“Yeah,” Elvin answered absently, his eyes drawn to a sudden rush of activity near the elevator banks. “Speaking of things being out of place, what are they doing here?” he asked nervously.
Jin followed his gaze. Councilman Markum strode confidently down the hall, surrounded by a tight cluster of associates and reporters, Verta Mae Sneed among them. “So she is working with Markum,” she said, pointing her out to Elvin.
“And look, there’s Museum Guy.” Elvin shuddered as he nodded toward a rotund man whose pudgy legs struggled to keep up with Markum.
Jin and Elvin flattened themselves against the wall. As they waited for the group to pass, Jin overheard two nearby janitors commenting on the entourage.
“They brought out the bigwigs today. All for a painting, can you believe it?” said one of the men, who was pushing a cart loaded with cleaning supplies. Jin nudged Elvin, who nodded to let her know that he was listening.
“That painting, my friend, could save us our jobs,” the other man retorted, swishing around his mop to emphasize the point. “I, for one, thank the man upstairs that that kid found it. I heard the hospital is claiming that they own it, and it’s worth a lot of money. Might just save this place.”
How would Harlem Hospital own a painting by Henriette that was buried in a garden? Jin wondered.
“I don’t think they’re really going to close this place,” the first janitor argued. “This is a Harlem institution. Where else are the people gonna go when they get sick?”
“What planet are you living on? With the way things are going, this place could be gone tomorrow. That Markum guy has got the higher-ups salivating over his Harlem World project, saying that he’s gonna fund a state-of-the art medical facility that would make this place look like a dinosaur.”
“Don’t they know that the past doesn’t die? It lives beneath and just blossoms into new forms again and again. I read that somewhere,” the janitor with the cart said.
“Maybe you oughta give Markum a copy of that book,” the man with the mop joked. The two men chuckled as they moved down the hallway.
A few minutes later, Alex appeared. “And the Academy Award for Best Performance, goes to … moi!” she exploded. “You should’ve seen it. I did my best pathetic kid routine.”
“Alex,” Jin tried to interrupt her.
Alex ignored her. “I was peeking into your grandfather’s room when one of the nurses saw me. Immediately, I pretended like I was about to start crying. He’s my favorite uncle! I don’t know what I’ll do if he dies! I really laid it on. I think the nurse just gave me the info to shut me up.” She turned to Elvin. “Your grandfather’s still in a coma, but he’s stable.”
“Thanks, I appreciate it,” Elvin mumbled, his eyes darting to look at Jin.
“What’s going on?” Alex asked.
“The painting is here. Markum and his entourage just left. Verta Mae Sneed was with them,” Jin filled her in, and also told her about the janitors’ conversation that they’d overheard.
Alex’s mouth dropped open. “We’ve got to get a look at that painting.”
“Exactly,” Jin said. “Markum and his crew came from over here.” She pointed and led the way.
The painting was in a small rotunda in a newer section of the hospital. The area was roped off with a sign posted at the entrance that said PRIVATE. There was a glass case in the center of the enclosed area. A beefy security guard stood watch. Elvin, Alex, and Jin ducked back around the corner before he could see them.
“The painting must be in that case,” Alex said.
“But how do we get past the guard? That guy looks like he could squish us with one hand,” Elvin whispered.
“I have an idea,” Jin said. “You two go up to the guard and ask him a question, something like how to get to the nearest vending machine. If he steps away from his post to show you, I’ll sneak in and take some shots of the painting.”
Alex and Elvin agreed and approached the guard. Just as Jin suspected, the guard stepped away to point them down a nearby corridor. She quickly ducked under the rope barricade and ran over to the glass case. There was a canvas stretched out inside, but Jin didn’t stop to look at it, she just started snapping pictures with her phone.
“Hey!” She heard a booming voice behind her. “You can’t be in this area.” The security guard marched toward her.
Jin took a step back. “Uh, no speak English,” she said in a thick, generic Asian accent, and bowed her head slightly for full effect. People saw what they wanted to see, and for once, Jin was happy to use a ridiculous stereotype to her advantage.
