The remaining items in the box weren’t hers. Since no one else claimed the things and they didn’t quite fall under the benchmark of worthlessness required to be lumped into Viola’s boxes, she’d saved them. She’d first found the wide Japanese-looking dagger with the ivory handle wrapped in canvas in a drawer under Viola’s china cabinet. It probably belonged to Troy, or Miles or perhaps Duke, as those three were the only ones who Lelah recalled having Asian tours while in the service. There was also a pair of door-knocker earrings, presumably gold, presumably belonging to Sandra, the eleventh Turner child, who’d worn so many heavy, dangly earrings in the seventies and eighties that the holes in her lobes were now long slits. Rounding out the collection of possibly valuable forgotten things was an old-fashioned pipe made out of dark wood—perhaps cherry or mahogany—that undoubtedly belonged to Francis Turner.
CHAINS-R-US was on Gratiot, less than a mile from the house. She hadn’t been there before, but she’d been to the White Castle just south of it and the check-cashing place a little farther up. She didn’t admit to herself as she cleaned that morning that she’d end up doing this, but part of her knew it would happen soon. The box had been somewhere in her consciousness since the first night back on Yarrow. On the periphery like a repressed memory. A low, persistent sound, like feedback from a television.
The space that housed CHAINS-R-US had been a banquet hall first. Brotherly Banquet was the site of Viola’s sixtieth birthday celebration as well as Francis’s retirement party and a host of baby/wedding/welcome-back-from-deployment gatherings. Its wood-paneled walls had witnessed many a Turner Soul Train line. The owner, Mr. Clive Brothers, had pink fluorescent lights installed in the women’s restroom and blue fluorescent lights in the men’s.
According to a scrolling LED banner out front, CHAINS-R-US specialized in cash-for-gold exchanges but provided traditional pawn services as well. The woman behind the bulletproof window was what Lelah, for lack of a better reference point, would call ghetto-Asian. The charm on her necklace said THANH in tiny gold cursive, so Lelah assumed her to be Vietnamese, maybe Hmong, but Thanh’s hair was slicked back into a ponytail with the baby hairs gelled down like teenage girls around the way had been doing since time immemorial, and held in place with a plastic balls hair tie. Lelah fought the urge to tell Thanh the same thing she wanted to tell every around-the-way girl: you’re beautiful, now go wash that gunk out of your hair. Thanh’s nails were long, electric blue, and acrylic, and she popped her gum like her life depended on it.
“You’re going to have to give me stuff one by one on the carousel,” she said.
Her voice sounded high and sweet, maternal even, not how Lelah had imagined. The dissonance unnerved her. She looked down into her box, at the flute case that was hers and all of the rest that wasn’t. The pipe couldn’t go. No, you could not pawn a dead man’s things, especially if that dead man was your father. She put the pipe in her back pocket. The rest she would come back for, she promised herself. Starting with the door knockers, she placed the items on the plastic carousel for Thanh to spin around and retrieve on her side of the window.
Thanh rubbed the earrings between her palms, held them up to the light.
“These are only gold plated. I’ll give you twenty.”
Lelah opened her mouth to speak, perhaps to point out how heavy the earrings were, but truth was, she’d only pawned things one other time and didn’t know the weight of gold from that of brass. She nodded.
Next was the dagger. Thanh unfolded it from its canvas envelope, ran one neon nail along the blade, then carried it into the back, presumably for a second opinion.
“I’ll give you two hundred for this,” Thanh said upon her return.
“Wha?” Lelah said, not to Thanh as much as to herself. The dagger was likely worth a lot more than she’d expected, and maybe she could haggle Thanh up a bit, but it could also be that Thanh and Co. didn’t know a good fake when they saw one. She decided to not rock the boat.
“Two hundred sounds about right.”
“Okay, good,” Thanh said. She opened the flute case, read the old information card, checked the pads, removed the head joint, and weighed it in her palm.
“Fifty for this.”
“Fifty? That’s like thirty years old, and the head joint is solid silver.”
