Angela Flournoy - The Turner House

Cha-Cha watched the haint watch whatever it saw under the bed. He realized he was holding his breath and tried to take a deep one to make up for it. He was suddenly worried about his health. Perhaps the haint was here to collect him, take him to heaven or hell. He had no intention of dying so young, not even outliving his father. He thought maybe he should tell the haint that it wasn’t welcome here, that it should go toward the light, or some other variant of things people in movies say. But Cha-Cha didn’t feel he had a right to say such a thing, not even if the haint was just something he’d made up.

“Well, do what you want then,” the haint said. It spat, but no liquid reached Cha-Cha’s carpet. “I never knowed you to be no coward.”

The door opened, and Cha-Cha turned to look at it. It was Lonnie, come so late to look for extra pillows, and when Cha-Cha turned back to the windowsill, the haint was gone. For the first time ever, he wished it would return.

SUMMER 1945

On the ride back to her parents’ shotgun house that morning, Reverend Tufts told Viola there was something heathen and hysterical in Francis. That her husband had claimed to see haints, and worse, that he claimed they were from God. It was not surprising Francis had gone north and turned feckless, he said; he likely succumbed to depravity shortly after stepping off the train. Tufts tried to console Viola. “You shouldn’t be overly upset,” he said. “A practical, good-looking girl like yourself will find an honest man to take care of you.” Viola hoped more than she’d ever hoped for anything that Tufts was right. She didn’t care much about haints; she just knew she couldn’t wait anymore. It wasn’t fair. And just as she refused to ever recount the story of her short stint as a white woman’s help, she told no one what happened in that car next. She watched the reverend remove his glove from his right hand and reach for her thigh. On the surface it might have looked innocent, a comforting pat, but Viola felt the warmth of his palm and the need in his fingers. Push that hand away, she thought, but she did nothing. She let his fingers settle there, and with a slight shift of her thighs she gave him permission to connect with what he wanted. With only one hand on the wheel the reverend pulled the car onto a gravel road flanked by oaks. Then he took off his other glove and put his hat on the dashboard. She did not wait for him to move toward her. She went to him, slid over to his side of the wide Packard. Viola did not know what she expected to happen afterward; she was not naïve enough to think the reverend would be the “honest man” to take care of her. The best he could possibly do was give her money to get to one of her brothers Up North, but Viola knew she would never ask him for it. She simply felt alone, and trapped in a life that should not have been hers. Francis had betrayed and abandoned her; she would betray him as well. She was eighteen years old. She thought it would be the lowest day of her life.

It wasn’t. Just as he’d known to wait on the side of the road for her that first time, Reverend Tufts appeared again in his Packard on the perfect patch of isolated road as Viola walked back from an errand a few days later. He again opened the door. She once again climbed in. Soon enough she started walking the long way home whenever possible, passing in front of the reverend’s porch where he might happen to be sitting outside for a smoke. They never talked much, a relief to Viola because as much as the love-starved part of her needed him to touch her, she hated when he spoke. He had certain turns of phrase that reminded her of Francis, and the shame quadrupled when she heard them. After each time, she returned to the shotgun house and swore to never walk the long way again, but she could hold out only a few days. He aroused her, and he repulsed her. A woman without no options is waitin for a man to come by and ruin her. It was a lesson that Viola would pass on to her daughters years later.

A month after she quit the Joggetses, Francis stood at the door of the shotgun house. Pounds thinner, dirty. Dressed even poorer than when he left. It was the middle of the day. Viola was home alone with Cha-Cha.

“I’ve done wrong,” he said. “But I got a good job lined up and I’m here for my family. I’m gonna be here for now on.”

I’ve done wrong, too! Viola had wanted to shout, but she did not. Nothing good could have come of telling her husband this. She let Francis into the house, handed him his child. He had ridden buses and hitched rides back south so that the three of them—husband, wife, and son—could afford train rides north. She pumped and heated water for her road-weary husband, bathed him, and set their baby down for a nap. Then Viola and Francis made slow, quiet love in the front room of the shotgun house.

They forgave each other without sharing the details of their betrayals. They would spend the rest of their lives atoning for those months when they had not only forsaken their marriage but given up hope. Each child became a consecration, further commitment to stay put and be happy. And they often were.

A boy like Francis had reason to see ghosts. A father in the ground so young from a poor man’s ailment. A mother away. Shortly after he lost them both, a haint visited him. A man with pale skin, hitched-up trousers, and bare feet. Francis had no picture of his own father, so he could not say for sure if this was him, but he had no reason to think it was anyone else. His yearning for his father had been so deep that he did not dare question how the man had found a way back to him. If haints could be conjured, called forth from the hereafter, then young Francis had accomplished it. The haint returned every subsequent Arkansas night, not always as a man, sometimes just as a light in the darkness of a room. For years he told no one because he did not want intercession. One man’s haunting is another man’s hallowed guest.

At twenty, married and father to one, Francis wanted a place in church leadership. Reverend Tufts, the man who considered himself a scholar, pushing his church toward pragmatism, fashioning a model, modern congregation, and above the need of even three old deacons, doubted his ward’s worthiness. Francis had received little formal education, after all.

“How do I know that you’ve truly received the call as opposed to doing what you think I expect of you?”

A simple enough question, and Francis could have answered with a verbose citation of scripture or a simple, fervent oath, but he spoke about the haint that had visited him for ten years right under the reverend’s roof. He likened it to the angel Gabriel, counsel to Daniel and comforter of Mary. He said he knew his place was in the church, helping to shepherd their humble congregation however he could.

It was the wrong answer. Reverend Tufts did not take kindly to superstition or root work, and claims of otherwordly visitations fell under that umbrella for him. Never mind the ghosts in the Bible. The reverend detested the tendency of Negro churches to prize the sensational at the expense of more complex concepts. He said he would consider what Francis wanted, but he did not. The next week he gave Francis a letter of introduction to a Detroit pastor and advised him to shoot for a better life up north.

Starting his first evening in Detroit, and every night for the rest of his life, Francis saw nothing. Not hide nor hair of the haint that had helped give his life purpose. He spent no small amount of time pondering why. Could have been that his father’s spirit, if the haint was indeed his father’s spirit, was unable to travel so far away from where its earthly body lay. Or maybe Francis, finally grown and gone for good from the sort of poor, sharecropping life that had killed Francis Sr., no longer needed protection. Either way, his conclusion was the same: there ain’t no haints in Detroit. When his firstborn son claimed to have seen a ghost, to have fought with it, Francis refused to believe. His haint had been a blessing, nothing to fear.