Tumbling

by Diane McKinney-Whetstone

  Reverend Schell swiveled his chair around so that his back was to them. He turned then to face Willie Mann. “The church,” he asked, “is the church sitting in the path of the road?”

  Willie Mann and Tom Moore exchanged glances.

  “No,” Tom Moore said. “Not at all.”

  “Not at all,” Reverend Schell repeated, as if he had some doubt. He positioned his chair back to center so that he could see them both. He addressed only Willie Mann, though. “So I guess these big fish, as you call them, brought you on so you could pour a little persuasion with the whiskey, and now I’m supposed to pour my brand of persuasion with the prayer.” He shook his head and drummed his fingers along the desk. “I don’t think they’ll move. Most of them won’t. Too tied to this area. Won’t move.”

  “But, Reverend”—Willie Mann stood and thrust his hands in his pants pockets and walked to the window and looked out again—“it’s not a matter of whether or not they’ll move; it’s a matter of when. The people may reject Highway South’s first offer, may say, ‘No, we’re not selling our homes.’ No problem, we’ll back off then, give them six months to think about it. Come back with another offer, some may still reject that. Still no problem. In the meantime some of the people will have moved by, say, the second offer. Their houses will be sitting, and since they’ll be targeted for demolition, no one will certainly move in behind them. They’ll be, you know, a change in the neighborhood. A year and a half from now, we anticipate they’ll still be some holders-on, but think about it, Reverend, it’s the people that make it a community, would you want to hang around when all your neighbors are jumping ship? Three years, this whole area should be cleaned out and ready to be razed.” He walked back to the desk. “Yes, siree, in about three years, you won’t even know this area.”

  “So why do you need me?” Reverend Schell asked. “You saying it’s going to happen regardless.”

  Willie Mann leaned in almost to Reverend Schell’s ear. “They’ll need help cutting the cord, sir,” he whispered. “They’ll be coming to you, asking your advice; they’ll be more amenable to move if you lead with the example, you know, that it’s okay, better in fact than being crammed down here the way we’re all crammed down here like sardines in a can. It’s going to happen, like you’ve said, regardless. Better that it happen sooner. That’s what we need you for, to keep them from challenging it, tying it up in a court battle that could go for years.”

  Reverend Shell held up his finger sharply. “And I’m supposed to go along with that and just watch my church membership fall off to nothing.”

  “We can set you up in a new church building.” Tom Moore spoke. “You just tell us what area; that will be the least of your concerns. We can even match your salary if your membership falls off and your congregation can’t meet your salary; that’s not a problem.”

  “It’s more than salary,” Reverend Schell said, a measure of anger in his voice. “This church does a lot in this community. We put towards sending deserving ones to college, our young people’s union gets out each and every Saturday and goes shopping for our sick and shut-in, they even wash down their steps if need be, we make sure our members have coal through the winter, we extend credit with our revolving loan program, so it’s not just my salary.”

  “Understood,” Willie Mann said quickly. “And you can still do all that, from here, if you choose to remain in this church building, or from much better surroundings.” He rolled his hands as he talked and moved his shoulders in and out, and sat back and up until it looked as if he were conducting an orchestra. “Your—our people deserve better. Now’s our chance to have better.” His voice had an urgency to it.

  Reverend Schell drummed his fingers again the way he always did when he was in deep thought. Both Willie Mann and Tom Moore watched the preacher’s eyes stare blankly; they listened to each other breathe for several minutes. When Reverend Schell spoke again, his voice was dry and he had to clear his throat. “Let’s just say I’m neither for nor against you right now. I need to pray on it. But I won’t speak out against the highway right now. That’s a help to you, trust me. If I go in that meeting now and tell the people to pay you no mind, you’ve got a fight on your hands.”

  Reverend Schell stood—his shoulders squared, eyes straight ahead, stately stance in his dark suit. He looked down at the bulging envelope on his desk. They all did. The room was completely quiet save the rumble in the sanctuary sifting into the office. The piano started to play; it was old and out of tune.

