Leaving Cecil Street

by Diane McKinney-Whetstone

  Johnetta paused to catch her breath and wipe the perspiration forming at her hairline. She had long hair that fell around her shoulders once she’d gotten her scarf off. “I got Indian in me,” she’d say when anyone complimented her hair, pointed also to her red complexion and high cheekbones as confirmation that she was more than just black. She pulled her fingers through her hair now as if the rest of the story was a part of her hair and needed to be teased out. The shop was quiet. Just the rustle of the exhaust fan carrying the smoke outside, and the hiss of the hot comb as it steamed through Joyce’s hair.

  “Then,” Johnetta continued, “the woman had the mighty nerve to tell the Corner Boys that she was old school, told them couldn’t none of them handle her. Is that something or what? They tried to follow her to see whose house she was going in, probably too just to sass her some more, those Corner Boys being half raised like they are, but there was too much activity and too many people and they lost sight of her right around your house, Louise. Said they hung out till late trying to find her and they never saw her leave the block by either end.”

  “Well, whose house was she looking for?” Clara asked.

  “Don’t know, don’t know. Just know what I think.”

  “And that would be?” This from Nathina, who generally lived at the opposite end of any point of view Johnetta espoused.

  “Probably got something to do with that devil worshiper living next door to you, Louise,” Johnetta said, ignoring Nathina. “That Alberta. Dollar to a doughnut it’s related to her.”

  “Or it could be that the Corner Boys had just finished their Friday-night jug of Tokay wine,” Nathina said.

  “Look, Nathina, I know what I know,” Johnetta said. “And everybody knows Alberta ain’t been right since she joined up with that cult that got her dressing funny and snubbing everybody ’round here.”

  “Johnetta, it’s been over ten years since Alberta fell in with those people, and she kept to herself before that. You need some new sources of conversation,” Nathina said. “Now you wanna hear what somebody knows, I can tell you what I know, who I saw trying to make a play for my husband.”

  Clara tapped the straightening comb against the barrel-shaped countertop stove. “Nathina, go sit at the sink so I can rinse you,” Clara said, quick to scatter any contentious air before it could form into a full-blown fight in her shop. “And, Louise, you may as well get settled back there too ’cause BB’s Sondra will be walking through the door any minute and she’ll get you washed. Got a new leave-in conditioner I’m trying on you today.”

  Louise did as Clara instructed, yanked Nathina by the hand, who otherwise was content to spar with Johnetta. Louise was glad she hadn’t had the chance to tell them how she’d felt when she’d seen Joe in the dark corner with Valadean. Would have certainly heard it repeated when Nathina finally let loose on Johnetta, which she inevitably would. “Even Louise said she made a move on Joe,” Nathina would surely say to push her point had Louise said how she’d felt last night. And Louise was embarrassed now that she’d felt that way, so jealous. Joe was right when he’d said that he’d never given her cause to be so suspicious. She reasoned that her anxiety over the condition of her mouth was affecting her logic. She settled in at the washbowl and thought about what she’d wear for Joe tonight. Thought she’d wear the new silky emerald green robe he’d given her for her birthday. She’d open wine and put something sultry on the hi-fi and offer herself up to dance. She imagined the feel of the silky robe brushing against her nakedness once they were into their slow drag and Joe got going with his hands. She was tingling all over by the time BB’s daughter, Sondra, eased Louise’s head under the warm sprays of water. Sondra was asking Louise if she’d had fun at the block party last night. Asked her if she’d heard about the monster-woman Miss Johnetta was in there talking about. “Probably nothing to concern ourselves with, Sondra,” Louise said, even as she wondered how much of it was true, if there was some crazy woman holed up somewhere on their block. Now she felt chill bumps forming on her arms and legs. She shivered and rubbed her hands up and down her arms and told herself that it was cold back here.

