The Turner House (15 page)

He found Odella reasonably versed in the Bible, and she knew about the goings-on both overseas and in Detroit thanks to her fondness for the radio.

The
Fibber McGee and Molly
show had just come on the evening Francis decided to sit directly next to Odella and see what that wide mouth felt like pressed against his own. They were in her little apartment downstairs with its banging radiator by the time the show's ham-fisted Johnson's Wax opening commercial ended. Odella was the second woman Francis had ever slept with, and he was very grateful for the experience, adultery be damned. So grateful he repeated the act as often as she let him.

Sleeping with her was not enough to absolve him of rental obligations.

“
Every
body's got to pay rent, soldier,” she said one morning. “Even a body like yours.”

They'd drunk a half pint of cheap bourbon the night before, and Odella stood in an ivory slip in front of her kitchenette making a water and baking soda concoction for their hangovers. The thermostat outside read in the twenties, but Odella's basement apartment was always steamy, which she claimed was good for the lungs and bad for her hair. She liked to call Francis a soldier, and Francis never could decide whether she meant to make him feel brave or like a coward. She did not ask him about back home, and he did not ask how she came to rent out a big old house by herself. He guessed her to be in her late thirties, but this guess was predicated only upon the way the skin between her breasts folded like a tiny accordion when she put them in a brassiere.

The first job Odella found Francis involved painting houses with an outfit run by the same man who had painted the boardinghouse years before. This job Francis enjoyed. He had some skill in painting, thanks to summers spent touching up the church back home, and he got an opportunity to see more of the city than bus and streetcar fare could afford him. He tracked the pockets in neighborhoods where Negroes were living, and those where they seemed to have the best chance of encroaching. Out near Eight Mile and Wyoming, country life claimed its last foothold, but as much as a small farm and a modest house appealed to him, Francis knew Detroit was not the place for it. While outhouses and water pumps were ubiquitous back home, up here they heralded dire straits. He rode in the back of the truck and watched junk collectors traverse Black Bottom, their rickety carts overloaded with treasure scavenged from the many garbage piles that lined the back streets. Forty years later, he would think of these men when scrappers descended on his neighborhood. He would imagine them running around the east side at night, placing the bits of metal they pried off of houses into the same rudimentary carts. From the men who worked with him he discovered that a fellow could pay to get his name moved up on the wait list for the new housing projects, and that the only real way a colored man could get past the racist real estate pacts in white neighborhoods was with a whole bunch of cash, connections, and luck. It was useful information, if not encouraging. By the middle of November snow wrapped its obstinate fingers around the city's neck and the painting work dried up.

The second job Odella found for him was the most Jim Crow job in all of Detroit, or so Francis thought. Odella knew a few members of the Urban League who knew a member of the Nacirema Club, a social club for Negroes with status (
American
spelled backward, she told him; Francis found this foreboding). The Nacirema man hired all of the caretakers for the cars that executives at a certain major manufacturer drove to work each day. They'd switched to defense building for the war, yet their own cars still received special attention. The company preferred Negroes with genteel mannerisms to serve the executives, but they settled for those with light skin in a pinch. Francis greeted the bosses when they came to work, washed and serviced the cars as needed, and drove them back out front when summoned. A stable boy for twentieth-century horses. The type of job Francis was born to lose.

Two sorts of men worked with him: those who took immense pride in the measure of intimacy they were granted with the executives, and Francis's type, who would just as soon crash the boatlike vessels into a wall. Of the latter group Francis found a friend in Norman McNair, a young man near his own age up from Alabama, with a receding hairline and a habit of chewing tobacco in lieu of lunch. “Rather eat breakfast and dinner,” McNair would say. “Do those two right and lunch ain't on your mind.” He and his wife rented a room not far from Francis's half room, over in the poorest section of Black Bottom, but they had no access to the kitchen, so meals were expensive. His wife worked as a housekeeper for a black undertaker's family in the Conant Gardens neighborhood. The McNairs were an example of what Francis should have been doing—working hard, saving for a house—but he could not manage it. Even if he somehow made the money, he thought it would take twice as long to make the right connections. His country conversation skills did not do the long-term charming up here that they had done back home. During his third week, one of the “other” sort of colored men working as a valet accused Francis of stealing a pair of driving gloves out of an executive's car. Francis was fired without deliberation.

He would come to think of these first months in Detroit as his heathen period, the beginning of his walk from God. Not completely away, but farther than he'd ever been before. Since stepping off the train, Francis had felt the call to preach receding within him, like a sonar ping growing fainter with each knot traveled. Nothing replaced it. He went to church once, to Bethel AME, and felt insignificant, sitting in a back pew in his faded trousers and sweater. More than a purpose, being part of Reverend Tufts's church had given Francis identity. He was no one in Detroit. One more migrant in a city where so many stepped off of trains and buses each day. No one knew him up here to judge him, because no one knew him up here at all. So he drank and screwed and lost his jobs. He did not call or write his wife.

FALL
1944

Viola had to work for white folks after all. She needed the money, and in the end she couldn't bear to be in those fields. As far as the fraught dynamic of interracial housekeeping went, Viola believed she fared well. Ethel Joggets, newly married into the Pine Bluff Joggetses, did not condescend more than Viola expected, nor did she degrade. Ethel had a son named Harold around the same age as Cha-Cha. The two women had origin in common; their people came from roughly the same spot in southern Virginia. When they figured out the connection, Ethel had said, “Small as that county is, we might be
distant
cousins!” She laughed long enough to highlight how absurd she found the prospect. Viola had an older, more complicated relationship in mind, but she kept it to herself.

