by Dan Baum
Officially, striking a child was against the rules, and this one parent had screamed to the school board. Mr. Jackson had stepped in with an artful compromise: Wil would leave Reed at Christmas break to finish his certification. During that semester Wil was off—studying for the test and working at Home Depot—Mr. Jackson was appointed principal at George Washington Carver, a combined junior and senior high at the edge of the Desire Project. Come the fall, Wil had been one of his first hires.
Carver, if anything, was rougher than Reed. Most of the Reed kids had had at least one sane parent. Carver kids, most of them growing up in the Desire, were right out of Lord of the Flies. If they had parents at all, the mothers might be turning five-dollar tricks on the living room sofa, the fathers selling off the family TVs, PlayStations, and microwaves to buy drugs. The Carver kids couldn’t play in the project courtyard, because that’s where the knuckleheads peddled their crack. They didn’t have a quiet place to sleep, much less study. Most of the kids were messed up with that welfare mentality, that bullshit about the world owing them a living and the white man standing on their necks. On Wil’s first day, maybe seven kids had shown up for band—listless, bored, and sulky. Da had come in with his drumstick bag full of wire and tape, and they’d cobbled up the usual cast-off instruments. As for uniforms, it was khaki pants and T-shirts; Carver’s colors were green and orange, but it was a long way from being able to field a band in uniform. He didn’t have but a dozen bandsmen now.
Most of his kids seemed to have been born with crack in their blood and couldn’t calm down enough to pay attention. Wil often had to stop practice and take them outside for a touch-football game to let them blow off energy and regain concentration. And always, the pine. The board of education. Indispensable, and Mr. Jackson quietly supported him. Most days he never had to touch it. During an unruly practice he’d send a kid to the office to “get that wood,” lay it across his knees, and ignore it—usually, that’s all it took to bring the band into focus. But occasionally, he’d send a kid to his office to grab the top of the desk, and he’d close the door. Never in anger. Never as revenge. Pain was like Ritalin. A measured dose could bring a child back to himself. A child was happier focused.
Many days, Wil had had Da around school during practice, endlessly rummaging through his magic drumstick bag for whatever a kid needed to fix an instrument. Lately, though, Da hadn’t been coming around, and Wil had just found out why. He’d gone to have dinner with his parents on Dwyer Road, and without any preamble Da had sat him and Lawrence down at the kitchen table and said, “I got something to tell y’all. I got cancer, and there’s nothing they can do for me.” Da wasn’t one to say something in thirty minutes that he could say in one.
Mr. Jackson turned in to an alley and parked behind a sooty warehouse. A small sign beside the door read, “Louisiana Schoolbook Depository.”
“This will be a relief,” he said. “I’ve been embarrassed—really, embarrassed, to hand out the books we got at Carver. They’re not just tore up; they’re egregiously outdated.” He frowned, his square face bunching. “What’s the use of a civics book from the 1950s?”
“I’m impressed you got this done,” Wil said as they walked inside. Mr. Jackson had been fighting the school board for months to get funds for new textbooks.
“We’re a poor school.” Mr. Jackson stopped and straightened his tie.
A young, pretty clerk sat at a window. “I have your order right here,” she said, pulling out some yellow papers. “It’s for the middle school and the high school, is that right?”
“That’s right.” They ran down the list: new science, math, social studies, and English textbooks for everybody.
“You brought the check?” she asked.
“Right here,” Mr. Jackson said, opening his briefcase and taking out a checkbook the size of a photo album. He bent to write the check. “Eighty. Three. Thousand,” he said, fluidly filling in the number. He signed it with a flourish. She clipped the check to a sheaf of yellow papers and lifted the phone.
It took Wil, Mr. Jackson, and a couple of workmen from the warehouse an hour to fill the pickup bed with cartons of new textbooks. Wil tarped and tied it carefully.
