by Pearl Cleage
That house represented the official end of their enslavement and was handed down from mother to daughter until the city of Montgomery grew up around it. Finally forced to sell to make way for progress, the great-granddaughter took the proceeds, immediately bought another house, and started the process all over again. When I was a little girl in Montgomery, all my aunts and female cousins owned their own houses. Men would come and go, but the houses and the freedom they represented remained constant.
When my mother divorced my father and moved us to Atlanta when I was twelve, she sold our house to her second cousin, once removed, and immediately bought the duplex. Her plan was for us to live on one side and rent the other to an older, single woman, preferably a schoolteacher or a retiree. She did this successfully for the whole time I lived in Atlanta, after I moved to New York, then Amsterdam, and up until the time she decided to go back to Montgomery and buy back her first house from the cousin who had decided she’d had enough of Alabama and moved to Florida.
She held on to the Atlanta house for my benefit, and when the rent money it continued to generate paid for Zora’s education, I knew how pleased that would have made her. But Zora needed something else now. She needed a way to get far enough from the scene of the crime, and the coverage of it, to regain her perspective. There was no way she could learn any valuable lessons from a boarded-up house located smack-dab in the middle of—what had Greer Woodruff called it?—an undesirable neighborhood. If my mother’s legacy was about continuing a long line of free women, this would be what she would expect me to do.
I hoped when Aretha and I got there, the indignant squatter wouldn’t be around to greet us, but I had no way of knowing, and the prospect of being confronted by him again did not appeal to me. Aretha told me not to worry about it.
“You said he didn’t seem dangerous, right?”
“More pissed off at me than anything.”
We were riding down Martin Luther King in her beautiful red truck and, considering our mission, her expression was surprisingly serene.
“Maybe you woke him up,” she said calmly. “He’s probably not a morning person.”
I looked over to see if she was kidding and she grinned to let me know she was.
“Don’t worry. If he makes you nervous, we’ll get one of Blue’s guys to come back over with us.”
Blue’s guys, the army of well-dressed, soft-spoken, hat-tipping men whose presence made West End such a peaceful place. Too bad we couldn’t clone them, I thought, as Aretha turned into the driveway and headed up to the house. As she parked the truck, she looked around, frowning.
“I can’t believe they just let it go like this,” she said. “This was a great house.”
“The question is,” I said, “can it be a great house again?”
“That’s what we’re here to find out, right?”
“Right.”
“I’m just going to give a few blasts on the horn in case our squatter is sleeping in.”
I nodded. “Good thinking.”
She blew three long blasts and then three more. If anybody was in the house, they would know they had company. We waited a minute, but no one emerged. In spite of her confident demeanor, I think Aretha was as relieved as I was.
“You ready?”
“Absolutely,” I said, opening the door and stepping down into the overgrown yard.
Aretha shook her head, her eyes surveying the bags of trash, piles of broken furniture, stained, rain-sodden mattresses, and other debris scattered all over the big front lawn and up to the front door. People had obviously been using the yard as an unofficial neighborhood dump site. I could smell the rank stench of garbage spilling out of a bag near the back fence. The idea of rats suddenly came crashing into my mind. One of my first official acts would have to be hiring a good exterminator.
Reaching into the truck for a black bag that she had stashed behind her seat, Aretha unzipped it and took out a small video camera.
“What’s that for?” I said, immediately aware that I had applied no makeup and was wearing a pair of sweats I had borrowed from Zora. I never wore sweats, didn’t even own any, but I realized the clothes I had with me were not really suitable for the task at hand. However, this borrowed finery was definitely not camera-ready.
“I thought it might be good to videotape what we find inside,” she said. “I don’t know what your legal options are, but it never hurts to have a visual record of the property’s current condition.”
That made sense, but I wanted to be clear. “So I won’t be on camera?”
“Not unless you want to. We’ll walk through and I’ll make some comments about what we’re looking at, sort of a running commentary, and you can add anything you want.”
“On camera?”
She grinned again. “On or off. It doesn’t matter, but for the record? You look great.”
“Thanks,” I said, knowing this was no time to explain to her that part of how I make my living is being able to make a dispassionate assessment of how I look at any given moment. Great was how I looked at the party after I opened the season with A Raisin in the Sun last year. I’d never played Lena, the matriarch, before, but I nailed it. When she picks up that pitiful little plant from the windowsill at the end and gets ready to go do battle with her new neighbors, there wasn’t a dry eye in the house. But Lena is a poor woman eking out a living on Chicago’s South Side doing day work. Her costumes, including an incredibly serious wig, are uniformly unattractive. For the party, I needed an outfit that would effectively banish Lena from the minds of all who saw me and reestablish me immediately as my real self.
Howard didn’t let me down. I arrived in a bright red gown that clung where it was supposed to and gave me a break when it needed to, sky-high heels, ropes and ropes of pearls, and a faux-fur coat that looked so real I got an angry letter from the animal rights people which they later had to rescind. I was utterly fabulous, eliciting gasps whenever I floated by, pausing to offer a cheek or an air kiss somewhere in the vicinity of the recipient’s ear. That was great. This is what it is.
