The Turner House

by Angela Flournoy

  He would come to think of these first months in Detroit as his heathen period, the beginning of his walk from God. Not completely away, but farther than he’d ever been before. Since stepping off the train, Francis had felt the call to preach receding within him, like a sonar ping growing fainter with each knot traveled. Nothing replaced it. He went to church once, to Bethel AME, and felt insignificant, sitting in a back pew in his faded trousers and sweater. More than a purpose, being part of Reverend Tufts’s church had given Francis identity. He was no one in Detroit. One more migrant in a city where so many stepped off of trains and buses each day. No one knew him up here to judge him, because no one knew him up here at all. So he drank and screwed and lost his jobs. He did not call or write his wife.

  Better Than a Burlap Sack

  FALL 1944

  Viola had to work for white folks after all. She needed the money, and in the end she couldn’t bear to be in those fields. As far as the fraught dynamic of interracial housekeeping went, Viola believed she fared well. Ethel Joggets, newly married into the Pine Bluff Joggetses, did not condescend more than Viola expected, nor did she degrade. Ethel had a son named Harold around the same age as Cha-Cha. The two women had origin in common; their people came from roughly the same spot in southern Virginia. When they figured out the connection, Ethel had said, “Small as that county is, we might be distant cousins!” She laughed long enough to highlight how absurd she found the prospect. Viola had an older, more complicated relationship in mind, but she kept it to herself.

  The Joggetses lived thirteen miles from Viola’s shotgun house (she would always call it the shotgun house), and it took two buses to get there. On the first one she rode with her sisters, Olivia and Lucille; they set out an hour before sunrise and parted ways at first light for their respective second buses. Gas rationing meant the second buses were overcrowded; sometimes Viola and a handful of other colored maids waited for several to pass before a driver deigned to give his last few inches of standing space to them. On the ride home she’d listen to the geese honking or the humpback crickets singing and imagine Francis on a bus or a trolley of some sort as exhausted as she was, only he was going off to spend his money on what? Viola couldn’t imagine. People talked about how a good war-effort job paid at least six dollars a day. Almost six times as much as Ethel Joggets paid her.

  Viola had no intention of playing the disgruntled, abandoned wife for long. In 1944 it already felt cliché. And no, she wouldn’t resign herself to the work of her sisters and half the women in town. She had no inherent gift for organization, no real skill for cooking or cleaning, which was something her sisters knew when they found her the job. “I oughta get into the pictures, way I was lyin to that woman,” Olivia had said. “Lord knows you don’t know nothin bout puttin things back where you found em.” Being the third girl and child number six out of ten had buffered Viola from certain singularly female duties. She was better at delegating, and managing the expectations of her father when she and her siblings worked in the field, or of her mother when it came to the status of housework. She might have operated a successful housekeeper-dispatching business—a sort of precursor to Molly Maid—but back then housekeepers were hired by word-of-mouth reference only, and the salaries were so small, no housekeeper would pay a fee for a go-between. Ethel Joggets assumed Viola knew how to make dishes that she’d never learned to cook and that Ethel herself couldn’t prepare. (How to make hot-water cornbread? What was tuna casserole?) She also expected Viola to have a facility with children that Viola did not yet possess. Cha-Cha did not cry like Harold did, for what felt like hours at a time. Each day Viola arrived anxious that she would be outed as unfit for this job that she now needed to keep.

  On the way home from work three months after Francis’s departure, Viola walked past Jean Manroy’s scraggly front yard. She realized she had no urge to stop in and see if there was a message for her. In fact, the last time she’d stopped by, the front of Jean Manroy’s property had been a mess of gardening tools and dry, overgrown summer grass. Now red and gold leaves covered the lawn.

  WEEK THREE

  SPRING 2008

  Downtown Sunlight

  The line for the unemployment department’s Problem Resolution Office in New Center stretched out of the building’s tinted-glass doors, past the neighboring FedEx, and several hundred yards to the corner. At least sixty people waited outside, not to mention the snaking line within, and the office had only been open for forty-five minutes. Lelah joined at the very back, behind an obese white woman who sat on a red combination walker/chair contraption. All sorts of people populated the line: teenagers, the elderly, the shabbily dressed, the suit-and-tie types, the shabby-suit-and-tie types. To Lelah’s surprise there were near-equal numbers of whites and blacks waiting. Lelah had been laid off from her job at the airport in 2002, and when she had visited the unemployment office then, the overwhelming blackness of her fellow unemployed seemed to be clear evidence of injustice. But the proliferation of these new white jobless was more disturbing. If this many white folks couldn’t find a job, times were certainly tough.

  In fifteen minutes Lelah moved up a few feet, and the line behind her grew by nine people. She overheard people discussing extensions, training programs, and appeals, but she had no desire to join a conversation. Experience had taught her that this sort of talk was pure speculation, and getting excited about one’s case based on the shaky advice of the fellow jobless a waste of time. Instead she played a maze game on her phone over and over, beating her previous high score each time.

  After another twenty minutes someone tapped her on the shoulder. A short, skinny, balding man in slacks and a T-shirt.

  “Hi,” he said. “How long you been in line?”

