The Cave Dwellers

by Christina McDowell

  “Companies,” he corrects her, frustrated that he has to sit here and listen to Bunny recap what he’s always known. “The Banks got companies. But listen, we don’t got a lot of time, my minutes…” Anthony says urgently, his stomach churning, anxious for the money.

  “Anthony,” Bunny says, taking her time, “do you think the Banks family deserved to die? Do you think they had it coming?”

  Anthony bites his cheek, exhales. “When I’m questioned about it, I’m having to pretend to show remorse, ’cause if I don’t it makes me look guilty. But when someone’s fuckin’ killed your father, you don’t give a shit what happens to them—in fact, you want the worst for them.… How do you think it’s going to make me look?”

  “I—I don’t know, I don’t know what it’s like to lose a father, I guess. I can’t say.”

  “Mm-hmm.” Anthony doubts her honesty.

  “I think… I think I’m… afraid,” Bunny continues.

  “Afraid of what, we don’t got all day here!” Anthony’s impatience is escalating as his phone minutes dwindle.

  “Afraid that I’m a bad person.”

  “You want to give me a hundred thousand dollars, and you think you’re a bad person? What the fuck’s wrong with you?!”

  “ ’Cause the money I inherited is dark and conditional and bleeding all over America!” She wants him to tell her it’s okay, she wants him to tell her she’s innocent, she wants him to tell her she shouldn’t feel guilty, she wants to put the burden on anyone but herself. She wants him to tell her she isn’t complicit.

  Anthony takes a good long look at her. “You’re not bad, Grace, you’re not bad.”

  “Right, yeah, of course,” Bunny lies, reburying the shame she feels. “So will you take the money? I want to give it to you, to go after what is fair and what is right—you should have a chance to be heard and the right to a decent fucking lawyer. But I—if you take the money, I won’t be able to write about your case. I probably shouldn’t,” she says, wiggling her way out of “Grace, independent reporter.”

  “Yeah, yes, thank you. I’ll take the money,” Anthony says into the telephone. “So what is this anyway, your white guilt? A donation to make you feel better about Black lives?”

  Bunny panics, she knows she’s gotten too emotional, she’s revealed too much, why did I do that, why did I come here? “I don’t want to end up like my parents,” she blurts out. It is the most honest thing she has shared.

  Anthony takes it in. “Yeah,” he says, “me neither.”

  For a brief moment they share a look of understanding.

  “So who should I give the money to?” Bunny asks.

  Anacostia

  In 1608 explorer John Smith discovered a village along the Anacostia River that belonged to the Nacotchtank tribeI (Anacostia is the Anglicized version of their name). It turned out to be an abundant trading center frequented by the Iroquois of New York among others. By 1668, the Native Americans were being forced out and uprooted by war. It wasn’t until 1854 that Anacostia became an early suburb of the District of Columbia. Known in those days as Uniontown, it was built to provide affordable housing for the white working class until desegregation spread and public housing units were built in the 1950s and ’60s. During this time, Anacostia saw a dramatic change, its population quickly becoming predominantly Black amidst cultural, political, and racial tensions.

  During the crack cocaine crisis of the 1980s and ’90s, Anacostia took a violent turn as an epicenter for drug dealing in Washington, making the city the murder capital of the United States. Its name became synonymous with gun violence for the white elites, perpetuating even deeper racial tensions, gentrification, and segregation.II Once home to abolitionist Fredrick Douglass, Anacostia today is being eyed by aggressive developers eager to build properties as the massive infrastructure project of the Eleventh Street Bridge Park, connecting the Navy Yard district to Anacostia, is scheduled to open in the near future.

  I. https://www.nps.gov/nr/travel/wash/dc90.htm

  II. Asch and Musgrove, Chocolate City.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  Bunny stares down at the brown river as her Uber crosses the Eleventh Street Bridge. She couldn’t risk getting lost or parking her car on the street, given what her mother’s always told her: Don’t get lost and end up in Anacostia, you might get shot.

