Seen It All and Done the Rest

by Pearl Cleage

  She had me there. “I don’t know,” I said. “It just seems a shame to do all this work and then let them use it that way, but you’re right. It’s not my job to worry about it.”

  “But you are.”

  I wanted to deny it, but I couldn’t. Working at the house every day, I had begun to think of it as my place again. I had begun to remember all the good times I’d had there and how much it meant to my mother.

  Abbie turned a page and then looked at me. “You don’t have to be ashamed of starting to care about this place, Jo. Everybody’s rooted somewhere.”

  The idea of being rooted on a little corner of Atlanta, Georgia, had never been my intention. I was a citizen of the world, just passing through on my way back to the life I’d created for myself in a place where nobody ever dumped trash on my lawn and people celebrated my presence with complimentary bottles of expensive champagne. What was it about this house that was starting to pull at my heartstrings in a way I had never intended and didn’t really understand?

  “Are you?”

  “Of course,” she said, tapping her heart as if it was a place you could go to like Detroit or Chicago. “I’m rooted here.”

  FIFTY-ONE

  When Victor told me his mother wanted to see me, I was happy to hear it. We hadn’t had enough time to talk the other day, and I knew she had a lot more to tell me. I told him to tell her I’d look forward to it. On the appointed day, he offered to walk me over, but I asked him to stay at the house instead since we were the only two there and somebody was coming over from Georgia Power Company. Betty had sent the message through Victor, but he was not invited and I thought it would be less awkward if he didn’t show up at all, hoping to be invited in.

  When I walked up on the porch and rang the bell, I could hear her unlocking several dead bolts and at least one chain. It reminded me of living in New York before I went to Amsterdam. It took people twenty minutes to unlock their apartment doors. Those moments always made me nervous. If the building was so bad you needed that many locks, how safe did I feel cooling my heels in the hallway with both eyes peeled for predators?

  Betty’s front windows, including the large picture window, were covered with elaborate white burglar bars that looked more like New Orleans’s famous wrought-iron balconies but not quite so welcoming.

  “Come in, come in,” she said when she finally opened the front door, and the burglar door, and stepped aside to let me in. The house was neat as a pin and smelled vaguely of pine-scented cleaner. She ushered me into the living room where a small television in a big cabinet occupied one corner and a matching couch, chair, and love seat were carefully angled for the best view of the screen. A low, glass-topped coffee table had several issues of Ebony and O, The Oprah Magazine carefully fanned out in the manner of doctor’s waiting rooms. On top of the TV, there was a black-and-white photograph of a much younger Betty and a man in an army uniform standing arm in arm and smiling into the camera with the full confidence bestowed upon them by their youth and beauty. Beside it was a color photograph of a much younger Victor, graduating from college, or maybe high school, and looking appropriately serious.

  The sound was turned down on the television, but I saw the Fox News commentator giving the latest grisly details of some poor woman whose only claim to fame was as the victim of a man she thought could love her. Betty took a seat on the couch. She had already laid out a tray with a pot of coffee, two cups, and half a pound cake. I turned my back on the mug shot of the accused ex and smiled at Betty.

  “Thank you for inviting me to stop by,” I said. “It was good to meet you the other day, even if it wasn’t such a good time to talk.”

  “It was all right,” she said. “Sonny was just talking like a lawyer.”

  Sonny.

  “Would you like some coffee?”

  “Thank you,” I said. “I’d love some.”

  She poured two cups and handed me one.

  “He’s been a big help as part of our crew,” I said.

  “Well, that’s good to hear,” she said, pouring a little splash of cream in her coffee from a small silver pitcher. “He’s a good boy, but it’s time for him to be a good man. You’ve heard of tough love?”

  I nodded.

  “Well, that’s what I’m giving him,” she said. “It’ll make him stronger or it’ll kill him. Either way, we’ll know what we’re dealing with.”

  There was no denying that, so I just smiled and sipped my coffee.

  “I saw you the first day you came over here,” she said.

  “You did?” I wondered if she had binoculars. Maybe while Victor was keeping an eye on her, she was keeping an eye on him, too.

  “Of course,” she said. “You were driving down the street so slow, looking at everything so hard, I wanted to make sure you weren’t planning something. It used to just be the boys, but now it’s the girls, too, and you can’t be too careful.”

  The idea that anybody would mistake me for a dangerous juvenile would have been funny to me, except that she was serious. It struck me as a terrible way to have to live, hiding in your own house, peering out between the bars to see who might be casing the joint. It sounded like being in jail.

  “I was just trying to get a feel for the neighborhood,” I said. “It didn’t look like this last time I lived here.”

  She put her cup down and looked at me. “How long do you think it takes? People’s kids grow up, they move away, sometimes they die. Things change a little at a time, then one day you wake up and you’re living in a different place. You’re living someplace where people will steal everything that isn’t nailed down, and sometimes that doesn’t help either. A place where you can’t even go out and work in your garden for worrying about these knuckleheads bopping you in the head for the money you got in your pocket.”

  “That’s terrible,” I said. “What about the police?”

  She snorted a little. “They ain’t no better. You didn’t hear how they shot a woman ninety years old because they said she was dealing crack out of her house?”