“You ready?” I said.
The key I had gotten from Greer’s office was completely unnecessary. When Aretha pushed the front door, it opened slowly like a bad moment in a horror movie. If it had actually creaked, I probably would have lost my nerve altogether. We stepped inside and just stood there for a minute while our eyes adjusted to the gloom. Inside was dim and dank, and I was glad Aretha had a big flashlight stuck in the back pocket of her overalls. There was lots of graffiti on the walls, some crudely pornographic, with various forms of fellatio being the cartoon subject of choice, and some scrawled signatures that seemed to be there strictly for identification purposes. Sir Smith and Kozmic Kat were two favorites.
There were mounds of trash everywhere, mostly fast-food wrappers and white Styrofoam food containers, but also some shoes, clothing, and lots of newspapers. Aretha handed me the flashlight and propped open the front door with a stick to give us the benefit of any available sunshine, but with most of the windows boarded up, we didn’t get much help there. I flipped on the flashlight and swept it over the area we could see. Aretha turned on the camera and started walking around the house slowly, speaking clearly and calmly about what she saw.
“No locks on the front door. Trash uncollected. Walls defaced. Floors scarred.” She turned on a switch but neither one of us expected light and we were right. Aretha kept walking and talking and I followed her, but I was in shock. It was so much worse than I had expected. They had bashed in the walls, ripped out the wiring, torn out the bathroom fixtures, and stripped the kitchen of both appliances and cabinets. Parts of the parquet floors were deeply scratched as if someone had deliberately gouged out the wood. The linoleum in the kitchen was just disgusting.
All the rooms were filled with more trash and whatever else the squatters left behind. There was no furniture to speak of outside of a few broken-down chairs and a couple of filthy mattresses that I wanted to douse w
ith gasoline and burn right then and there. We had started on the rental side, but I was sure the family side would be no better. There was no sign here of recent occupancy so I assumed my squatter had been camped out next door.
Aretha finished the last bedroom: “Both windows gone, no overhead fixtures, walls defaced and damaged. Ceiling stained, but no sag.” She turned off the camera and looked at me. I could see the concern in her eyes so I must have looked as stricken as I felt.
“You okay?”
“This is terrible,” I said. “Just awful, awful.”
“Calm down,” she said. “Some of it is cosmetic and won’t cost much to fix.”
“What about the rest?”
She shrugged. “Let’s look at the other side before I try to give you any estimates, okay?”
That didn’t sound promising, but I agreed and followed her back through the wreck. The front door on the side we used to live on wasn’t locked either. Aretha turned on the camera and I turned on the flashlight. My heart sank. This one was just as bad. The small dining room where my mother and I ate so many meals together. The living room where I’d entertained my first boyfriends to the sound of Motown music. The kitchen where I mastered a family recipe for macaroni and cheese. It was all trashed. Aretha was still describing what she saw, but she was also watching me out of the corner of her eye.
When we got to the two bedroom doors, both of them were closed. I opened the door to my mother’s room and found nothing there that had belonged to her, just more mess and the strong smell of urine and mildew. I stepped out of Aretha’s way and reached for the door to what had been my room. The room where I started my period. The room where I first had sex when my mom had to go to Montgomery one weekend and I stayed home alone to study. The room where I’d know it was Sunday by the sound of Ms. Simpson’s voice singing, “And he walks with me/and he talks with me/and he tells me I am his own,” on her side of the house. The memories were suddenly pouring out of that door before I even cracked it and I wasn’t sure I could go in.
“Was this your room?” Aretha said.
I nodded as I stood there with my hand on the doorknob.
“Do you want me to do this one by myself?”
“No, I’m okay,” I said. “It’s just a little spooky. Makes me think about how long it’s been since I lived here.”
And how weird it feels to be back.
But then I opened the door. The room that had been my girlhood sanctuary was free of trash and as neatly organized as a prison cell. A narrow cot was covered with an old quilt, which was surprisingly clean, and a card table with one chair was in the corner. Sitting in the middle of the table, on top of a stack of what looked like old library books, was a saucer full of candle stubs, obviously the room’s only light. There were books lined up around three of the four walls.
He also had a small red plastic cooler and a pair of black shoes with no shoelaces at the front of the cot. On the wall above the pillow, he had tacked up a small snapshot of a man and woman wearing their Sunday clothes, smiling into the camera. They looked happy and hopeful, the way people do on graduation days and election nights and honeymoons. There was also a calendar from the soul food restaurant around the corner with the days of the current month marked off in a series of neat red X’s.
“I guess this is where your squatter has been hanging out,” Aretha said, as surprised as I was by the sudden imposition of order in the midst of the chaos we’d been slogging through.
“Let’s leave it,” I said, pulling the door closed, suddenly feeling an entirely inappropriate rush of guilt for invading his privacy, even though he was squatting in my room.
Aretha wanted to get some footage of the yard and the exterior of the house. She didn’t need me for lighting anymore, but I walked with her anyway, trying to sort things out.