Mr. Jackson was unusually quiet as they made their way back to the interstate. He didn’t talk at all until they had crossed the causeway through the swamps west of New Orleans, passed the airport, skirted the flossy commercial section of Metairie, and entered Orleans Parish.
“Well, Wilbert,” he said. “I hope you’re ready to go to prison.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Jail! Prison! Fraud!” Mr. Jackson sang. He looked over at Wil with a wide smile. “I don’t think there’s more than about three hundred dollars in the Carver account.”
“You wrote a bogus check?”
“I couldn’t do it anymore.” Mr. Jackson squeezed the wheel, and his smile faded. “I couldn’t face the kids another day with those raggedy-ass books.”
BELINDA SMALLS
UNIVERSITY OF NEW ORLEANS
1998
Belinda touched the tender spot on her cheekbone. The other women in the office never said anything about her bruises. Maybe they couldn’t recognize discoloration on dark skin, or maybe they figured it was normal in Belinda’s world. But men on Egania Street didn’t hit their women. Dad may have run out, but he’d never struck Mom, and Lionus would never have raised a hand.
She wondered, for the thousandth time, why she’d let herself get mixed up with Snooker. She’d been doing fine on her own, Lionus paying his share and seeing the girls every few days. Belinda had been working, taking care of her girls, living a quiet life with her books. Snooker didn’t do a thing for her but drink her pay and beat her up—and give her one more child, a baby boy named Curtis.
She had to get Snooker out of her life before he killed her.
That white-picket-fence life seemed to move further away the closer she tried to get to it. Even getting a bachelor’s degree at SUNO hadn’t changed her life. The best job she could find was here in the personnel department at the University of New Orleans—the white counterpart to SUNO. And as she watched the others in the office, she realized she’d made a terrible mistake. SUNO degrees weren’t respected. Of course not; SUNO was a black college. The other clerks in the office would look at a résumé, notice that the applicant had graduated from SUNO, and put the application in the wastebasket. The end of the twentieth century, Belinda thought, and not only are there still white and black colleges, but the black colleges aren’t respected.
Her older daughter, Lionesha—whom everybody called Niecy—was fourteen now. Latisha—Mookey—was ten. It was time to start being a better role model, Belinda thought.
One afternoon she heard two of the women talking about a class they were taking. It turned out anybody working for the University of New Orleans could take classes for free. Belinda rolled the thought around in her head for a few days before coming to her decision: she was going to start college all over again. It hadn’t been enough to claw her way through to vocational schools and an accredited four-year college. If she really wanted to get ahead—if she really wanted that white-picket-fence life outside the Lower Ninth Ward—she was going to need a white lady’s education.
That fall, while caring for three children, working full-time, and divorcing her husband, Belinda started in on her second bachelor’s degree.
TIM BRUNEAU
FORT POLK, LOUISIANA
1998
Tim Bruneau screeched his Jeep Cherokee to a halt, stepped out, and cocked his fists on his hips. He wore mirrored sunglasses and a black brassard emblazoned with “MP” in big white letters. His camouflaged fatigues were starched and ironed to the stiffness of cardboard; his boots and his duty belt—from which hung an automatic pistol, handcuffs, and a nightstick—were buffed to a searing black. In the shower, Tim Bruneau was a pale, skinny, twenty-three-year-old E-4, but on the parade ground he was The Man.
A captain stood
with his back to him, addressing a company of soldiers. He turned to look at Tim and rolled his eyes; he’d gotten a call ahead of time that Tim was going to show up. He started to say something, but Tim thrust forward an out-turned palm.
“Sir!” Tim said. “Do not confuse your rank with my authority!” Tim called the name of a soldier and one in back broke ranks and walked forward sheepishly. Tim turned to the captain. “Dirty urine, sir,” he said. “This soldier will be coming with me.” The captain shrugged.
Tim cuffed the private, helped him into a jeep, and ignored his wheedling protests all the way to the stockade.
