The Turner House (8 page)

Pride worked in mysterious ways on Francis, much like the God he worshipped. Pride prevented him from using Reverend Tufts's letter of introduction to get a good job and maybe even free rent for a while. But he was not too proud to ask strangers for help. At the train station in Detroit he chatted up a porter who directed him to a janitor who told him to head to a house off Hastings and see about renting a room. He had a gift for conversation, for making people feel at ease. It wasn't his words, exactly; Reverend Tufts always said that Francis was eloquent in his head but still too much a country nigger out his mouth. It was his looks, he supposed. He was tall and slender without lapsing into frail, and his skin was the color of baked-right cornbread. He'd learned early on that folks assigned all sorts of qualities to skin like his, and that a certain type of middle-aged woman would always consider a yellow boy somehow trustworthy. The sort of young man who would help carry a load of groceries and not run off with them. He asked colored person after colored person for advice until he climbed aboard a streetcar headed for Paradise Valley.

The best way to avoid feeling too small for a place was to pretend you'd been there before. It was Francis's first time on a streetcar, but after the lurching claustrophobia of the train ride (another first), the wide-open windows were welcome. On Hastings, among so many citified Negroes, Francis tried to feel like one of them. He dawdled in front of a chicken shack he didn't dare spend his money in. He stood in front of a vegetable cart and lamented the pallor of Up North tomatoes. He broke down and bought a plum, found it sour but ate it anyway. Poor folks and the better-off were out, couples shopping and mothers with children in tow. It was Saturday. He'd only had liquor a couple of times in his twenty years—a neighbor's moonshine made his throat swell when he was thirteen—but he thought that after seeing about a room he'd find himself a nice place to sit and have a drink. There would be workingmen at a bar, and maybe he'd find his way into a job.

A room. The boardinghouse was crumbling. Ash-gray rotting wood showed through the black paint, and greasy sheets hung in the windows. The porch sagged as if it were sometimes tasked with supporting more than a dozen Negroes at once. The house sat on a street narrower than Hastings, and poorly paved. The smell of garbage and sewage made Francis's mouth tingle with nausea. He knocked, and a sharply dressed young woman with a wide, pouty mouth opened the door. Too good-looking for such a place. Francis thought she might be a whore, and this place some type of cathouse. Still, he took off his cap.

“You a soldier?”

“No ma'am. I just come up from Arkansas,” he said. “You only rentin to soldiers?”

“I didn't say that,” she said. She looked him over again. “You just look like a soldier, the way you stand. Not much the way you dress, though.”

Francis made a conscious effort not to adjust his posture. He repeated that he'd just come from Arkansas, added that he didn't have much money, but if she had space for him, he'd never miss rent. The woman's eyes dropped to his mouth as he talked, and Francis wondered if this was because he sounded so country or because she saw something there she liked, or didn't like. He had a gap between his two front teeth, and people were often of two minds about it.

The woman suggested he split a room to save his money. He'd get the room to sleep at night, and during the day a Mr. Jenkins, who worked nights, would have it. She would hold his belongings downstairs.

“You're lookin at me strange, but this here's the best setup for a fellow like you.” She swept one arm in front of her like a circus ringleader presenting to a crowd. “You all keep coming up on every train and bus, and y'all find work, sure enough. But it'll be
a lot
harder to find yourself a decent place to live. You wait and see.”

Francis didn't believe her. He'd read about the race riots up here the year before. He'd read that on top of rumors of a black baby thrown into the river or some other specific injustice, the fighting had been over housing, and that the government had finally broken down and guaranteed space for Negroes in the city. Housing projects, they were called. He kept these thoughts to himself. Part of the job of being the mistress of a crumbling boardinghouse was to present housing as scarce, he supposed. He had no doubt he'd find a better place to live once he found work, so he left his bag with her. She introduced herself as Miss Odella Withers after he'd paid his rent for the week. He wandered over to Beaubien Street, back toward the heart of the Negro commerce stretch that he did not yet know doubled as the center of Negro nightlife. He passed over a place that two conked-haired men in suits entered and followed a man with rolled-up shirtsleeves and well-worn trousers into another. He sat at the bar and ordered a scotch, the only liquor he'd ever seen Reverend Tufts drink.

