Solemn (31 page)

“Now your daddy said you went to a yard sale, while he was knocking on doors?”

“Not really,” Solemn said, and she clucked her tongue to the roof of her mouth. She stared at the front desk again, with all the official busyness and computer monitors and even a woman police officer. She wondered how long it took her to get that job.

“Can you explain what ‘not really' means?”

“Well, there was a lot of stuff in a house and I took it.”

“Just like that?” Bolden quizzed, with his face turned to Bev's.

“Yup.”

“What did you take?” Bolden said, picking up a pen and starting to write now.

“A lot of stuff … rings, diamonds, nice radios, some guns.”

“You took guns outta a house in Cleveland?”

“Yep.”

“What kind of guns were they, Solemn?”

“The kind that shoot.”

“Were they small, big, short, long … did they look like this?” Bolden inched up and unholstered the the .22-caliber he hitched to the back of his slacks.

“Some of 'em,” said Solemn, still.

“And you weren't scared to touch 'em? You ain't think a gun would go off?”

“Not if you don't pull on it.”

“Touch that one.”

“Mr. Bolden, I don't want her doing that,” Bev interrupted.

“I'll touch it.” Solemn's fingers glided to the warm black object on the table. She circled thoughts of what to do. She imagined, for a moment passed slow, effects of a blistering and sudden blast on the people's heads before her. The Man at the Well appeared in a chair. That Baby wiggled on the floor in the corner of the room. The woman from the television smashed Bolden's head on the table, and a line opened up on his forehead. That poor woman jitterbugged in a corner. They swished back to figment.

“Where were the guns you found?”

“Uh … in this big tall thing, this cabinet. It had locks on it, so I broke it with this long thing I found in the living room.”

“The fireplace poker?”

“What's that?”

“What color was the house?”

“White.”

“Somebody let you in?”

“The door was unlocked. I was in the car all by myself. My daddy was down the street somewhere. So I went in.”

“And … you just started taking stuff out? Stealing, a crime, for no reason?”

“I wasn't stealing anything. I just wanted to see some of the stuff. It was fancy.”

“Did your father tell you to do it?”

“Earl would never have done that,” Bev interrupted.

“Mrs. Redvine,
please
. I'm asking your daughter.”

Akila spoke: “I need to go to the ladies' room.” She rushed out to go sit in the car.

“My daddy didn't tell me to do anything. He wasn't there. I just did it.”

“So you just walked around a bunch of houses in a place you never been, tried the knobs, found one that was unlocked, and decided to let yourself in?” No more notes.

“No. I didn't try any other houses. Just that one.”

“The white one in Cleveland?”

“Well, I don't know where we was when I went in the house.”

“Why that one?”

“I don't know. It just looked like the door was unlocked.”

“How you tell if a door unlocked just by looking at it from the street?”

“I just had a feeling.”

“I don't believe you, Solemn.”

“I'm sorry I did it,” Solemn recalled she was to say. “I didn't think anybody would get mad about it. It looked like these people had a lot of stuff as it was, so they wouldn't miss anything. My daddy didn't sell any DigiCates for a long time and I was just helping. But the people in the house looked rich. I didn't think they'd care.”

“But, Solemn, you had to have known some people wouldn't like it if they came back home and found out a total stranger had been in their home, going through their private things, touching their stuff, taking whatever they wanted. I mean, these people are very important. They're not happy. They want someone to pay for this. And much as I'd love to help you, you go before a judge and you're gonna be sent to a detention center. Now, we can try to get the time reduced … but that'd be up to a judge.”

“Well, I didn't think about all that. I just thought about the stuff.”

“Okay, Solemn,” Bolden groaned. And for once, he wished it weren't his vacation around the corner. “Okay. If that's what you say, I have no choice but to believe you. But you do know you're going to have your picture and fingerprints taken and all that? And if it all matches up, if some neighbors remember your face or if your fingerprints match ones found in the house … well. Solemn, this is really serious.”

“But I'm only a minor.”

“Yes,” Bolden said, with his eyes square into Bev's, “you sure are that.”

