Mat Johnson - Loving Day

IN THE GHETTO THERE IS A MANSION, and it is my father’s house. It sits on seven acres, surrounded by growling row homes, frozen in an architectural class war. Its expansive lawn is utterly useless, wild like it smokes its own grass and dreams of being a jungle. The street around it is even worse: littered with the disposables no one could bother to put in a can, the cars on their last American owner, the living dead roaming slow and steady to nowhere. And this damn house, which killed my father, is as big as it is old, decaying to gray pulp yet somehow still standing there, with its phallic white pillars and the intention of eternity. An eighteenth-century estate in the middle of the urban depression of Germantown. Before he died, my father bought the wreck at auction, planned on restoring it to its original state, just like he did for so many smaller houses in the neighborhood. Rescuing a slice of colonial history to sell it back to the city for a timeless American profit. His plan didn’t include being old, getting sick, or me having to come back to this country, to this city, to pick up his pieces. This house is a job for a legion, not one person. It would kill one person. It did — my father. I am one person now. My father’s house is on me. I see it from the back of the cab, up on its hill, rotting.

Donated by the Loudin family after the Depression, the mansion was used by the city as a museum until a fire that created repair costs beyond its means and interest. At one point in my life, decades before, I was a boy. As such, I knew this house. I used to ride the 23 trolley past its absurd presence and marvel at this artifact of rich white folks’ attempt at dynasty. A physical memory of historic Germantown’s pastoral roots, before the larger city of Philadelphia exploded past this location, propelled by the force of the industrial revolution. Most things from childhood get smaller with age, but Loudin Mansion towers, because now I have to take care of it. So I want to run. I sit passively in the taxi as I’m driven closer, but my thighs ache and my bowels are prepared to evacuate, and I want to open the door and run. I’ll run. I’ll run through North Philly if I have to, all the way downtown. Run along the highway back to the airport, then run away again from the whole damn country.

The white cabdriver makes no move to get out with me when he finally stops, just pops the trunk open with one button and with another relocks the doors after I open mine. That lock clicks hard. I’m on the street with my bags, and I can’t get back inside. I’m not white, but I can feel the eyes of the few people outside on me, people who must think that I am, because I look white, and as such what the hell am I doing here? This disconnect in my racial projection is one of the things I hate. It goes in a subcategory I call “America,” which has another subheading called “Philly.” I hate that because I know I’m black. My mother was black — that counts, no matter how pale and Irish my father was. So I shall not be rebuked. I will not be rejected. I want to run but I refuse to be run off.

A kid walks by, about seventeen, not much younger than I was when I escaped this neighborhood. He looks up, and as I lift my bags I give him the appropriate local response, an expression that says I’m having a bad life in general and a headache right now. Welcome home. There are blocks around here where you can be attacked for looking another man in the eyes, and other blocks where you can be assaulted for not giving the respect of eye contact. I could never figure it, which blocks were which, until I realized these were just the excuses of sociopaths. The sociopaths, that’s the real problem. The whole street demeanor is about pretending to be a sociopath as well, so that the real ones can’t find you.

When I get to the porch, the front door opens. I can hear it creak before I see someone emerging from behind its paint-cracked surface. Sirleaf Day is carpeted in cloth. He’s got a Kenyan dashiki, Sudanese mudcloth pants, and a little Ghanian kente hat. It’s like Africa finally united, but just in his wardrobe. Last time I saw him, he dressed the same, but he only had one leather medallion. Now he has enough to be the most decorated general in the Afrocentric army. I give him a “Howyadoin,” and the Philly salute, a hummingbird-like vibration of my forehead, the most defensive of nods. He gives me a hug. He hugs me like he knows I’m trying to get away.

“So you had your first divorce. That just means you a man now. Which kind was it? She stop loving you, or you stop loving her?”

“It wasn’t like that,” I tell him. Sirleaf grips me closer.

“Oh hell no. I hope it wasn’t one of those where you both still love each other, but it’s broke anyway. Those are the worst. My first, fourth marriages, they were like that. At least you didn’t have any kids with her.”

“Uncle Sirleaf, I really don’t want to talk about—”

“Don’t give me that ‘uncle’ mess. You’re too old for that shit. And I’m way too young,” he says, pushing me back for another look before pulling me in once more. “Your pop was waiting for you to come home, you know that? This house, it was going to be for you. You and your wife, your children. Bring you back to the community.” Sirleaf’s voice cracks with emotion. It makes me feel guilty for wanting to break free of his musky grasp. “And it did. You got to give that crazy honky that.”

I look over Sirleaf’s shoulder: there’s a rusty Folgers Coffee can sitting on the porch, by the wall. It’s there because my dad never smoked in a house. This can of ashes is full of cheap cigar butts, mixed with the cigarette butts of whoever visited. I know without looking inside it, because there was always a can like that on the porch of wherever my dad was living.

“He knew I wasn’t coming back. He was just going to fix it up to sell it, like he always did.” This gets him to release me, partially. He still holds my shoulders, pushes me back as far as he can to take a look at my face.

“Wasn’t his fault you ran off, was it? My daddy left me when I was four and gave me nothing but my stunning Yoruba features. So stop bitching.”

Sirleaf is a lawyer, a realtor, a griot, and a kook, and he’s good at all of those things. My dad was his white friend, because they had the kook thing in common. For three decades, they would get together to sell a property or drink whiskey and get kooky together. My dad had his own realtor’s license, but he wasn’t good with most types of humans. Sirleaf is the people’s man, knows everyone that matters in Germantown, from councilmen to people looking to buy their first homes. He speaks three languages: Street, Caucasian, and Brotherman.

Sirleaf’s getting old and finally he looks it. Some people age, and some just dehydrate. Sirleaf looks like someone let the water out and the creases dried in its absence. I can’t imagine how old my dad must have looked. They were the same age but my father was one of those pasty Irish people with no melanin to protect his skin from time. He could barely manage enough pigment for a mole.

“We should really have a funeral,” I tell him. “Or a memorial or—”

“He ain’t want one, and we’re going to respect that. You know your pop — he wasn’t one to spend good money on a bunch of bullshit. His legacy, it’s this house, this property. And it’s you. Now let’s look at your inheritance.”

With great flourish, Sirleaf turns back to open the front door. But it’s stuck. The wood’s swelled and it takes a lot to jar, a lot of effort to protect so little. Hell’s lobby waits on the other side. If my father’s soul is left in the physical world, it’s in the tools he left behind. Sandpaper, ladders, and scaffolding. Plaster and tarps, rollers and paint tins. At the back of my nose I can smell the Old Spice and Prell even though he hadn’t used either since I was eleven. I will be buried here too, I just know, and then I fight that thought with the words I have been thinking in the days leading up to this moment: paint and polish. Paint it, polish the wood floors, tidy up whatever basic visual problems might get in the way of a buyer’s imagination. Build on whatever my father managed in the months since he’d taken ownership. Use all the tricks he taught me. That’s what I thought, packing to come back Stateside; that’s what I thought waiting for the plane. That’s what I tell myself now. Paint and polish. I even say it out loud.