by Ibi Zoboi
Pri paces back and forth in the short, narrow hallway. Donna covers her face with her hands, and I can’t tell if she’s crying or not.
“The girl on the news?” I ask, a little bit calmer now. “The one the people are protesting for? Is that your fault? Did you do that?”
Chantal lets go of me. “Now why in the world would you connect a dead white girl to us, huh? Why would you even think we have anything to do with that?”
“I’m not stupid,” I say. For a moment, I am afraid I’ve said too much. Detective Stevens has told me too much. “I heard that man, Uncle Q, say it. Grosse Pointe Park, right?”
They’re all quiet. Then Donna starts to walk into her bedroom.
“No! You have to tell me what’s going on. There is all this money. I don’t even see Matant Jo working. Is that what you have been sending to Haiti all this time? Drug money? If everything I ever had in my life is because of drug money, I need to know.” I speak as if my words are running. I’m out of breath. My heart is a conga drum. I wipe sweat from my forehead.
“It wasn’t always drug money,” Chantal says.
“Chant!” Pri calls out. “What you doing?”
“She’s family. She asked a question, so I’m telling her.”
Pri rushes to me and puts her finger in my face. “Fabiola, I swear on my father’s grave, if you so much as utter a word to any one of your so-called friends, I will . . . Ooooh! You don’t even wanna know.” She steps away from me.
Chantal takes my hand and walks me into her bedroom. She sits me down. Donna and Pri come in, turn on a nearby lamp, and close the door behind them. Chantal doesn’t let go of my hand. She takes the other one and looks me in the eye. I look her in the eye, too.
“Maybe it was supposed to be Four Bees all along,” she says.
Pri sighs long and deep, and she plops down on my mattress. It makes a hissing sound as if the air is slowly escaping.
“Maybe we’re not supposed to be like a pyramid,” Chantal continues. “’Cause that’ll mean somebody would have to be on top. And we don’t want nobody falling off.”
“Chantal, what the fuck you talkin’ about?” Pri asks.
Chantal shushes her. “Maybe you’re here to make us more like a square—four points—a solid foundation.”
“I can’t believe she’s turning this shit into a geometry class,” Pri mumbles.
I pull my hands away from Chantal. “Don’t treat me like a baby,” I say. “How are you going to get the money for that man by the end of the month?”
“I don’t know yet. Uncle Q was like a father to us,” Donna says. She’s standing by the closed door with her arms folded across her chest. A silky scarf is tied around her head and for the first time, I get a good look at her face without all the makeup. I see my face in hers, my mother’s face in hers—so small, simple, and pretty. “He looked out for us after our father died.”
“Yo, son.” Pri sits up on the air mattress now and pounds her fist into her palm with each word she speaks. “He’s out fifteen Gs. You think he’s gonna let that shit slide?”
“He’s not gonna let it slide,” Chantal says.
“Wait, wait, wait,” I say. “What happened to his money? Why don’t you just give it back to him?”
Chantal sighs. “Fabiola, our father was making a drop for Q when he got shot in the back of his head. He wasn’t dealing or nothing. He just needed some extra cash, like everybody else around here.”
“What?” I breathe. I sit down. I brace myself.
“It wasn’t random,” she continues. “Our father dipped his toe into the game for just a hot minute. One drop. That’s all. So, of course, Q had to pay up for that deal gone bad. So Q gave Ma thirty Gs ’cause we were just little kids and she was struggling really hard to raise us. She didn’t know English, and she didn’t have any skills. But that money wasn’t lasting ’cause Ma was giving it away—a couple hundred here, a couple thousand there, until Q put an end to that. He was like, Yo, they gotta pay you back. So she started loaning out money—a loan shark. And she had to get muscle to back her up because people weren’t paying her back at first. So Q hooked her up with some of his boys. And with that kinda weight, she had to have the mouth to back everything else up, too. If her boys couldn’t handle business, Ma would just roll up to somebody’s house, curse the shit out of them in Creole, and jack them up for all they got. You know why, Fabiola?”
“No. Why?”