 

3

THE NORTH

 

TWENTY-SIX

What appeared to the black people of Bledsoe to be a mount of gods where fates were handed down was nothing more than halls of secretaries, three-line phones, typewriters, computer databases, and bathroom meetings across a few precincts and a courthouse. What appeared to be sensational for them was customary for forces above them. What caused hysteria and alcoholism among the poor was a string of checked boxes and eye contact among the rich. It was all a syndicate.

Had Solemn not been coincidentally known to a token black officer turned detective, in one of the few noteworthy zip codes of Mississippi, she would have gone to Lincoln Training Center: to be detained for petty mistakes, tied down for illegal whippings, doused for defiance, tripped for oversleeping, starved for attention and dinner, then breakfast and lunch, passed in state education exams just for knowing how to write her name—no more. Solemn would have slept in barracks reeked of vomit and abandonment, unmanaged. She would have had patches of hair twisted loose by the bullies among them who confused domination with a chance. She would have been at the mercy of hard stone floors. She would have spoken to her visitors at slim tables in sweltering rooms. She would have found weed, cigarettes, and crack. If she had not found them, they would have found her. She would have been forced onto imprecise meds arresting her mind, changing it from what she could relate to.

However, there came an arrangement. The police weren't stupid. That was not the test. The question was: “Do we care?” And they did not. At the northwesternmost edge of Mississippi, on 1-55 North, just a baby's breath from Memphis, was a group home for girl truants and wards of the state: the Fanny O. Barnes Home, named for a rich white reverend's wife who sent a few of her black help's girls to private schools, paid so long as their mothers put up with mean and spiteful bosses like Fanny was before she died.

First in a tiny office of the Attala courthouse outside a courtroom, Bev and Solemn signed a lot of papers nobody bothered to read out loud.

Then Akila took Solemn for cheeseburgers and fries at the Tracys' diner.

Next Bev met Earl at the jail to bring him home, few words between them but the same story.

Finally, Akila snatched Solemn out of the trailer before they got back. Landon covered for her. Solemn made sure to grab one thing. The jewelry and music box with its black threaded sides now unraveled, the unicorn missed a foot. She was warned. No girl in Fanny O. Barnes could have money anywhere but on the books—no trades. But still. She needed it.

“Solemn, we gotta go now!” Akila shouted from somewhere in the dizzy, blurred, and pin-striped world Solemn could not hold in her mind for too much longer. “We can't start off breaking the rules…” she echoed on.

When Solemn unrolled and opened the socks where her money went once the jewelry and music box became unnecessary and immature, nothing was inside them. Not one dollar at all. All that time. All that work. All those years. Nothing. Solemn recalled her hands through a house in Cleveland, thought about bigger hands and what they do.

*   *   *

At the Days Inn where they once honeymooned, Akila and Landon packed Solemn two suitcases and a hatbox full of four pastel General Dollar sundresses on summer clearance, a pair of tennis shoes, jeans, an alarm clock, deodorant, feminine products, toilet paper, lotion, and baby powder—like she was off to college. Had it not been for the state sheriff who trailed them in a dead giveaway, she could have been.

Next morning Landon's new Buick LeSabre drove up the snaking driveway to the group home shrouded in a clearing razed for its purpose. Solemn perceived a mansion—first she had ever seen in real life, up closer than at the edges of interstate roads. It had columns, a fountain, a flagpole, pillars at the seams, balance, depth. Vines braided into the outside. Along its side appeared to be a flower garden, through an arch: periwinkles, marigold, and sunflower patches she could tell. Not a squad car parked in sight. No guards stood at the door. And, she was to live here? It was a punishment, to them. To Solemn, it was a dream come true. Solemn knew a thing or two about maps from the rides with her daddy. Memphis was in reach. Nashville was attainable to her. Chicago much closer.