“YOU CANNOT BE IN THIS AREA!” he shouted, and waved his arms in wild circular motions, shaking his head violently at the same time.
She nearly laughed out loud. If she really didn’t speak his language, did he think talking louder would make her suddenly understand him?
“So. No photo?” Jin said.
“YOU HAVE TO LEAVE!” He ushered her down the corridor where Elvin and Alex had disappeared. Jin found them munching on a bag of chips from the vending machine. Jin’s legs wobbled. Her nerves were only now catching up with her.
“Did it work?” Alex asked. Jin nodded and handed over her phone.
Alex flipped through the pictures, frowning. “We still don’t know the significance of this piece, or even if it’s really Henriette’s. I think we need Rad to weigh in on this one.”
Jin rolled her eyes, annoyed. I did all that, and she just brushes it off like it doesn’t matter?
Elvin fell into step beside her. “Nice work back there. Celebratory chip?” he offered.
“Fine,” Jin snapped as she grabbed the package and downed the entire bag.
Jin still felt irritated ten minutes later as they waited for Rad in the cereal aisle of a grocery store, a block away from the hospital. “Do we really have to meet him here?”
“I just wanted to be safe. Hospital security might still be on the lookout for Elvin,” Alex answered.
“So now you want to be safe?” Jin muttered under her breath. I pretty much just risked my life, not to mention what would happen to me if Halmoni found out, just to take a picture of a stupid painting—and Alex hasn’t said a word about it. It must only matter when she and Rad do cool, dangerous stuff, Jin thought, contorting her face into a frown.
“What did you say?” Alex glanced at her. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” Jin huffed, and picked up a box of Cap’n Crunch.
“No, seriously. You seem upset,” Alex pressed.
“I said I’m fine.” Jin pretended to be totally engrossed in the list of ingredients on the side of the box.
“Suit yourself,” Alex said, and wandered to the other end of the aisle, where she plopped down onto the floor and started swiping away at her phone. A few seconds later, Rad rolled into the aisle on his skateboard.
“I prefer Frosted Flakes, but Cap’n Crunch will do in a pinch,” he joked, tapping the box Jin was holding as he hopped off his board. “What up, dudes?”
Alex mumbled a weak “hey,” and Jin just nodded slightly in response.
“Whoa, I’m getting some serious negative vibes here. What’s going on?” Rad glanced at Elvin, who gave him a bewildered shrug.
“Ask Jin,” Alex muttered.
“I said I was fine,” Jin snapped.
“Hold up, dudes! Look around you. Do you see where you are?” Rad gestured toward the colorful boxes lining the shelves. “This is the cereal aisle. This is a happy place. Whatever is going on here, you need to squash it.”
“Jin is the one who’s upset.” Alex stood up and walked back to the group.
“Well, I wouldn’t be upset if someone didn’t think that she deserved all the credit for everything.”
“Are you talking about me? How could you even say that?” Alex looked genuinely hurt.
“For one, you always want us to say how great the stuff you do is, but you never say the same for other people. Like just now, you bra
gged about sneaking up to Elvin’s grandfather’s hospital room, but when I snuck past that guard to take the picture of the painting, you didn’t say anything.” Jin folded her arms across her chest.
“Maybe because I thought it went without saying how brilliant an idea that was.”
“Well, it doesn’t. Go without saying, that is.”
Alex raised both arms above her head. “Hear ye! Hear ye! Let the record show that I think Jin Yi is a brilliant mastermind, a sleuth of the highest order. This I proclaim to all those far and wide, now and forevermore!” Alex grinned and turned to Jin. “Seriously, I do think you’re brilliant. Happy now?”
A smile crept across Jin’s face. “It’s a start,” she said.
“As the great Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu said, ‘The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.’ Awesome work here, dudes.” Rad held out both hands and Jin and Alex gave him a fist bump. “Now, let’s move on to the painting. Lay it on me.”
Jin handed him her phone. Rad squinted at the screen for several long minutes.
