by Tayari Jones
Then I noticed the child. I was passing the hill at the Sibley Park, an ostentatious collection of contraptions of Scandinavian design meant to entertain the spawn of said gentrifiers—oh, such precious urchins! God forbid they play on a swing—when the ephemeral look of the girl startled me. I peered hard, but no, she was a child of this world, six or seven in age, naked except for a ragged, oversized T-shirt that draped her like a tunic.
I see the homeless all the time. In the old days—those hippieville days—they squatted in the old mansions, abandoned by commerce and condemned by the state. Now they haunt the periphery of the district. They wander Ponce, and camp at Little Five Points, but would be hustled along by the IPP if they ventured into this purlieu! Private police. The “I-pee-pee,” I call them.
“Where is your mama, little girl?” I asked, my tone conveying my caring nature. I was concerned that a chill would catch her. Already, her bare arms were pimpled with goose bumps. “Where do you live?” She was of indeterminate race—light-skinned black? Mediterranean? A mix of some kind. A tangle of sandy hair matted her head. I came closer, resisting the urge to reach out. As I said, I am a compassionate man. In a sudden burst, she fled, running like a Hiawatha to the playhouse—a structure for the gentrified children to “play” house—ha! “The melancholy House of Usher”—as if any one of them expected to clean and cook as adults.
I followed the child, not chasing, but approaching cautiously. Two souls crossed in front of me, walking the path toward the train station—a double murder from two decades ago. Inside the square little playhouse, among a scatter of toy pots and sand buckets, was the girl holding tightly to another figure—girlish too, and only slightly larger. The larger, older one was perhaps in her midtwenties, her youth though was blanched, and her face, yellow and negroid, was blooming with purple and pink bruises. A cut on the lip.
We stared a moment and when my breath came back to me, I whispered, “Are you all right?”
The older one—the woman—drew herself smaller, wrapping herself around the child. They were cold. I had only a light jacket, and immediately stripped it off and held it out to her. With a quivering hand, she took it, and nodded slightly to show gratitude, and true to her maternity, she fitted it on the child, whose frame it swallowed up.
If ever there was a need for the police, I thought, it was now. I broached the subject carefully, as I myself have a well-cultivated distrust of the law. The woman’s reaction was blank, but the bruises spoke loudly. I stepped from the playhouse, took a deep breath, and surveyed the park as it fell into a miasmic darkness, a thin fog seeping from the ground. Streetlamps, ringed with prismatic halos, illuminated the marble steps of long ago–razed mansions which led up the hill to nowhere. I flipped open the phone and dialed 9-1-1. And waited.
After several rings, far more than any dying soul would have lasted through, a voice asked me to leave a message. I am as patient as I am compassionate, but I have little patience for such sloppiness. I resolved at that moment that I would be the hero; I would help the poor woman; I! Not the Atlanta police, and certainly not the I-pee-pee. They were but functionaries, paid help. They helped without compassion, but I am called to it by the Highest Power, the power of God, or the power of gods. Whichever. Selah.
I raced down the hill toward the street, toward home. The damp grass clumped between the sole of my sandals and my toes. Some hand, grasping my ankle, nearly tripped me up. But soon I was on the sidewalk, walking swiftly home, my mind listing, relisting what I must do to save the child, the mother. Suddenly a light, blue and holy, burst around me. I tasted the contents of my stomach at the back of my throat. Such excitement is not good for the heart. Then out of the light came a figure, burly and haloed. My knees weakened.
“Hey, pard-na! Where you going so fast?”
Hardly an epiphanic salutation! It was a damn cop. True to calling, they come when you least need them.
“Officer,” I intoned, appropriately obsequious. It is the best strategy, especially around the black ones, and this one was not only burly but as black as a moonless night. And yet, in the foggy streetlamp, he glowed somehow, the bulge of eyes and round jowls, a monstrous chest under his shirt and his massive arms, swollen in his sleeves which acted upon the veins like a tourniquet. Anabolic steroids—mum’s the word; dumb’s the word. “I was just running to call you for assistance,” I explained, and he, fiddling with gadgets pinned here and thither on his person, talked in a gibberish of codes to which a crackled and popping voice replied.
