old as you are, that your daddy drank too much and your mama delegated too much onto you and onto me? Don’t act like you were just the prime minister and I was off in the countryside not helping out. Lord, I don’t even like this metaphor, and here you got me using it! I helped out until I couldn’t anymore. You know that. Don’t act like you don’t.”
Up until her bariatric surgery Francey had been just as involved as Cha-Cha in settling familial squabbles, remembering birthdays, looking after Viola, opening up her home to down-on-their-luck nieces and nephews, and providing leadership in countless other ways. Cha-Cha was still not sure why the rest of his siblings didn’t do more for Francey following her operation. Maybe opting to have the surgery was too decisive a step among a family of people who talked about improving their health but generally left the things that ailed their bodies and minds unattended. Francey contracted an infection after the operation and was hospitalized for nearly a month. None of her siblings visited more than once, save for Cha-Cha, who, in part due to Tina’s insistence, had visited almost daily. After she got well and got skinny, she distanced herself from all familial obligations. She remained cordial, and social, and it was clear she still loved them all, but there was no more hand wringing over other people’s problems, no more open-door policy to relatives in need of money or beds. She wouldn’t even offer a ride to the airport.
“Oh, come on, Francey. I’m talkin about myself right now,” Cha-Cha said. “I never said you weren’t there. You helped out too when we were comin up, and I was there for you when you needed it, so don’t try to make me feel guilty.”
“You know what,” Francey said. “Richard’s gonna be back soon. Seeing you up in here with your tools and stuff makes him embarrassed about his electricity phobia thing.”
Cha-Cha made no move to leave. This morning he and Alice had talked about how he thought Turners were prone to addiction. There was Francis, who Alice had called an alcoholic, but Cha-Cha thought the word was too clinical to truly convey the sort of secret, sad drinker Francis was. He took no joy in his drinking; it was as if he drank to punish himself for some past misdeed. There was Lonnie, no longer little and peeing in the hallway, but he had dabbled in heroin as young as thirteen and was clearly still on something, Cha-Cha didn’t want to know what, at the age of fifty-three. Troy, bless his heart, was obsessed with success, but he hadn’t figured out how hard work begot it. There was Marlene, and with her Viola Turner herself, not really hurting anyone with their obsession, Cha-Cha supposed, but there had been a decade or so when they were downright absorbed with that flea market stall, even through Marlene’s chemotherapy, and despite never having turned a profit. The duo had scoured the Midwest for things. Cha-Cha never understood their need for things to sell just to say they had them to sell—fur coats, vintage pocketbooks, lamps. There was Cha-Cha’s own wife, not a Turner by blood, but thirty-odd years rubbed off on people. He felt a pinprick of guilt calling Tina’s church involvement an addiction, but that’s how he thought of it. Now here was Francey standing before him, obsessed with nutrition and vegetarianism and kitchen gadgets. Turners seemed incapable of doing anything in moderation. Maybe Cha-Cha himself was addicted to being in charge of the family, or to going to therapy with Alice, or even this revived idea of a haint. Well, he wouldn’t let his obsessions get the best of him; he would take them apart and figure out where they came from. He pulled his book from underneath his bag of tools.
“Can we switch gears right quick? I said I’d come over here and put your water filter in cause I’m tryna learn more about this haint. I been lookin around on the Internet, and I found this book.”
Francey eyed the book, allowed Cha-Cha to put it into her hands. She walked to the couch in her living room and sat down. She was one of two Turner siblings who’d finished college, the other being Lonnie, who had a bachelor’s but had been too busy chasing pop music stardom to put it to good use. Francey had taken correspondence courses while raising her three daughters and earned her BA after seven years. She was the only Turner sibling with genuine bookish inclinations.
“If you haven’t read it, then never mind,” Cha-Cha said. “I just thought maybe.”
“I read this a long time ago,” Francey said. “Good book. A lot of the stories and jokes reminded me of going down to see Auntie Lucille and Olivia when we were little. You know how, when Mama says something that makes people mad, she’ll say, ‘Don’t like it, don’t take it, here’s my collar come and shake it’?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s in the book. You start reading it?”
“Not yet, I just got it.”
“You said ‘this haint,’ like it’s yours. You still seeing it?”
Cha-Cha explained what he’d reali
zed with the help of Alice, that he had felt the haint’s presence on and off throughout his life, although he hadn’t actually seen it save for that time in the big room and the night of his accident. He was glad Francey seemed to be relaxing. He never took for granted her ability to bounce back from potential discord. Too many of his siblings were incapable of doing the same.
