Seen It All and Done the Rest (16 page)

Aretha turned off the camera and looked at me. “Then I guess we’ll have to do something about it.”

TWENTY-SIX

H
alf an hour later, we were back in West End, lingering over a cup of tea at the Soul Vegetarian Restaurant while Aretha tried to make the task I was facing seem routine and achievable. Neither one of us had ordered food, but all around us hungry diners were feasting on broccoli quiche, sweet potato soufflé, and lentil soup. I was too busy pouring over the figures Aretha had written on a yellow legal pad to think about food. She had listed all the repairs and estimated the cost, including labor and supplies, and at the bottom, the figure she’d written and underlined twice was eighteen thousand dollars.

“That’s more than the whole place is worth,” I said.

“Only according to Greer Woodruff,” Aretha said. “But I think we can discount her opinion for two reasons. One, she let the place fall apart and didn’t even call you, which is not only bad business but downright rude, and two, she’s trying to buy up all the property around here fast for some reason that doesn’t have anything to do with a desire to help rebuild anybody’s nest egg.”

“What is it?”

Aretha shrugged. “My guess is she’s got somebody interested in that corner property and all the way down Wiley Street to the freeway. These hotshot developers are always trying to buy these problem properties cheap and then sell them to the highest commercial bidder. If there’s some real interest and the owners are reluctant to sell, they’ve been known to use some pretty unsavory tactics to intimidate the holdouts.”

“Like what?”

“Vandalizing vacant property. Encouraging squatters and break-ins. Most of the people on Wiley are old women by themselves. Their husbands are dead. Their kids are grown and gone one way or another. Once they don’t feel safe after a few of these incidents, they’re much more willing to take what they’re offered and make the best of it.”

“How can they make the best of it on fifteen thousand dollars?”

“They can’t. They’ve been trying to get preservation money, but there’s nothing really historic about the neighborhood. It’s just some little houses where people lived their lives and raised their kids and got old. It’s sad, you know? Where are they supposed to go once Greer Woodruff buys them out? Fifteen thousand won’t even be a down payment on anyplace they’d want to live.”

“Do you think Greer Woodruff would do something like that? Just to make a profit?”

“Didn’t you tell me your squatter was worried about predators?”

“Yes.”

Aretha took a sip of her tea. “I think she’s already doing it.”

“Well, what if the people in the neighborhood refused to sell? What if we fix up these properties and make our own deal?”

“Well, you’ll probably triple the value of your mother’s investment, and your neighbors can stay put if they want to or take the best offer and move to Florida. Everybody wins.”

“Except Greer Woodruff,” I said.

“Exactly.”

I wondered how this had suddenly morphed into one of those “reclaim the community” movies. I hate that pseudo-inspirational bullshit. In my experience, the target population usually remains intractable, no mater how many uplifting power ballads you pack onto the soundtrack. “So now I’ve got to redeem the whole neighborhood?”

“You don’t have to redeem it,” she said. “They want to stay. They just need…” Her voice trailed off and she frowned, searching for the right word. “
Inspiration.
They need some inspiration.”

I rest my case.
Cue the ballad.

“How much do you think the place is worth?”

“I’d say one hundred twenty-five thousand just for the land.”

“One hundred twenty-five thousand dollars?”

“Two hundred thousand if you fix up the house and do a little landscaping.”

“That’s ten times what she offered me!”

“That’s what I’m talking about. She figures you’re not going to want to spend the time and money to fix it up or have the patience or contacts to find a buyer on your own.”

“How much time are we talking about?”

Aretha shrugged and her eyes scanned the figures she had put on the legal pad. “Depends on how much work you want to do.”

“All of it,” I said. If I was going to sell the place and put my faith in hard cash instead of bricks and mortar, I needed to be sure I got a good return on my mother’s investment. Otherwise, she’d never forgive me.

“Well,” Aretha said. “I’d say two and a half, three months, to get it all done, once we get a crew.”

“How big a crew?”

“The more, the merrier,” she said. “Four is good. Five is better. Experience preferred but not required.”

The only kind of crew I knew how to organize was the kind that puts a play on the stage, but that wasn’t the same thing at all. “Where do I find a crew?”

“I’ll pull one together if you want me to,” she said. “I manage a lot of property for Blue so I always have some guys on standby. It’ll take me two weeks to finish the door project, then I’m ready to come on full-time.”

“The door project?”

She laughed. “That’s a long story and I’ve got to pick up Joyce Ann.”

“I’m sorry I kept you so long,” I said. “You’ve given me a lot to think about.”

“Well, don’t just get stuck on the numbers, think about how great that house is going to be once we get it all fixed up. You won’t recognize the place.” She stopped and smiled across the table at me. “Or maybe you will.”

TWENTY-SEVEN

W
hat happened while I was gone? I don’t mean just to my house. I mean to
us.
What happened to the idea we had about being a community of people on the move? Atlanta was a magnet once for every bright young black person with a willingness to work hard and a desire to share the vision of a city where we were the decision makers, the visionaries, the leaders, the ones who could already see that future where everybody got a slice of the seemingly inexhaustible pie. We walked proud and we felt free. We were free! Sure, there were some old folks on both sides of the great American racial divide who couldn’t quite get it together about this new day, this new way of being and seeing and doing what needed to be done, but their habitually negative energy was overwhelmed by the voices of men and women determined to change the face of business as usual
forever and ever, amen.

