Tales of Two Americas

by Tales of Two Americas- Stories of Inequality in a Divided Nation (retail) (epub)

  Jessalyn was stricken with embarrassment. Like a guilty child she all but shrank in the pew. Why had she come to the Hope Baptist Church, to intrude upon these people who knew one another intimately, and had no need of her? Badly she wished she could escape. In a hoarse voice she managed to stammer that she’d wanted to contribute to SaveOurLives but her words were too faint to register with anyone.

  Fortunately the massive glaring woman and her ashy-blond-haired friend had lost interest in Jessalyn almost immediately. Nor did anyone else take notice of her except, out of politeness, it seemed, the minister of Hope Church, who smiled in her direction, and seemed uncertain whether he should approach her, or take pity on her embarrassment and ignore her.

  How thoughtless and foolish she’d been, Jessalyn thought. An affluent white woman, a resident of Old Farm Road, hoping to align herself with inner-city African Americans who’d suffered at the hands of white police officers, and through white indifference, countless times: what had she been thinking? Her son would charge her with white-liberal condescension. Her daughter would charge her with lunatic recklessness. If he’d been alive her husband would be speechless, as deeply shocked by Jessalyn’s behavior as if she’d set out deliberately to upset him.

  That’s a dangerous neighborhood. Why are you there? Why alone? What on earth are you thinking?

  Yet, the minister decided to come to speak with her. He had a wan, worn face, kindly eyes, his impatience with the awkward white visitor seemed to vie with his natural courtliness. Jessalyn saw that he was older than he’d appeared at the pulpit, her deceased husband’s age at least. Maybe he knew Jonny. Maybe they’d worked together and had been friends. . . .

  It was the most tenuous, the most pathetic, of hopes. But Jessalyn dared not suggest it. There were no words she could offer to anyone in the little redbrick church, no attitude that was not in some way condescending, or inadequate; ridiculous, self-serving, and (unavoidably) racist. The massive stern-faced woman had peered into her white, shallow soul and annihilated her.

  Vaguely Jessalyn had intended to donate money to SaveOurLives. For that purpose she’d brought along her checkbook. She had no idea how much money to give: one thousand dollars? But she was thinking now that such a sum was too much, that it might surprise and offend these people; the massive woman would sneer at her, and the ashy-blond-haired woman would sneer at her, as a rich white woman who hoped to absolve herself of racial guilt by giving money. But was five hundred dollars too little? Was five hundred dollars both too much and too little?

  In his will her husband had left thousands of dollars to Hammond charitable organizations with ties to the black, inner-city community; he and Jessalyn had donated to these, as to the NAACP, for years. But the donations had been impersonal, mediated. The donations had, in a sense, substituted for actual encounters, investigations of the inner city, attempts to become acquainted with, still less befriend, individuals who lived in the Armory Street neighborhood; they had been oblique assertions of power, of the power to be charitable, a virtue of the Christian church to which, at least officially, Jessalyn and her husband had belonged. (And of course, the donations were tax-exempt.)

  But here in the Hope Baptist Church, Jessalyn was personally exposed. Her generosity, or lack of generosity, could not be disguised.

  The kindly minister stooped over her, introduced himself, and shook Jessalyn’s hand. He did not ask her name (she would recall later) but thanked her gravely for coming. He did ask if her car was parked near the church. Rapidly Jessalyn’s mind was working: should she make out a check for seven hundred dollars? (Not much, but nothing she could give would add up to much. The racial situation in the city seemed all but hopeless, during the very reign of the first black president of the United States.) Jessalyn wanted to apologize to the gentlemanly black man for having so little to give: her husband had left her money constrained by the stipulations of a trust fund, to prevent her giving extravagant amounts of money away to causes like SaveOurLives. . . . But of course Jessalyn couldn’t give such an excuse: it would seem to be blaming her husband, the most generous of men.

  In the end, as the minister looked on with some embarrassment, Jessalyn hurriedly made out a check for fifteen hundred dollars to SaveOurLives. It was more than she could afford this quarter but she could not explain that. Her face burned with shame, discomfort. “Ma’am, thank you!”—the minister smiled and blinked at her in genuine surprise, and shook her hand another time.