  “Just payment for your time, sir,” Willie Mann said again. “You’re a leader. Your time is costly. We’ve had your ear for the past hour.”

  Reverend Schell cleared his throat and straightened the knot of his tie. “We really shouldn’t keep the people waiting.” His voice cracked, and he had to swallow hard. He picked the envelope up and dropped it quickly in his inside breast pocket where his reading glasses should have been. “No strings,” he said. “And definitely no promises.”

  “They’ll be more where that came from, Reverend, should you decide to come on board and be a full player in this venture.” Willie Mann whispered it, almost gasped it, like the voice he used when he breathed into a woman’s ear after he’d taken her on that couch in the cellar at Club Royale.

  Noon and Fannie and Liz had made their way to the front of the church and found seats along the side aisle. They could see the members filing in. Liz listed them, trying to make Fannie laugh and chase away the strange look to her eyes. “There’s Hurry-up Hank from the fish market, and here comes Johnnie Mae Makeup from Bea’s Beauty Parlor, and there’s Sad Sandra Saunders from the funeral parlor, and Look-Out-Louie, the number man, and Cross-the-Street-Dottie, mnh, Fat Barb getting bigger every day.” Liz whispered out the ones she knew and made up names for the ones she didn’t, and then she gasped and dug her hand into Fannie’s arm.

  “What’s your problem, girl?” Fannie snapped, pulling her arm from Liz’s tight grasp.

  “Fannie, Fannie,” Liz whispered, out of breath, “it’s him, he’s looking at me.”

  “It’s who?” Fannie demanded. “Who the heck is worth you squeezing my arm to death?”

  “Him, Fannie, it’s him, Fine Willie Mann from Club Royale, he was just looking at me, Fannie, honest to God he was, I think he winked his eye.” Liz had not yet told Fannie about her cup of tea the week before on the couch in Royale’s cellar. She had meant to, but then Fannie had had the vision of Miss Pernsley’s death, and she was so irritable with getting her period, Liz thought it better to wait. Even now Fannie didn’t look quite right to Liz. Her lean face looked even smaller, and her yellow skin easily showed shadows under her eyes.

  Fannie shook her arm and rolled her eyes at Liz. “Him? Thinks he’s too pretty for me. Miss Jeanie said you should never go out with a boy that thinks he’s prettier than you. Plus he’s not even a boy, gotta be well in his twenties. He’s not worth the emotions, Liz.”

  “Who said anything about emotions?” Liz asked defensively.

  “My bruised arm,” Fannie blurted out so loudly that Noon told her to hush.

  “Quiet now,” Noon said, leaning her head so both Fannie and Liz could hear her. “They’re getting ready to start, and I don’t want to miss a word.”

  Noon sat very straight and still. Her memory earlier as she’d watched the sun come up still had her unsettled. The rest of the congregation had filed in and tried to settle down too. But there was still too much of a jumpiness in the air, a ferocity. And then Reverend Schell took to the center of the pulpit.

  Reverend Schell didn’t look immediately at the church body. He looked instead at the gavel he held in his hands, his dark hands almost lost in the darkness of the wood. The deep lines in his fingers almost matched the etchings in the gavel. He turned the gavel over several times, looked at it even more intently as he tried to guess the tree that the wood had been carved from. He shifted the gavel from one hand to the next, trying to guess its weight. The congregation got
silent watching him. Even the scrambling toddlers stopped. They all watched him study the gavel. Finally he looked up. All at once he looked up and out at his waiting congregation.

  “Let’s open with prayer,” he said in a voice somewhat raspy, drier than his usual richness of tone. He prayed hard. Eyes clenched tight. Hands opening and closing, arms raising and falling, head going up and down. “Bless us, Lord,” he shouted.

  “Please, Lord,” the congregation responded.

  “Take us through the storm, Lord,” he sang.

  “Yes, take us, please take us,” the congregation sang back.

  “Just give us Your guiding light, Lord.”

  “Please give us the light,” they repeated.

  He prayed for a full ten minutes, the congregation chiming in and helping him pray. He prayed a ferocious prayer.