  On Bunny’s sixth-grade field trip hiking through Great Falls, the only Hispanic kid in her class slipped on a wet rock by the river, splitting his forehead open. When Bunny saw the blood spilling down his cheek, she felt it was the inevitable result of socioeconomic and racial consequences: This is what happens to Hispanic children. The thought came to her as though she’d been warned of it her entire eleven years on earth. And for the rest of the school year, Bunny was afraid to sit near him, as if she might catch a fall through osmosis—it was a white psychosis. Slipping: it can happen to anyone.

  For Bunny’s entire life, everyone in her inner circle always said not to cross the bridge into Anacostia. But as she enters Ward Eight, passing Fredrick Douglass’s large house, its porch buzzing with tourists, the crossing of the wards feels anticlimactic. Where are all the loose gunmen? Children bleeding and starving in the street?

  They drive down Good Hope Road passing signs for CASH KING and HOPE DOLLAR STORE, abandoned laundromats in art deco buildings hugging corners, liquor stores. Bunny sees an “eye in the sky” tower for the first time. After her visit at the jail, she knows what it’s for: government and police surveillance. Intimidation.

  “Is this the right location, miss?” asks the Uber driver, a Middle Eastern man.

  “Yep. Here is good.”

  He pulls the car over to the curb.

  Bunny gets out and checks the address, then looks up to the yellow row house, protected by a chain-link fence. She walks up the porch steps, proud of herself, and reaches for the doorbell, but before she can press it, the door swings open.

  “May I help you?” A striking Black woman stands behind a screen door, her long braids swept up into an elegant bun.

  Bunny jumps back. “Ohmigod, I’m so sorry, you scared me,” she says, catching her breath. Bunny notices the woman’s distinctive style, a baby-blue turtleneck sweater complementing her dark complexion.

  Bunny waits for her to respond, but the woman remains unmoved.

  “Hi, I’m… Grace. Did Anthony mention I was coming by? Are you his sister?” Bunny asks, suddenly hating the acute sound of her voice.

  “No, Anthony did not tell us you were coming by.… Are you a social worker?”

  “Oh,” Bunny says, trying to hide her confusion. “No, but I am here to—to drop something off for his case.”

  “What do you mean? I’m not following,” the woman says, somewhere between paranoid and skeptical.

  “I’m here to provide some financial help. For his case,” Bunny says, mustering confidence and pride.

  The woman looks up and over Bunny’s head, scanning her surroundings. “What? Who sent you here? Did the attorney send you?”

  “No one sent me. Well, Anthony told me where you lived. I thought he would be able to tell you I’d be coming by and why—”

  “I haven’t talked to Anthony in months,” she says.

  “I’m sure this seems super weird, me just showing up on your doorstep on a Saturday morning.…” Bunny says, trying to convince her she’s not a threat.

  “Do you have any identification on you? Or a business card?” she asks.

  Bunny’s hands begin to shake a little from nerves as she reaches for her tote bag. No one has ever asked her for a business card before. Bunny is unsettled by this lack of trust.

  “I have a driver’s license. I don’t have a business card.” She takes out her cousin’s driver’s license she’s been using to get into the jail, several receipts spilling out of her bag in the process. “Sorry,” Bunny says, handing her the ID, then kneeling to gather the scattered trash, heart racing.

  “Do you work for a
clinic?” the woman asks. “You look young.”

  This isn’t how Bunny planned, prepared for, imagined it. Instead, this woman is poised, beautiful and intelligent, rightfully suspicious, questioning—everything Bunny’s always been told didn’t exist over on the other side of the river. In this moment—her learned stereotype obliterated by reality—humiliation courses through her.

  “How do you know my brother?” the woman asks.

