City of Refuge

Parade coming. Could be any Sunday, just about, especially in the fall. People on the steps of shotgun houses, shoulder to shoulder on the sidewalk, watching everyone passing by, ice chest just inside the door full of beer and wine coolers and lemonade, people all out on the grassy neutral ground cooking up food—SJ, too, with his converted oil drum. That’s their place, across from Shawnetta’s house, where they stake out when they steak out. Hot dogs, too, for the kids, burgers.

Lucy up on the second step, drinking that wine cooler she likes, shaking her hips in time to the band in the distance, salt-and-pepper pincurls plastered flat to her forehead, waving to friends, high-spirited, “Hey baby.” Shawnetta right up there next to her wearing her new lime-green matching top and bottom, shaking it in time.

“Hey SJ,” Lucy shouts, loud and raucous, trying to get his attention, but he’s across the street, across that river of shouting, talking humanity and of course he doesn’t hear and she waves a couple of times and Bootsy sees her from his beach chair over in the little area they roped off and she’s going to point to SJ when someone bumps into her and almost knocks her off her place and she says, “What the fuck you bumping into people?” and Shawnetta says something to her that makes her laugh and the anger is gone as quickly as it arose, and that was Lucy—mean and evil one moment, but then gone just as quick.

Always a few white folks mixed in, threading through, making their way along, old hippie-looking types with weathered faces, or youngsters wearing military fatigues and dreadlocks and what SJ calls a pocketful of metal in their face; they don’t bother anybody and nobody bothers them. You wouldn’t see many down where she and SJ live, on the other side of the other side of the tracks, unless they were driving down to Caffin Avenue to take a picture of Fats Domino’s house.

Now along come something you don’t see every day, a sweet-looking white boy in his late thirties probably, wearing nice-looking, respectful clothes, leading a little blond girl can’t be more than seven by the hand. Pointing at things and bending down talking to her.

Lucy on the steps laughing at something and notices this nice white boy looking up at her, smiling, and the little girl, too. “Hey white folks,” she hollers at them, raucous and unsmiling, holding up her bottle of wine cooler. The man laughs at this and says a hearty “Hi,” and the little girl—listen at this—says plain as water, “Hey black folks!” with this big smile on her face. Lucy and Shawnetta, both startled, laugh and laugh at this, and Shawnetta says to the man “You need you something to drink? What about something for your girl?”

“Sure,” the man says, and tells the girl to say thank you. Shawnetta opens the door and bends down to the cooler and Lucy tells her, “Give him a Crystal Mist. You ever had Crystal Mist, white folks?”

“Nope! But I’m looking forward to trying it…” Before he finishes his sentence Lucy has turned away and is telling Shawnetta to get the little girl one of the lemonades.

“You like lemonade, baby?” she says, bending down to the little girl, who looks back up right in Lucy’s eyes and nods a big, exaggerated nod, and Lucy says, “Good. Everybody like lemonade.” She opens one of the cans of lemonade and hands it down to the girl. Then Shawnetta passes her the bottle of Crystal Mist, which Lucy hands to the man, saying “Welcome to the ghetto!” He holds his bottle out to click, and Lucy does, then she notices the little girl doing the same thing and clicks
with the girl. The man takes a swig and raises his eyebrows and says, “Wow.”

“Yeah, it’s good, baby,” Lucy says. “Y’all having a good time?”

“We always do.”

“Good. Y’all be careful.”

And the man takes the cue to head along, and the little girl says “Thank you” one more time but the nice woman’s attention has already turned elsewhere, and the girl walks off with her father down Galvez Street through the crowd, to find Mommy at the corner of Canal and wait for the band to come.

Deep mid-August in the New Orleans heat. Not even much traffic a block away on North Claiborne, a Saturday afternoon, and the sound of SJ’s hammer going in the stupefying thick air. SJ was almost finished framing the new shed he was building in his backyard. Wiring and Sheetrocking would be for after Labor Day. Way off in the distance, past the Industrial Canal and the reaches of the Upper Ninth Ward and the Bywater, the skyscrapers of downtown and the iridescent blister of the Superdome roof lay naked under the brilliant sun.