All Tim had ever wanted, from the time he was eight years old in Boerne, Texas, was to be a cop. Until then, his mother had been the most powerful authority in his universe. Even Tim’s stepdad, a kindly soft-spoken fellow named Gary, hadn’t wielded the imperial command of the great and powerful Mom. Then one day a Texas state trooper pulled Mom over as they were driving up Highway 46. She’d started to argue; nobody kept her from getting home after work and getting out her shoes. The trooper, who to Tim looked like a statue of himself—tall, broad, and impeccably creased—reduced Mom to sniveling jelly. Without once raising his voice, he lectured her about the 140 children killed in car accidents the year before. He talked about the law, about the need to model upright behavior to young ones. He went on and on, and by the time he was finished, Mom was practically thanking him for the ticket. Tim was agog. From that day on, he always knew what to say when grown-ups asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up.
The military police was an imperfect career. The Army was too orderly a society to foster enough screwups to make police work fun. What he really wanted was to kick some ass. After a boring stint in Panama, Tim had requested transfer to Fort Hood, Texas, the bleakest, dustiest, most miserable post in the Army—which made it the post with the most drug dealing, domestic abuse, interunit brawling, and general mayhem. The Army, though, in its wisdom, had sent him here to Fort Polk, Louisiana. Inspecting urine samples was not Tim’s idea of police work.
The closest big city to Fort Polk was New Orleans, which Tim enjoyed visiting on furlough. It was hot, sexy, and noisy, like Panama. And its police force was interesting. Tim had watched a fight on Bourbon Street one night—a couple of tattooed toughs whaling on each other with garbage-can lids. Tim had asked a cop leaning on a nearby lamppost to do something.
“Soon as they’re done,” the cop had said. And sure enough, when the two toughs lay exhausted on the ground, the cop had sauntered up to clap them in cuffs. Tim still couldn’t decide if the cop had been lazy or smart.
The newspapers lately were full of police news from New Orleans, because the city’s new chief of police was really shaking things up. NOPD cops were notorious for taking money, dealing drugs, and selling stolen property. A cop named Antoinette Frank had shot a fellow cop dead a while back, along with two civilians, while robbing a restaurant. Another cop, named Len Davis, had run a multimillion-dollar cocaine ring and murdered a woman because she’d had the nerve to report him for brutality. The place was out of control.
But now the NOPD had a new chief, Richard Pennington, who had locked up a couple dozen cops, fired many more, disbanded the corrupt Internal Affairs office, and banned cops working private security details at bars. Pennington carried a gun, because he was afraid a cop might take a pop at him.
In a few months, Tim would have to decide whether to reenlist. Increasingly, he found himself thinking about how much fun it would be to get in on the ground floor of Pennington’s reforms. Having fired so many officers, Pennington was hungry for new ones. Every day, Tim saw Pennington’s recruiting ad in the Times-Picayune: 1-800-NOPD-YES.
BILLY GRACE
AUDUBON PARK
1999
It was a warm, fragrant summer evening, and as he crossed Exposition Boulevard into Audubon Park with John Charbonnet, Billy felt his spirits rise. Joggers and bicyclists meandered along the broad path that ran in a great misshapen oval the length of the park. Men and women in bright pastels played golf in the slanting afternoon light. Billy and John had to decide on eight maids and eight dukes for debut season, and plenty of twelve-year-old pages for the ball. He loved imagining the men of New Orleans, walking these same oak-lined paths and making these same choices for more than a century.
Billy was captain of the Rex krewe now. No lawyer had ever been chosen as captain, and Billy understood why. It was a huge job; Billy figured it would consume at least five hundred otherwise-billable hours this year. He had lieutenants, sure. One was in charge of the parade; one planned the ball; one wrote the proclamation; another designed and ordered the invitations; there was the cast dinner, the meet-the-king party, and the luncheons to plan; somebody had to run the Rex den, where the floats were stored and the costumes made. In all, Billy had some thirty-five men ringing his cell phone at all hours of the day and night.
