by Richard Dry
This was a mostly Black residential area of Berkeley, with huge houses and rock-bordered gardens of lavender and bougainvillea. There were shiny new cars parked in the wide driveways between each house and children’s toys on the lawns. He peered into one backyard at a twisted pipe sculpture in the shape of a pyramid. A calico cat rested on top of the fence and let Love pet him, purring and closing his eyes with a black, mustachioed smile. A small rat-dog tied with a rope ran out onto the back porch and started barking in a high-pitched yelp. Love kicked the wooden fence, and the cat flew off toward the dog. He walked away quickly and turned on to Harper Street, which was lined with high-leafed chestnut and palm trees.
His hands began to sweat and tingle as he looked around for a car. He saw an LTD with its window open, but Freight had said a Toyota. An older man walked toward him with a cane, watching squirrels run across the telephone lines. Love rubbed the tips of his fingers with his thumbs and looked down as the man passed him, yellow leaves crunching under his feet.
“Don’t look now,” the man said. “I might just smile at you.”
Love looked up and the man smiled. Love couldn’t help but smile back. But then the man was gone and it was getting darker. The conga drummers were still at it in the distant flea market, their rhythms faster and louder as the night approached.
He spotted a Toyota in front of a triangular-shaped house with a high wooden fence: a bashed-up white Tercel hatchback with a ski rack. As long as it was pre-’85, it would be easy to break into. He’d learned how even before Juvi. He wiped his palms on his pants and walked past it, glanced in, and continued to walk the rest of the block to Ashby. At the corner, he swung around on the pole with the big fish-eyed Neighborhood Watch sign, then headed back, looking around for witnesses.
A silver Honda pulled onto the street and parked a few spaces before the Tercel. Love slipped between cars and sat down on the back fender of a rust-colored pickup truck and bowed his head, his arms and chest shaking, waiting for the people to get out of the car and go away. He smelled chimney smoke and inhaled deeply.
“Pizza?” he heard a man from the car say. “I was thinking more like pasta, or a salad, a great big salad.”
“That’s fine with me,” a woman said. The car doors shut and Love looked over his shoulder. A man, woman, and little girl carrying a red purse entered a yard with a chain-link fence around it. The man lifted up the girl by a tree and she picked a lemon. The woman unlocked the front door and they went in.
Love got up and walked toward the Toyota. He must have gotten up too fast because he felt dizzy. He stopped at the fence in front of the house and wrapped his tingling hands around the top pole. He looked up at the porch. There was a pumpkin on the railing, carved with jagged teeth, and a brown ceramic lamp in the window between the crack in the curtains. In the garden, a tomato plant with small yellow tomatoes grew out of a bathtub up against the fence. He crouched down behind the plant and picked off a firm tomato, the vine pulling and snapping back. He spit in his hands and rolled the fruit around in his palms to clean off the dust, then popped it in his mouth and chewed, the sweet and sour juice squirting into his cheeks.
He savored the taste and rested on his knee as if he didn’t have anything else to do. There was only this moment, on this piece of pavement, in this hickory-filled air, the distant drums. He just might not do anything else all night but stay here in this neighborhood and listen to the drumming, and in the morning go from here to the next town. He didn’t have to steal the car. There were a million towns and families and gardens in the world.
The yellow streetlights flickered and Love jolted up as if he’d been discovered. At the same moment, a White boy with a Mohawk and chains hanging down from his belt loops came around the corner. His boots pounded on the pavement, and Love turned back to the house and pretended that he was heading inside. The boy was walking right at him with one hand in his jacket pocket. Love opened the gate quietly and went into the yard. The boy looked at him but kept walking. By the time he had passed, Love found himself halfway up the path to the house.
There he was, already inside. That easy. Another world, another life. He took a step toward the porch but then heard the front door opening and quickly turned around.
“Can I help you?” the man from the house asked. He didn’t sound angry or frightened, just interested. Love stopped but kept his back to him.