  Chapter 5

  THE BLACKNESS STARING Deucie in the face told her that it was nighttime again. She’d slept the day away down here and now she sat up thinking that she might never leave this cellar. Had the thought that she should rummage through the boxes and find swatches of clothes that she could spread out for her dying bed. She didn’t want to die at Byberry State Hospital. She wasn’t crazy anyhow, had never been crazy, just made a spectacle of herself from time to time when a headache came on. And that was her main concern now, that a headache would come on as she was trying to get back downtown, and there she’d be all over again treated to a trip to Byberry with their arm restraints and rubber rooms and hypodermic needles that were supposed to mainline her to sanity.

  “Awl, Luther,” she whispered, “it might not work out for me to get back to you, baby boy. I’ma try. But it may not happen.”

  She pulled her frail, naked self to standing. Held on to the wall and inched to the back of the cellar. She used the drain as a toilet, then walked to the spigot and turned it to get the water running. She squatted under the gush of water and let it run down her back, turned then to douse her front, using her hands to rinse where the water didn’t flow. The water was neither hot nor cold, so it wasn’t shocking against her skin. A placid feel it had and she felt herself coming back to life some. Felt now what she hadn’t felt in weeks as she stood there dripping water and looking out into the yard where drizzles of light fell. She watched a gray-and-white cat on the ledge just outside the window above her head. Felt hungry right now as she watched the cat turn its back on a bowl of food and walk into a little wooden cat house. Got to be a man cat, she thought, probably got bowls he eats from all over the place. She’d eaten cat food before. Both the dry kind from a bag and the chunks that came from a can and looked to be covered in slime. It all went down good though when her circumstances dictated that that’s what she’d eat. Her trusty step stool of a wooden pony was patient under the window from when she’d cleared the cobwebs earlier. A laugh crackled up from her throat as she climbed onto the pony’s back and thought about how she’d swiped away at the cobwebs as a gift for the people who lived here. Now her gift had boomeranged and she would be the primary beneficiary. “Ain’t that just like life,” she whispered as she braced herself for several tries of pulling at the window latch, thinking the latch, like the spigot, was stuck in place from lack of use. It wasn’t though, and the ease with which the window lock turned was so out of proportion to her use of force that the pony almost tipped backward. She steadied herself and hoisted her body all the way onto the ledge in case the window was more stubborn. It was. It took her several tries before she heard the grunt of air and felt the window rising. It was a cool night for July and the air sizzled against her face, wet from a combination of her makeshift shower and the perspiration from working so hard to raise the window. She was tempted to just climb all the way through the window and out of this cellar and head on home to Luther. She reminded herself that she was naked, and wet. Might catch a cold. She laughed at the irony. Her cirrhosis was in the advanced stage; her prognosis a month ago had been that she’d last weeks rather than months, and here she was, worried about catching a cold.

  She reached out of the window and retrieved the bowl filled with cat food. Could see from this vantage point that a Cyclone fence surrounded the concrete backyard. Would be too emotionally draining to try to leave through the yard and then discover that the fence had her locked in. She watched the cat slip out of the yard under the space at the bottom of the fence. She was small these days, but not that small, she thought. The smell of fish wafted up from the bowl and pulled her attention to her meal. This was the canned kind. Good. She didn’t have to work so hard to chew the kind that came out of a can. She settled in on the ledge and enjoyed the night air flowing in through the opened window. She ate with
her fingers, licked them between bites as if she was eating filet mignon and the gravy drippings were that good.

  She thought about her childhood now, which had been filled with rich gravies and thick cuts of meat, real satin ribbons for the ends of her plaits.

  She grew up the pretty daddy’s girl to a hardworking stevedore who made a good living before he started losing toes to sugar. Deucie’s heart would drop lower in her chest as the gauze wrapped around his perpetually elevated foot grew thicker, the brown stains seeping through the gauze more intense, the gauze moving higher and higher up his leg until one day there was no leg to elevate. He’d cry out in pain and Deucie, hysterical herself, would ask him what could she do, please let her do something to take away his pain. “Rub Daddy’s leg, Deucie,” he’d cry, pointing to the empty space where his leg once was, “please, please, rub Daddy’s leg.” She’d get down on her knees and caress the air, she’d lightly stroke the air and ask him if it was better, was she making his leg all better again.