Whatever they had to settle was settled, and reluctantly the cop, hefting his big frame up the hill, followed me. He shone his flashlight inside the playhouse like he was chasing down a fly. Finally it rested on the Pietà, cowering in the corner by the play cook stove. Through blunt and gruff questioning, he ascertained the obvious: they were homeless. If they ever had a home, they had been driven out of it.
“What do you want to do?” he asked the mother, and to her credit, she didn’t answer him. He turned the question to me: “What do you want to do?”
“What can I do?”
“Do you want to go to the Pine Street shelter, ma’am?” he blurted.
Her response shocked me. No. She wouldn’t. She’d been there. She said that it wasn’t safe. It was crowded and filthy and she would rather make her bed where she was.
The forecast called for cold and the child’s nose was snotty.
“If she don’t want to go,” the cop said, “I could arrest her for trespassing—in jail, she be out of the cold.”
The cruelty of his suggestion, his arrogance, nearly sent my hand against his fat head. I looked to the sky. A half-moon slid behind the skyline, diffusely ablaze as if shining behind theatrical scrim. It was God speaking and I knew the mission. “I will take her!”
“Take her where?” the buffarilla asked. Did he suspect misconduct from me?
“To shelter! I will find succor for them or succor them myself.”
The cop pursed his lips and asked the woman if she wanted to go with me. I’ll have you know, she hesitated. Help on the way, and she hesitated! Then he said she’d have to come with him. Was it such a Morton’s fork? Jail or me? The gods led her to the right choice, and quickly. She took the child in her arms and followed me home through the roaming mists.
Before there was city here—either gilded ghetto or hippieville—this was a battleground of the War Between the States. Thousands of boys lined up, blasting musket balls in one another’s faces. Look out any moonlit night into the mists that gather in the hollows of Freedom Park, or the grove at Delta, and you will see them. Regiments and squadrons at a time. They are not so invisible. And why should it be strange? Lives have been lived in this place since the time of the unfortunate Creeks, some of whom clung to these very oaks to save themselves from the Trail of Tears. You scoff? Your arrogance will be the end of you. Life piles on life. Hurt on hurt. That is why I, by the grace of the Almighty, am merciful.
Several times during the short walk, the woman trailing me disappeared in the fog. I waited until she was in sight, only to lose her again. There is the tale of the apparition that trails and vanishes, and reappears on one’s own back. Thinking this, I was beginning to feel some regret about my bravado, as I watched them descend, ragamuffin and ragamitten, from Euclid Avenue down the hill on Druid Street.
“You live here?” the little mother asked. It was the first time she seemed to have looked at me, her rheumy eyes catching the porch light. “It’s such a big house.”
“But?” An impatient flash heated my face. Next she would say it needed paint or repair.
“You live here all by yourself?” There was a pleading in her tone that I caught but did not fully understand.
“Wait here. I’ll run into the yard and get the car.”
“But we’re tired. We tired and hungry, sir.”
“I’ll fix you a sandwich. Peanut butter? Egg salad?”
“Maybe we could just rest awhile. Just a couple o
f days.”
My imagination sprang. What an idea! A lovely young Negress in the house. To cook and clean and who knows what. She was quite a little spinner. The gentrifiers would talk and talk about that one. And the child? As light-skinned as the child was, we’d be thought to be a little family. How we could roam the neighborhood, the graying, balding, long-haired Ichabod and his darling little girls!
Just then an owl hooted and a door slammed. I jolted out of my reverie. “Impossible!” I went into the yard and brought around the Beetle.