  And then he looked out on the congregation again. Suddenly they looked weathered. Many had worked all day as domestics, and dish-washers, and in factories making fine leather belts or fancy draperies. Some poured sand at the shipyard; some hacked freshly slaughtered, healthy-looking pigs. Some lifted heavy pieces of French Provincial furniture onto dark, musky vans; one or two had won at card games. Most had put in a hard day’s work, he could see that. Even if it was spent fretting over how they were going to get milk to feed the babies or keep their son away from the prostitutes, or their daughter from the hustlers, or their wife away from that devil-filled Four Roses whiskey. Even the well-to-do property owners, the teachers, the shopkeepers, the government workers, the ones who had college and professions—they especially worked hard because they worked under the illusion of having made it. In the light of the upper sanctuary it all showed on their faces. Why shouldn’t they have more than these tight blocks? he thought. As he scanned the congregation, he wrestled with his conscience. Knew that his judgment might likely be clouded by the bulging brown envelope he’d just slipped into his pocket. He tried now to convince himself that his people did deserve more than these South Philly blocks. Much more than these weathered expressions.

  “It’s no secret why we’re here, Church, am I right?” he began.

  “No secret at all,” one shouted back.

  “Seems the city has plans for this area we call home,” he continued.

  “They can keep their ole plans and do you know what with their plans,” another voice said.

  Nervous snickers rippled through the church. “Please, let’s be respectful,” Reverend Schell said. “Now the city, or should I say a representative from what’s now being called the Highway South Project, has sent a representative to talk to us tonight. That’s all we’re going do tonight is talk. We’re going to talk and listen, but nothing is going to be decided tonight. Let’s just say we’re in the phase where we’re collecting information. Can we all agree to that?”

  “Mnhuhs,” and, “yes, Reverends,” and, “sure nuffs just listen,” and, “that’s reasonable” floated around the church. Heads were nodding and turning to meet other heads in whispered “I guess it ain’t no problem long as we’re just talking.”

  “Now we’re going to hear from Mr. Thomas Moore.” Reverend Schell continued. “He’ll probably be around to visit you-all over the next several months. My understanding is that he’ll go block by block, tell you what your house is worth, make you an offer. Some of you may be ready to take him and the city up on the offer immediately. Some of you will tell him flat out no. But we’ll all be prayful, prayful and respectful throughout this process that my understanding is can take some years. Now if we’re in agreement, we’ll hear from Mr. Moore.” He looked down and motioned to Tom Moore.

  Tom Moore was sitting at the front of the church, not up in the pulpit with Reverend Schell, but behind a school desk–type table at the front of the church. He wanted to sit in the pulpit, wanted to be able to look down over the congregation the way Reverend Schell did. But the good reverend had explained to him that only preachers were so exalted. So Tom Moore sat behind the small table looking awkward, looking almost as if he were being punished and had to sit in the front of the class where his classmates could jeer at him when the teacher wasn’t looking. The congregation wasn’t jeering, though. They were polite. Waiting, expectant.

  Tom Moore stood; his cheek was going up and down; his glasses hung around the bottom of his nose. Right now he looked over the top of them. “Moonhead,” Liz whispered to Fannie, who didn’t respond; she was rubbing her eyes hard with her fist.

  Tom Moore didn’t look at anybody in particular, at least not for any length of time. He looked over them as he stood. He looked at the tops of their hair. He looked at their foreheads of black and brown and yellow and olive and tan and red. He looked at the creases in their furrowed brows. But he didn’t look at their eyes.

  “Reverend Schell is correct,” he began. “I will be around to visit all of you who live in the affected area. The Highway South Project is prepared to purchase your homes and relocate you to more spacious areas in other parts of the city and maybe even out into the suburbs. I have no doubt you all will be pleased at the amount of money the city is prepared to offer, much more than the current worth of your properties.”

  “How you calculating worth?” one irate member shouted. “Some of us have kids in school down here we’ll have to yank them out of.”