  As much as Deucie was devoted to her father, she despised her own mother. Deucie blamed her mother for her father’s demise. Thought that if her mother hadn’t always demanded a lace something this, or pearl-studded that, he wouldn’t have had to work so many hours at the waterfront, causing him to lose his leg. Had it confirmed when her father was in his last days and Deucie caught her mother swinging hands with a big-shouldered merchant marine up on Broad Street. Deucie went for her mother’s throat that night, called her a conniving, murdering bitch. Shortly after the father’s death Deucie was sent to live with a distant cousin in New Jersey. Though the mother blamed it on the Depression, explained to Deucie that the war bonds the father had left were worthless and at least the cousin worked a small farm so that Deucie could subsist on corn and tomatoes, but life in Philadelphia would hardly yield even that, Deucie knew that her mother was lying, knew she just wanted Deucie out of the way so that she could lay up with her merchant marine in peace.

  Deucie was sixteen by then and she hated Jersey, hated the wide-open spaces and the sounds of crickets at night and the way the air always smelled like horse shit. She hated the cousin too, a poppy-eyed half-white girl who followed Deucie’s every move as if Deucie wanted to sleep with her husband. Deucie didn’t want the husband, told him so every Friday night when he’d get drunk from moonshine and proposition her. She slept with a switchblade under her pillow should he try to creep in her room at night. Rolled over on the switchblade one night, snapping it open and gashing her lovely face. Decided this was no way to live and ran away from that farm, hitchhiked back to Philly with a red-complexioned man named Jeffery. Jeffery was short but had the most well-defined arms she’d ever seen. And though he didn’t seem to be too smart—he’d stare blankly when Deucie made a joke and after a pause his eyes would light up and he’d let go with a gawking laugh and say, “I get it”—he was charming in a boyish way, good looking, with well-cut features, and could move on the dance floor like Bojangles. His stepmother, Pat, ran an all-night speakeasy in South Philly. Deucie got drunk for the first time that night and fell in love with Jeffery. She experienced her first headache that night too, which was preceded by an intense bombardment of smells: the chitterlings and potato salad that Pat sold for fifty cents a plate, the cherries that she’d jam into the flasks of mixed drinks that were more water than alcohol, the sweat pouring from the bodies slapping around on the beds upstairs; Deucie could even smell that right before the headache unrolled itself in thunderclaps that disabled her completely. All she could do was get naked and curl up in a ball and moan out for her father since she wholly hated her mother by then.

  SHE EMPTIED THE bowl of cat food and belched. She slid the bowl back out of the window and curled up on the oversize window ledge. She heard the sigh of the floor above her head. Someone had just come in through the front door. Shortly there was the prolonged squeal of water flowing through the pipes and the hot-water heater down here replenishing, which she guessed meant someone was taking a long bath. Then she could hear the faint but recognizable singing voices of the Temptations sifting through the basement ceiling. Later more footsteps, faster, lighter footsteps crunching on the porch. Then much later, heavier stomps on the porch, a hesitation about those. Deucie rightly guessed that it was the wife-mother, the daughter, the father-husband coming home, in that order. Only here twenty-four hours, she thought, and already accustomed to the sounds.

  JOE DIDN’T GET home until after eleven though he’d told Louise he’d be straight in when he got off at six. Coming straight in had been his intention at six o’clock when the shift changed at his station at Fifty-sixth and Market where he worked as a commuter engineer. A glorified cashier, he called what he did. Collected fares and hit the button to make the turnstiles move. Made small talk with the regulars about the Phillies or the Black Revolution. “Hey, man, when we taking this shit over,” he’d greet the Huey Newton impersonators dressed head to toe in black or the Rap Brown wannabes wearing sunglasses at night. He’d flirt with the women, occasionally allowing one or two to ride for free. “Baby, you go ahead on through, you looking too good to pay,” he’d tease. He’d say polite “how do yous” to the elderly and make jokes with the little kids.