“Since you guys asked me about Henriette Drummond, I’ve been doing some research on her and the work of the Invisible 7. They were a pretty amazing group of artists. This piece definitely looks like it could be one of Henriette’s, but it doesn’t seem finished to me. It looks almost like a study for a larger work,” Rad said.
“Maybe another mural?” Jin wondered, reaching for the phone. She studied the image of the painting. Rad was right, the piece did look more like a sketch. Comprised of a series of miniature black-and-white portraits, it didn’t have the colorful and expressive figures and backgrounds the hospital mural had. Most of the people in the painting were doctors and nurses dressed in white coats and uniforms, others were dressed in more traditional attire from Africa, Asia, and India. She remembered what Dr. Whitmore had told them about how Henriette had destroyed the sketches after she finished the Harlem Hospital mural. Maybe this sketch was for a mural she never got to paint, Jin thought.
“ ‘The Healers,’ ” Elvin read the title of the piece over Jin’s shoulder. “Wait, why is that person holding a human heart?” He pointed to one of the figures. Jin looked closely and saw that the person was indeed cradling a heart, small as a bird in his hands. Another person held a brain, and yet another, a pair of eyes. Most of the people in the portraits held less unusual items, like stethoscopes, plants, or a mortar and pestle.
“The Invisible 7 painted a lot of murals that celebrated regular people from the neighborhood, and also those who they felt had made a contribution to the community,” Rad explained. “Usually, they included some symbol of that person’s field or specialty in the painting,” Rad explained. “So that dude with the heart was maybe an awesome heart surgeon.”
“Hey, there’s Dr. Whitmore, without his beard.” Elvin pointed and read the name below one of the figures. “He’s holding a baby.”
“Yeah, he was an obstetrician before he retired,” Alex chimed. “I’ll have to tell him we saw this. The Invisible 7 seem like they were pretty cool.”
“I thought you guys might be into them. I also found several other Invisible 7 murals around the neighborhood. Those dudes really were about something, you know?” Rad said.
“Will you show us the other murals?” Alex asked.
Rad broke into a wide grin. “I was hoping you’d ask. Lately, I’ve been kind of obsessed with the ‘Sevens’—that’s what I started calling them. I even came up with my own little Invisible 7 mural walking tour. You dudes can be my first customers.” Jin looked over at him, surprised. Even she had to give Rad credit. Skater Dude had designed a walking tour.
After buying a box of Frosted Flakes for the road, they headed for the first stop on the tour. Rad rolled ahead on his board, while Alex, Elvin, and Jin trailed behind on foot.
“I might have to make this a skateboard tour in the future. That way everyone can stay together,” Rad said when the three of them had finally caught up with him in front of the former Magic Skillet restaurant.
Alex peered through the large front window into the now empty diner. “We’ve got to stop Markum,” she whispered to Jin, who nodded in agreement.
“It is a real bummer that this fine establishment is closed,” Rad said. “But at least there’s a really cool mural that will allow its legacy to live on. Follow me.” He led them across the street to a large mural painted on the side of another building, and pulled a crumpled piece of paper out of his pocket. “This mural actually pays homage to both the Magic Skillet and the Harlem YMCA. You can see the images of people eating at the Skillet and then doing stuff at the Y, which not only gave people a place to live but also hosted a lot of cultural activities. There was even a theater company here at one point,” Rad read from his notes on the paper. “The Skillet and the Y were both really important institutions that nourished the people of Harlem,” he said, sounding like a real tour guide.
Jin noticed a feather painted in the lower right-hand corner of the mural. It was just like the black one she’d seen on the mural at the hospital, except this one was bright green. “What’s with the feather?” she asked.
“Oh, that’s the logo of the Invisible 7. It’s on all their work, so that’s how you know the piece is one of theirs. Sometimes, instead of an entire mural, they’d just paint the feather on a particular building, to honor a person or organization.” Rad consulted his notes again. “They believed art had the power to speak to people directly. The feather is supposed to symbolize hope and freedom,” he read.
“Didn’t we see that feather in Verta Mae Sneed’s office?” Elvin asked.