  “I don’t have a car,” another called to Tom Moore. “Everything I need I can walk right to. Am I gonna be able to do that somewhere else?”

  “And how ’bout to getting to church?” Sister Maybell asked. “We supposed to have to get on a bus or trolley every time we ready to go to church?”

  “Listen good,” called one of the mothers of the church, “I’m in here every Saturday morning at the break of day washing down these pews with oil soap, so I don’t want hear a thing about having to travel no distance to get here.”

  “Those City Hall white people don’t understand our kinship with our blocks, why we even gonna listen to what they got to say?” asked Pop. “I have a business. How am I gonna be compensated, not just financially, but how they gonna replace the streams of ‘Morning, Pop,’ I get from y’all on your way to your day jobs.”

  They got louder as one by one they offered up their emotional ties to the neighborhood. A steady background chorus of why here, why now rose and fell and resonated through the building like a gospel song. The comments were circling so loud and fast that Reverend Schell had to bang his gavel and shout, “Order. We serve a God that does things decent and in order. Let’s have some order here and now.”

  “You’re asking individual questions that need individual answers,” Tom Moore shouted when they had quieted down enough for him to be heard. “Just hear me out.” He hated this part of his job the most. He liked the negotiating, the closing deals part of it, but this part, the group part, particularly when he had to deal with colored groups, he hated the most. They were so unreasonable or so easily led, he thought. Polar, either hot or cold, no middle ground with these people, he thought. “Like I said, if you all would just let me continue, I’ll be quick and out of your way. We need the area where your houses now sit because this is where the road is slated to run. We really need your cooperation.”

  “I ain’t cooperating at all,” Noon whispered to Fannie and Liz. “Not at all.”

  Fannie squinted as she watched sweat gather along Tom Moore’s forehead. Her head was pounding. Everything around her took on a clarity as if she had been seeing things through a dirty screen. She could even see the white marks along Reverend Schell’s fingernails as his hands gripped the sides of the podium.

  Tom Moore waved a red-tipped pointer in the air. The pointer looked like red lightning to Fannie as it cut through the yellowness of the church air. He unfolded maps and diagrams and indicated with the red-tipped pointer what was targeted to be torn down, leveled, demolished, swept up, so the highway could run through.

  “You still haven’t answered the main question. Why here? I mean, why now?” demanded Bow. A
lmost sixty years old, a member of the church for at least half that long. The muscles in his shoulders flexed through his light blue shirt as he put his whole body into his question.

  Fannie saw the shirt as a light blue ocean giving up its tide as Bow’s arms moved up and down and jabbed into the yellow air. She turned away so she wouldn’t be swallowed by the tide.

  “This is where it has to be,” Tom Moore said. “We’ve studied this. Our staffs have worked overtime. I won’t even bore you with the names of all the type studies we’ve done.”

  “Bore us,” shouted Jeanie. She scowled at Tom Moore and repeated, “I said, bore us. Talk to us like you talk to your colleagues. We can understand. Explain the studies, what do they show, why does the highway need to be right here? And furthermore, why are there suddenly blocks and blocks of available houses in West Philadelphia? If it’s so wonderful there like you claim, why’s everybody suddenly moving?”

  “Jeanie, if you don’t mind, I’d like to hear him out,” said Dottie.

  “I want to hear him out too, Dottie,” Jeanie shot back. “But I want some answers first. Sounds to me like they rode through the streets of West Philly like Paul Revere shouting, ‘The colored are coming.’”

  “You don’t even go to this church, Jeanie.” Dottie’s voice was getting loud. “I don’t know why you come here trying to monopolize things so the man can’t even make his point.”

  “This a community meeting, not a church meeting,” Jeanie shouted. “I’m a member of this community, a homeowner in this community, I think I have a right to have my questions answered.”

  “Mr. Moore,” Dottie called, exasperated, “could you please just ignore this distraction and continue with your presentation?”

  “What’s the matter, Dottie?” Jeanie turned to the back of the church where Dottie sat. “Isn’t your job secure yet? You been working for the city how long now? And you still have to be their neighborhood yes-girl.”