Out front, SJ’s truck and his van sat in the curved cement driveway he had laid in front of his house (he had moved the structure back seven feet to make room for that driveway), with the magnetic sign on the door—New Breed Carpentry and Repair, and his phone number. It had been cheaper than getting it stenciled on the door itself, and it worked fine, he got calls off of it. He had, however, painted his own name in script on the front fender, the way the taxi drivers did, for an extra touch of distinction. Most of his work came from out in New Orleans East, a sprawling area of new houses and curving, landscaped streets in the subdivisions, reclaimed from swampland in the 1970s, where he could certainly have moved, if money were the only question and he had wanted to leave the Lower Ninth, which he didn’t.

SJ’s father had built his own house in a vacant lot on North Miro Street, five blocks away, when he came back from World War II, with two-by-fours and weatherboard and nails that he salvaged from all around and saved up by his mama’s house. He pulled the nails out of scrap wood, carefully, or found them on the ground, and sometimes even straightened them if they could be straightened, one nail at a time. He kept them in what his mother called put-up jars, sorted roughly by size and thickness and purpose. SJ had kept that old house, although his father was dead and gone, and he rented it out to a widow lady. Sometimes when he wanted to get off by himself he would walk those five blocks to the old house and sit on the side steps and think.

He hammered some finishing nails into a line across the bottom of a small French cornice. He was trying something different with this shed, which he had seen in one of the books his daughter, Camille, sent him from North Carolina, something a little more decorative in a different way, not just utilitarian. His thin, ribbed undershirt, with thin straps over his shoulder, was soaked through with sweat, which glistened on his shaved head, shoulders and upper arms. Around his neck on a thin chain hung a St. Christopher medal. In his mid-fifties, SJ was still a powerful, compact man. He loved to build things, to work with his hands, and he loved to cook, especially outside, and he liked to read. After Rosetta, his wife, had died of an aortic aneurism six years earlier, he had read less and built more.

He would finish the line he was working on and then stop for the day and get some food going. He would go out to find Wesley later if he could; he had left his nephew to finish up a part of the job the day before and Wesley had left the tools sitting outside and SJ had come out in the morning to find them slick with overnight wet. He had wiped them down and put them in the oven to sweat them out, but he didn’t understand that carelessness at all. His nephew was
a smart young man, nineteen years old and teetering on the edge of something anyone in the Lower Nine knew all too well. Lately he had been riding around at night on these motorcycles where you had to hunch way over, weaving in and out of stopped traffic. Where he got the money for the bike SJ didn’t know and Lucy, SJ’s sister, would not say. At least, SJ thought, they had the bikes to work on. Working with your hands kept you focused on the real world. Still, you could hit a pothole on of those bikes and end up in a wheelchair for life.

Two weeks earlier the police arrested Wesley for beating on his girlfriend. SJ had drilled into his nephew many times the importance of surviving the encounter with police when you had one. Wesley had a quick mouth and a mannish attitude, but he had done allright, at least he hadn’t gotten the police mad, and SJ got the call from the jail at 3:30 in the morning and SJ and Lucy had to go down and get him out on bond and later on SJ had demanded an accounting from his nephew.

“Uncle J she slap me and I didn’t hit her. I’m not lying.” They were sitting in SJ’s living room, the sky just getting light outside. Wesley had on jeans with the crotch halfway down to his knees, and an oversize T-shirt hanging out, and he had taken off his Raiders cap at his uncle’s request. His reddish skin seemed to be breaking out, and his hair was uneven and untended. “Then she slap me again and called me a pussy. What I’m supposed to do?”

“Walk out the room, nephew. You already paying for another man’s baby. How she going to respect you? You need to find a woman who gonna watch your back and not put a knife in it. It doesn’t matter how good that pussy is, you got to stay alive.”

Wesley looked up at his uncle then, sly smile, the charming look, “It is good, Uncle J.”

SJ allowed himself a small laugh. He knew as well as anyone. He remembered one of the old blues records his father liked to play,
something about
“Some people say she’s no good, but she’s allright with me.”

“Well,” SJ said, “don’t be beating on no woman, nephew.”

