The Turner House (12 page)

“If you haven't read it, then never mind,” Cha-Cha said. “I just thought maybe.”

“I read this a
long
time ago,” Francey said. “Good book. A lot of the stories and jokes reminded me of going down to see Auntie Lucille and Olivia when we were little. You know how, when Mama says something that makes people mad, she'll say, ‘Don't like it, don't take it, here's my collar come and shake it'?”

“Yeah.”

“That's in the book. You start reading it?”

“Not yet, I just got it.”

“You said ‘this haint,' like it's yours. You still seeing it?”

Cha-Cha explained what he'd realized with the help of Alice, that he had felt the haint's presence on and off throughout his life, although he hadn't actually seen it save for that time in the big room and the night of his accident. He was glad Francey seemed to be relaxing. He never took for granted her ability to bounce back from potential discord. Too many of his siblings were incapable of doing the same.

“You think you're too smart for this kinda thing to be happening to you?”

Yes
, Cha-Cha thought. “No,” he said. “Being smart's got nothing to do with it.”

“Please. You're not a touchy-feely person, Cha. You're a logic person. So even though you know you seen something, had an experience, you either need to find some logic in it or get rid of it.”

“What's wrong with logic?”

Francey smiled. She had small, straight teeth and a slim gap between the front two, like Francis Turner.

“What's wrong with it is that you end up acting like the white folks in scary movies, who either provoke the ghost or try to get rid of it, when really they don't have to do anything. That's a Western thing, being afraid of ghosts. And really, it's a
new
Western thing. They used to have all kinds of spirits they believed in before they decided they knew better. Look at
Hamlet.
Matter of fact, a lot of them still believe in stuff like that, but they like to make black folks feel stupid and superstitious for doing the same thing.”

Ever since becoming a healthier person Francey had taken an interest in non-Western everything, preferably anything with African or Middle Eastern roots. It might have had something to do with the dreadlocked brothers and Yemeni immigrants who ran the juice bars she frequented. It had never really bothered Cha-Cha one way or the other, not like it bothered Quincy, who was too conservative—too interested in appearing upright and unsentimental—to sit around without eye rolling and listen to Francey talk about architecture in ancient Kemet, or Asanti funeral traditions. Cha-Cha was just happy Francey backed up all her talk of the Motherland and libation rituals with book knowledge and specificity.

“I never said I'm afraid.”

“You are, Cha.” She smiled again. “You checked out a book from the library? You're doing
research?
You're afraid. You need to work toward acceptance. Science can't explain why you and I are alive when so many folks we grew up with are dead, but you're able to accept that.”

“I think that's statistics, or probability,” he said. “We had two parents, and then you and me were the third and fourth parents for the ones under us. It was harder for folks to get into trouble, and there was more support around.”

“Don't buy in to that, Cha. Folks got into plenty of trouble. Lonnie especially. Don't give me that two-parent-household junk. Other folks had two parents, and a bunch of siblings, and they're not around anymore. It was chance, or fate or God, but it wasn't science. You know, the Yoruba in Nigeria, they believe in what they call Orishas for all sorts of things. So do black Cubans and Brazilians in their own ways; they kept believing right through slavery. Then you have Vodou in Haiti, which, you know, made its way to New Orleans. And plenty people around the world believe that ancestors can intercede on our behalf, which I'm not saying this is, but you never know. I used to have a book about it, someplace. If I can find it, I'ma bring it to you.”

The storm door slammed shut, and Richard walked in with a white butcher-paper bundle cradled in his arms. Meat, which Cha-Cha guessed he would grill out back since it was now warm enough to do so. Francey didn't allow it to be cooked in her kitchen. He clasped hands with his brother-in-law and hugged him. The same height as Cha-Cha but thinner, the same bald head and skin tone as Harry Belafonte.

Richard picked up
Mules and Men
, pulled the book to arm's length to read the title better.

“What's this about?”

“I gotta run,” Cha-Cha said. “Good to see you though, Rich.” He didn't want to have to sit there while Francey told Richard about his haint; he'd feel ridiculous. He gathered up his tools, pecked his sister on the cheek, and let himself out.