Viola was expecting a call. Francis imagined her sitting in Jean Manroy's ramshackle house far down the road from her own, trying to be polite so that Jean didn't change her mind about lending the phone. He'd said he would call when he was settled, but who could consider half a room and no job settled? Francis looked around the Up North bar and drank his scotch like the other patrons—slowly, carefully, as if it had been on his mind all day.

SUMMER
1944

The Reverend Charles Tufts left a message for Viola with her neighbor Jean Manroy. He said that his pastor friend Up North had not heard from Francis, and furthermore that it was not advisable for Viola to contact him about it again, seeing as how her husband was now in the business of turning his nose up at favors. Jean relayed this message with a nasally, phony-white accent meant to mimic the reverend's intonations. It was a known secret that the reverend who claimed New York was originally from North Carolina and had trussed up his diction upon setting foot in town. Viola did not laugh. She left Jean standing barefoot in her raggedy front yard and walked back to her parents' house to check on Cha-Cha.

Six weeks had passed since Francis left town on a bus bound for the train station in Little Rock, and local tongues wagged. Eventually the ones in Viola's own house joined in. Her overworked father was too tired to care about gossip, but her mother, two older sisters, and four younger brothers took to aggressive whispering.
Ain't he have a job lined up? They got phones Up North, don't they? Well, at least he
married
the girl, fore he run off. I heard they roundin up colored men at the train station and sendin em to the war if they don't have no proof of work. He supposed to be preachin with Tufts, why'd he run outta here in the first place? He liked to do right, but with a mama like his maybe he just ain't got it in him.
When Viola entered a room in their two-bedroom shotgun house, voices retreated abruptly, like water from the shore.

Francis could have stayed in their tiny town, devolved into a drunk and a whoremonger, and Viola's family would have supported them with fewer complaints. Aspirations to leave set her and her new husband apart. Ever since the Budlongs of Brunswick County, Virginia, had found their way west to Arkansas, no woman in her family had left for anyplace farther than Pine Bluff, which was less than twenty miles east. She had two brothers in Cleveland and a third in Omaha, but they were men and their lives their own. And Francis
was
supposed to be preaching. Viola had met him in church when she was thirteen years old, shortly after she stopped going to school. He was already tall at fifteen, golden and thoughtful. He usually read the opening scripture for Reverend Tufts on Sundays, and Viola noticed that he knew most of the Old Testament by heart. A more impressive feat than memorizing the new one. The Reverend Tufts was not a tall man, but he was handsome and imposing in his Sunday robes. Viola imagined that Francis would one day look even better in those robes because he would be more humble, and not clutter his sermons with flourishes like Tufts did. When you got the call like that, so early in life, what was there to do but preach? You didn't necessarily need a college degree like Tufts had, you just had to know the scripture and feel the pull of the pulpit for admirable reasons.

When Francis said they were moving to Detroit, that Tufts had given him a letter of introduction and a little money to send him on his way, Viola had insisted she wouldn't go. “Just cause somebody tells you to up and move don't mean you move,” she'd said. “This time it do,” Francis had muttered back. They were in his room in Tufts's house, on the first floor behind the kitchen, their makeshift honeymoon suite, and they could hear the reverend creaking around upstairs. It was the first time she'd sensed that she ought to hold her tongue with Francis, that she should tamp down the flurry of questions in her throat to spare some part of her new husband's pride. A difficult feat, but she managed it. Francis left two days later.

On her way back from another fruitless visit to Jean Manroy's telephone, Viola saw her sisters, Lucille and Olivia, standing on the porch of her mother's house. Lucille carried Cha-Cha, just four months old, in her arms. When she came closer she saw that Olivia held a white envelope in her fist, so tight it looked like she meant to crush it. Viola ran up the walk and snatched it out of her hand. Its seal was intact, and it had an incomplete return address.