  He had seemed to like her, at least. She felt a faint thrill at the touch of his hand, his long fingers closing upon hers, unusually long fingers, they seemed to her, with pale undersides; strong fingers, surely, but their grip of the (white) woman’s hand was tentative, fleeting.

  By this time the others, at the front of the church, speaking intensely together, had forgotten Jessalyn utterly.

  The minister walked her to the door of the church, which he pushed open for her, as if to make sure that she left. In some magical way, a click of the long deft fingers, perhaps, he’d summoned a boy named Leander to “walk this lady to her car, please”—that happened to be in the parking lot of the Hammond Public Library just three blocks away.

  Tall, spindly-limbed Leander was polite, taciturn with the (white) woman with long, shoulder-length strikingly white hair. He had not ever seen anyone quite like her close up—(was that possible?). He hadn’t balked at the minister’s request though clearly he was not thrilled with it. As he escorted Jessalyn to her car she tried to make conversation with him but he replied in mumbles—Yes’m. N’m. He was about the age of her eldest grandson, she gauged; though, in fact (she had to concede), she had no idea how old Leander might be, a teenager, or in his twenties, his skin was so dark and his features so—unusual—unfamiliar?—in her eyes.

  To white police officers, black boys invariably looked older than their age, and larger than they actually were. Jessalyn had never quite understood this before.

  ■ ■

  The thought came to her, both exciting and distressing—Should I give Leander something? But—of course not. I should not.

  He would be embarrassed by the gesture. Possibly, insulted.

  (Would he?)

  At her car Jessalyn thanked Leander for his kindness. Leander did not linger as if he expected anything more than thanks but muttered Yes’m and quickly edged away.

  She could call after him—but she did not.

  Of course, she should not.

  In her car, at once she locked the doors. The parking area behind the library was lighted and there were a half dozen vehicles still in the lot since the library was open until nine p.m., but still her heart was beating rapidly as if she’d narrowly avoided a terrible danger.

  How easily she might have given Leander a twenty-dollar bill—she would have liked to, badly; and the boy would have appreciated it.

  Yet he might have been insulted by a tip. (He had acted out of kindness, not for a tip.) (She knew this: yet, knowing it, could she not in any case have given him a twenty-dollar bill as an acknowledgment of his kindness, and not a tip?)

  “But when is a tip not a tip? Is a tip always a tip? Is there no escaping—tip? If you are white?”

  There was something debasing in the very word tip. Flippant, insulting. No one wants a tip.

  By the time Jessalyn arrived at the large, darkened house on Old Farm Road she was feeling very tired. Disgust and depression commingled in an ashy taste at the back of her mouth. The drive from Armory Street in downtown Hammond to Old Farm Road, North Hammond, that should have taken no more than twenty-five minutes at this hour of the day required nearly twice that long for her; in the haze of a steadily increasing headache pain she’d stared through the windshield at the highway as if she’d never seen it before. She was assailed by a dread of taking a wrong exit and becoming hopelessly lost in the very place in which she’d lived most of her adult life.

 
; The fact was, she’d rarely driven into Hammond, and never at night; returning home from an event in the city, her husband had always driven.

  And how dark Old Farm Road was, without streetlights! Set on large three- and four-acre lots, the houses here were spaced apart; the driveways were so long, like the graveled drive to Jessalyn’s house, you could barely see the houses from the road. Of course, it is a white enclave. Strangers are not welcome here after dark or before.

  ■ ■

  “Leander?”—in the morning and for many mornings in succession the name came to her, a mysterious name, it seemed, beautiful and strange and yet tinged with regret, reproach.

  She had to think for a moment, before recalling why.

  FAULT LINES

  Ru Freeman

  Mira

  She crosses the street, comes up to me, bold as a rabbit in predator-purged territory, ferret-like herself, well-trained suburban calling card on a leash beside her, and asks me, right in front of all the other mothers, if I’m looking for more work as a nanny.

  The other women have already recoiled, not from her, so much, as from the response they now know to expect from me, their one (fill in your chosen blank) friend. Perhaps at some primeval level they feel more sorry for her than horrified for me. It’s too early, even for me. I choose clarity.