  “The police shot her?”

  Betty nodded. “When it started getting real bad around here, I went over to West End and met with Bea Grimes at the Growers Association to see if we could become members so maybe their group could address some of our security problems, but Bea said they don’t do anything outside of West End.” Betty frowned and pursed her lips at the absurdity of the answer. “I said I understand Blue Hamilton can’t be everywhere, but we still have a right to live, don’t we? We still have a right to grow some collard greens.”

  That sounded like the chorus of a postmillennium urban American freedom song: Ain’t we got a right to grow some greens? So far, she was describing the perils of living in almost any inner-city community, but what did this have to do with Greer Woodruff?

  “Who do you think is responsible for the things that have been happening?” I said, hoping she would identify the enemy.

  “I don’t think. I know it’s that Woodruff woman.”

  “How do you know?” I thought so, too, but I needed more than a feeling.

  “Because once she got involved in it, things changed. We always had the break-ins and the robberies, but nobody was messing with your house. Nobody was dumping garbage on the grass or spraying nasty pictures on your front walk or sending the fire inspector out to tell you how dangerous your place is if you don’t spend all the money you’ve got to redo everything.”

  The association between Greer and Councilman Rogers was becoming clearer by the minute. Betty was getting more agitated the longer she thought about it. She put her cup down.

  “Crackheads crawling in the window are one thing. That’s when you get burglar bars. But this stuff, this city stuff, all that is because we won’t give her our houses so she can tear them down and sell this land to whoever wants it, just like we never lived here and raised our families and did the best we could with the blessings we were given.”

  She was leaning forward now, tr
ying to share her feelings and keep control of them at the same time.

  “She can’t make you sell your houses if you don’t want to,” I said. “What she’s offering isn’t even close to what they’re worth.”

  “They aren’t worth anything now,” Betty said. “Not with things around here like they are. People are scared if we don’t take what she’s offering, we won’t be able to get anything better.”

  I put my cup down, too. “I think we can do a lot better.”

  She looked at me with a ghost of a smile. “So do I.”

  “Then let’s work together,” I said. “How many neighbors do you have who want to stay?”

  “Three are strong,” she said. “Daisy’s a little shaky since she got broken into a couple of weeks ago, but I think if she sees we got something going, she’ll come around.”

  “So that’s four houses down here and mine makes five,” I said. “If we all agree we’re not selling, Greer Woodruff will get tired of trying to intimidate people and go find some land to steal that nobody’s living on.”

  “That’s what I keep telling everybody, but they act like I’m just talking crazy.”

  “Crazy or not,” I said, “I just think if you let them run you out of one place, they’ll run you out of another.”

  “Exactly,” she said, refilling our cups. “And in spite of everything? I still like it here. This is home.”

  “Me too,” I said, surprised by how much I really meant it. “Me too.”

  FIFTY-TWO

  Zora had a date with her friend from Morehouse. Victor was having dinner with Betty for the second time this week, and Abbie had gone to Tybee for a weekend visit with Peachy, who had stepped up his lobbying efforts with Louie. For his part, Louie had agreed to finally come down and see the place after three days of watching the Weather Channel to be sure there was no sign of a tropical storm. With everybody so scattered, Aretha and I decided to use the time to do some detail work on the inside of the house. We were painting the trim in the dining room a delicate shade of ivory. The pornographic graffiti was a distant bad memory, and the new windows we opened wide allowed light and fresh air in abundance.

  I was sitting cross-legged on a cushion, painting an old-fashioned floorboard, and Aretha was perched halfway up an aluminum stepladder touching up the ceiling trim. I liked working with Aretha. We talked about everything and nothing with an ease that surprised me, given the thirty-year difference in our ages. Sometimes we didn’t talk about anything at all, like today, but the company still made the job go faster. We’d been working in silence for a couple of hours when Aretha suddenly asked a question as if we’d spent the afternoon in conversation.

  “Your son was Zora’s father, right?”

  “Yes,” I said. “His name was Ira. He was an actor, too.”

  “Can I ask you something?”

  “Sure.”

  “Did you find it hard to balance being an artist with being a mother?”

  I laughed. “Impossible.”

  She laughed, too. “Thanks a lot!”

  “I was lucky. Ira’s father was able to take on the primary responsibility for raising him and did a much better job than I ever would have done.” Although he blamed himself for Ira’s drinking until the day he died.

  “Joyce Ann’s father is really hands-on, too.”

  “Well, then she’s a lucky little girl.”

  “Did you ever regret it?”

  No point in lying to the girl. She already knew the answer to that question. “Constantly, but I never thought I could be a great mother. I knew I could be a great artist.”

  And that was the unvarnished truth, in all its selfish glory. “And I was.”

  “And you are.” She smiled.

  I smiled, too. “Do you miss spending more time on your work?”

  “I do,” she said, “but I had a lot going on in my life and I needed to take some time and sort things out.”

  I remembered the pictures of her and her husband in Dig It! It couldn’t have been easy to come back from that with sanity and optimism intact, but she had done it. I wondered how.