“Are you looking for someone?” the man called out again. “Can I help you?” Already the smell of dinner came from inside the house. Love noticed that there were yellow flowers on this side of the tomato plant along with the fruit.
“Naw, man, I was just mixed up,” Love said with an accentuated drawl. He wanted to say something else. But what? Maybe something that would get him invited inside, so then something else could happen—he could show them what a nice kid he was, and they’d want to help him, want to keep him. But what could he possibly hope for from this complete stranger? What about Li’l Pit? What was he thinking?
“Naw, Man. Wrong house. Sorry.” He walked out the gate and waited around the corner until he heard the door close.
The front seat of the Toyota was torn up so badly that the foam was missing in the middle. There was no club or alarm. He tried the door handle just in case, but it was locked. The screwdriver fit in the driver’s door with a little wiggling. He jammed it into the lock and the button popped up. This only worked with an old Toyota. He opened the door, got in, closed the door, and lay down across the front seats. His eyes moved about in the dark car and his fingers felt for the ignition. He shoved the screwdriver into the keyhole and pushed hard. Something clicked and he tried the steering wheel. The wheel was loose, but the ignition wouldn’t turn. He sat up in the driver’s seat and worked the handle back and forth, his foot ready over the gas.
After a few tries, the starter turned over and he revved the engine. He’d watched other guys steal cars, but he’d driven a stick only once, on an outing to 7-Eleven with Tom from Los Aspirantes.
He put it in first and pressed the gas, but the car was in gear with the parking brake on, and he stalled. Two bicyclists with helmets turned on to Harper and stopped at a car across the street. They glanced over at him and then looked away. He started the car again and took off the parking brake but let it idle with the clutch in. The bicyclists put their bikes up onto the roof of their car, glancing his way every so often. Love kept the clutch in and put it in first. He turned the wheel and then pressed on the gas. The car revved loudly and then he let out the clutch too quickly, but the car jerked forward into the street.
“Hey,” one of the bicyclists yelled and ran toward the car. Love sped up.
“Hey, your lights. Your lights.”
Love couldn’t bother looking for the light switch. He drove through the stop sign at Prince and kept going on the residential streets, all the way back to Cranston, in first gear.
SANTA RITA JAIL
TODAY, I READ sections in From Plantation to Ghetto: An Interpretive History of American Negroes:
The Black Laws regulating the behavior of free Negroes in the Old Northwest were in fact based upon the slave codes of the Southern states. For a period the legislatures of Illinois and Indiana evaded the antislavery prohibition of the Ordinance by enacting laws placing Negro youths under long-term indentures. Thus was perpetuated in modified form the practice of Negro slavery known previously in the Northwest Territory when it had been under French and British rule. The Illinois constitution of 1818 expressly provided for the hiring of slave labor at the saltworks near Shawneetown. Nowhere in the Old Northwest or the newer Western states could Negroes exercise the right to vote or serve on juries. They could not testify in cases involving whites in Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, or California. Most of the Western states also banned intermarriage. The Northwestern and Western States attempted to discourage Negro settlers by requiring them to register their certificates of freedom at a county clerk’s office and to present bonds of $500 or $1,000 g
uaranteeing that they would not disturb the peace or become public charges. Toward the end of the ante-bellum period, Illinois, Indiana, and Oregon excluded Negro migrants entirely. Only Ohio, after a long battle, repealed its restrictive immigration legislation in 1849. Though such anti-immigration statutes were only erratically enforced, nevertheless they intimidated Negroes. In 1829 an attempt to enforce an 1807 law requiring a $500 bond precipitated a race riot at Cincinnati and a mass Negro exodus to Canada.
In the Northeast, none of the states provided by law for discrimination in the courtroom and Negro testimony was admissible in cases involving whites. Social custom, however, barred Negroes from sitting on juries, except in Massachusetts where a few Negroes served just prior to the Civil War. Negroes enjoyed the same voting rights as whites in all the original Northern states for a generation after the American Revolution. Then, one by one, between 1807 and 1837, five of them—New Jersey, Connecticut, New York, Rhode Island, and Pennsylvania—enacted disfranchisement provisions. The laws of Connecticut and Rhode Island did not disqualify those already on the rolls, and in Rhode Island the prohibition was repealed in 1842.