  “I…” Bunny thinks twice now about telling her she’s a journalist. “I saw what happened in the news and took it upon myself to visit him. I remember when it happened, it… was close to where I live, and I began to question whether or not he did it. And no one is talking about it. The information is sealed. But Anthony told me about the chemical dumping. Everyone seems fine with the fact that they think he’s guilty. So I want to be able to do something good with the money that I have, and I know Anthony doesn’t have a good lawyer, that’s what he said.… So that’s why I’m here, to talk to you—about giving you money for a good lawyer. And—and he told me about your father, I’m so sor—”

  “You came by here to give us money?” Anthony’s sister laughs. “What else did my brother tell you? He sweet-talk you into giving him money? How much money?”

  Bunny is taken aback by this. “Well, uh… like I said, he told me about your father and—”

  “How much?” she interrupts.

  “A hundred thousand dollars—but, really, he didn’t sweet-talk me.”

  “Ohhh, this is too much. You got some nerve.” She hands back Bunny’s ID.

  “Okay.” Bunny isn’t quite sure what to say. “So where should I send the money to? The bank said I should get your routing number.”

  “Oh, sweetie, listen. You don’t know my brother, he’s no saint.… You don’t know the situation. Keep your money.” She steps backward to close the door.

  “No, wait,” Bunny says. “I don’t understand. I’m serious. I don’t want or need this money. I want to give it to you.”

  “Look, I don’t have time to unpack you right now, and the last thing I need is for the feds to be breathing down my neck as a respectable business owner because I got some handout from a stranger obsessed with my brother that I don’t need and that doesn’t coincide with the agreement with the chemical company.”

  “I’m really sorry,” Bunny says. “I’m not sure I’m following—what agreement are you talking about?”

  “Honey, you’re not following because you’re not on this road. You think it’s okay to insert yourself into another family’s business because you got money?”

  “What? No, I—I think I’m confused. I just want to help. Did the Banks family make an agreement? Like… a financial agreement? Like they paid you?”

  “You don’t have a right to be here. I have to get back to my day. I’m not interested in anything else you have to say. Get off my property or I’m calling the police.” The door slams.

  Bunny stands alone on the porch; her lower lip and legs start shaking. As she takes herself down to the sidewalk, a German shepherd lunges from behind the neighbor’s chain-link fence with a snarl, his jaw snapping. Startled, Bunny throws her hand against her pounding chest, then quickly calls for an Uber. She waits, vulnerable in her skin, and tilts her head to the sky to see a government security camera filming her from atop its long white pole. She stares at it as if staring directly into the sun.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  You from around here?” Bunny’s Uber driver asks. A crucifix dangles from his rearview mirror.

  “Uh, yeah,” Bunny replies, still shaken.

  “A native! Wow. Don’t pick up too many of those. I was just dropping off a couple at the old Frederick Douglass Museum.”

  “Yeah, well, the city’s changed a lot, or that’s what people tell me.”

  “Oh, let me tell you…” he begins. “I don’t mind all the nice houses and buildings goin’ up. I’m a lot older than you, ha. I coach a baseball team, and I got people, kids I used to know, who are all comin’ back to town after maybe ten, fifteen years, you know, ’cause they got families now, and they’re complaining about how it’s changed! So this is what I say, I say the city that you left, once you could afford to, has not become the museum that you wanted it to be, the euphoric bullshit recall that you have of it now that you’re back. And on top of that, you’re complaining about the race of those who came in to buy the homes of the elders that you did not stay with. So let me make sure I get this straight—because if it wasn’t that, you would have stayed here, been here in a house that was already paid for—”

  Bunny’s cell phone begins to ring. “Oh, I’m so sorry, I’m—”

  “It’s all right, go ahead,” he tells her.

  Bunny answers. An older woman’s voice says, “Hello? Is this Ms. Elizabeth Bartholomew?”

  “This is she.”

  “This is Ellen Rivkin with Bank of America calling about your recent deposit.”

  “Yes, yes, I remember.”

  “Well, I’m so sorry to have to inform you of this, but it appears that this check has bounced.”

  “What? I’m sorry, I think you’re breaking up.”

  “It appears that the check has bounced. It did not go through.”

  “What? What do you mean, not go through?”

  “Well, whichever bank the money is coming from, it appears to have insufficient funds. So what I recommend is that you contact the business or individual who issued you the check. I am here if you have any further questions.”