“You think you’re too smart for this kinda thing to be happening to you?”
Yes, Cha-Cha thought. “No,” he said. “Being smart’s got nothing to do with it.”
“Please. You’re not a touchy-feely person, Cha. You’re a logic person. So even though you know you seen something, had an experience, you either need to find some logic in it or get rid of it.”
“What’s wrong with logic?”
Francey smiled. She had small, straight teeth and a slim gap between the front two, like Francis Turner.
“What’s wrong with it is that you end up acting like the white folks in scary movies, who either provoke the ghost or try to get rid of it, when really they don’t have to do anything. That’s a Western thing, being afraid of ghosts. And really, it’s a new Western thing. They used to have all kinds of spirits they believed in before they decided they knew better. Look at Hamlet. Matter of fact, a lot of them still believe in stuff like that, but they like to make black folks feel stupid and superstitious for doing the same thing.”
Ever since becoming a healthier person Francey had taken an interest in non-Western everything, preferably anything with African or Middle Eastern roots. It might have had something to do with the dreadlocked brothers and Yemeni immigrants who ran the juice bars she frequented. It had never really bothered Cha-Cha one way or the other, not like it bothered Quincy, who was too conservative—too interested in appearing upright and unsentimental—to sit around without eye rolling and listen to Francey talk about architecture in ancient Kemet, or Asanti funeral traditions. Cha-Cha was just happy Francey backed up all her talk of the Motherland and libation rituals with book knowledge and specificity.
“I never said I’m afraid.”
“You are, Cha.” She smiled again. “You checked out a book from the library? You’re doing research? You’re afraid. You need to work toward acceptance. Science can’t explain why you and I are alive when so many folks we grew up with are dead, but you’re able to accept that.”
“I think that’s statistics, or probability,” he said. “We had two parents, and then you and me were the third and fourth parents for the ones under us. It was harder for folks to get into trouble, and there was more support around.”
“Don’t buy in to that, Cha. Folks got into plenty of trouble. Lonnie especially. Don’t give me that two-parent-household junk. Other folks had two parents, and a bunch of siblings, and they’re not around anymore. It was chance, or fate or God, but it wasn’t science. You know, the Yoruba in Nigeria, they believe in what they call Orishas for all sorts of things. So do black Cubans and Brazilians in their own ways; they kept believing right through slavery. Then you have Vodou in Haiti, which, you know, made its way to New Orleans. And plenty people around the world believe that ancestors can intercede on our behalf, which I’m not saying this is, but you never know. I used to have a book about it, someplace. If I can find it, I’ma bring it to you.”
The storm door slammed shut, and Richard walked in with a white butcher-paper bundle cradled in his arms. Meat, which Cha-Cha guessed he would grill out back since it was now warm enough to do so. Francey didn’t allow it to be cooked in her kitchen. He clasped hands with his brother-in-law and hugged him. The same height as Cha-Cha but thinner, the same bald head and skin tone as Harry Belafonte.
Richard picked up Mules and Men, pulled the book to arm’s length to read the title better.
“What’s this about?”
“I gotta run,” Cha-Cha said. “Good to see you though, Rich.” He didn’t want to have to sit there while Francey told Richard about his haint; he’d feel ridiculous. He gathered up his tools, pecked his sister on the cheek, and let himself out.
“Hey, Cha?”
Francey had followed him out to the driveway.
“One thing you gotta remember is he stopped,” she said.
“Huh?”
“Your daddy stopped drinking. He found the willpower to quit. You can’t go around tellin his story to your therapist or whoever without mentioning that.”
Cha-Cha said nothing in return. He drove home. A memory kept bothering him, one that seemed to fly in the face of the narrative of his father that his siblings cherished. He wasn’t sure if he’d made things larger as an adult, whether time had inflated the importance, but since seeing Alice this morning it had played in his mind on a loop. He hadn’t even told her about it, because he did not know what it meant.
IN THE SUMMER of 1967, when Cha-Cha was twenty-three, he worked at the Lynch Road Assembly Plant putting together Dodge Chargers. In June of that year Viola announced she was pregnant again, at forty years old. This thirteenth and final pregnancy might have been the most memorable event of the summer if only Detroit, the country, and maybe even the entire world had seen a different July.