  “About half an hour,” Lelah said. She brought her phone up to her face again.

  “You mind if I ask what you’re waiting to find out?”

  Lelah looked the man in the eyes. He had shaved recently, and this seemed like an indication of sanity to her, never mind the incongruity of crisp slacks and dingy T-shirt.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m trying to figure out what kinds of problems they solve before I stand in this line for the rest of the morning,” he said.

  Lelah opened her mouth to respond, but the woman in the walker butted in.

  “Anything and everything, sweetie,” she said. “If you couldn’t get your answer through the phone or on the computer, you have to come here and hope they figure it out. No exceptions.”

  The man didn’t appear satisfied with this answer, but he said thank you and moved to the back. The woman in the walker looked up at Lelah conspiratorially. The flaky makeup on her jowls reminded Lelah of powdered doughnuts.

  “There’s always that type here who thinks they can cut,” the woman said. “Like if they just ask someone closer to the front, they’ll find a way to bypass the line. But we all gotta stand here and suffer until it’s our turn, right?”

  Lelah smiled with her mouth closed. She didn’t enjoy talking to strangers outside of the casino. Without the clanging of jackpot bells and the headiness of free booze to bolster them, people generally only had inane or rude things to say. The woman chuckled to herself and scooted her walker up as the line edged forward. Lelah turned to see the line stretching back to the Fisher Building, an art deco behemoth she had been inside of only a handful of times.

  The interior of the PRO office smelled of stale breath and popcorn. Signs hanging above the representative windows instructed those in line to have their ID cards, social security numbers, and a copy of their initial correspondence ready. Lelah dug around in her purse for several minutes before acknowledging that she had no idea where her official unemployment rejection letter was. Likely balled up in a corner of her old apartment, next to the stack of unopened delinquent account notices. Francis’s pipe still lay in her purse. She decided to carry it around as a reminder of the things she needed to retrieve from CHAINS-R-US. She couldn’t sto
p thinking about her flute. She had decided that she needed discipline; maybe she could trick her brain into finding stillness while making music instead of gambling, and abandon its other preoccupations.

  At the window, a woman behind the counter took Lelah’s ID and entered her social security number into the computer. There should have been an easier system than this, Lelah thought, a computer kiosk where people could input their own information and get basic answers. She’d waited two and a half hours to watch someone push buttons on a keyboard.

  “It says you’re not eligible,” the woman said.

  “I know it says that,” Lelah said. “That’s why I’m here. I got suspended from my job without pay, so I should be eligible, right?”

  “Your employer hasn’t put anything in here,” the woman said. She was fair-skinned but not quite white. Lebanese, maybe, or Egyptian. She had green eyes, a long, slender nose, and a small, pretty diamond stud in her nostril. She did not look Lelah in the eye.

  “What happened when you called Martha?” she asked Lelah.

  “Martha? Who is Martha?”

  “M-A-R-T-H-A,” the woman said loudly. “Michigan Automated Response Telephone Hotline for Assistance.”

  She slid Lelah a pamphlet titled “Meet MARTHA: Your Guide to Filing for and Receiving Unemployment Benefits.” Lelah folded it up and shoved it into her purse.

  “I couldn’t get through to anybody when I called the numbers online,” she said. “That’s why I came down here.”

  “Was it MARTHA you called, or some other number?”

  “It was MARTHA,” Lelah said, but she wasn’t sure.

  “Well, what’s the status of your suspension? When will they tell you if you’ve been terminated for good?”

  “I have no idea,” Lelah said. “But I assume I’m pretty much fired at this point.”

  The woman scrunched her brow and pulled her lips back into a kind of closed-mouth grimace, a look intended to communicate empathy.

  “You need to find out for sure and get something in writing,” she said. “It might be better to go ahead and get them to officially cut you loose if you think they’re going to anyway. That way you’ll have something solid to input into MARTHA’s system when you call. Most of the time, MARTHA can help you more than we can.”

  Lelah relinquished the window to the next person in line. She almost laughed to herself as she walked back to her car. This was her new life, she thought, begging various people for money through windows, as if the whole world had morphed into one big, stingy casino cashier counter.

  She realized the mail might be to blame. She always remembered to check her email at the library, and aside from the usual spam sales offers and chain letters from Russell, she never had anything new. But she’d been without physical mail for nearly two weeks. Off the grid, unreachable. All sorts of money could have been tied up in postal purgatory—a little bit of refunded 401(k) cash, a severance offering, an important message from MARTHA. She’d forgotten about real, hold-in-your-hand mail, and the things that could only come to you through it. She drove to the post office near Jefferson and Lemay, the closest one to her old apartment. No mail for her there. She bought a six-month PO box for $21 and filled out a change of address form just in case.

  There was a choice to be made now. She could go about her day and wait to see what arrived in the PO box. Go to the library, maybe, or straighten up the Yarrow house some more. Or she could be proactive. Find out once and for all whether she would ever work at the phone company again. There were risks associated with finding out, the potential for added humiliation high. She’d felt awash in relief when she learned that Dwayne the lonely widower was fired for his actions on the parking deck, both because the act itself was so unsettling and because the chances of him being able to ask for his money back decreased if they didn’t work together. She even wanted to thank her manager for expediting the grievance process to get Dwayne out. Then her own scandal surfaced and she had nothing to say. She sat silent as that same manager enumerated all of the money she’d borrowed, and Misty, her union representative, shook her head in disappointment. She’d never felt so exposed in her life.

