Angela Flournoy - The Turner House

“You want to change some of those for twenties?” the dealer asked.

He’s talking to me, Lelah realized, and she looked down for the first time in at least ten plays. Her hand rested on a cluster of persimmon stacks about six inches tall. Three hundred dollars, give or take, she could feel it. Jim, the dealer, stared at her.

“Sure,” she said. “How about one hundred in twenties, one eighty in fives, and whatever’s left in ones again.”

Jim obliged, and Lelah slid a cobalt $5 chip back to him for his assistance.

She had enough for a hotel room now. She knew she should leave. Slide her chips into her purse like that generous woman did earlier and make a beeline for the cashier. But her watch said 11 P.M. Just another half hour and she could be up $600. With $600 she could find a place to stay for a week, maybe two weeks if she settled for a shitty motel. She could flip the money into something worth leaving with. Not could, she would. She just had to try. She put $60 on black, $10 on 00 because it hadn’t hit yet, $40 on the third 12 of the board, and $20 on 27.

No matter how still Lelah’s mind became as she played, she was never careless; her purse stayed in her lap, her cell phone tucked in her front pocket. Vernon was the one to tell her that over two decades ago, back when they’d taken trips off base in Missouri to the riverboat casinos. “The same guy sitting next to you shooting the shit all night will steal your wallet in a heartbeat,” he’d said, and she’d nodded. This was toward the end of their marriage, and the riverboats, newly opened, were one of the few places where the two of them still had fun. Neither of them was interested in winning money, but Vernon had an engineer’s knack for figuring things out, breaking systems down into their parts. They conceived Brianne after one of these trips, and although they weren’t exactly in love anymore, Lelah believed they had created their daughter in hope.

“No more bets.”

The ball landed on 14. She had no chips on 14, which meant $120 was gone. The remaining $180 was still more than she had in the bank, but what could you get with that? Not much. If you walked out with $180 when you could have had $600, you didn’t walk away the victor. She put money on the same spots again, just half as much.

It wasn’t Vernon’s fault she’d ended up a gambler; she would never say it was. A few years after the divorce and her return home Lelah started going to Caesars in Windsor on her own, and that’s when the feeling found her. The stillness she hadn’t even realized she’d needed up until then. When she felt like she was flailing, back on Yarrow not doing anything worth anything with her life and tired of being alone, she could sit right here, put her hand on the chalky surface of the chips, and be still for a moment in the middle of all the commotion of the casino floor.

“No more bets.”

Lelah looked down. Her twenties were gone, gone before she even thought to admire the shiny redness of them. Cobalt and persimmon were left—it felt like forty dollars. Her watch said 11:27. Forty dollars was like no money at all, so she might as well let it play. Straight up on 27 twice and it was gone, and with it, the stillness. She heard the slot bells first, then noticed the stink of cigarette smoke in the air. Lelah found herself part of a loud and bright Friday night in Motor City once again.

SUMMER 1944

A city had its own time and cruelty. There was cruelty in the country too, but it was plain. Not veiled beneath promises of progress, nor subtle when it manifested itself. Francis took in the high-domed roof, the glittering marble floors, and the multitude of corridors as he walked. One stepped into a place like this—a palace like the kinds that Abraham and his wife, Sarah, turned up in, he thought—and felt impossibly small. Just a dim light, easily blown out. Francis arrived at Michigan Central Station with a small bag, his only pair of shoes on his feet, $15 in one pocket, and a letter for a pastor in the other.

He’d hoped for a different letter from the one he carried. It did not introduce him as a clever young man worthy of apprenticeship in the Lord’s work. That letter and any chances of a preacher’s life were gone.

Reverend Matthews,

I trust that you will be able to assist Francis Turner, of my flock, with securing housing and a good word at one of the fabled places of industry in your city. He is open to any work available. He and I will both be much obliged.

With Faith in Our Lord,

Reverend Charles Williams Tufts

Spring of Faith Missionary Baptist Church, Arkansas

Francis had opened the letter as the train thundered through Kansas. It was early morning, and the sky out the window stretched wide and black and endless. That phrase, “of my flock,” was impersonal, as if he and Reverend Tufts had not lived under the same roof, as if they were casual acquaintances. He deserved more warmth than that, a few words to lift him from the ranks of ordinary congregation member to favored almost-son. The reverend could have called his friend ahead of time; he had a phone line in his house, and Francis was sure the other man had one too. Putting the letter in Francis’s hand ensured that he would have to look the man up, humble himself before a stranger, and beg his case. He couldn’t bring himself to use such a letter, especially not one so impersonal. He kept it in his pocket for the duration of the train ride. This was how it had been done since Henry Ford first took a paternal interest in Negro employment and the cheap labor it provided: manufacturers depended on Up North ministers to supply them with reliable workers, and those ministers reached out to their southern colleagues for help filling the positions. But that was before the war. Who needed a note of introduction in a city on the forefront of the war effort? Francis had read that there were more jobs available in Detroit than in the entire state of Arkansas.

Pride had always played a prominent role in the Turner psyche. Its source went back further than Cha-Cha and Lelah’s generation, past Francis’s too. Officially, Francis Turner Sr. died in 1930 from a rusty-nail puncture to the bottom of his left foot, but it was pride that did him in. He stepped on the nail walking back from the fields he sharecropped, and the soles of his shoes were so worn that nothing prevented the corroded metal from piercing him nearly to bone. He hobbled home to his wife and six-year-old son and let his wife dress the wound. Francis Sr. ignored Cynthia Turner’s pleas to go see a doctor for monetary reasons but also out of pride. There were no doctors in their town, and Francis Sr. could not imagine sending for a white Pine Bluff doctor over a cut on his foot. He doubted the doctor would be willing to even step inside his house, and he would not let any doctor tend to him in the yard as if he were an animal. His was not an arbitrary, selfish sort of pride; for Francis Sr., losing the little dignity he’d held on to as a black man in the South seemed a more concrete defeat than death. Two weeks later Cynthia was a widow, and the debt Francis Sr. left her led to eviction. She and her son moved into a one-room shack that was one bad storm away from being no more than a lean-to. After two years of scraping by, Cynthia found a live-in maid job in Little Rock. She entrusted young Francis to Reverend Tufts, a widower himself, and sent money when she could.

If Francis hadn’t inherited enough pride from his father, Reverend Tufts supplemented what he lacked. The man had a congregation of fewer than three hundred poor people, but he indulged in frequent haircuts, a two-story house, and a new car every five or so years, even while paying tuition for his only daughter at Tougaloo College. His brand of pride—heavier on self-regard than Francis Turner’s, but still rooted in the same desire to feel a man when the world told you otherwise—extended to his pulpit. The reverend had three deacons and he would have preferred none, but these three were so old and respected, there before he even moved to town, that he couldn’t rid himself of them.