On the morning that Detroiters began to realize the skirmish on Twelfth and Clairmount had morphed into something larger, Cha-Cha and his fellow line workers went to the plant as usual. Anxiety crackled off of people like static. Nervous behavior led to carelessness, and by lunchtime Cha-Cha’s coveralls were splattered with the blood of another man, a man who let himself get distracted. He left the plant determined to find a new job.
Before that July a burning building felt like a particular and tragic occurrence to Cha-Cha. The smell of brick and clothes and small pets smoldering urged a person to stand tall like a prairie dog and crane his neck in search of the emergency. Afterward, a burning house became an olfactory norm akin to skunk spray; as long as the source of the odor wasn’t too close, you eventually ignored it. Cha-Cha’s shared apartment on Forrest and McDougall had no kitchen, so when he felt particularly lonely, he used the excuse of needing a home-cooked meal to come back and check on things at the Yarrow house. If he’d had no younger siblings to worry about, he might have joined his own friends from the neighborhood in search of new shoes, lightweight appliances, anything with resale potential. He wasn’t above recreational looting. But as the eldest, he kept in mind that the fires, the looting, and any police beatings all qualified as reasons a Turner boy might get into serious trouble, or maybe even die. He felt responsible for making sure nothing happened. Quincy was in army boot camp in South Carolina. Miles, Duke, and Troy were all under the age of eight and therefore still under Viola’s thumb. This left Lonnie and Russell. The two of them were standing on the porch when Cha-Cha pulled up.
“Everybody in the house?” Cha-Cha asked.
“Yeah,” Lonnie said. “Except Daddy’s not home yet. They’re sayin on TV there’s a curfew tonight. They got snipers on the roofs shootin at the police.”
Lonnie stood with his chest puffed out, his bony shoulders thrust back. He was thirteen but already as tall as Russell, with tight knots of pubescent muscle on his arms, and his father’s strong chin. Neither him nor Russell asked Cha-Cha about the blood on his collar.
“Where y’all goin?” Cha-Cha asked.
“To get bricks,” Russell said.
Cha-Cha stared at his brother as if he didn’t comprehend. He knew Viola was kneeling on the couch on the other side of the front window, listening. He walked toward the door.
Russell stepped in front of him.
“I said we’re gonna go get bricks, Cha, and we want you to come with us.”
“I heard what you said. You see all that smoke? They probably shooting niggas on the west side by now,” he said.
“Well, we on the east side,” Lonnie said.
“I heard they looting on Harper too,” Cha-Cha said.
“So? I’m not finna sit up in that house like a girl, watching everything on the news,” Lonnie said. His new, deeper voice crac
ked as he spoke.
“Kowski pays a nickel a brick,” Russell said. “All this shit goin on, you think anybody cares about the bricks we take from tore-up buildings? We could be doing a lot better money-wise, but ain’t nobody gonna shoot us over bricks.”
When he was sixteen, Cha-Cha had also felt and looked as much of a man as Russell did. He knew that no matter what Russell felt like inside, living in the Yarrow house meant he was still considered a child. Still reduced to bickering with younger siblings and begging Viola for pocket money. To wait patiently while Viola, eyes closed, mouth scrunched, rooted around in her purse and extracted a few crumpled dollars was the ultimate humiliation. Russell sometimes worked for a Polish man he called Kowski, short for a longer name Cha-Cha never knew. He swept up trash and debris on construction sites in East Detroit. A nickel per brick could add up quickly.
Cha-Cha agreed to go with them. He wasn’t old enough to forbid Russell and Lonnie from doing what they wanted, or strong enough to drag them both into the house. And if he stayed home and something happened to them out in the streets, what then? He turned his back on the window where his mother was likely spying on them, and offered his truck for the transport of bricks.
Every block seemed devoid of women. Most porches were empty. A half dozen were occupied by young men and older boys, their postures communicating a readiness to protect whatever resided on the other side of their thresholds. Cha-Cha knew most of them had guns within easy reach. Old hunting rifles brought up from Down South, and newer, lighter weapons acquired here. But who would they shoot, the police? They surely wouldn’t shoot their neighbors.
Russell guided them to a house several streets west of Yarrow. It sat on a block abutting Harper, and its overgrown yard suggested it had been vacant even before flames from the neighboring dry cleaner burned through its roof and much of its second floor. By 1967 whites had already started their retreat to the suburbs, leaving vacant houses in their wake if black folks couldn’t afford to buy or rent them quickly enough.
The Turner House Page 9