That’s right! Jin suddenly remembered the red banner with the green feather hanging behind Verta Mae Sneed’s desk. She’d even made a sketch of it in her notebook—the notebook the developers from the building now had in their possession. She felt a wave of nausea churn in her stomach and inch up her esophagus at the thought. Focus on the future, focus on the future, she repeated to herself until the queasiness went away, then opened the new notebook she’d brought and quickly jotted down a question:
If the Invisible 7 feather is green, why is the one on the hospital mural black?
“All right, dudes, let’s roll!” Rad hopped on his board, ready to move on. They traveled uptown to an elegant townhome on Hamilton Terrace, where there was a single feather painted above the door. “This used to be the home of jazz singer Mary Lou Williams, who you probably never heard of—but check her out. She turned this house into a twenty-four-hour jazz academy. Lots of famous jazz musicians came here to study,” Rad said.
Next, they visited a mural that celebrated the Last Poets, a group of spoken-word artists from the 1960s who used poetry as a means to speak out against injustice, Rad told them. “These dudes were like rappers before there were rappers. They inspired hip-hop. Pretty awesome,” he gushed.
They visited several more murals, depicting a wide range of scenes, from parent protests for better schools for their kids to neighbors cleaning up their blocks, before coming to their last stop, a small brick building on 122nd Street and 7th Avenue. “It’s an abandoned church now, and way back in the day, it used to be a carriage house and stable for the owners of the brownstones in the area. But most important, this building was the original meeting place of the Invisible 7. This is where it all began, where the magic happened.” Rad stared reverently at the crumbling building, while Elvin, Jin, and Alex moved in closer.
“It’s not exactly welcoming,” Alex said, taking a look around.
“Hey, look at this!” Elvin pointed at a carved stone head of a goat, posted like a sentry above the building’s entrance. “This is some kind of crazy coincidence.” He pulled the goat Pez dispenser his grandfather had given him out of his pocket. Ever since the attack, he’d taken to carrying it around with him.
“Something tells me it’s not a coincidence,” Jin remarked, making a few notes. “Maybe it’s some kind of message.”
Elvin frowned. “If the message
is that my grandfather is stubborn, I’ve already gotten it loud and clear.”
“Cheer up, dude!” Rad clapped Elvin on the shoulder. “I have one more thing to show you guys,” he said.
They hopped on the subway back uptown to 135th Street, where Rad led them into the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. “This is one of best research libraries in the city. Oh, and the ashes of the poet Langston Hughes are also buried here, literally right here,” he said, pointing to the floor as they walked through a small atrium. Jin sped up. As much as she enjoyed reading Langston Hughes’s poetry, she wasn’t crazy about the idea of walking on his ashes.
Rad led them down a stairwell to one of the research rooms.
“Hello, Radley,” said a man sitting at a desk at the entrance of the room. Rad blushed and immediately spun around to give his three companions a stony glare. “Not a word about the name,” he hissed, then turned back to the librarian. “Hey, Mr. Bell. I was wondering if you could pull the file that I was working on the last time I was here, the one about the Invisible 7.”
Mr. Bell handed Rad a materials request slip, which he quickly filled out. Then Mr. Bell disappeared into a room behind the desk. He reappeared shortly and handed Rad a slim file folder. Rad found a table for the four of them.
“From what I can tell, the Invisible 7 broke up in the late 1960s, and it seemed to have something to do with this exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1969 called Harlem on My Mind,” Rad said once they were all seated. “This was supposed to be an exhibit that celebrated the culture and history of Harlem, which, on the surface, seemed like a really good idea, totally in line with the work that the Invisible 7 was doing around the neighborhood, right? But somehow, this thing went south really fast and exploded into a major controversy,” he explained. “Henriette and the Invisible 7 were among the most visible protestors of the exhibit.” Rad took a piece of paper out of the folder and slid it onto the table.
Jin reached for it. “ ‘An Open Letter to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Curators of the Harlem on My Mind Exhibition,’ ” she read aloud. “ ‘We, the artists and members of the Invisible 7, respectfully protest the aforementioned exhibition on the following grounds:
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