by Pearl Cleage
TWENTY-SEVEN
What happened while I was gone? I don’t mean just to my house. I mean to us. What happened to the idea we had about being a community of people on the move? Atlanta was a magnet once for every bright young black person with a willingness to work hard and a desire to share the vision of a city where we were the decision makers, the visionaries, the leaders, the ones who could already see that future where everybody got a slice of the seemingly inexhaustible pie. We walked proud and we felt free. We were free! Sure, there were some old folks on both sides of the great American racial divide who couldn’t quite get it together about this new day, this new way of being and seeing and doing what needed to be done, but their habitually negative energy was overwhelmed by the voices of men and women determined to change the face of business as usual forever and ever, amen.
But all that seemed like a cruel joke now. All those dreams have dovetailed into a community-wide nightmare where casual violence is the order of every day, vandalism is a spectator sport, and a strange sense of entitlement allows those unwilling to work at anything to still feel they have the right to kick in somebody’s door to get the things they want. Young people are angry and confused. Old people are scared to leave their houses for fear of being mugged or worse. And in the middle, the rest of us look around and wonder how it all fell apart so fast.
Walking through my mother’s house with Aretha was more than a revelation. It was a reinforcement of what I told Zora the other night. We don’t have to stay here another second longer than we want to. There is no place for me in Atlanta anymore, if there ever was. This is no place to live free, laugh loud, and stay strong. It’s too hard just to stay alive. I don’t see myself in ten years, a little old lady, locked in her house, afraid to open the door for the mailman, or crack the window to let in the evening breeze.
No wonder Zora was floundering around, trying to hide from the scandal sheets, stop the war, and save the world, all at the same time. It was time for her to be in a place where every hand that reaches out is not trying to pull you down. All I had to do now was piece together enough money to do what needed to be done at the house, find a buyer who wouldn’t insult me with such a low offer, and get me and Zora two one-way tickets back to where a woman can enjoy her freedom instead of just dreaming about it.
I pulled out Aretha’s notes and got my own legal pad. My financial reserves, such as they were, had to support me while I waited for François’s heart to grow fonder, keep up with my expenses in Amsterdam, and now, somehow, find a way to make major repairs on a house I didn’t even want to live in. It was going to take some juggling, that was for sure. The sooner I got started, the sooner I hoped I could figure it out.
By the time I had covered three pages with “what-ifs,” and was still no closer to really getting any balls in the air, Zora arrived with a pizza and a much needed infusion of positive energy.
“I gave them my notice,” she said, putting the pizza on the kitchen table, where I was doing my calculations, and going over to the sink to wash her hands. “I told them I’d help interview a replacement, but after this week, I’m yours!”
“Were they surprised?” I was glad she had moved so quickly, but also a little nervous now that I had promised her I had the next move covered.
“I think they figured they were doing me a favor letting me work there at all, so I should be grateful no matter how they treated me,” she said. “The thing is, I was grateful. But it doesn’t feel like I’m helping anybody anymore. Like no matter what I do, people are still going to be fighting about nothing and coming home crazy, and nobody knows what to do about any of it.”
“They’re always fighting about something,” I said.
She dried her hands and sat down across from me. “Okay, but what? What is it about?”
I smiled and opened the box, releasing the unmistakable aroma into the air. My stomach growled in response. “Who knows?” I said, taking a slice of pizza. “Maybe it’s a man thing.”
She laughed and reached for a slice, too, folding it expertly like Howard had shown her. “Then we’ll never understand it.”
“You got that right,” I said. “But your timing couldn’t be better. I’m looking for a crew and you’d be perfect.”
“A film crew?” She sounded excited by the idea.
“Not exactly,” I said quickly, reaching for the disk Aretha had given me with the video she took this morning. She assured me that Zora would know what to do with it. “Where’s your laptop?”
“In my backpack,” she said. “What’s this?”
“A disaster movie,” I said, while she withdrew the thin silver notebook and opened it for business.
She popped in the tiny disk and the video came up on the screen. You could hear Aretha’s voice calmly ticking off the problems as we moved through the debris and darkness. “Walls defaced, floors scarred…”
Zora looked up at me. “This is terrible.”
I nodded. “Yep.”
“It’s even worse than you thought.”
I had told Zora we were gong to have to do some work at the place, but nothing prepared her for what she was seeing. We sat there, munching on our pizza and looking at our pitiful nest egg, rotting among the weeds. This was my first viewing of what Aretha had shot and it was pretty hard to take even though I’d been there. When we came back outside to get some footage of the yard, I heard her ask me a question and then my voice talking about my mother’s roses. I was so saddened by what I was seeing that I didn’t notice that she had turned the lens in my direction and suddenly, there I was, in all my borrowed sweats bunching around my ankles, no-makeup-wearing glory. To complete the picture, I was frowning.
Zora leaned closer when I came on the screen, listening intently. I was listening, too, but mostly I was looking. I assumed I’d hate myself on camera the way I looked this morning, but I didn’t. I actually liked the way I looked and the way I sounded. Indignant. Incredulous. Outraged. Exactly the way I felt. And then it was over. The last freeze-frame was a long shot of that huge pile of trash bags, just sitting there, stinking in the sunshine.