“But it’s like you have to or her girlfriends be talking about how she play you.”

“Why you care what they say?”

Wesley shook his head, looked at the floor. And anyway SJ knew the answer. You care because you are young, and that is your world, and most of your understanding of who you are comes from how other people act toward you. That is the whole thing until you get the ground under your own feet. Some of them found it in the military. Young men had to prove themselves. They could do it in healthy ways or unhealthy ways. The range of options had a lot to do with where you were born and what color your skin was. That was an old story.

SJ had gone through his own foolishness back in the day, the mid-seventies, after he came back from the army, drinking and gambling, rolling dice, which was what he had liked. Wearing the old Shaft pimp clothes for a while, and staying out and acting foolish and getting into arguments and coming home drunk—the street wasn’t as bad then as it was today, but you could still get cut or shot very easily. And one day he awoke at noon, and Rosetta had packed two suitcases full of clothes and was dressed to leave. SJ jumped up and immediately started to fall over, dizzy from the night before, and he had to take a knee on the floor before he could get up and say, “What is this?”

Rosetta was calm as could be. She told him quietly that he worked very hard for his money and had a right to do with it as he pleased. She didn’t want to stand in the way if this was how he wanted to spend his money and his life; he had worked very hard and she would not stand in his way; she loved him too much. She would always love him and wish him the best…and she was zip
ping up one of the suitcases as she said this, and each profession of love felt like a slap in the face and made a panic rise in him.

If she had told him to stop what he was doing he could have started hollering about how it was his money and he would do what the goddamn hell he pleased with it, but she had covered all that before he said a word and now there was nothing to holler about, nothing to grab on to. Half an hour later he was promising that he would not gamble a dime again and drink neither, and he had kept those promises. Well, in fact he liked to taste a beer every now and again on a hot day, during a cookout or a second line, or on a rare occasion after a workday, especially if he had company working. But not two beers, not ever.

He was no choir boy, though. SJ knew how to take care of himself, and how to take care of his family, and one needed to know that. He didn’t make a show of it or act tough. When he went out he carried his father’s old straight razor in his right sock, and a derringer in his pocket. There was a saying: “Lower Nine, don’t mind dyin’…” But SJ did mind dying, or at least dying over nothing. If it came down to it he would rather see the other fellow die. Yes he would.

Around front, SJ set his carpenter’s apron down in the bed of his pickup and went into his van to straighten some things he had left in disarray earlier. The inside of the van was a portable workshop, and SJ always had his tools in order before he ate dinner, unless he was going to work later on in the night. He still kept his nails sorted in jars, the way his father had. He loved this time of day in the summer, six-thirty or so, when in some other time of the year it would be dark already, people walking and bicycling by. The heat didn’t bother him. Across the way Bootsy and his wife and sister-in-law always sitting out in front talking and laughing, and the sweet-olive tree by Mrs. Gray’s fence next door throwing off all that scent. A woman named Sylvia who lived two blocks down toward the canal passed by, wearing a dark green crotcheted hat and pushing a grocery cart, and
said, “Allright,” with that slow New Orleans drawl, and SJ looked over at her and smiled and said, “Allright. Joe finish that siding?”

“He’ll get it.”

“I know that’s right.” Finished with the van, he went around to put some of his materials inside the steel lockbox that sat behind the cab of his pickup and lock it down. A young man with a long T-shirt and dreadlocks walked by, throwing a gum wrapper on the ground, and smiled at SJ and said, “Allriiight.” SJ nodded briefly back at him and said, “Allright” in a short rhythm, without being rude but without any invitation to more closeness. The speech patterns in certain New Orleans neighborhoods approach the complexity of Chinese in the shades of meaning that can be extracted from the tiniest gradations of inflection and timing. Sometimes these gradations can mean the difference between life and death. SJ recognized this young man as one of the group that Wesley had been spending too much time around, and SJ’s “Allright” conveyed: “I see you, I recognize you, I have no reason to be rude to you or more than basically polite, either; I am secure where I am, and I will be watching you as you continue down the street,” which SJ did.