  “Abbie helped me realize that it takes time to figure it all out and that the most important thing for me to do was to be patient with myself and take the time I needed to heal.”

  “Easier said than done.”

  Aretha grinned and turned back to her painting. “Not once you start doing it.”

  FIFTY-THREE

  We spent the day refinishing floors inside the house. Buffing off all the gunk was hard work, but at the end of it, we could finally see the beauty of the wood again. I congratulated Victor on a job well done and he actually smiled at me. He was spending more time with his mother, and although he hadn’t said it, I think they were both circling around the idea of him moving back in with her again.

  Zora was babysitting for Aretha so I had the house to myself for a few hours. My plan was to take a nice hot shower and then fix myself some dinner, but first I decided to retrieve two messages that had come in to the cellphone I never carry with me.

  Howard’s was the first one. “Oh, my darling, I can’t believe you’re not picking up! What is the point of a cellphone if you never take it out of the house with you?”

  He sounded stressed and annoyed.

  “Well, they have lost their minds over here. Everything is up in the air. I’m on my way to Paris for the weekend, but I think that weasel critic from the paper has your number and will probably call you. Somebody at the theater gave it to him. Three guesses who, but do not talk to him! No matter what he says, do nothing until you hear from me!”

  I wondered what the hell was going on.

  “You’re a star,” Howard said, his voice trembling with indignation. “They don’t deserve you!”

  That didn’t sound so good. I couldn’t even imagine what he was talking about. I saved the message and went on to the next one.

  “Hello, Miss Josephine,” said a voice I recognized as belonging to the snide little drama critic who was François’s girlfriend’s biggest booster. I realized that it had been days since I’d ever thought about the theater wars and wondered what kind of progress Howard was making. “Are you there? Well, call me back as fast as you can. I’ll pay, but I can’t go to press without a quote from you since The Human Theatre Company has just announced that they’ll be closing their season with a brand-new mounting of Medea.”

  I sat down. Do nothing until you hear from me.

  “François will direct, of course.”

  Of course.

  “Consuelo Rivera will be starring, which is the big news!”

  The really big news.

  “So call me, please. I need a reaction and I’m on deadline. Oh, and congratulations on that reality thing you’re doing. Everybody’s talking about it. Ciao!”

  The house was quiet and empty. Zora wasn’t around and obviously neither was my good sense. Here I was, scraping years of crap off a bunch of filthy floors, and my artistic life was being snatched right out from under me. It was time to fight back. I picked up the phone and punched in the number. He answered on the second ring.

  “It’s Josephine Evans,” I said. “I didn’t miss your deadline, did I?”

  FIFTY-FOUR

  I think I just burned a very big bridge,” I told Abbie the next day as we strolled along the aisles of the nursery Abbie had dragged me to at the crack of dawn. She justified the insane hour by telling me that all the best plants would be gone by nine o’clock since the West End Growers Association gardeners all knew about this place, too.

  “And you know how they are,” she had said and rolled her eyes. I had no idea how they were, but that didn’t save me from having to accompany Abbie on her early-morning mission.

  Of course, I grumbled, but only because I didn’t want her to make a habit of these outings. I’d been getting up earlier since I was usually too worn out to stay up very late, but I still considered myself to be a night person. Repairing old houses was a te
mporary blip on my screen. I didn’t want to undo a lifetime of getting acclimated to theater hours by turning everything around. The truth was, I enjoyed these early-morning excursions. The smell of the wet dirt, the racks and racks of seeds, and the tiny seedlings that always looked too fragile to safely leave the greenhouse were all exotic to me. The only thing that was familiar was the absolute nature of the whole process.

  Theater is like that, too. There is room in some performances for a little improvising, but that is a tightwire act best left to geniuses. For those of us who are merely mortal, the theater is a place of absolutes. You either know the line or you don’t. You either understand the character or you don’t. You can hit your mark, pick up your cue, and arrive for rehearsal on time, or you can’t. Ultimately, whether you do or don’t, at eight o’clock on any given evening the house lights will go down, the spot will find its mark, and the audience’s collective wish that you will indeed make magic hangs in the air like the smell of hashish in an Amsterdam coffee house. Abbie had explained to me that gardening is like that, too. If you don’t get the plants in by Good Friday, no amount of good intentions will produce tomatoes by the Fourth of July.

  “Sometimes you have to burn a few bridges to keep from crossing the same river twice,” Abbie said. “What’d you do?”

  “I told the biggest drama critic in Amsterdam that François had completely lost his mind and his vision, that his board was clueless, and that his girlfriend couldn’t act her way out of a paper bag.”

  Abbie looked surprised only by the last point. “I thought you said she was talented.”

  “She wants to close the season with Medea.”

  “François would never do that.”

  “He’s directing.”

  Abbie stopped in her tracks. “You’re kidding, right?”

  “I wish I was.”

  “Well, that’s just tacky. What are you going to do?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, watching two women who were easily eighty-plus pushing along a cart filled with potted calla lilies. Despite their age, their gait was more stride than stumble. They nodded as they passed us and we nodded back. “I guess I’ll have to wait and see what Howard says. He’s kind of my general on the ground.”