Zora looked at me. “She put you in it.”
“I told her I didn’t want to be on camera.”
“Why? That’s what made it real. Listening to you talking about Great-gram’s roses. I never saw them, but you made me care.” Zora sounded like she was critiquing a performance. “That was the best part.”
“The best part of a disaster movie,” I said. “According to Aretha, the place is going to need almost twenty thousand dollars’ worth of repairs.”
Her eyes got big with surprise. “Do you have that much to put into it?” “Do I have that much period.” I pushed the legal pad across the table so she could see for herself.
“Does this estimate include the crew?” Zora said, her eyes scanning the figures.
“That includes everything.”
“And if we do all this, do you think we’ll be able to sell it?”
“We’ll be able to put it on the market,” I said, “but Aretha said we might still have a problem finding a buyer.”
“Why?”
“Because people don’t just buy a house. They buy a neighborhood.”
“So we have to fix up the whole neighborhood?”
“No, but we have to be realistic. There’s no guarantee that we’ll find a buyer. We may end up right back at Greer Woodruff’s office, hat in hand, asking if her offer’s still good.” Of course, that wasn’t going to happen. Not the hat-in-hand part, anyway.
Zora thought about that for a minute, her eyes still studying my scribblings. Then she pushed the figures aside and looked at me. “I think we have to do it, Mafeenie. The bigger our nest egg, the freer we’ll be. We have to consider this an investment.”
Although I would usually argue that finances aren’t the key to freedom, in this context, she had a point.
“I’ve got almost two thousand dollars in my savings account,” she said. “We can use
all of that.”
My first reaction was to say: Don’t worry, honey. Hold on to your money. Mafeenie will take care of it, but if we were going to be free women together, I had to stop thinking of her as a baby girl and realize she was a partner in all this. It was her future we were talking about, too. She should be allowed to invest in it. Besides, if things didn’t work out, I could always replace her money later when I got back on my feet.
“I’ll figure out how to piece together the rest,” I said. “And we can save some more if we can both work crew. Aretha’s going to help too as soon as she gets through with a project she’s doing in West End.”
“The door project?”
“That’s the one. She said she accepted a lot of work based on having some help, but her assistant’s reserve unit got called to Iraq.”
“I know her. That’s Alisa, the girl who was staying here before me.”
“She’s a painter?” The idea of a young artist fighting her way through the streets of Fallujah suddenly made me feel sad.
“She’s a housepainter. Aretha’s the artist, but the door project is different.”
“She said we’re on the list,” I said. “What is it exactly?”
Zora smiled and closed up her laptop with a muffled click. “When Aretha first started working with Blue Hamilton, she painted a lot of the doors on his properties blue. It was a North African thing she had read about to ward off evil spirits, but people thought it meant they were down with Blue, so everybody wanted one.”
I remembered seeing a lot of blue doors in the neighborhood. Turquoise, really, a nice splash of tropical color even on a cold gray day. “Did it keep away evil spirits?”
“It did a good enough job so that when the doors started fading, or got scuffed up, people wanted her to repaint them. The more she did, the more people wanted her to do. They even ran a picture of her in Dig It! painting the door of the twenty-four-hour salon up on Abernathy. The day after that, they got so many calls Aretha could have spent the next two years just doing doors. How many more does she have to do?”
“She said about another two weeks’ work.”
Zora reached for another slice of pizza and grinned at me. “Then I guess I didn’t become unemployed a moment too soon.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’ll be Aretha’s crew so she can finish the doors and she’ll be our crew to fix up the house.”
I was a big fan of exactly that kind of bartering. Saved money and kept everybody connected.
“Fair enough,” I said, pinching a mushroom off the pizza, but resisting another slice. “That way you’ll get to our place much faster.”
“You’re not scared of the evil eye, are you, Mafeenie?”
“I’m not scared of anything,” I said, “but why take a chance?”
TWENTY-EIGHT
Four hours later, we had figured out where the major pieces of our budget were coming from so we decided to save the rest for tomorrow and reward ourselves with a swim. It’s funny how a new decision can give you the impetus you need to get moving. Once we decided we were going to sell, we had an organizing principle. We shared a goal that we had said out loud and we were in this together.
We slipped into our suits and padded out to the pool, slid into the water, and closed our eyes. We both sighed at the same time. That’s the thing about being in warm water. It’s hard to keep worrying. Which isn’t to say my brain wasn’t still sorting through strategies and solutions. I opened my eyes.
“Can we really list the house on the computer?” I said to Zora, who was doing a lazy breaststroke nearby.
She laughed. “I love the way you say it. ‘On the computer,’ like the Internet is this vast, mysterious thing that requires special attention and animal sacrifices in order to do your bidding.”
“Don’t make fun of me,” I said, glad I was floating on my back so I could see the moon. “My whole generation is illiterate when it comes to computers. Even the ones with the BlackBerries. They’re faking it.”
