Seen It All and Done the Rest (15 page)

TWENTY-FIVE

W
hen Aretha came by to pick me up in the morning, Zora had already headed off to work and I was preparing myself for a first look inside. The thing about the house is that it isn’t just a piece of property to me. It represents my connection to a long line of women for whom home ownership was a requirement. My mother was a member of a large, messy, matriarchal clan whose family herstory begins with the story of an enslaved ancestor forced to bear the master’s child. When the baby’s facial features precluded the possibility of denial, the mistress of the plantation grew increasingly agitated at her presence until the master packed up our ancestor and her daughter and drove them to the outskirts of Montgomery, where he deeded them a small house and set them free.

That house represented the official end of their enslavement and was handed down from mother to daughter until the city of Montgomery grew up around it. Finally forced to sell to make way for progress, the great-granddaughter took the proceeds, immediately bought another house, and started the process all over again. When I was a little girl in Montgomery, all my aunts and female cousins owned their own houses. Men would come and go, but the houses and the freedom they represented remained constant.

When my mother divorced my father and moved us to Atlanta when I was twelve, she sold our house to her second cousin, once removed, and immediately bought the duplex. Her plan was for us to live on one side and rent the other to an older, single woman, preferably a schoolteacher or a retiree. She did this successfully for the whole time I lived in Atlanta, after I moved to New York, then Amsterdam, and up until the time she decided to go back to Montgomery and buy back her first house from the cousin who had decided she’d had enough of Alabama and moved to Florida.

She held on to the Atlanta house for my benefit, and when the rent money it continued to generate paid for Zora’s education, I knew how pleased that would have made her. But Zora needed something else now. She needed a way to get far enough from the scene of the crime, and the coverage of it, to regain her perspective. There was no way she could learn any valuable lessons from a boarded-up house located smack-dab in the middle of—what had Greer Woodruff called it?—an undesirable neighborhood. If my mother’s legacy was about continuing a long line of free women, this would be what she would expect me to do.

I hoped when Aretha and I got there, the indignant squatter wouldn’t be around to greet us, but I had no way of knowing, and the prospect of being confronted by him again did not appeal to me. Aretha told me not to worry about it.

“You said he didn’t seem dangerous, right?”

“More pissed off at me than anything.”

We were riding down Martin Luther King in her beautiful red truck and, considering our mission, her expression was surprisingly serene.

“Maybe you woke him up,” she said calmly. “He’s probably not a morning person.”

I looked over to see if she was kidding and she grinned to let me know she was.

“Don’t worry. If he makes you nervous, we’ll get one of Blue’s guys to come back over with us.”

Blue’s guys,
the army of well-dressed, soft-spoken, hat-tipping men whose presence made West End such a peaceful place. Too bad we couldn’t clone them, I thought, as Aretha turned into the driveway and headed up to the house. As she parked the truck, she looked around, frowning.

“I can’t believe they just let it go like this,” she said. “This was a great house.”

“The question is,” I said, “can it be a great house again?”

“That’s what we’re here to find out, right?”

“Right.”

“I’m just going to give a few blasts on the horn in case our squatter is sleeping in.”

I nodded. “Good thinking.”

She blew three long blasts and then three more. If anybody was in the house, they would know they had company. We waited a minute, but no one emerged. In spite of her confident demeanor, I think Aretha was as relieved as I was.

“You ready?”

“Absolutely,” I said, opening the door and stepping down into the overgrown yard.

Aretha shook her head, her eyes surveying the bags of trash, piles of broken furniture, stained, rain-sodden mattresses, and other debris scattered all over the big front lawn and up to the front door. People had obviously been using the yard as an unofficial neighborhood dump site. I could smell the rank stench of garbage spilling out of a bag near the back fence. The idea of rats suddenly came crashing into my mind. One of my first official acts would have to be hiring a good exterminator.

Reaching into the truck for a black bag that she had stashed behind her seat, Aretha unzipped it and took out a small video camera.

“What’s that for?” I said, immediately aware that I had applied no makeup and was wearing a pair of sweats I had borrowed from Zora. I never wore sweats, didn’t even own any, but I realized the clothes I had with me were not really suitable for the task at hand. However, this borrowed finery was definitely not camera-ready.

“I thought it might be good to videotape what we find inside,” she said. “I don’t know what your legal options are, but it never hurts to have a visual record of the property’s current condition.”

That made sense, but I wanted to be clear. “So I won’t be on camera?”

“Not unless you want to. We’ll walk through and I’ll make some comments about what we’re looking at, sort of a running commentary, and you can add anything you want.”

“On camera?”

She grinned again. “On or off. It doesn’t matter, but for the record? You look great.”

“Thanks,” I said, knowing this was no time to explain to her that part of how I make my living is being able to make a dispassionate assessment of how I look at any given moment. Great was how I looked at the party after I opened the season with
A Raisin in the Sun
last year. I’d never played Lena, the matriarch, before, but I nailed it. When she picks up that pitiful little plant from the windowsill at the end and gets ready to go do battle with her new neighbors, there wasn’t a dry eye in the house. But Lena is a poor woman eking out a living on Chicago’s South Side doing day work. Her costumes, including an incredibly serious wig, are uniformly unattractive. For the party, I needed an outfit that would effectively banish Lena from the minds of all who saw me and reestablish me immediately as my real self.