The Joggetses lived thirteen miles from Viola's shotgun house (she would always call it the shotgun house), and it took two buses to get there. On the first one she rode with her sisters, Olivia and Lucille; they set out an hour before sunrise and parted ways at first light for their respective second buses. Gas rationing meant the second buses were overcrowded; sometimes Viola and a handful of other colored maids waited for several to pass before a driver deigned to give his last few inches of standing space to them. On the ride home she'd listen to the geese honking or the humpback crickets singing and imagine Francis on a bus or a trolley of some sort as exhausted as she was, only he was going off to spend his money on what? Viola couldn't imagine. People talked about how a good war-effort job paid at least six dollars a day. Almost six times as much as Ethel Joggets paid her.

Viola had no intention of playing the disgruntled, abandoned wife for long. In 1944 it already felt cliché. And no, she wouldn't resign herself to the work of her sisters and half the women in town. She had no inherent gift for organization, no real skill for cooking or cleaning, which was something her sisters knew when they found her the job. “I oughta get into the pictures, way I was lyin to that woman,” Olivia had said. “Lord knows you don't know
nothin
bout puttin things back where you found em.” Being the third girl and child number six out of ten had buffered Viola from certain singularly female duties. She was better at delegating, and managing the expectations of her father when she and her siblings worked in the field, or of her mother when it came to the status of housework. She might have operated a successful housekeeper-dispatching business—a sort of precursor to Molly Maid—but back then housekeepers were hired by word-of-mouth reference only, and the salaries were so small, no housekeeper would pay a fee for a go-between. Ethel Joggets assumed Viola knew how to make dishes that she'd never learned to cook and that Ethel herself couldn't prepare. (How to make hot-water cornbread? What
was
tuna casserole?) She also expected Viola to have a facility with children that Viola did not yet possess. Cha-Cha did not cry like Harold did, for what felt like hours at a time. Each day Viola arrived anxious that she would be outed as unfit for this job that she now needed to keep.

On the way home from work three months after Francis's departure, Viola walked past Jean Manroy's scraggly front yard. She realized she had no urge to stop in and see if there was a message for her. In fact, the last time she'd stopped by, the front of Jean Manroy's property had been a mess of gardening tools and dry, overgrown summer grass. Now red and gold leaves covered the lawn.

SPRING 2008

The line for the unemployment department's Problem Resolution Office in New Center stretched out of the building's tinted-glass doors, past the neighboring FedEx, and several hundred yards to the corner. At least sixty people waited outside, not to mention the snaking line within, and the office had only been open for forty-five minutes. Lelah joined at the very back, behind an obese white woman who sat on a red combination walker/chair contraption. All sorts of people populated the line: teenagers, the elderly, the shabbily dressed, the suit-and-tie types, the shabby-suit-and-tie types. To Lelah's surprise there were near-equal numbers of whites and blacks waiting. Lelah had been laid off from her job at the airport in 2002, and when she had visited the unemployment office then, the overwhelming blackness of her fellow unemployed seemed to be clear evidence of injustice. But the proliferation of these new white jobless was more disturbing. If this many white folks couldn't find a job, times were certainly tough.

In fifteen minutes Lelah moved up a few feet, and the line behind her grew by nine people. She overheard people discussing extensions, training programs, and appeals, but she had no desire to join a conversation. Experience had taught her that this sort of talk was pure speculation, and getting excited about one's case based on the shaky advice of the fellow jobless a waste of time. Instead she played a maze game on her phone over and over, beating her previous high score each time.

After another twenty minutes someone tapped her on the shoulder. A short, skinny, balding man in slacks and a T-shirt.

“Hi,” he said. “How long you been in line?”

“About half an hour,” Lelah said. She brought her phone up to her face again.

“You mind if I ask what you're waiting to find out?”

Lelah looked the man in the eyes. He had shaved recently, and this seemed like an indication of sanity to her, never mind the incongruity of crisp slacks and dingy T-shirt.

“What do you mean?”

“I'm trying to figure out what kinds of problems they solve before I stand in this line for the rest of the morning,” he said.

Lelah opened her mouth to respond, but the woman in the walker butted in.

“Anything and
everything
, sweetie,” she said. “If you couldn't get your answer through the phone or on the computer, you have to come here and hope they figure it out. No exceptions.”

The man didn't appear satisfied with this answer, but he said thank you and moved to the back. The woman in the walker looked up at Lelah conspiratorially. The flaky makeup on her jowls reminded Lelah of powdered doughnuts.

“There's always that type here who thinks they can cut,” the woman said. “Like if they just ask someone closer to the front, they'll find a way to bypass the line. But we all gotta stand here and suffer until it's our turn, right?”

Lelah smiled with her mouth closed. She didn't enjoy talking to strangers outside of the casino. Without the clanging of jackpot bells and the headiness of free booze to bolster them, people generally only had inane or rude things to say. The woman chuckled to herself and scooted her walker up as the line edged forward. Lelah turned to see the line stretching back to the Fisher Building, an art deco behemoth she had been inside of only a handful of times.

The interior of the PRO office smelled of stale breath and popcorn. Signs hanging above the representative windows instructed those in line to have their ID cards, social security numbers, and a copy of their initial correspondence ready. Lelah dug around in her purse for several minutes before acknowledging that she had no idea where her official unemployment rejection letter was. Likely balled up in a corner of her old apartment, next to the stack of unopened delinquent account notices. Francis's pipe still lay in her purse. She decided to carry it around as a reminder of the things she needed to retrieve from CHAINS-R-US. She couldn't stop thinking about her flute. She had decided that she needed discipline; maybe she could trick her brain into finding stillness while making music instead of gambling, and abandon its other preoccupations.

At the window, a woman behind the counter took Lelah's ID and entered her social security number into the computer. There should have been an easier system than this, Lelah thought, a computer kiosk where people could input their own information and get basic answers. She'd waited two and a half hours to watch someone push buttons on a keyboard.