“I know. I felt it.” Thanh’s eyes trailed to a small television in the corner. A cooking show was on, and the host molded ground meat into patties.
“It’s in almost new condition! Won’t people pay extra for an antique like this?” Lelah’s inflection went up a little too high for her liking at the end of this question. She was begging.
Thanh’s eyes returned to her.
“Most dealers count something to be an antique after one hundred years, so no, this isn’t an antique. What it could be is vintage, but flutes don’t automatically go up in value with age. Maybe if it was solid silver, or gold, or platinum, somebody might call it vintage, but it isn’t, okay? Besides, do you see any kids running in here to buy some flutes?”
Lelah turned around and saw one boy, maybe thirteen, in an oversized T-shirt that had seen better days, eyeing a silver chain on display behind more plastic. No use in pushing her point further. It appeared that Thanh knew her stuff.
Back inside the Yarrow Street kitchen, a feeling like nausea forced Lelah to sit on the floor. She hadn’t asked Thanh how long she had to buy the items back. You won’t go back for them, and you’ll piss away this money at a table. This thought was the true thought, never mind the promises she’d made to herself beforehand. She’d just sold things that weren’t hers, maybe for a lot less than they were worth, and the crushing, life-changing regret she hoped to feel hadn’t arrived. An act like this should’ve spurred so much shame that she would have no choice but to make a vow to herself to change. The people in GA often talked about hitting rock bottom. One woman, heavyset with a vaguely West Indian accent, said turning tricks out of her back shed while her kids slept in the house had done it. She’d gone too low and knew she was in danger of permanently becoming someone else if she didn’t stop. Lelah was waiting for that moment, an act that put her so close to the precipice of losing herself that she’d have no choice but to shake the image of those chips from her brain, the feel of them from her sensory memory. She knew it wasn’t this, wasn’t now, because she’d already partitioned sixty dollars off in her mind for a gambling “emergency.” If it wasn’t this, then what and when would it be?
At some point the notion had entered her mind that she was special, that she deserved more than a healthy baby girl, a roof over her head, and whatever job she could find. A dangerous, selfish notion to leave unattended, Lelah thought now. And one so hard to get rid of once it was there. She might have been in this very kitchen, tucking ant baits into corners on the butter-colored linoleum when it happened.
Far from Any Pulpit
FALL 1944
Jobs Francis Turner held in his first 6 months in Detroit : 4
Jobs willfully abandoned: 1½
Rooms rented: ½
Money sent to Viola: $7
Alcohol consumed: Many paychecks’ worth
Women slept with: 1
Number of times he slept with her: He stopped counting.
Here is the truth about self-discovery: it is never without cost. Not now, in the age of create-your-own college majors, the Peace Corps, and yoga retreats, and definitely not during World War II for a young black father newly migrated to a strange city. That very first night in Detroit, after nursing two scotches for three hours, Francis talked his way into a dishwashing job at the bar on Beaubien. The owner and cook, a redbone man named Clydell, had family down in Little Rock and hired Francis based on shared Arkansan roots. For a month Francis washed congealed plates of leftover corned beef hash, smothered turkey, and oxtails from two in the afternoon until one in the morning. An unfortunate schedule because it cut into time on his rented half room. Once off work, after getting something to eat an
d cleaning himself up, he usually had three or four hours to sleep before the sun came charging across the low midwestern horizon and Mr. Jenkins came knocking for his space. Mr. Jenkins, a short, husky fellow from Kentucky, either worked in some sort of brewery or was a beer-loving drunk, Francis gathered. The smell of sour, yeasty sweat lingered in their shared room throughout the night. Francis took to gulping down coffee throughout his shift to fight drowsiness. The coffee made him jittery by the time work was over, and to help him relax he frequented a blind pig on Saint Antoine and Gratiot where for a nickel a day he rented a little locker to store his own hooch. He discovered he was a bourbon man, not a scotch man like Reverend Tufts. He’d sit in that upstairs illegal establishment and think about how his mother had washed dirty dishes and drawers so that he’d be a preacher, not a dishwasher himself. He’d also think of his father, with gapped teeth like his own, and other facial features he couldn’t quite remember. He thought he remembered his father sitting on their porch in the afternoons, chewing snuff and spitting into a pail, but often this memory would bleed into one of Reverend Tufts sitting on his porch and reading the Bible. Reverend Tufts would go to Pine Bluff once or twice a month and come home very late at night or early the next morning, leaving Francis alone in the two-story house. These one or two nights alone were when Francis would think about his father the most. It hadn’t occurred to him until the last summer he was in Arkansas that Tufts might have had a woman he saw in Pine Bluff, some romance that a widower pastor had reason to keep in the dark.