“You all are just lazy,” she said. “But the answer is yes, of course we can list it. All the real estate companies do it. That’s the easy part. The hard part is there are thousands of houses listed. Probably millions. We need something to make ours stand out. Something to catch your eye that makes it special.”
“Too bad we don’t have a mermaid.”
“That would definitely help.”
“You never did tell me the story of how it got here,” I said.
“You need to ask Amelia when she gets back,” Zora said, kicking her feet gently so that we floated along side by side, talking easily. “All I know is that some of the rich guys who built these houses had a little competition going with giving extravagant gifts to their wives. The guy next door built a life-size playhouse. The one across the street put in a terraced garden with a waterfall. There’s a house around the corner with beautiful stained-glass windows all around. But this guy drove them all crazy when he built this pool. It was one of the first ones in Atlanta and it got written up in the paper and everything.”
“How come the beautiful mermaid is so brown?” I said, knowing there were no black folks living in West End way back then.
“The tiles were made at some special place in Morocco and they cost a fortune. The guy didn’t specify color when he ordered it. He just said he wanted a mermaid, so when the tiles got here, he couldn’t send them back.”
“What did his wife say?”
“The story is that she refused to swim in it,” Zora said.
“Just because the mermaid was brown?”
“I guess,” Zora said, floating on ahead. “You should ask Amelia.”
That must have been one angry white woman to give up the pleasures of swimming in her own private pool just because of a brown mermaid, or there was more to the story than met the eye.
“Do you think it was his mistress?” I called to Zora at the other end of the pool now.
“The mermaid?” She sounded shocked.
“Not a real mermaid,” I said. “Whoever posed for the picture.”
“I never thought about it,” she said, laughing as she floated back alongside me. “You’re always looking for a story.”
“That’s my job,” I said. “You ready to get out?”
“Sure,” she said.
We climbed out into the cool night air and wrapped ourselves in two big beach towels.
“That would kind of finish off the story right, wouldn’t it?” I said. “The wife had looked the other way for years, and then, suddenly, in full view of her neighbors, she’s confronted with the face of her rival, right in her own backyard.”
“Right in her own backyard,” Zora echoed, wrapping another towel around her head.
“Now that would be enough to make you concede use of this wonderful pool, but just a generic racial response? I don’t think so.”
“That’s because you’re not a racist,” Zora said. “Remember they had to drain that whole pool in Las Vegas because Dorothy Dandridge put her toe in it.”
“Dorothy Dandridge was a real live woman, not a bunch of Moroccan tiles and they didn’t have to,” I said, slipping on my flip-flops and leaning over to touch my toes just because I could. “They chose to. All those people who sat there and let that hotel manager act a fool are the ones who made it such an ugly story.”
“What do you mean?”
“Think how differently that whole crowd could have gone down in history if they had all jumped in the pool when he insulted Dorothy to show their support for another human being. Then Dorothy would have jumped in, too, and they would have had the great pleasure of seeing one of the most beautiful women in the world laughing and playing in the water with all her new friends.”
“I like your story better than the real one, Mafeenie,” Zora said, slipping her arm through mine as we headed up the path to the house.
“Of course you do,” I said. “Everybody likes a happy ending.”
&n
bsp; TWENTY-NINE
The next morning when Zora went to work, I called Greer Woodruff’s office. The pretty little receptionist told me nobody was available so I left a message on the boss lady’s voice mail.
“Ms. Woodruff? This is Josephine Evans. Thank you for your offer to buy my mother’s house, but it’s not for sale at this time. I think she’d want it that way.”
THIRTY
Abbie was more confident of my decision than I was. She was making a pot of tea and telling me why.
“The first thing is, it’s your mother’s place, so you know you have to fix it up. Second, how can you pass it along to Miss Zora unless you do?”
She was pouring boiling water over the silver tea ball she had dropped into the round dark blue pot. “Plus, Dr. King deserves better.”
She put the teakettle back on the stove and dropped a big dollop of Tupelo honey into the hot water.
“Dr. Martin Luther King?”
“That’s the one,” she said. “May he rest in peace.”
“Rest in peace,” I said, “but what does that have to do with this?”
“Only everything,” Abbie said, taking down two round mugs in the same shape as the teapot. “Your house happens to be on his street.”
That much was true, but so was Jake’s Soul Food Shack and Miss Diana’s Wig Parlor and Hakim’s Bookstore and the building where the old Paschal’s used to be down the street from the Busy Bee Café.
“The corner lot, too. It should be a showpiece.”
“What are you talking about?” I said, following her down the hall to the living room where she had made what would probably be the last fire of the season. It was almost spring. Moving in a fragrant cloud of jasmine tea and patchouli, she put the tray down and we claimed opposite ends of the couch.
“I’m talking about showing some respect. I’m talking about how we’ve let a street that is supposed to honor a great American hero become a punch line for black comedians,” she said, pouring two steaming cups of sweet tea and handing me one. “I just think he deserves better.”