Dinaw Mengestu - The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears

“Here. You can give these out to people when they come in the store.”

She caught my smile.

“What’s so funny?”

“Nothing,” I said. “Of course I’ll pass them out.”

“And you’ll be at the church on Wednesday night.”

“Yes. I’ll be at the church.”

Mrs. Davis took her leave of my store and me with all of the dignity she could have created for herself. She took a carton of milk with her for the road. She drank it by the gallon every week to strengthen her bones and fight her arthritis. I suspected that she washed her face and hands in it as well. Some people grow old passively. Others, like Mrs. Davis, are committed to battling any and every obstacle that approaches them, regardless of how ridiculous or impossible.

I waited until she was safely out of sight before I threw out all of the flyers she had given me.

The Second AME Church was located two blocks south of the circle in the middle of a street that, up until a couple of years ago, was known for the casual ease with which drugs were bought and sold on it. The block still retained more than a few remnants of its old splendor, including two abandoned Victorian mansions that were now being slated for historic preservation. The Second AME Church dated back to the late nineteenth century. A massive gray-brick building that sat on the corner of the block, it had passed through Methodist, Baptist, and Episcopalian hands before being abandoned in the 1950s. For nearly two decades the building sat empty, deteriorating year by year with the Victorian mansions that sat just up the street. Finally, in the 1970s, the building was bought by the AME Church from the city for twenty dollars. Money came in from both liberal and conservative politicians to pay for the new wooden pews, and to fix the broken stained-glass windows and the cracked steps leading up to the church. The congregation swelled through the ’70s and early ’80s. When I first moved into the neighborhood, my store was packed on Sunday mornings with black women in their elaborate pastel Sunday hats and men in their best and brightest suits. Even after most of them drove back to their homes in the suburbs or in less run-down parts of the city, some of their affluence still seemed to linger in the neighborhood. The foreign crowds began to thin out with the rapid deterioration of an already broken neighborhood. The congregation grew smaller year after year, until the church became what it is today — a meetinghouse for the neighborhood’s widows and lonely old men.

The meeting was being held in the church basement, in a room built to hold two hundred people, on one of the coldest nights of the winter so far. At least a hundred folding chairs were set down for the night, neatly split in two halves by a wide aisle large enough for strollers and wheelchairs down the middle. In the corner, right by the entrance, fifty more chairs were stacked on top of one another. There was a fold-up table in the front, with one seat in the center reserved for the neighborhood’s city councilman. It was empty as well. I arrived at the meeting twenty minutes late. Not counting Mrs. Davis and four other women who were sitting in the front row, I was the twenty-third person there.

I was counting the heads from the back of the room, noting the familiarity of certain people just by the way they sat in their chairs, or the way they wore their hair tied neatly in a bun or carefully slicked back, when I noticed Judith sitting in a row all by herself in the middle of the room. She was the only white person there. No one had seen me come in, and for a few minutes I considered simply turning around and leaving. All that time I had spent waiting for her to return, and now here she was, exactly where I least needed or wanted her to be.

Had Mrs. Davis not stood up to address the crowd, I would have slipped back out the door and returned to my store, where I could have sat comfortably alone through the night, but she saw me the minute she turned to face the crowd.

I took a seat in the back row by myself.

“I can hardly see you all the way back there, Mr. Stephanos,” Mrs. Davis called out.

Besides Naomi, she was the only person I knew who called me Mr. Stephanos. There was something friendly and yet mocking in the way she said it, something akin to the way you can occasionally hear a mother refer to her son as a “big boy.”

Judith turned around in response to Mrs. Davis’s scolding to see me sitting nervously in the back. I stood up. Judith moved her coat off the seat next to her. Mrs. Davis caught the gesture and followed me with her eyes to see where I was going to sit. It had become that type of meeting. I saw that now. Poor Judith. She didn’t know what she had walked in on. All she had seen was a chance to demonstrate her high-minded concern, her belief in participatory democracy and Emersonian ideals.

I took my time gathering my coat and scarf. There were definite sides, and the people in that room were all waiting to see which one I was going to choose.

I smiled warmly at Judith as I passed her row. She turned her head in the opposite direction and threw her coat back over the empty seat. I walked all the way to the front. I took a seat in the first row, on the opposite side of Mrs. Davis and her committee. I focused all of my energy and attention on a flyer posted in front of me for a potluck dinner being held in the church the following week. I read the words over and over — Join Us for a Special Night of Food and Friends — like a prayer that, if said often enough and with the proper conviction, could bring the world to a complete stop.

A dozen more people trickled in behind me, bringing the grand total of people in the room to less than forty. Everyone in that room, with the exception of Judith, had lived in this neighborhood for at least as long as I had. A few of the younger faces in the crowd had still been children when I moved in.

Mrs. Davis began the meeting by thanking everyone for coming. She apologized for the missing councilman, who, according to her, had just phoned to say he had an important meeting with the mayor that was going to run late. She paused briefly after she finished that last sentence — a meeting with the mayor — so we could understand her proximity to the great powers of the city. One of two things was inevitably true: either the councilman had actually called and said what Mrs. Davis had just told us, or he had never been asked to come in the first place. There was a rehearsed and scripted quality to Mrs. Davis’s speech that convinced me the latter was true.

“We’re all concerned about the direction our neighborhood is moving in,” she began. As she spoke she moved quietly, almost imperceptibly, from one side of the room to the other. Her small feet shuffled like sandpaper across the yellow linoleum tile with every word she spoke.

“I can’t even begin to count how many old friends I’ve had to say good-bye to in the past six months. These are people just like you and me. Some of them have been living here their whole lives just to find that one day they can’t afford to pay the rent. I don’t have to tell you that this isn’t right. We all know that. Now it’s up to us to figure out what we’re going to do about it.”

The crowd was more than receptive to everything Mrs. Davis had to say. The last line received a long hum of appreciation that was followed by whispered comments of approval. After a few more words, Mrs. Davis opened the meeting to anyone who wanted to speak. The grievances and frustrations came quickly. Some had to do specifically with the changes in the neighborhood, others were more general and came from a deeper, longer-standing frustration with life. One older man, dressed in a shabby navy blue suit that had grown too large for his body, talked about his wife, who had passed away three years ago, and the children who never came to visit. He said what was happening to the neighborhood wasn’t right, but it was impossible to tell anymore where the disappointments of his life ended and those of the neighborhood began. Another woman, young, or at least desperate to seem so, with a black and blond weave that roped down to her waist, complained about her neighbor’s boyfriends, who came in and out of the building at all times of the night. As she spoke, she rapped her long plastic nails against the chair in front of her so that each word was punctuated with the click-clacking of her nails on metal. When the speeches came back to the neighborhood, the people’s anger was barely disguised. I don’t know who used the word “they” first. It might have been Mrs. Davis, or the woman with the blond and black weave who rapped her fingernails and spoke furiously. Once the word entered the meeting, it seemed to trail onto the end of nearly every sentence. I don’t know who they think they are. What are they doing here anyway. They have their own neighborhoods and now they want ours too. It’s bad enough that they have all the jobs and schools. I was convinced that if given enough space and time, a conclusion would have been drawn that held “them” responsible not only for the evictions in the neighborhood, but for every slight and injury each person in that room had suffered, from the children who never made it past junior high to the unpaid heating bill waiting in a dresser drawer.