Edward Jones - All Aunt Hagar's Children

So the good neighbors of 8th Street decided to raise the money and buy the house and rent it to more agreeable people. “Let’s drink to that,” Lane said and stood up. About then Sharon Palmer came down from upstairs where she had been comforting Terence. The medicine had finally overcome him and he had fallen asleep. “Thank you, sweet Sharon, thank you, thank you,” Lane said and he sat his drink on the table beside his chair and put his arms around her. “It was the least I could do,” she said. “It was the very least.”

After everyone had left, and his wife had gone to bed, Lane sat beside his son’s bed. He had enjoyed that house for a long time, and it saddened him, beyond the effects of the liquor, to think that he would not see his grandchildren enjoy it. He loved Washington, and as he sat and watched Terence sleep, he feared he would have to leave. He was hearing good things about Prince George County, but that place, abutting the even more redneck areas of the Maryland suburbs, was not home like D.C. He had heard, too, that the police there were brutes, straight out of the worst Southern town, but he had come a long way since the boyhood days of helping his father deliver coal and ice throughout Washington. Dirty nigger coal man and his dirty nigger coal son, children had called them. And that was in the colored neighborhoods of maids and shoe shiners and janitors and cooks and elevator operators. But he was a thousand lives from that now, even though he wasn’t anybody’s lawyer. With his reputation as a GS 15 at the Labor Department and a wife high up in the D.C. school system and a bigger Maryland house and a son on the way to being a doctor, the police in Prince George would know just what sort he was.

The good neighbors were helped by one major thing—the white man and his wife across the Potomac who owned the Bennington house had been thinking for some time about moving to Florida. Their son, who had no interest in real estate in Washington, was now off to a great start nevertheless—he owned two used car lots, one in Arlington and the other in Alexandria. He had a lovely wife and two children in Great Falls, and he had a mistress in both cities where the car lots were. Of the three blond women, only one had been born blond.

Lane Stagg, Hamilton Palmer, Arthur Atwell, and Prudence Forsythe met with the white man on the highway in Arlington named for Robert E. Lee, in a restaurant that had been segregated less than two years before. They offered him $31,000 for the Bennington house. The white man whistled at the figure. Arthur Atwell was silent, as usual. He was semi-retired and liked to think he had more money than he really did have; his widow, Beatrice, was to discover that when he died not long after that meeting. The white man, Nicholas Riccocelli, whistled again, this time even louder, because the $31,000 sounded good—he really had no idea how much the house was worth. For several moments, he studied a cheap print of a Dutch windmill on the wall beside the table and thought about how many days on a Florida beach $31,000 would provide. That plus the money from some other property and his investments in his son’s businesses.

Riccocelli said give him a week to think it over, and he called Lane Stagg in four days and said they had a deal. The white man had never had any trouble with the Benningtons and so felt he owed it to them to tell them himself, formally, that they would have to move. He came late one Saturday afternoon in early February, and when Derek told him his mother wasn’t home, Riccocelli wanted to know if she would be gone long.

“If there’s something important,” Derek said, “you can tell me.” And when the white man told him that they would have to be gone in two months, Derek turned from his spot in the middle of the living room to look at Amanda and Neil standing in the doorway to the dining room. “Can you believe this shit?” Then to Riccocelli, he asked, “Why? Ain’t we always paid rent on time? Ain’t we?”

“Yes, but the new owners would like to start anew.”

“Who are they?” Derek said. “You tell em we good tenants and everything’ll be all right.”

“I’m afraid,” the white man said, “that will not work. The new owners wish to go in another direction altogether.”

“Who the fuck are these people? What kinda direction you talkin about?” Derek came two steps closer to the man.

“Why…why…” and Riccocelli seemed unable to complete the sentence because he had thought their neighbors would have somehow let the Benningtons know. “Why your neighbors around you.” The man sensed something bad about to happen and backed toward the front door. Where, he wondered, was the mother? She had always seemed so sensible.

“Get the fuck out!” Derek said and grabbed the man by his coat collar. The man opened the door and Derek pushed him out. “You sorry motherfucker!” The woman who always wore sunglasses, seated between two children, began to cry, and the children, following her, began crying as well.

“Derek, leave him alone,” Amanda said. “Leave him be.”

Out on the porch, Derek still had Riccocelli by the collar. He pulled him down the stairs. “Derek!” Amanda shouted. “Please!”

“Don’t hurt me, Mr. Bennington.” The ride over from Arlington had been pleasant enough. Riccocelli was a small man, and his eyes only came about thirteen inches above the dashboard, but he enjoyed driving. There had been gentle and light snow most of the way from Arlington, and a few times he saw lightning across the sky. Snow and lightning, and then the thunder. How could a day go wrong that quickly? He would miss the snow in Florida, he had thought all the way across Key Bridge. Now, as the two men stumbled and fell their way down the steps to the sidewalk, there was rain, also gentle, but the sky was quiet. “You mustn’t molest me, Mr. Bennington.” Riccocelli had parked behind Derek’s Ford, and Derek pushed and half carried him to the car and slammed him against it. “You come back and you dead meat.”

After the man was gone, Derek went up and down both sides of the street, shouting to the neighbors to come out and confront him. “Don’t be punks!” he shouted. As he neared the middle of the other side of 8th, Grace came around the corner, and she and Amanda and Neil, who had been standing in the yard, went to him. “We got babies in that house, man! It’s winter, for Godsakes!” Sharon opened her door and came out on the porch, but she was the only neighbor to do so. “We got sweet innocent babies in that house, man! What can yall be thinkin?” They were able to calm him but before they could get him across the street, the police came.

Arthur Atwell died of a heart attack not long after the Benningtons moved at the end of February, two days before Derek got out of D.C. Jail. Arthur’s widow, Beatrice, found that despite all Arthur had said, there was not much money, and she had to back out of the Bennington house deal. She moved to Claridge Towers on M Street, into an apartment with a bathroom where she could hide when the thunder and lightning came. Everyone was sad to see her leave because she had been a better neighbor than most. Those still in on the Bennington house deal did manage to buy the house, but the good neighbors rarely found their sort of people to rent the place to.

Sharon Palmer Stagg’s car had been in the shop two days when she finished her shift at Georgetown University Hospital one Saturday night in March. It was too late for a bus, and she thought she would have a better chance for a cab at Wisconsin Avenue and so she made her way out of the hospital grounds to P Street. She was not yet a nurse, but did have a part-time job as a nurse’s assistant at the hospital, where she often volunteered on her days off. Just before 36th Street that night, she saw a small group of young men coming toward her, loud, singing a song too garbled for her to understand. She was used to such crowds—Georgetown University students, many with bogus identification cards they used to buy drinks at the bars along Wisconsin Avenue and M Street.