* * *
Peachtree, Peachtree. Everything is Peachtree. That’s tourist talk. Beware the Druids. The Decaturs and DeKalbs. The Morelands and Memorials. The Capitols, the Hardees, the Aarons, the Williamses. They writhe like a tangle of snakes. And we traveled them all. She and the child, scrunched together on the back bench, the springs of the passenger seat having cut through and made it uncomfortable if not dangerous to sit there. We went first to one shelter for women and children, and then another, only to be told that like old cemeteries, there was no room in the tombs. City ordinances, all of that. Or too late to check in, as if exigencies punched a clock. The brute husband plans to slap the wife around at two in order that she may be checked in by three thirty! The gods are gracious, but they do not chime to a human clock. With each failure, we were directed to the next. And the next. Until we had made a circuit of the eastern neighborhoods from Edgewood to Glenwood. Then I was instructed by a burly black devil hiding behind a clerical collar to go deeper into the southwest. Even deeper into the poor Negro habitats. Deep into Summerhill, into Mechanicsville and Peoplestown, where a wholly different set of souls abide.
Once I got a call from South-View Cemetery. Generally I am not compelled to answer the land line. Solicitors, you know. But for some reason the receiver seemed to beckon; it trembled in the cradle. Hesitantly I answered, and a chill crawled from my coccyx to the nape of my neck, and then spread like a contagious itch across my scalp. “It is your auntie,” the voice said. It was Auntie’s voice and yet it was not so.
“Auntie,” I said, “where are you?”
“I am in South-View. South-View Cemetery. I am waiting for you. Waiting.”
My dear auntie who raised me—and how I treated her, abandoned her. Had I the presence of mind, I would have asked why she was at a colored cemetery. In life, she would have never associated with the colored, except Louisa, her maid. She refused to go to the tea room at Rich’s after integration. She voted for Lester Maddox. When she died I inherited the house—just as the neighborhood “declined” into hippieville—and at her funeral, there were only me and Louisa. Now she calls from South-View—the rooms of Tartarus are heated by ironies. Selah.
But I am determined not to be among the damned. I pressed on, shelter after shelter, and no room at the inn. The night grew old. The poor child nodded, whimpered, shivered, though I blasted the car’s heater. The mother, clutching the child, cringed and said nothing; I spoke, not loquaciously, but with good cheer and encouragement.
At last, we drove up to a little soul-saving station on a short, poorly lit street with overgrown and abandoned lots. Pope Street or Hope Street. It could even have been Dope Street, it seemed so much on the edge of nowhere. The square, whitewashed building with its slanted steeple nonetheless buoyed our expectations of succor. I helped the darling mother and child from the cramped backseat, though reluctant she was to take my hand for fear of losing grip of her daughter. I offered to carry the girl. I am good with children. They might be brash with others, but they are quiet around me. We walked the muddy path to the building, guided only by the dim bug light next to the door. There was a sign, written in red block letters against the whitewash: LIGHTHOUSE OF DELIVERANCE. A large, very black—purplish black—negroid woman—no girl, she—all woman—peeped through the inner door, leaving the security door locked. What breasts! What breasts! I thought. You scoff! It is a compliment that even in that hour of exasperation, I took heed of the well-formed breasts, and the curve of ample hips. I am a man, not a priest, though priestly is my nature.
“Can I help you?” Her voice was gruff.
I have come to blow your house down, I wanted to answer, but turned my tongue to better purpose. “We seek shelter!”
She studied the three of us, her mouth turning down as she looked me over.
Quickly, I clarified: “For the woman and child, not for me.”
I saw the moment of decision, when the suspicion dropped from her face and the vixen unlocked the security door. My little woman practically sang out a sigh of relief. The child, sensing her relaxation, chirped and gurgled. Was it Nevermore or Evermore? In we went through a narrow, stale hallway. It might as well have been lit by gaslight. On the walls were portraits of the Living Christ, as blond as a movie star. His eyes followed me. We were taken to a card table that served as a desk, and our Hottentot Venus sat and began to ask questions for her forms. Bureaucracy haunts every kindness. The room behind her, I could see, served as a sanctuary, though it was sparse and void of any of the ornamentation that God expects in a place of worship. The few pews had been dragged to the periphery of the room, and on the floor, about three feet apart, lay three rows of twin-sized mattresses, ten or so in a row. Each mattress was bare, but covered with a blanket, and on each—all of them, except for one—reposed a soul. This was the shelter I had driven so long to find.
The innkeeper, such as she was, gave me the evil eye. She turned her lips down smugly. “Not good enough?” she challenged.