Dear Viola,

I am in Detroit. Grateful enough I have a job and somewhere to sleep. I am saving my money and will find a way. I do miss you.

F. Turner

Francis had enclosed $7. Seven dollars! Not enough, not at all. Viola had left school to work in the fields with her older brothers and sisters on their father's sharecropping plot. The boys picked cotton and the girls held out the stiff burlap sacks for collection. The longer Francis stayed away and kept sending such little money, the more the fields called her. It was either that or housework for white folks, which is what Olivia and Lucille had opted to do a few years back. She tried to think of which job would spare the most of her dignity and afford her time with the baby. A preacher's wife shouldn't be forced to choose between field work and white folks, she thought.

“So he ain't dead,” Olivia said.

“No, he ain't
dead
,” Viola said. “Who thought he was? I thought the goin rumor was he run off.”

“Well he ain't said he's leavin you for good, or you'd be cryin,” Lucille said. She handed Cha-Cha to Viola and put her arm around them both. “You oughta be smiling, girl. Plenty girls sittin around waitin for a letter like that, and it ain't never comin.”

Viola tried to see it that way.

SPRING 2008

With the exception of his graduation from navy basic training—all those white uniforms, the green lawn, the crisp rows—any time an event reminded Troy, the twelfth Turner child, of a scene from a movie, things turned out poorly. Occasionally on his beat when he pulled someone over or responded to a call he'd have this cinematic déjà vu, and trouble always followed, be it an irate arrestee or a senior officer with brass on his shoulder who barked in Troy's face. This evening had all the makings of a scene from a white-collar crime thriller, and Troy's nerves responded accordingly.

“Pull over right here,” David Gardenhire said.

Troy parked his SUV at the curb in front of a little park with a gazebo abutting the river.

“Here? We're only a couple blocks from your apartment,” Troy said.

“So? We don't need to drive into the woods. This phone just doesn't get good signal inside.”

David pulled out a phone Troy had never seen before. A cheap flip-up one, not nearly as nice as David's new smartphone.

“You got a prepaid just for this one call?” Troy's voice cracked at the end of his question.

“Yeah,” David said. “Last time I dealt with this dude I used a pay phone. Shows you how long ago that was.”

The need for an untraceable phone line increased Troy's suspicion that he was acting out a Hollywood scene. He wasn't a detective, but beat work and crime shows had proven that if a prepaid phone was necessary, the perpetrator was into something extra dirty.

Over the previous few days his original idea about the Yarrow Street house had crystallized into a plan. He and his girlfriend Jillian might not have the $40,000 needed to absolve Viola of her debt, but they had enough to buy the house for the price any interested stranger would be expected to pay. Less than four thousand, Troy estimated. Of course, short-selling at the current market rate to relatives of the debtor wasn't legal, or else everyone would shimmy out of bad loans as quickly as thin women out of dresses. As Troy had pointed out during the meeting at Cha-Cha's, on paper Jillian Farmer had no connection to the Turners at all. The larger issue, Troy knew, was his siblings' lack of confidence in his and Jillian's relationship. Troy himself had a middling amount of confidence in them as a couple, but not having the approval of his siblings had become one of the most appealing incentives for short-selling the house. He used to crave their approval with a desperation that dictated his life. Since coming back to Detroit and becoming “Officer Troy,” a name his siblings used to mock him, he'd discovered that it felt good to do what he damn well pleased.

“So you ain't worked with this guy since forever ago, and you trust him to just up and help us now?”

Twilight was turning into evening on the RiverWalk, but Troy could still see the whites of David's eyes as he rolled them. Both David's dark skin and his lankiness had been fodder for teasing growing up. Now Troy thought these features made his friend look ageless; he could have been twenty-five or fifty-five.

“This ain't a big money deal, Troy. It's four grand at most, which means this guy's cut is only a couple hundred. Not worth snitching over, trust me.”