“Because of you and your mom,” Chantal says. “Catholic school for all three of us out here was just pennies. But your ass over there in Haiti cost her like twenty Gs every year. Your school, money for your mom, your clothes. Hell, all this time, Ma thought y’all were building a mansion near the beach and she swore she’d go back down there to retire.
“But she’s getting sick. We don’t want her to do this loan-sharking shit anymore. Money was running out. We still gotta live, Fab. We still gotta breathe. Money’s just room to breathe, that’s all.”
I don’t even realize when the tears start rolling down my cheeks. I let them fall. I let them drip from my chin, and onto my mother’s nightgown, and onto Chantal’s blanket. The room is quiet. “What now?” I finally ask.
“What now is that you keep your mouth shut and let us handle this,” Pri says. “As a matter of fact, forget everything you heard and saw tonight. Don’t let Ma even read that shit off your forehead.”
Chantal nods. “Focus on graduating, Fabiola. That’s all.”
“My mother,” I whisper.
Chantal sighs. “We’ll figure something out. I promise.”
I don’t believe her, because this thing with Uncle Q is a much heavier burden than this aunt they hardly know. They are the ones who are responsible for that girl’s death. Not Dray. My cousins. I am at a crossroads again.
Hours pass and my cousins are asleep. I breathe in and pretend that I’m taking in my mother’s scent—baby powder and cheap perfume. I hug myself and pretend it’s her arms around me, pulling me in close, and kissing me on the forehead, and asking me if I washed my face, if I did my homework, if I made a good, hearty meal for her to eat.
Something pulls me out of bed, out of Chantal’s room, out of the house, and onto American Street and Joy Road. Bad Leg is nowhere. His overturned plastic bucket is gone, and the streetlight shines on only the empty lot and me. I am lost. There is no road for me to take. Nothing will lead me to my mother, or clear the way for her to get to me.
I turn to each of the corners—the four directions—as if to bow to every single possibility around me: north, south, east, west. A light rain starts to fall and I think of my cousins. If the old man at the corner called Bad Leg is Papa Legba in the flesh, if Dray with his eye patch and gold cross is Baron Samedi, if Donna with her makeup and pretty things is Ezili and, with her scars, Ezili-Danto, then Chantal and Pri can be my spirit guides, too, as Ogu, the warrior, and one-half of Les Marassa Jumeaux, the divine twins who stand for truth, balance, and justice. Maybe even Kasim represents a lwa if I look hard enough. They are all here to help.
I run back to the house and reach the door, turn the knob, but it doesn’t budge. I twist the knob from right to left, from left to right. It’s locked. I almost knock, but something about this door . . . I step back away from it and go down the short front steps. Something about those steps . . . I back away from the house and stand on the narrow patch of brown grass. Something about this house . . . 8800 American Street.
I used to stare at that address whenever those white envelopes with the blue-and-red-striped edges would make their way to our little house in Port-au-Prince. I’d copy the address over and over again, 8800 American Street, because this house was my very first home. But for three short months only. This house is where I became American. This house is the one my mother and I prayed for every night, every morning, and during every ceremony: 8800 American Street.
But maybe, again, my eyes are betraying me, because this house that stands here at the corner, with
its doorway almost like a smile, with its windows almost like eyes making fun of everything it sees, seems different.
I walk around the side, to Joy Road, thinking there must be another door I’ve never seen. Nothing. There’s a small backyard protected by a tall gate. No entrance there, either.
I come back around to the front and knock on the door really loud. Finally, I hear heavy footsteps. I guess I didn’t hear Matant Jo come in after all. She opens the door, but instead of my aunt’s face, or any one of my cousins greeting me, it’s an older white man.
I quickly apologize and step back away from the door and run down the steps, thinking that I got turned around somehow. But I look back at the house, now with its door closed. It’s still 8800 American Street. So I go back and knock again. Now it’s a white woman who opens the door. I apologize. She closes the door. I don’t move because the number on the house still reads 8800. So I knock again. This time, a younger white man opens the door.