  This evening he left work in good form, felt so unwound, so loose and energetic because he had money in his pocket and tomorrow was a day off. Was going to suggest to Louise that maybe they go out for dinner, Chinatown maybe, tonight. He and Louise could walk through Center City after they ate and allow the night air to make them feel young and in love. He headed up Market Street in the direction of the sun hanging in the back of the sky as if it had no intention of setting tonight. People were out and about and Joe called, “Hey now,” every so often as he walked. For all of the talk of how the neighborhood was going down, Joe took it as a bright sign that the streets were bustling at six on a Saturday evening. As long as people were getting together outside their houses, talking and relating and bonding, this area would stay desirable. Knew his block of Cecil Street would. Thought his block quicksanded in all that was good about the previous decade because of the way they leaned on one another. The way they’d take up donations for whoever on the block was in the midst of a money crisis, or prepared enough food to serve a two-hundred-person repast when somebody died. They streamed in to visit the hospitalized; fed each other’s children bologna and cheese sandwiches and got them started on their homework for whoever was late getting home; crowded auditoriums for school awards nights whether or not their own child was a recipient. They were tight. And though personalities sometimes erupted like a case of German measles, and they’d divide into cliques and stop speaking for a couple of days because somebody’s child dripped cherry-water ice and attracted flies to somebody’s front that had just been hosed down with bleach and water, Joe thought his block of Cecil Street a storybook of what community meant—of life wrought with the struggles of being black in Philadelphia in 1969. But because they had Cecil Street to greet them at the start and end of each day, it was, in Joe’s mind, a good life, a desirable life. He’d chosen well, he told himself now as he turned from Market onto Fifty-seventh.

  He’d grown up in Pittsburgh, one of two. Left there as soon as he could because by the time he was seventeen he’d lost everything a young man could. Lost his father, though he couldn’t prove it, for being pegged a “smart-ass nigger” by a flat-footed Pittsburgh cop. His father was found in a field a mile from their house with a single bullet to his head a day after he had stepped to the cop for his comments about his wife, “…titties looking like they dripping milk. Wish I had me a cup,” the flatfoot had said to Joe’s mother. Then Joe lost his best friend to a gang war, his older sister in a car wreck, and his mother; he guessed she really died of a broken heart. So he left Pittsburgh at seventeen with the only thing that still mattered. His horn. He’d been given the horn by an old-timer who’d hung with his father, Mr. Tyne. At the repast for Joe’s father, Mr. Tyne had pulled Joe outside, away from all the wo
men in his house that day clutching at him, trying to console him, trying to feed him hot buttered yeast rolls or smothered chops. Joe walked under Mr. Tyne’s hand as he held Joe’s shoulder as if it was the curve of his cane. “Boy, I got something that’s gonna help you make it through,” he said as he led Joe to his wagon and lifted a blanket and handed him the horn. “I’ll show you the basics, and you can add to it ’cause you smart, boy, like your daddy always bragged. This’ll help you keep on living when you don’t see the sense in life, ’cause as long as you blowing, you breathin’. You keep on breathing and the sense you need to make outta things come to you in the by-and-by.”

  Joe was seeing that first horn. Now he was back to thinking about the mass of feelings that had stormed up in his chest when he’d looked at his horn last night, feelings that he hadn’t begun to unwrap because of the knife edges they seemed to bear. He told himself now that choosing Louise over life on the road with his horn had been the best choice a man could make. Settling down in Philadelphia on his block of Cecil Street which was almost enchanting to walk through was a treasure-filled choice. He stomped his foot at the corner of Chestnut and Fifty-seventh as if to confirm that, settle it once and for all that he was a happy man, a fulfilled man. And then he saw Valadean.