… Besides legal restrictions in voting rights and the courts, there were other forms of oppression. In Northern cities the most extreme of these was mob violence. During the 1830’s and 1840’s riots occurred in Philadelphia, New York, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and other places. More continuous and pervasive were the patterns of segregation and employment discrimination.
The Jim Crow or segregation laws were largely a product of the late nineteenth century. Segregation by custom, however, and even occasionally by statute, was already common during the ante-bellum period. In the South segregation developed as one of the devices to control the urban free Negroes and the slave population. Separation in jails and hospitals was universal. Negroes were widely excluded from the public parks and burial grounds. They were relegated to the balconies of the theatres and opera houses and barred from hotels and restaurants. The New Orleans street railway maintained separate cars for the two races. Sometimes these practices were codified in law: as early as 1816 New Orleans passed an ordinance segregating Negroes in places of public accommodation. The Legal codes of Savannah and Charleston excluded free Negroes from public parks. Charleston, Baltimore, and New Orleans were among the cities legalizing segregated jails and poorhouses.
In the North, Negroes were not legally segregated in places of public accommodation, nor, except for schools, in publicly owned institutions. Custom, however, barred them from hotels and restaurants, and they were segregated, if not entirely excluded, from theatres, public lyceums, hospitals, and cemeteries. Even in abolitionist Boston, the Negro was considered a pariah in most circles.…
Traveling by public conveyance was difficult for Negroes. In Boston there were signs: “colored people not allowed to ride in this omnibus.” In New York City Negroes were refused streetcar seats except on a segregated basis. Philadelphia Negroes were restricted to the front platform of these vehicles. Long-distance travel was even more of a problem. On stagecoaches Negroes usually rode on an outside seat, and on the early railroads they often occupied filthy accommodations in a separate car. Steamboats offered the worst conditions, since Negroes were almost invariably excluded from cabins and required to remain on deck even in cold weather. On the all-night trip from New York City to Newport, Rhode Island, they usually had the choice of pacing the deck or sleeping among the cotton bales, horses, sheep, and pigs.…
Negroes continued to face discrimination on the streetcars. In 1856 when a minister was removed from a vehicle, the judge upheld the transportation company on the ground that its business would suffer if Negroes could sit anywhere they pleased. This decision was interpreted to apply to omnibuses, hotels, and other public facilities. Five years later a Philadelphia court also ruled in favor of a transportation company’s right to bar Negroes by force if necessary.
Recent scholarship has found residential segregation and the origins of the modern ghetto in the ante-bellum city. Actually, before the Civil War urban Negroes generally resided in racially mixed neighborhoods. The homes of the more prosperous free Negro artisans and businessmen were often scattered throughout various parts of the city, singly or in small clusters. There was a tendency, however, for Negroes to be concentrated in certain neighborhoods or wards, but within close proximity to whites. In the Southern towns the slaves who “lived out” tended to move to the edges of the city, where they formed neighborhoods predominantly, though not exclusively, Negro. In Baltimore and Philadelphia there were Negroes living in the alleys between the main streets on which fashionable whites resided. The most impoverished Negroes were the most segregated, often in vice districts controlled by white overlords. New York Negroes were heavily concentrated in a few wards, where poor whites also resided. In Philadelphia the worst slum consisted of a few densely populated unheated rooms, garrets, and tiny wooden shanties lacking even the most modest comforts. In Boston, Providence, New Haven, Cincinnati, and other seacoast and river cities, Negro slum neighborhoods, with names like “New Guinea,” developed first along the wharves. Later the Negroes tended to shift to outlying sections known by such names as “Nigger Hill.” As discrimination increased all over the North, even the more prosperous colored men were often drawn to predominantly Negro neighborhoods.