If nothing else, he had learned from Reverend Tufts the dangers of making one’s dreams and desires too public. Someone could take them from you, exile you to a cold, flat, and distant place. Francis was not naïve about the dangers Down South, but it was home. His father’s grave in an old colored cemetery. His mother gone, but Texas more feasible to travel to from Arkansas than Detroit. Had he left of his own accord, this hankering for home would not have been so strong.
On the first freezing day in October, Francis discovered that the back of the bar on Beaubien had poor insulation. The patrons basked in warmth, but even Clydell’s sizzling griddle could not prevent the kitchen from slipping into the thirties. On Clydell’s advice, Francis spent the small amount of money he’d saved on a heavier coat to wear throughout his shift. No use. Whenever he pulled his hands out of the dishwater, his knuckles ached like he had a bad case of early-onset arthritis. He started spiking his coffee with bourbon to stay warm. Soon enough he called Clydell a stingy, pock-faced, crooked nigger under his breath (too loud, alas) and got the boot. It was a milestone. He’d never given words like that a go out of his own mouth, not directed at someone in particular. Never mind that Clydell’s face wasn’t marred by pocks as much as heavily freckled, or that Francis hadn’t quite cussed the man to his face; he felt one step closer to holding his own up here where men were crooked but pretended to be magnanimous.
That feeling lasted until rent on his half room was due. To say that Francis slept with Odella Withers, the mistress of his boardinghouse, to secure free housing would not be accurate. He might have slept with her sooner had he seen her for longer than the moment when she handed over his bedding each night. Lonely as he was, Francis might have slept with one of the prostitutes he often saw smoking cigarettes and laughing alongside men in Paradise Valley bars, had he thought he could afford one. Odella Withers had a wide mouth, very straight, square teeth, and bright pink gums. A mouth that made her look happier than Francis thought she was. Brown skin, not as dark as Viola’s but close. Francis Turner had a predilection for darker women. Perhaps it was a subconscious effort to prevent potential offspring from defecting to white, or maybe it was because his own mother had been darker than his ill-fated beige father. Francis would sit in the armchair across from Odella in the boardinghouse’s miserable little parlor and tell her about his long day of looking for work. How he’d hitched a ride down to River Rouge to see about work, only to have the slots for black men snapped up before he arrived. How he was in line to see about work at a foundry when an ambulance pulled up and word spread that a man had been nearly cooked alive. He told her about his week and a half working as a runner at the salt mine, how it reminded him of the time he’d traveled down to the Gulf with Reverend Tufts for a revival and felt his lungs fill with salty sea air miles before they got close enough to see the coast. He didn’t tell her that he’d quit the salt mines because, sea air notwithstanding, he could not bear to be so far underground, the white walls dwarfing him, his own shadow a stranger as he hunched over and shuttled carts of supplies to white men similar to how he imagined Hebrew slaves carting stone at Egyptian quarries. Few people think about the individual lives lost to make something huge, but Francis thought about it often, had thought about it since the first time he read Exodus as a child. He feared he’d die in that dried-up ocean cave, either from a blast gone wrong or plain old sun-starved misery.
He found Odella reasonably versed in the Bible, and she knew about the goings-on both overseas and in Detroit thanks to her fondness for the radio.