“Excuse me,” I ask. “Is this eighty-eight hundred?”
I must’ve scared him, because his eyes open wide, wide, and he shuts the door. But before I knock again, he’s back. This time I’m staring at a gun. A gun!
And the only thing I can do is throw my hands up to my face and scream.
It goes off with a loud bang.
I scream and scream until I hear my name.
“Fabiola! Fabiola!”
I open my eyes to bright light and Chantal’s face standing over me, calling my name over and over again until I stop screaming and realize that I’ve been in bed all along.
“Are you okay?” Chantal asks.
“No,” I say. As my heart calms down, as my breath softens, I get up to work on my altar.
I tie my head with my mother’s white scarf, fill the white enamel mug with water from the bathroom sink, light another tea candle with a match, and recite my prayer to Papa Legba once again.
THE STORY OF 8800 AMERICAN STREET
There was work here in Detroit—cars, houses, factories, highways. Here was the American dream built brick by brick, screw by screw, concrete over dirt.
So Adrian Weiss and his wife, Ruth, moved into 8800 American Street in July 1924, after that long journey from Poland, and Ellis Island, and the tenements of New York City. He’d been working in the Ford River Rouge complex for the last five years when Ruth gave birth to their first child in the middle of a snowstorm. Adrian came home two days later, drunk, smelly, bruised, and without a job because Henry Ford had zero tolerance for drunkards and their bathtub gin. So why not gin? Adrian loved it just as much as he loved the Model T. And there was more money with the Purple Gang and its bootlegging.
Months later, Ruth hid money beneath the mattresses, in Mason jars, in the ice box, in the backyard. Adrian liked to flaunt his money, even during the Great Depression of 1929, when the other husbands were let go from their jobs, and the women knocked on the door of 8800 American Street for some bread and milk or for some of that well-hidden money.
So maybe it was the jealous husbands on American Street, or unpaid debt owed to some members of the Purple Gang, that led to the shooting of Adrian Weiss on the corner of American Street and Joy Road. And maybe it was because of this first act of violence at the crossroads of hopes and dreams that death lingered around that house like a baby ghost.
So in 1942, Ohio native and father of one Wilson Coolidge, who’d bought the house from Ruth Weiss four years earlier, was struck by a car on the corner of American and Joy.
Father of two, Alabama native, and son of a sharecropper, Lester Charles Walker was one of American Street’s very first black residents in 1947. He was shot and killed by his white neighbor just as he stepped out of 8800.
The old families, whose grandfathers and fathers worked at the Ford plant, were fleeing the neighborhood as if it was the second coming of the black plague. White flight, they called it. And it swept over most of Detroit like a giant bird of prey.
It was no use selling 8800 since kinfolk from Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina were now moving in, and on most days, they gathered on the sidewalks and the porches for gossip and cookouts.
Death had moved away from 8800 American Street and traveled to the many broken parts of the city. So during the 12th Street riot in July 1967, Lester Junior was struck by a single bullet to the head.
The youngest Walker son rented out 8800 all through the eighties and nineties when Death claimed the lives of dealers and junkies alike. Until the day came when a black man in a suit and with a funny accent decided to call it his little dream house. He wanted what the very first residents wanted: to be American and to have some Joy.
So in 2000, Jean-Phillip François, the Haitian immigrant and the first occupant to actually land a job at a car factory—the Chrysler plant—paid the city three thousand dollars in cash for that little house on American Street.
And maybe because the little house had been revived with the sounds of babies and the scent of warm meals and love and hopes and dreams, Death woke from its long sleep to claim the life of Haitian immigrant and father of three Jean-Phillip François with a single bullet to the head outside the Chrysler plant.
Death parked itself on that corner of American and Joy, some days as still as stone, other days singing cautionary songs and delivering telltale riddles, waiting for the day when one girl would ask to open the gates to the other side.
TWENTY-TWO
MY SCALP ITCHES, but I can’t get to it because of this stupid weave. The fake hair is sewn to my own braided hair and my scalp doesn’t have room to breathe. And it was all for nothing. I turned myself into someone else just so I could get information on Dray, but he was the wrong one.