  “I—I don’t understand, there should be money in that account.” Bunny’s universe is plunging into an unknown dimension. How is that possible?

  “I’m so sorry,” the woman says.

  “Thanks for letting me know.” Bunny hangs up. She turns back to the driver. “Sorry about that.”

  “All good, all good,” the driver says, cruising over Key Bridge.

  “Sorry, you were saying?” Bunny says.

  “Well now, so you know, I said, let me tell you something, it’s not about color, it’s about culture. You know, I said, that’s what, you know that’s what it’s about, and I said, for some reason, we told these folks who didn’t have the opportunities or the skills that we had that they were supposed to stay like they were when that’s exactly what got these guys into the pickle that they were in. I said, you have to change, you, you have to change. And I said, if you notice, the people that are complainin’ about this are y’all. It ain’t all these elders who actually had to live through the riots and who got five hundred thousand dollars for a house they paid thirty thousand dollars for back in the 1950s. These people are makin’ bank! And good for them. I don’t mind. God bless the free market. That’s what I say, God bless the free market!”

  Bunny’s hands are shaking. She asks him if it’s possible to turn up the heat.

  “No problem.… You know, I have elder cousins who lived in the U Street Corridor and they bought their house for fifty-one thousand back in 1949 and it hadn’t been updated since the sixties or whatever. And some developers came through because the house was twenty-six feet wide, so they said, we want to split this up into—it was a four-story house, three stories and a basement—they said, look we want to sell three condos, and the basement we’re going to rent out and that’s going to pay the condo fees for the condo association. Brilliant! Just brilliant. So they paid her four hundred thousand cash for the place, and they paid her six hundred dollars a month to live there, this was back in 2013. So you know what she did? She went and built her own new house in southeast Virginia where her part of the family is from, and she still had money left over. So, so my whole thing is, how, how, how is this wrong?”

  Bunny nods her head, pretending to listen. Thinking about Anthony, the falling dominoes of her preconceived ideas about him, how her fundamental assumptions about his life keep revealing themselves; they feel almost uncontrollable, impulsive, even if she can’t see them yet as being derived from something dise
ase-like, so pervasive she feels completely powerless. How her foundation of belief rests on the underpinnings of all the responses she seems to think are right only to come to learn they’re wrong.

  Her head aches at the thought of having to meet her mother and Phyllis at the Christmas Homes Tour of Georgetown in a few minutes.

  “My wife and I live out in the country. I’m done with city life. I have my little piece of earth—sixteen acres of open space behind us. So I got my smoker on my deck. I cooked a brisket this past weekend. The kids can run outside—well, now they’re teenagers, but they’d go out and fly their kites. And that’s one of the reasons why I love America. I grew up in the projects, my father was an alcoholic. My mother, she was overwhelmed. I was a drug addict when I was a teenager myself, and now I got twenty years sober—look what can happen when we do the work. Miracles.” He shakes his head in disbelief.

  Light snowfall trickles across the windshield as the Uber driver pulls up to Thirty-Third Street. “Alrighty, I think this is it.” He turns his head over his shoulder. “You stay warm now.”

  Bunny looks up, disoriented, in a different world than the one she’s pulled up to. “Thank you.”

  Bunny shuts the car door, her strawberry blond hair glowing in the yellow streetlight. Lamps adorned with round Christmas wreaths and red bows. A Christmas fairy tale as Georgetown’s cobblestone streets bustle with stay-at-home moms in their furs and camels and wools, wine hidden in coffee mugs, ready for the Christmas Homes Tour.

  “Sweetheart!” Meredith runs up the sidewalk, the spitting image of Bunny’s grandmother in a vintage fur and a hat reminiscent of some kind of twentieth-century bonnet. “Hurry, hurry, put these on before we go inside.” Meredith hands Bunny a pair of cloth bootees for her shoes to prevent mud and snow from damaging the expensive rugs they’re about to trample. The bootees look like hospital caps, blue netting with white elastic around the ankle.