The Fibber McGee and Molly show had just come on the evening Francis decided to sit directly next to Odella and see what that wide mouth felt like pressed against his own. They were in her little apartment downstairs with its banging radiator by the time the show’s ham-fisted Johnson’s Wax opening commercial ended. Odella was the second woman Francis had ever slept with, and he was very grateful for the experience, adultery be damned. So grateful he repeated the act as often as she let him.
Sleeping with her was not enough to absolve him of rental obligations.
“Everybody’s got to pay rent, soldier,” she said one morning. “Even a body like yours.”
They’d drunk a half pint of cheap bourbon the night before, and Odella stood in an ivory slip in front of her kitchenette making a water and baking soda concoction for their hangovers. The thermostat outside read in the twenties, but Odella’s basement apartment was always steamy, which she claimed was good for the lungs and bad for her hair. She liked to call Francis a soldier, and Francis never could decide whether she meant to make him feel brave or like a coward. She did not ask him about back home, and he did not ask how she came to rent out a big old house by herself. He guessed her to be in her late thirties, but this guess was predicated only upon the way the skin between her breasts folded like a tiny accordion when she put them in a brassiere.
The first job Odella found Francis involved painting houses with an outfit run by the same man who had painted the boardinghouse years before. This job Francis enjoyed. He had some skill in painting, thanks to summers spent touching up the church back home, and he got an opportunity to see more of the city than bus and streetcar fare could afford him. He tracked the pockets in neighborhoods where Negroes were living, and those where they seemed to have the best chance of encroaching. Out near Eight Mile and Wyoming, country life claimed its last foothold, but as much as a small farm and a modest house appealed to him, Francis knew Detroit was not the place for it. While outhouses and water pumps were ubiquitous back home, up here they heralded dire straits. He rode in the back of the truck and watched junk collectors traverse Black Bottom, their rickety carts overloaded with treasure scavenged from the many garbage piles that lined the back streets. Forty years later, he would think of these men when scrappers descended on his neighborhood. He would imagine them running around the east side at night, placing the bits of metal they pried off of houses into the same rudimentary carts. From the men who worked with him he discovered that a fellow could pay to get his name moved up on the wait list for the new housing projects, and that the only real way a colored man could get past the racist real estate pacts in white neighborhoods was with a whole bunch of cash, connections, and luck. It was useful information, if not encouraging. By the middle of November snow wrapped its obstinate fingers around the city’s neck and the painting work dried up.
The second job Odella found for him was the most Jim Crow job in all o
f Detroit, or so Francis thought. Odella knew a few members of the Urban League who knew a member of the Nacirema Club, a social club for Negroes with status (American spelled backward, she told him; Francis found this foreboding). The Nacirema man hired all of the caretakers for the cars that executives at a certain major manufacturer drove to work each day. They’d switched to defense building for the war, yet their own cars still received special attention. The company preferred Negroes with genteel mannerisms to serve the executives, but they settled for those with light skin in a pinch. Francis greeted the bosses when they came to work, washed and serviced the cars as needed, and drove them back out front when summoned. A stable boy for twentieth-century horses. The type of job Francis was born to lose.
Two sorts of men worked with him: those who took immense pride in the measure of intimacy they were granted with the executives, and Francis’s type, who would just as soon crash the boatlike vessels into a wall. Of the latter group Francis found a friend in Norman McNair, a young man near his own age up from Alabama, with a receding hairline and a habit of chewing tobacco in lieu of lunch. “Rather eat breakfast and dinner,” McNair would say. “Do those two right and lunch ain’t on your mind.” He and his wife rented a room not far from Francis’s half room, over in the poorest section of Black Bottom, but they had no access to the kitchen, so meals were expensive. His wife worked as a housekeeper for a black undertaker’s family in the Conant Gardens neighborhood. The McNairs were an example of what Francis should have been doing—working hard, saving for a house—but he could not manage it. Even if he somehow made the money, he thought it would take twice as long to make the right connections. His country conversation skills did not do the long-term charming up here that they had done back home. During his third week, one of the “other” sort of colored men working as a valet accused Francis of stealing a pair of driving gloves out of an executive’s car. Francis was fired without deliberation.
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