He comes around less now, and I hang out with Pri and Donna more. Or maybe they are keeping me close. Only a few days have passed since the thing with Q and me finding out what my cousins really do for money.
But it doesn’t change who they are—Chantal still sticks to her books and is worried about paying for her classes next semester. She shows me how to fill out financial aid and scholarship forms. “You’re a citizen, so you’ll be good. But make sure you take advantage of every penny, you hear me?” she says.
I don’t trust it because my mother filled out American forms that promised her things, too.
Pri still likes a girl from afar. I hear her singing in the shower one night—a love song. She sings Taj’s name. Her voice is smooth and it reaches me all the way on my mattress. It sounds like it’s filled with the shards of her broken heart. So when she comes out, I ask her, “How will you ever know if Taj feels the same?”
“I won’t. And I’m okay with that,” Pri says. “That’s what gives me my edge. Probably gonna walk around with a little chip on my shoulder all my life.”
“But you deserve every good thing,” I tell her.
“And the bad things?” she asks.
I don’t have an answer for her.
I borrow more of Donna’s clothes now. This is how we’ve become closer. I give in to all the things I’ve always liked: jeans that show off my curves, light makeup—not too much, just lip gloss and mascara—and beautiful hairstyles that highlight my eyes and cheekbones as Donna says. My mother is not here to judge me. So I experiment with different looks.
And Kasim. Kasim. I have been ignoring him since the night I found out.
My cousins make sure that I come with them whenever they go out together. I’m never in the house alone with Matant Jo. One day, we drove somewhere to pay a bill. Another day, we went grocery shopping. This morning, we’re going out to eat chicken and waffles, a dish I’ve never had.
Before we leave, I hear Matant Jo calling Chantal’s name from her bedroom. She comes out and she’s all dressed up in a nice sweater and a wig. She’s been making herself look nice and going out. She’s not worried about her sister anymore, it seems. But I am. She reminds me of my mother when she’s like this—all smiles and sunny days. But Chantal tells me not to get used to it.
> “Where y’all going?” she asks. “Is there room for me?”
“Hell yeah!” Pri says.
And soon, I’m in the backseat, squeezed between the twins while Chantal drives and Aunt Jo sits in the passenger seat. My heart swells because this is starting to feel like a family. My heart deflates because my mother is starting to feel farther and farther away. I shake the thought from my mind, because thinking of my mother forces me to think of my cousins and their drugs, which makes me think of Detective Stevens, and Dray, and Kasim. Kasim. My heart swells again.
We drive down Livernois Avenue to a place called Kuzzo’s Chicken and Waffles.
“This is your spot, cuzz,” Pri jokes, and rubs the top of my head.
When Chantal parks the car, I notice her looking every which way, as if making sure nothing is going to jump out of the corners of this neighborhood to attack us. Donna and Pri are looking around, too, and I soon realize that they think Q might be here. This is the only thing I’ve seen them be afraid of—Q and his threat.
Matant Jo is still all smiles and sunshine and has no idea what’s going on with her daughters, or even me, or even her sister. If she finds out about all of this, I wonder if it will break her.
The restaurant is full of people, and this reminds me of my first date with Kasim, when we saw the Alvin Ailey performance. I shake that from my mind, too, because it makes me think of the tickets, which makes me think of Uncle Q, which makes me scared for my cousins.
The whole time at the restaurant, Pri keeps an eye on me, as if I will shout out their secret to their mother at any moment. Even as they joke and eat, I’m quiet and try to enjoy this fried chicken and waffles. Pri forces me to pour syrup over my chicken, too. She’s sitting next to me when my phone rings and I recognize Detective Stevens’s number. Pri looks at my phone. I don’t hide it from her, and I’m glad that I never typed in the detective’s name.
“Who’s that? Imani?” she asks.
I nod and don’t answer the phone.
“You didn’t answer it?” Pri says. “So you cuttin’ off Kasim and Imani? Too much Detroit drama for you, huh?”