“Hey, Cha?”

Francey had followed him out to the driveway.

“One thing you gotta remember is he stopped,” she said.

“Huh?”

“Your daddy stopped drinking. He found the willpower to quit. You can't go around tellin his story to your therapist or whoever without mentioning that.”

Cha-Cha said nothing in return. He drove home. A memory kept bothering him, one that seemed to fly in the face of the narrative of his father that his siblings cherished. He wasn't sure if he'd made things larger as an adult, whether time had inflated the importance, but since seeing Alice this morning it had played in his mind on a loop. He hadn't even told her about it, because he did not know what it meant.

I
N THE SUMMER
of 1967, when Cha-Cha was twenty-three, he worked at the Lynch Road Assembly Plant putting together Dodge Chargers. In June of that year Viola announced she was pregnant again, at forty years old. This thirteenth and final pregnancy might have been the most memorable event of the summer if only Detroit, the country, and maybe even the entire world had seen a different July.

On the morning that Detroiters began to realize the skirmish on Twelfth and Clairmount had morphed into something larger, Cha-Cha and his fellow line workers went to the plant as usual. Anxiety crackled off of people like static. Nervous behavior led to carelessness, and by lunchtime Cha-Cha's coveralls were splattered with the blood of another man, a man who let himself get distracted. He left the plant determined to find a new job.

Before that July a burning building felt like a particular and tragic occurrence to Cha-Cha. The smell of brick and clothes and small pets smoldering urged a person to stand tall like a prairie dog and crane his neck in search of the emergency. Afterward, a burning house became an olfactory norm akin to skunk spray; as long as the source of the odor wasn't too close, you eventually ignored it. Cha-Cha's shared apartment on Forrest and McDougall had no kitchen, so when he felt particularly lonely, he used the excuse of needing a home-cooked meal to come back and check on things at the Yarrow house. If he'd had no younger siblings to worry about, he might have joined his own friends from the neighborhood in search of new shoes, lightweight appliances, anything with resale potential. He wasn't above recreational looting. But as the eldest, he kept in mind that the fires, the looting, and any police beatings all qualified as reasons a Turner boy might get into serious trouble, or maybe even die. He felt responsible for making sure nothing happened. Quincy was in army boot camp in South Carolina. Miles, Duke, and Troy were all under the age of eight and therefore still under Viola's thumb. This left Lonnie and Russell. The two of them were standing on the porch when Cha-Cha pulled up.

“Everybody in the house?” Cha-Cha asked.

“Yeah,” Lonnie said. “Except Daddy's not home yet. They're sayin on TV there's a curfew tonight. They got snipers on the roofs shootin at the police.”

Lonnie stood with his chest puffed out, his bony shoulders thrust back. He was thirteen but already as tall as Russell, with tight knots of pubescent muscle on his arms, and his father's strong chin. Neither him nor Russell asked Cha-Cha about the blood on his collar.

“Where y'all goin?” Cha-Cha asked.

“To get bricks,” Russell said.

Cha-Cha stared at his brother as if he didn't comprehend. He knew Viola was kneeling on the couch on the other side of the front window, listening. He walked toward the door.

Russell stepped in front of him.

“I said we're gonna go get bricks, Cha, and we want you to come with us.”

“I heard what you said. You see all that smoke? They probably shooting niggas on the west side by now,” he said.

“Well, we on the east side,” Lonnie said.

“I heard they looting on Harper too,” Cha-Cha said.

“So? I'm not finna sit up in that house like a girl, watching everything on the news,” Lonnie said. His new, deeper voice cracked as he spoke.

“Kowski pays a
nickel
a brick,” Russell said. “All this shit goin on, you think anybody cares about the bricks we take from tore-up buildings? We could be doing a lot better money-wise, but ain't nobody gonna shoot us over bricks.”