  —Did you feel entitled to ask me that because I’m the only brown person standing here?

  My daughters press against my body on either side, comprehending only its hardness, that chain mail that descends, the armor tossed as though from the hands of a benevolent deity all haste and consternation as he rushes through neighborhoods intuiting coming events casting shadows in each set of eyes that hood, each set of lips pursing its contents, that look that is turned inward asking: Is this it? Is this time for The Crazy Black Man/Woman or is there some mitigating element that must be considered? Time of day? Circumstance? A wrinkle or a smile? What other pressing duty calls that cannot now be derailed with a reaction or a rant? I feel their arms wrap, one higher, one lower, around my thighs, feel the pale strength of them, and do not move my own, crossed, waiting, face-off. Silence, and then the chug of the yellow bus coming up the road toward us, its sunshine color stippled by the old oaks that arch overhead and touch each other the way we neighbors will never do. She steps off the street and onto the pavement beside us, lingers there, lost in the shuffle of rituals in which she has no part, while we hustle our children inside and break into our directional cliques, leaving.

  —I cannot believe

  —What nerve

  —Are you okay?

  Ah, the vernacular of suburbia where we reserve our epithets for colleagues at workplaces where most of us are overpaid, for politicians we imagine give a damn about our vote, and for grouped people—the “those” of our stories—all the absent ones who need never feel nor fear our low-motility seeds of wrath. In the day-to-day, though, that’s a different kettle of gefilte, that’s a farce called civility, where the only people hurting are the ones who are hoping you might say fuck, just once, on their behalf. You’re the one wearing whiteface after all. Fuck you, fuck off, fucking moron, any of those would do. I don’t need the potluck or the block party, just give one flying fuck. Say it loud and clear.

  I’m the last mother to reach her house, the farthest from the stop. The chatter of the Friedman toddlers catches up just as I reach my door, and I glance back for a moment to watch the double baby carriage making its vertiginous climb up the slope toward me. I make eye contact with the woman who shares no facial features with her four wards, but can only manage a commiserating grimace; I’ve got my own grievance to nurse today.

  Iris

  Iris Jones works down the street at the house with the sagging gutters and the haphazardly tended garden where the remains of the last tree felled are still being carted away, a few small logs at a time, by the neighbors who have begun to use their outdoor fire pits as they watch the first bulbs bloom along the edges of their own flower beds. There are six children there to fill up the three bedrooms of the house, the fifth still swaddled and kept beside his mother who is pregnant with the last. Iris manages the older four, all girls, aged six, five, three, and two. They are well behaved and expectant of an excess of attention in all aspects of their lives from baths to play to reading to naps, which they take religiously from one to three each afternoon.

  Iris arrives by six in the morning. She passes Geraldo’s Laundromat (where someone has pulled off various letters so it now read’s Geraldo’s Lat), two shops with wigs on display in colors that God never intended for human heads, and a salon with the “Nails” sign illuminated whether it is open or shut on her way to her transport. As she walks to the stop at Ridge and Susquehanna, she thinks about the fact that the prayers from four churches—Church of God of Prophesy, Jones Tabernacle AME Church, Bethel Presbyterian Church, and Faith Emanuel Baptist Church—always surround her as she stands within sight of her sons’ high school, waiting for the 61. Each morning, just before the bus arrives, she turns toward the school and bends her head as she mentally gathers the prayers of all four churches to help keep her children safe until she returns. She boards the bus and nods to the same eleven people who are already sitting in their preferred places—only one, a teenage girl, chooses the aisle—changes to the 65 at the Wissahickon Transportation Center, and tries not to fall asleep before her stop at Bryn Mawr and City Line, where she gets off. It takes her 572 steps from there to reach the house on Upland Terrace. She lets herself in and hangs up her coat on the metal rack near the ketubah, which, according to the translation offered to her by Chana, tells the world that Yitzak Friedman and Chana Salzburg were married on the twenty-fourth of July, 2009. Every morning Iris does the same math and shakes her head, then changes the motion to a nod because Yitzak is always watching her from the dining table where he is already sitting down, drinking coffee and reading the Holy Book. In the kitchen that she is allowed to use, she makes herself a cup of tea and a slice of toast, and sets out breakfast for the children, each according to their taste; melon and yogurt for Acimah, banana and yogurt for Arashel, soft buttered white bread with the lightest touch of peach jam for Astera, and oatmeal for Aaliyah.