Mittimus in hand, the sheriff confirmed his transport inside then snuck back out to his car. To nap. Landon, Akila, and Solemn sat in the corner of a lobby with nothing but a custodian and his whistling. There was no greeting. The custodian saw so many come and go. He did not trust a one of them. They were all nice in the beginning, sure. Next thing you know, he would clean up shit dumped purposefully outside the toilet, a reflex of abuse they were used to. They tripped him when he passed. At some point, a woman with glasses on a chain came to hand them some forms, placed in such stern order on a clipboard there was no way to disorder them. There was no invitation to observe what went on behind two curtained French doors leading to the back.

“Who do we put as her legal guardians?” Akila asked, the pen in her mouth.

“Daddy and Mama,” Landon said. “This ridiculous. Somebody should be out here going through this with us. Wait here. I need to find somebody who runs this place.”

“You think I should put us down? We bringing her here…”

“Do what I said.”

Akila understood her husband. Their nerves were brittle. A new house, new job, new babies … now this. Landon thought his parents were smarter than this. Now the Redvines were exactly what everyone thought niggers were: caught up in the criminal justice system, statistics, undesirables, broken, ridiculous.

According to the scribbled sign on the office's glass window drawn shut, the front receptionist was now on a bathroom break, which was either diarrhea or a lie. After a five-minute wait, Landon had enough. He toured the hallways to search for staff, a few of them involved in interrupting disruptions or explaining schoolwork to hard little faces. He wore his corporal's uniform on purpose. He planned to throw it in the cleaners soon as he left Fanny O. Barnes. Already, it felt sooty and dirty just being in there. But for now, it served a purpose: to walk his little sister through this menacing dump and let anybody who saw her know she had a brother who had access to the guns. It was working so far. Few staff members who did glance in his direction, though they did not help, stood at some attention and wondered at who he was and what he was doing there.

The war finally show up in Mississippi?

The facility's hallways were a maze its staggering exterior had only hinted at. Landon ended up right back at the receptionist desk. She still wasn't back. He saw no bathrooms, or water fountains, or bells on the wall. The muggy home sent his blood boiling and shut down any patience he acquired in a brief appointment to reconnaissance. He headed toward sounds of pots, pans, and running water. He smelled what turned out to be breaded chicken, green beans, and mashed potatoes from a kitchen far back. Above long and steaming trays was an older black woman alone, with a snaggletoothed young white boy. The woman taste-tested her gravy. Her subordinate mopped the floor.

“Excuse me!” Landon yelled. Only the cook looked up. She motioned him over. He stared at her upper right chest and saw a copper tag pinned, the name
Ruth Golden
. She put hands on her hips and peered at his face: “Yessuh?”

“Miss Golden,” Landon said, “I'm bringing my sister here for her first day, and no one's here to help us in or see her on her way properly. Where do I go?”

Ruth Golden set the ladle on side of her brown gravy pan.

“Come on with me, baby,” she said.

Landon returned to Akila and Solemn with Dr. Pamela Givens.

Dr. Givens' office was a former unmarked closet near the emergency back door where they hid the trash. She wore tweed in Mississippi and Tennessee near fall. A chain fastened her spectacles, too. She was directed to the only child in the room. She knew the story. But she never knew shit. She just went by what she was told.

“Well, sorry we don't have personal greeters around here. Come on back.”

The walking tour was down two hallways passed by two hall-size rooms of faces, lethargy, and tension. They kept on down the hallways to her office. She pointed out relevant rooms. But all the while, her head split to another direction of inside talk:

These folks ain't got a clue. They done had it with this child and think I'm gonna work a miracle. And I ain't. If she's a hooker, forget it. She's hooked. If she's a pimp, she's done. If she's a gal with no daddy, forget it. She's feral. If she's a girl with no mama, I'm lost. That's in its own little category I'm still trying to figure out myself …

“We have three floors,” the orientation began. “Main floor for everybody. Better behaved get the top. Lesser in middle. All the doors alarmed. All the windows alarmed, too. This is not a jail, so we don't keep bars. But it's a special code to get the windows open, 'cause this ain't no hotel, either. We don't pay for air-conditioning here. But we understand the conditions. This is Mississippi, or Tennessee, depending on which way you looking. Windows only open a few inches. If they want a fan, they gotta check one out with Miss Bernadine at the front, and check it back in.”