Any room in my own house would be a palace by comparison. I’d take the little charges home rather than have them spend ten minutes in such a kennel. I’d house them in Auntie’s grand old boudoir, full of cobwebs and dust bunnies. How she would spin in her grave at that. Round and round she’d go. Where she’d stop the devil knows. They could become my wards, my little family. Papa, mama, and baby. The thought enticed and gratified me.
“It’s good,” the mother replied. The child babbled like a happy brook.
Yes, I then thought, happiness for them. A great sacrifice for me. But for the greater happiness, a just and small sacrifice. Seeing I had done all I could do, all that was expected of me, I smiled, reached to pat the little cherub on the head. She shrank back, but I touched the scruffy little naps anyhow. I drew in deeply, the close air catching in my throat, and turned to leave.
Then the big one stopped me. Her voice boomed. I turned to see her thick lips moving in slow, bumbling motion. “You be paying?”
“Pardon?”
“You be paying?”
“Paying?”
“Twenty dollars a night.”
“I thought this was a charitable enterprise.”
She rolled her neck. It was as if her head danced on her shoulders, and when it settled, she smirked and conveyed both incredulity and menace. I stepped back to the table, my hand itching to slap the baboon. No doubt she saw it in my eye, and slid her chair back with a squelch, ready to meet the challenge. Oh, but she couldn’t have known what scrap I’d give her. It was the child then, touching me lightly on the arm, who drew my attention. Her eyes, wide and watery, pleading. Her mouth quivered. And my heart broke open.
I found my wallet, slipped out a twenty, and flipped it like an ace of spades onto the table. I had another twenty and flipped it out too. “Two nights,” I said.
That took the smirk from the vixen’s face. And when I looked at the child, I nearly burst into tears to see her happiness, her once-tired face suddenly bright. The mother closed her eyes and formed a silent thank you with her lips. That portrait of the Living Jesus turned His head away in shame, and the sun portals of heaven opened and rained light down on me.
“You got ID?” the wench asked.
“ID?” the mother whispered.
The thing rolled her eyes at me. “She needs to show ID.”
I saw distress cloud my little mother’s face.
“What does she need ID for?”
“It’s for
her own safety.”
“Her own safety?”
“In case she comes and goes.”
“I won’t go,” the poor mother managed. “I’ll stay right here. I won’t be going out.”
“Dem’s the rules.”
“Dem’s stupid rules,” I mocked. “Obviously she has no ID. She’s homeless. Look at her. She’s been beaten, thrown out, abandoned.”
The head was dancing again and the big woman stood. “You might not like da rules, but deese is da rules. No ID, no bed.”
“Whose rules?”
“My rules.”
I changed tack. Obsequious now. “Sorry, so sorry. Listen.” I took out my wallet and put a twenty-dollar bill on top of the other two. “I’ll pay extra. What do you want, twenty? Thirty? How dare you scoff!”
She put her hands on her hips, inhaled, and the big chest filled out. Now she had the upper hand. A pine knot of a horn swelled above her left brow. The shadow of a tail flicked behind her. I saw then that I played against a devil, but devils can be tamed.
“I don’t want yo’ money. I was doing y’all a favor, till you come in here all . . .”
“All what?”
“All too-good.” Glee cackled in her voice and her lips trembled to play it down. “Y’all need to go on to Pine Street. Pine Street will take her in.”
“Better to go to hell,” the mother said.
“You can do that too,” said the bitch.
* * *
Outside, standing before the rusty Beetle, the mother turned to me. Standing close, whatever kept us distant melted for the moment. “Thank you,” she said, “but I’d rather just sleep outside.” She clutched the now-weeping child, whom she had held the whole time.
But I couldn’t allow it. I drove to the Pine Street shelter. Hardly had the engine shut off when hands were helping the mother out of the car. Resignedly, she passed the child over to one of the young souls, and she was led away, living, into the tomb. The steel door clanked as it shut behind her. Gloom pervaded me. An iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart, an unredeemable dreariness of thought—my mind was in a swirl. I fought to satisfy myself that my little family would have shelter, incommodious though it was. Shelter and twenty dollars, and I would never see mother or child again.