  Upstairs, she wakes each one with soft words or stern, as required, and gets them washed, brushed, and dressed in time for them to kiss their father good-bye before he walks out of the house, still carrying the Holy Book, and, as far as Iris can tell, intending to do so all day long wherever he goes, as he does, each day, on foot. By the time their mother comes down, slowly, slowly, holding the banister with one hand, her baby clutched in her other arm, Iris has prepared breakfast for her and turns her back and does the dishes while Chana nurses her baby and feeds herself. Iris cleans and dresses the baby—and for the baby Iris has soft words and baby songs in unfamiliar yet melodious rhythms—while Chana gets dressed.

  At around eight-thirty in the morning Iris pushes a double stroller down the middle of the street, the five- and the six-year-olds tagged on either side like long ribbons, and refuses to move for cars no matter how long and how hard they toot their horns, or how much their drivers yell out their windows. The ladies at the bus stop roll their eyes at her because Iris’s stroller, arriving on its unpredictable schedule, delays the departure of the school bus, though the Jamaican bus driver with the wild hair who drives both the kindergartners and the high schoolers—and who insists that the boys in both groups wait until the girls have finished boarding, and also that they stop and greet him before they proceed to take their seats, quirks that generate smiles from the younger and half smiles from the older—never seems to mind waiting and watching Iris’s progress down the road, which makes the mothers at the bus stop turn and gaze, like choreographed bit-part players in a drama where all of them tried and none of them made the leads, at Iris, and they cannot help but notice her stunning derriere, so they redo their ponytails and adjust their fitted baseball caps a
nd blow extra-special kisses at their wee ones already distracted and otherwise engaged with the particular hierarchies arranged to terrify those consigned to riding public school buses. Only Mira smiles at Iris, though Iris remains oblivious to this virtual high-five as she wends her way toward the Bala Cynwyd Library, her thoughts on matters far more pertinent to her day-to-day than the shape of her arse or the politics of her audience.

  By the time she is boarding the 65 for her return home, Iris has chalked up between twelve and sixteen thousand steps, which might have registered on her Fitbit or her iPhone if she possessed either one, but which register only on her veined calves, tight and raised like thin vagrant snakes. Iris also works until after dinner on Saturdays because on those days the Friedman family observes Shabbat and the laws of halacha, and would sit hungry in the darkness if not for her, and since she cannot leave until the ritual Havdalah is completed, Iris has come to associate the sour-sweet smell of wine and smoke and cinnamon with her long-awaited single day of freedom. On Saturdays the children are whiny and difficult because they are managed entirely by their parents in a routine neither side of the equation recognizes nor enjoys. (This does not make Iris feel special or loved.)

  Before leaving her house in the Strawberry Mansions neighborhood of Philadelphia, she wakes up her son, Diem, sixteen.

  —Baby, it’s five I’ve got to go now. Wake your brothers at six. You be home right after school.

  —Okay, Mom. Lock the door.

  Then he goes back to sleep and doesn’t wake until six-thirty and has to scream his brothers awake and through their cornflakes and milk (if there is milk, dry if there isn’t), and race out of the door to their school, which is just far enough that they are tired by the time they reach it, but too close for them to qualify for busing, and if there are blues out they have to slow to a stroll, which makes them late and gets them face time with teachers and the vice principal but never the principal, who has too many fires to put out to be bothered with these four smoldering pieces of coal. No matter how frantic their morning becomes, or how late they are—not even that time that he had to piggyback his youngest brother, Ozzie, all the way to school because he tripped right outside their door and bloodied both knees, or even the time that his second youngest brother, Jayjo, refused to go to school because he had not studied for his English test and swore that Mr. Bomze hated him and Diem had to drag Jayjo out and cuff his head and force-march him until he was within sight of the first teacher—Diem never forgets to stop and lock the door.