Angela Flournoy - The Turner House

During his sixteenth summer, Francis stopped receiving Cynthia Turner’s small packages of neatly folded money and sweets. She had maintained one-Sunday-a-month visits with him up until then. She would take a bus out or hitch a ride, and the two of them would sit on the reverend’s porch and talk. A stranger driving past might have mistaken the two for teenagers embarking on a courtship via sanctioned Sunday visits. If they were lucky, the reverend would join them and fill up their awkward silences with self-congratulatory chatter. On her final Sunday, Cynthia said her white folks were moving to Dallas, where the husband had some sort of work lined up, and they had asked her to join them. Francis was not surprised that his mother had said yes; the white folks had seven children, and he’d long suspected that the line between blood and water—questionable water at that—had gone blurry for his mother. His sixteen-year-old pride prevented him from showing his disappointment. He took a long look at her smooth, wide face, the high eyebrows he’d inherited, and said a variation of something he’d heard the reverend tell many a congregation member when they moved away: “I’ll be prayin for you, Mama. You call or write me if you ever need a thing.”

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.