“You did a good thing, getting Proteus back,” John said. Proteus hadn’t paraded for the seven years since Dorothy Mae Taylor’s antidiscrimination ordinance had taken effect. Dutch Morial’s son Marc was mayor now, and Billy—who had stuck out his neck and held parties at 2525 to raise money for his campaign—was co-chair of his Mardi Gras Advisory Committee. Billy had contrived to bring Morial and the Proteus captain together at a king-cake celebration. Marc, tall and fair skinned, with all of his father’s intensity, had graciously called the Proteus parade Mardi Gras’s most beautiful. It was all the krewe had needed; they’d signed the antidiscrimination clause and were back in their den working on floats with the energy of the redeemed.
“You and Morial work well together,” John said, and Billy glanced over at him. It was an innocuous comment, but Billy’s support for Morial—second in the dynasty that had broken white power at city hall—had been a minor scandal in certain uptown circles.
“I like Marc,” Billy said, though it didn’t begin to sum up the relationship. After helping Marc get elected, he’d been talked into serving on the Sewerage and Water Board, a legendarily cronyism-plagued agency. He hated hearing people argue, with no apparent shame, that black firms ought to get 10 percent of all contracts right off the top, simply because they were entitled. It wasn’t businesslike. It lacked elegance. More than once, Billy had had to bite his tongue; he couldn’t fight them every time. A certain amount of cronyism came with the office of New Orleans mayor. It had been that way with white mayors, so nobody should expect it to be different now.
“I must say, it seems like you’re doing very well in your tax-collection business without doing much work.”
Billy stopped. “What?”
John shrugged. “I’m just saying.”
Billy was speechless. He was proud of the work he and Westy were doing to collect unpaid city taxes. They had teamed up with a big Texas law firm called Linebarger that had the equipment and experience to process into useful data the reels of computer tape moldering in the courthouse basement. “We won the contract in open bidding, John,” Billy said.
“I know that. But thirty percent?”
The city council had imposed a 30 percent penalty on unpaid taxes and allowed Billy’s partnership to keep it as their commission. Sure, it was a lot of money. Sure, it sometimes took nothing more than writing a strong letter to get the city paid. That was the nature of contingency work.
“We only get paid on what we collect,” Billy said. “If we weren’t doing it, the taxes would go unpaid.”
“True,” John said.
“We’re making the city money.” Billy was doing all right himself; far from the twenty-five thousand a year he’d predicted, he and his partners had already made six million dollars.
“I’m sorry I brought it up,” John said.
Shit, Billy thought. This was not a good sign. If John—his pal—was thinking this way, what was the rest of uptown thinking?
WILBERT RAWLINS JR.
WHITNEY BANK, READ BOULEVARD
1999
Wil paced
the lobby of the Read Boulevard branch of Whitney Bank in New Orleans East, waiting for Luscious to show up. The great day had arrived; finally he was going to own a home. He and Luscious would be moving out of Ma and Da’s place on Dwyer Road, which was a little worrisome since Da’s diagnosis. Ma, though, said they could use the privacy, and Da could not have been prouder. He’d watched Wil save for four long years, to achieve what he himself never had.
They had to be at the realtor’s for two o’clock with a cashier’s check. Luscious was supposed to have gotten the check a week ago, but every day it was the same thing: my nails appointment went too long; I had to stay late at work; I forgot. Now they were down to the wire, picking up the check on their way to the closing.
Luscious came clicking across the bank lobby in yellow high heels, her cheeks flushed. Wil still could not believe he’d talked such a beautiful woman into marrying him. That day in the Southern cafeteria, he’d tapped his band brother Squaly on the shoulder and said, “See that woman? She’s going to be my wife.” Now she presented a smooth, perfumed cheek for him to kiss, but didn’t make eye contact.
He took her arm and led her to the teller’s window. “We’d like a cashier’s check,” he said. He pushed the withdrawal slip across the counter to the young woman on the other side. “Fourteen thousand dollars,” he said. “Going to put a down payment on our first house!”