“Did you used to play out here?” she said as she turned the camera toward a mountain of black trash bags down closer to the street. It looked like people had just walked up to the fence and tossed their junk right over into our yard.
“My mother had an amazing rose garden out here,” I said, remembering. “Red, yellow, pink, white. She was always pruning them or feeding them or watering them. It would kill her to see it like this.”
Aretha turned off the camera and looked at me. “Then I guess we’ll have to do something about it.”
TWENTY-SIX
Half an hour later, we were back in West End, lingering over a cup of tea at the Soul Vegetarian Restaurant while Aretha tried to make the task I was facing seem routine and achievable. Neither one of us had ordered food, but all around us hungry diners were feasting on broccoli quiche, sweet potato soufflé, and lentil soup. I was too busy pouring over the figures Aretha had written on a yellow legal pad to think about food. She had listed all the repairs and estimated the cost, including labor and supplies, and at the bottom, the figure she’d written and underlined twice was eighteen thousand dollars.
“That’s more than the whole place is worth,” I said.
“Only according to Greer Woodruff,” Aretha said. “But I think we can discount her opinion for two reasons. One, she let the place fall apart and didn’t even call you, which is not only bad business but downright rude, and two, she’s trying to buy up all the property around here fast for some reason that doesn’t have anything to do with a desire to help rebuild anybody’s nest egg.”
“What is it?”
Aretha shrugged. “My guess is she’s got somebody interested in that corner property and all the way down Wiley Street to the freeway. These hotshot developers are always trying to buy these problem properties cheap and then sell them to the highest commercial bidder. If there’s some real interest and the owners are reluctant to sell, they’ve been known to use some pretty unsavory tactics to intimidate the holdouts.”
“Like what?”
“Vandalizing vacant property. Encouraging squatters and break-ins. Most of the people on Wiley are old women by themselves. Their husbands are dead. Their kids are grown and gone one way or another. Once they don’t feel safe after a few of these incidents, they’re much more willing to take what they’re offered and make the best of it.”
“How can they make the best of it on fifteen thousand dollars?”
“They can’t. They’ve been trying to get preservation money, but there’s nothing really historic about the neighborhood. It’s just some little houses where people lived their lives and raised their kids and got old. It’s sad, you know? Where are they supposed to go once Greer Woodruff buys them out? Fifteen thousand won’t even be a down payment on anyplace they’d want to live.”
“Do you think Greer Woodruff would do something like that? Just to make a profit?”
“Didn’t you tell me your squatter was worried about predators?”
“Yes.”
Aretha took a sip of her tea. “I think she’s already doing it.”
“Well, what if the people in the neighborhood refused to sell? What if we fix up these properties and make our own deal?”
“Well, you’ll probably triple the value of your mother’s investment, and your neighbors can stay put if they want to or take the best offer and move to Florida. Everybody wins.”
“Except Greer Woodruff,” I said.
“Exactly.”
I wondered how this had suddenly morphed into one of those “reclaim the community” movies. I hate that pseudo-inspirational bullshit. In my experience, the target population usually remains intractable, no mater how many uplifting power ballads you pack onto the soundtrack. “So now I’ve got to redeem the whole neighborhood?”
“You don’t have to redeem it,” she said. “They want to stay. They just need…” Her voice trailed off and she frowned, searching for the right word. “Inspiration. They need some inspiration.”
I rest my case. Cue the ballad.
“How much do you think the place is worth?”
“I’d say one hundred twenty-five thousand just for the land.”
“One hundred twenty-five thousand dollars?”
“Two hundred thousand if you fix up the house and do a little landscaping.”
“That’s ten times what she offered me!”
“That’s what I’m talking about. She figures you’re not going to want to spend the time and money to fix it up or have the patience or contacts to find a buyer on your own.”
“How much time are we talking about?”
Aretha shrugged and her eyes scanned the figures she had put on the legal pad. “Depends on how much work you want to do.”
“All of it,” I said. If I was going to sell the place and put my faith in hard cash instead of bricks and mortar, I needed to be sure I got a good return on my mother’s investment. Otherwise, she’d never forgive me.
“Well,” Aretha said. “I’d say two and a half, three months, to get it all done, once we get a crew.”
“How big a crew?”
“The more, the merrier,” she said. “Four is good. Five is better. Experience preferred but not required.”
The only kind of crew I knew how to organize was the kind that puts a play on the stage, but that wasn’t the same thing at all. “Where do I find a crew?”
“I’ll pull one together if you want me to,” she said. “I manage a lot of property for Blue so I always have some guys on standby. It’ll take me two weeks to finish the door project, then I’m ready to come on full-time.”
“The door project?”
She laughed. “That’s a long story and I’ve got to pick up Joyce Ann.”
“I’m sorry I kept you so long,” I said. “You’ve given me a lot to think about.”
“Well, don’t just get stuck on the numbers, think about how great that house is going to be once we get it all fixed up. You won’t recognize the place.” She stopped and smiled across the table at me. “Or maybe you will.”