Howard didn’t let me down. I arrived in a bright red gown that clung where it was supposed to and gave me a break when it needed to, sky-high heels, ropes and ropes of pearls, and a faux-fur coat that looked so real I got an angry letter from the animal rights people which they later had to rescind. I was utterly fabulous, eliciting gasps whenever I floated by, pausing to offer a cheek or an air kiss somewhere in the vicinity of the recipient’s ear.
That
was great. This is what it is.

“You ready?” I said.

The key I had gotten from Greer’s office was completely unnecessary. When Aretha pushed the front door, it opened slowly like a bad moment in a horror movie. If it had actually creaked, I probably would have lost my nerve altogether. We stepped inside and just stood there for a minute while our eyes adjusted to the gloom. Inside was dim and dank, and I was glad Aretha had a big flashlight stuck in the back pocket of her overalls. There was lots of graffiti on the walls, some crudely pornographic, with various forms of fellatio being the cartoon subject of choice, and some scrawled signatures that seemed to be there strictly for identification purposes. Sir Smith and Kozmic Kat were two favorites.

There were mounds of trash everywhere, mostly fast-food wrappers and white Styrofoam food containers, but also some shoes, clothing, and lots of newspapers. Aretha handed me the flashlight and propped open the front door with a stick to give us the benefit of any available sunshine, but with most of the windows boarded up, we didn’t get much help there. I flipped on the flashlight and swept it over the area we could see. Aretha turned on the camera and started walking around the house slowly, speaking clearly and calmly about what she saw.

“No locks on the front door. Trash uncollected. Walls defaced. Floors scarred.” She turned on a switch but neither one of us expected light and we were right. Aretha kept walking and talking and I followed her, but I was in shock. It was so much worse than I had expected. They had bashed in the walls, ripped out the wiring, torn out the bathroom fixtures, and stripped the kitchen of both appliances and cabinets. Parts of the parquet floors were deeply scratched as if someone had deliberately gouged out the wood. The linoleum in the kitchen was just disgusting.

All the rooms were filled with more trash and whatever else the squatters left behind. There was no furniture to speak of outside of a few broken-down chairs and a couple of filthy mattresses that I wanted to douse with gasoline and burn right then and there. We had started on the rental side, but I was sure the family side would be no better. There was no sign here of recent occupancy so I assumed my squatter had been camped out next door.

Aretha finished the last bedroom: “Both windows gone, no overhead fixtures, walls defaced and damaged. Ceiling stained, but no sag.” She turned off the camera and looked at me. I could see the concern in her eyes so I must have looked as stricken as I felt.

“You okay?”

“This is terrible,” I said. “Just awful, awful.”

“Calm down,” she said. “Some of it is cosmetic and won’t cost much to fix.”

“What about the rest?”

She shrugged. “Let’s look at the other side before I try to give you any estimates, okay?”

That didn’t sound promising, but I agreed and followed her back through the wreck. The front door on the side we used to live on wasn’t locked either. Aretha turned on the camera and I turned on the flashlight. My heart sank. This one was just as bad. The small dining room where my mother and I ate so many meals together. The living room where I’d entertained my first boyfriends to the sound of Motown music. The kitchen where I mastered a family recipe for macaroni and cheese. It was all trashed. Aretha was still describing what she saw, but she was also watching me out of the corner of her eye.

When we got to the two bedroom doors, both of them were closed. I opened the door to my mother’s room and found nothing there that had belonged to her, just more mess and the strong smell of urine and mildew. I stepped out of Aretha’s way and reached for the door to what had been my room. The room where I started my period. The room where I first had sex when my mom had to go to Montgomery one weekend and I stayed home alone to study. The room where I’d know it was Sunday by the sound of Ms. Simpson’s voice singing, “And he walks with me/and he talks with me/and he tells me I am his own,” on her side of the house. The memories were suddenly pouring out of that door before I even cracked it and I wasn’t sure I could go in.

“Was this your room?” Aretha said.

I nodded as I stood there with my hand on the doorknob.

“Do you want me to do this one by myself?”

“No, I’m okay,” I said. “It’s just a little spooky. Makes me think about how long it’s been since I lived here.”

And how weird it feels to be back.

But then I opened the door. The room that had been my girlhood sanctuary was free of trash and as neatly organized as a prison cell. A narrow cot was covered with an old quilt, which was surprisingly clean, and a card table with one chair was in the corner. Sitting in the middle of the table, on top of a stack of what looked like old library books, was a saucer full of candle stubs, obviously the room’s only light. There were books lined up around three of the four walls.

He also had a small red plastic cooler and a pair of black shoes with no shoelaces at the front of the cot. On the wall above the pillow, he had tacked up a small snapshot of a man and woman wearing their Sunday clothes, smiling into the camera. They looked happy and hopeful, the way people do on graduation days and election nights and honeymoons. There was also a calendar from the soul food restaurant around the corner with the days of the current month marked off in a series of neat red
X
’s.

“I guess this is where your squatter has been hanging out,” Aretha said, as surprised as I was by the sudden imposition of order in the midst of the chaos we’d been slogging through.

“Let’s leave it,” I said, pulling the door closed, suddenly feeling an entirely inappropriate rush of guilt for invading his privacy, even though he was squatting in my room.

Aretha wanted to get some footage of the yard and the exterior of the house. She didn’t need me for lighting anymore, but I walked with her anyway, trying to sort things out.

“Did you used to play out here?” she said as she turned the camera toward a mountain of black trash bags down closer to the street. It looked like people had just walked up to the fence and tossed their junk right over into our yard.

“My mother had an amazing rose garden out here,” I said, remembering. “Red, yellow, pink, white. She was always pruning them or feeding them or watering them. It would kill her to see it like this.”