  But money was money. She decided to go downtown and try to speak with her union representative instead of her manager. She’d paid her dues out of each paycheck like everyone else, so even if Misty didn’t like her, it was her job to provide assistance, wasn’t it?

  She recognized the security guard on duty at the desk in the lobby. Sheldon had always struck her as a decent, reasonable person.

  “Shelly! Long time no see,” she said.

  Sheldon put his hands on the desk and leaned forward to peer at her in mock suspicion. His eyes traveled up and down her body. He leered in an absent-minded way; Lelah thought he was not even conscious of what he was doing. She’d always had the sort of figure that certain men stared at out of habit. While Turner men were blessed with beautiful faces—long eyelashes, smooth skin, square jaws—a Turner woman’s beauty originated below the neck. This wasn’t to say that Lelah thought she and her sisters were homely; they all had large, doe eyes, full lips, and the capacity to grow an impressive head of hair. But the Turner hourglass figure was their greatest gift, as well as a potential curse. A Turner woman’s lifelong challenge was to keep the proportions in check, to prevent her ample top from ballooning and drooping, to keep her waist discernible, to prevent her bottom from spreading and sagging. The fact that Sheldon always gave Lelah this extended once-over confirmed that she hadn’t lost the proportion war yet.

  “Lelah Turner? I thought you’d won the lotto or something. Where you been?”

  “I been around. Definitely didn’t win no lotto, though.”

  “That’s too bad,” Sheldon said. “You going up to your floor? I don’t know if you know, but they just put this new card scanner system in. It’s a pain in the ass cause I have to swipe everybody in and out now. They give you the new badge yet?”

  Lelah leaned an elbow on the tall desk, tried to appear casual. Two women in jeans and phone company polo shirts came up behind her, and Sheldon swiped them through. Lelah waited for them to get on the elevator before answering. The phone company was strict about who entered any of its buildings, but this building, full of non-salaried call center employees, had the most rigid visitation requirements of the entire downtown complex.

  “No, no new badge yet,” she said. “I’m just here to see if Misty Crespi is in today? I would’ve called her office, but my cell phone up and died on me this morning.”

  “Sounds like it’s time for an upgrade,” Sheldon said. He picked up the desk phone and scrolled through the directory. “Hi, it’s Sheldon from downstairs. Lelah Turner is here looking for Misty Crespi. Can I send her up?”

  Sheldon’s thick lips disappeared into his mouth.

  “Alright,” he said. “I understand.” He hung up and gave Lelah a look a person might give an energetic dog when leading it to a kennel.

  “Lelah.” His voice was too soft. “They say upstairs that you’re suspended, and because of that you can’t be on the property. I’m sorry, love, I have a list of suspended and terminated folks right here, but I didn’t even think to check when you came in.”

  “What, they think I’m gonna shoot up the place?” She attempted a laugh.

  “It’s my fault for even calling up,” Sheldon said. “It should have said something about you not being able to come here in whatever paperwork they gave you. You have to wait until they invite you back. Safety precaution.”

  “Yeah,” Lelah said. It came out like a whisper. “That makes sense.”

  Sheldon, still wearing his apologetic face, held out his chubby hand. Just then a chatty group of employees with colorful lunch bags exited the elevator and Lelah seized the opportunity to leave. She walked through the lobby with her head down. She needed to get to her car before the tears came.

  She’d made it to the door when she heard her name. It was another man calling, not Sheldon. Lelah igno
red it and stepped outside. The large shadows cast by the high-rises had shifted, and she walked through a triangle of bright sunshine.

  “Lelah Turner! Hold on a second, please.”

  There was a limit to Lelah’s capacity for rudeness, even when she’d been humiliated. The nice part of her, that same agreeable part that wouldn’t allow her to say what she really wanted to say to Brianne or anyone else, for that matter, prevented her from walking away from someone calling her name. Especially in broad downtown daylight. She stopped at the corner and turned around. A tall, dark-skinned man in khaki chinos and a light blue button-down shirt took long strides toward her. He looked like a lanky teenager from far away, but as he moved nearer she saw that he was closer to her own age. A boy she used to know from Yarrow Street, morphed into a full-grown man. He panted.

  “I thought that was you,” he said. “It’s me, David Gardenhire, Troy’s friend? Hi.”

  “What do you want?” This was ruder than Lelah imagined she could get.

  David wiped sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand. He rolled up his sleeves, smiled nervously. His square, white teeth seemed a special torment to Lelah, too insistent.

  “I’m sorry, I wasn’t tryna chase you down,” he said. “I was just up there meeting about a contract. You work here?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I saw you when I got off the elevator, and man, it’s been like twenty years.”

  They stood there for a few seconds. David looked at his watch and Lelah hoped this meant the conversation was over.