CHAPTER 9
JANUARY 1977 • LIDA 16, MARCUS 17
LIDA LIVED BY herself while Marcus was locked up. He’d been awaiting trial for forty-two days. But when Lida had visited him the previous Saturday, he said that he could be set free anytime if he’d agree to write a report about the shooting. All he needed to say was that Easton had a gun, or that he might have had a gun, or that Marcus didn’t see anything. If he didn’t write the statement, they told him that even though he was still a minor, he would get fifteen years for selling heroin and possession of a stolen weapon. Lida told him about the eviction notice, how the landlord came by and said the police informed him about the dealing and wanted them out. She told Marcus to write the statement, and he said he would only do it if they gave him his dope back because he might as well go to jail if he couldn’t give Jim the goods.
So she stayed at home and waited. One afternoon she sat on the yellow couch in Marcus’s apartment as sweat beaded on her head in the cold room. The low, warm hum of the fish tank drew her attention. She had not cleaned it while Marcus was away, and the algae pushed the lid off the filter. She sat for an hour watching the bubbles form and release from the tube. One bubble stuck to the opening. It grew and wavered in the water, then detached and floated up through the algae. She’d gotten the cap of heroin from Jim, when he’d dropped by to check in on the situation.
At first the ringing was very far away, underwater, in the fish tank; and she smiled as the bubble shook and rang, then floated to the top. Then she remembered the phone, the outside, Marcus, the killing. She stood up and wiped her mouth. The phone was on the bookshelf by the fish tank. She picked up the receiver.
“Yeah.”
“Are you sick?” It was Lori, her friend from Lucky’s.
“No.”
“You’re supposed to be on now, you know?”
“Shit. Don’t—I’ll be there soon. Just don’t do anything.” She hung up and walked to the closet, sat on the carpet, and slid her red sneakers onto her feet. She grabbed the door handle to pull herself up and then walked directly out of the house into the bright winter day, wearing her blue nylon sweatsuit with gold stripes and matching jacket.
Walking was easy, just one foot in front of the other and no one would know the difference: use the lines in the sidewalk to stay straight. The cracks didn’t matter anymore, none of that mattered when she was high. Just one foot in front of the other. Red sneaker toe, red sneaker toe. Curb and stop. Look up. Green light: go. Cross next to the straight white line, and curb, step up, and red sneaker toe, red sneaker toe.
Across East 14th was the big parking lot and Lucky’s. She zipped up h
er jacket to the neck. A woman walked by her with a shopping bag.
“How do I look?” she asked the stranger. The lady didn’t answer. Lida crossed the street and walked along the curb of the lot to the front entrance. A man held the door open for her and she thought about smiling at him but just walked straight in.
“Number seven, Lida,” Lori yelled.
She went to register seven and put in her key. Already two people raced into her line.
“I had the same flu last week,” said the man at the front of the line. “You should stay home and drink chicken soup.” Lida nodded and picked up his can of peaches. She pressed in the numbers and it came to thirty-nine dollars.
“I’d go home and sleep it off if I were you,” he said.
“Have a nice day,” she said. She punched up the soap from the next customer, punched up dog food, soda, candles, punched in the numbers, took the money, nodded to the next customer about whatever she was saying, something about you shouldn’t sell grapes because farmworkers’ babies were dying.
“Okay. Have a nice day.”
It went by mercifully, like the hour staring at the fish tank, not fast or slow, just gone.
* * *
THE POLICE LET Marcus out of jail for signing the affidavit. Since he’d been back, the apartment manager hadn’t left them alone. He knocked at the door every morning. Lida looked up from the bed at Marcus, who stood at the sink in the kitchen peeling a potato. He froze with the peeler in his hand and waited. The knock came again. Lida slowly lifted the blanket up over her head.
Her breath made a cocoon of warmth under the covers, where she stayed all day when she was home because the heat had gone out. Marcus put down the peeler and brought the potato over to the bed. He jumped in under the covers and rubbed his feet together.