When he was sixteen, Cha-Cha had also felt and looked as much of a man as Russell did. He knew that no matter what Russell felt like inside, living in the Yarrow house meant he was still considered a child. Still reduced to bickering with younger siblings and begging Viola for pocket money. To wait patiently while Viola, eyes closed, mouth scrunched, rooted around in her purse and extracted a few crumpled dollars was the ultimate humiliation. Russell sometimes worked for a Polish man he called Kowski, short for a longer name Cha-Cha never knew. He swept up trash and debris on construction sites in East Detroit. A nickel per brick could add up quickly.

Cha-Cha agreed to go with them. He wasn't old enough to forbid Russell and Lonnie from doing what they wanted, or strong enough to drag them both into the house. And if he stayed home and something happened to them out in the streets, what then? He turned his back on the window where his mother was likely spying on them, and offered his truck for the transport of bricks.

Every block seemed devoid of women. Most porches were empty. A half dozen were occupied by young men and older boys, their postures communicating a readiness to protect whatever resided on the other side of their thresholds. Cha-Cha knew most of them had guns within easy reach. Old hunting rifles brought up from Down South, and newer, lighter weapons acquired here. But who would they shoot, the police? They surely wouldn't shoot their neighbors.

Russell guided them to a house several streets west of Yarrow. It sat on a block abutting Harper, and its overgrown yard suggested it had been vacant even before flames from the neighboring dry cleaner burned through its roof and much of its second floor. By 1967 whites had already started their retreat to the suburbs, leaving vacant houses in their wake if black folks couldn't afford to buy or rent them quickly enough.

Cha-Cha stayed on the sidewalk while his brothers went to the side of the house. Judging from the way Lonnie walked ahead and Russell kept looking back, it was clear that the younger of the two had set this plan in motion. Although he was underage, Lonnie had talked himself into a job with Ron Vollick's Universal Teen Sales Club. Vollick organized carloads of colored teens to go door-to-door in white neighborhoods selling overpriced goods (dish soap, thermometers, measuring cups) to fearful housewives. Lonnie was a top salesman that summer, an expert at convincing ostensibly smart people to do stupid things.

Alone out front, Cha-Cha heard the
whup-whup-whup
of helicopters and the frenzied bleat of fire truck sirens. The sounds seemed to be moving away from him, toward the northwest of the city. He realized they should have had a better plan, one including a wheelbarrow. They wouldn't be able to make very many trips without attracting suspicion, and they needed twenty bricks just to make a dollar. The ferric scent of blood from his work shirt made him queasy. He should have at least changed clothes.

Cha-Cha's particular duty on the assembly line at work was to wait until a team of three men led by a fellow named Bryson bolted the body of the Charger to the lower frame. A train track-style conveyance then brought the car to Cha-Cha's bench. He had to reach under the body, connect a hose to the gas pump, and use a set of brackets to secure the rear axle. At first the line had moved smoothly despite everyone's nerves, but soon Bryson's team fell behind. Each bench had an approximate minute to complete its job before another car came down. Plenty of time in normal conditions. To prevent any backups, one relief man oversaw a clump of benches, and jumped in to help speed a job along if necessary. Cha-Cha and Bryson's relief man was Michel, a large, curly-haired white boy from Montreal.

Maybe it had been too long since Michel had helped out the line. Maybe Michel's mind was on the fighting and the fires in the streets. A minute should have been long enough to get Bryson's team caught up before the next Charger reached them. In a minute's time Michel managed to lodge his thumb between the lower frame and the upper body of the car, and Bryson's team bolted the two pieces together without noticing. The line stopped moving. Cha-Cha looked down and saw the blood sprayed across his own coveralls.

Now Lonnie and Russell loped toward Cha-Cha with large heaps of bricks in their arms. They dumped them into the back of the truck. Russell's chubby cheeks were smudged with soot, the front of his shirt drenched in sweat.

“Come on back and help us, Cha,” he said. “That way we can get outta here quicker.”

Cha-Cha agreed.

Lonnie and Russell sorted through the bricks, and Cha-Cha cradled the ones they passed to him. Russell had brought along a tiny hammer to knock off bits of mortar from the edges of the bricks. Lonnie wanted to climb down into the ruined basement where most of the bricks would have fallen, but Russell pointed out that the bad air quality might suffocate them.