He loved living in the Lower Ninth Ward. Its rhythm was his rhythm, despite the danger, the violence. It was their place; it belonged to the people in the Ninth Ward and they knew it and they managed as they could, and they were proud to have made lives there. No one had ever promised them, of all people, that life was going to be easy or without daily struggle, and there, at least, they took pride that it was their own struggle. And, unlike in some other parts of town, there weren’t a lot of people from outside coming through to bother them. SJ had built part of it, just like his father and grandfather, and it had made him who and what he was, and it had made his parents and almost everyone he knew.

People elsewhere didn’t understand it. He had family in Texas, just outside Houston, whom he liked visiting; they lived in a sub
division where only half the lots had been developed, and the lawns were struggling where they even existed, but each house had some land around it, even beyond the large yard, and his cousin Aaron was able to keep goats and chickens and they had a horse to ride, too. They always barbecued outside when SJ visited, sitting around in the dusty evening, often with Mexican accordion music floating across from a few houses away. Nobody bothered anybody.

“Look here,” Aaron would say to SJ, “why you want to go back up in there and worry about you gonna get shot some night?”

“Why am I going to get shot?” SJ replied, sipping at his one beer and enjoying the breeze on his face.

“They don’t have to even mean to shoot you,” Aaron’s wife, Dot, said.

“They don’t have to mean it,” Aaron repeated. “That’s right. Get hit with a stray shot. You move out here get you two or three acres, ain’t nobody bother you. Get that boy out of that bad, too.”

Wesley was their best argument, SJ knew, no doubt. But it wasn’t just Wesley; it wasn’t that simple. He would have to move Lucy, too, and then what would happen with Daddy’s house, and Lucy’s house, and his own house—the shelves and the cabinets and wainscoting and molding and trim, the wide pine floors? And the workshop out back that he had worked on for two years, all the wiring he had laid in…People who didn’t build things themselves thought everything was interchangeable. But you didn’t just get up and leave the place you had fought to build.

“It’s not the same thing,” SJ said.

“Why it’s not?”

“If they told you you could live in China and have a big house and a big yard and pay less money, would you do it?”

“They got plasma TV?”

They laughed about it, but that was more or less the signal to drop the subject until the next visit, and their talk turned to the
NCAA finals. Aaron’s own son went to Grambling and had been to New Orleans twice for the Bayou Classic, and the stories that got back to Aaron had confirmed his sense of New Orleans as a place for freaks, period.

Finished outside, now, SJ locked up the truck and the van and walked up the three steps into his wood-frame house, a shotgun double that he had altered into a single-family arrangement. The rooms were small and the ceilings low, but everything had been done well, not like some of the cheap work he had seen out in the East, or the careless renovations he saw Uptown, where the landlords milked all that Tulane student rent money out of their decaying housing stock. Six years ago, after Rosetta died, he had put a camelback upstairs on it—two rooms you reached by a stair that went up from the side of the living room, and he slept in the left-hand one. You didn’t have to worry about building variances so much in the Lower Nine since they weren’t too serious about checking, and even if they did it was an inexpensive proposition to cut through any red tape—and it was a roomy, good house. Often Lucy stayed over in Camille’s old bedroom, downstairs on the left side. It was just as Camille had left it; she had stayed there on visits home from NC State.

He walked inside, ready for a shower, and in the living room he found Lucy, sitting on the couch, asleep. His older sister, Lucy, with her head down, chin on her collarbone, snoring, her black T-shirt riding up on her stomach and her pants unbuttoned, and they had slid open enough so that over her drawers he could see the top of the scar from the Charity Hospital C-section that had brought Wesley into the world. Her pincurls were plastered down on her forehead and the sides of her head like the swirls in a rum cake. Her skin was dark and dry and in places almost blue-black, the color of gun metal. She had diabetes she didn’t take care of, and she had heart trouble and she drank too much and she had been an on-again, off-again user of combustible cocaine products. And in fact the nice white
social worker lady had questioned in strong terms whether Wesley might not be better off placed in foster care, but the fact was, above all else, that Lucy truly loved Wesley and the boy knew it and it was the closest, most stable relationship in his life. SJ loved Lucy, too; almost everybody did. She could get drunk and act foolish, but it came out of a generosity of spirit.