But all that seemed like a cruel joke now. All those dreams have dovetailed into a community-wide nightmare where casual violence is the order of every day, vandalism is a spectator sport, and a strange sense of entitlement allows those unwilling to work at anything to still feel they have the right to kick in somebody’s door to get the things they want. Young people are angry and confused. Old people are scared to leave their houses for fear of being mugged or worse. And in the middle, the rest of us look around and wonder how it all fell apart so fast.

Walking through my mother’s house with Aretha was more than a revelation. It was a reinforcement of what I told Zora the other night. We don’t have to stay here another second longer than we want to. There is no place for me in Atlanta anymore, if there ever was. This is no place to live free, laugh loud, and stay strong. It’s too hard just to stay alive. I don’t see myself in ten years, a little old lady, locked in her house, afraid to open the door for the mailman, or crack the window to let in the evening breeze.

No wonder Zora was floundering around, trying to hide from the scandal sheets, stop the war, and save the world, all at the same time. It was time for her to be in a place where every hand that reaches out is not trying to pull you down. All I had to do now was piece together enough money to do what needed to be done at the house, find a buyer who wouldn’t insult me with such a low offer, and get me and Zora two one-way tickets back to where a woman can enjoy her freedom instead of just dreaming about it.

I pulled out Aretha’s notes and got my own legal pad. My financial reserves, such as they were, had to support me while I waited for François’s heart to grow fonder, keep up with my expenses in Amsterdam, and now, somehow, find a way to make major repairs on a house I didn’t even want to live in. It was going to take some juggling, that was for sure. The sooner I got started, the sooner I hoped I could figure it out.

By the time I had covered three pages with “what-ifs,” and was still no closer to really getting any balls in the air, Zora arrived with a pizza and a much needed infusion of positive energy.

“I gave them my notice,” she said, putting the pizza on the kitchen table, where I was doing my calculations, and going over to the sink to wash her hands. “I told them I’d help interview a replacement, but after this week, I’m yours!”

“Were they surprised?” I was glad she had moved so quickly, but also a little nervous now that I had promised her I had the next move covered.

“I think they figured they were doing me a favor letting me work there at all, so I should be grateful no matter how they treated me,” she said. “The thing is, I was grateful. But it doesn’t feel like I’m helping anybody anymore. Like no matter what I do, people are still going to be fighting about nothing and coming home crazy, and nobody knows what to do about any of it.”

“They’re always fighting about something,” I said.

She dried her hands and sat down across from me. “Okay, but what? What is it about?”

I smiled and opened the box, releasing the unmistakable aroma into the air. My stomach growled in response. “Who knows?” I said, taking a slice of pizza. “Maybe it’s a man thing.”

She laughed and reached for a slice, too, folding it expertly like Howard had shown her. “Then we’ll never understand it.”

“You got that right,” I said. “But your timing couldn’t be better. I’m looking for a crew and you’d be perfect.”

“A film crew?” She sounded excited by the idea.

“Not exactly,” I said quickly, reaching for the disk Aretha had given me with the video she took this morning. She assured me that Zora would know what to do with it. “Where’s your laptop?”

“In my backpack,” she said. “What’s this?”

“A disaster movie,” I said, while she withdrew the thin silver notebook and opened it for business.

She popped in the tiny disk and the video came up on the screen. You could hear Aretha’s voice calmly ticking off the problems as we moved through the debris and darkness. “Walls defaced, floors scarred…”

Zora looked up at me. “This is terrible.”

I nodded. “Yep.”

“It’s even worse than you thought.”

I had told Zora we were gong to have to do some work at the place, but nothing prepared her for what she was seeing. We sat there, munching on our pizza and looking at our pitiful nest egg, rotting among the weeds. This was my first viewing of what Aretha had shot and it was pretty hard to take even though I’d been there. When we came back outside to get some footage of the yard, I heard her ask me a question and then my voice talking about my mother’s roses. I was so saddened by what I was seeing that I didn’t notice that she had turned the lens in my direction and suddenly, there I was, in all my borrowed sweats bunching around my ankles, no-makeup-wearing glory. To complete the picture, I was frowning.

Zora leaned closer when I came on the screen, listening intently. I was listening, too, but mostly I was looking. I assumed I’d hate myself on camera the way I looked this morning, but I didn’t. I actually liked the way I looked and the way I sounded. Indignant. Incredulous. Outraged. Exactly the way I felt. And then it was over. The last freeze-frame was a long shot of that huge pile of trash bags, just sitting there, stinking in the sunshine.

Zora looked at me. “She put you in it.”

“I told her I didn’t want to be on camera.”

“Why? That’s what made it real. Listening to you talking about Great-gram’s roses. I never saw them, but you made me care.” Zora sounded like she was critiquing a performance. “That was the best part.”

“The best part of a disaster movie,” I said. “According to Aretha, the place is going to need almost twenty thousand dollars’ worth of repairs.”

Her eyes got big with surprise. “Do you have that much to put into it?” “Do I have that much period.” I pushed the legal pad across the table so she could see for herself.

“Does this estimate include the crew?” Zora said, her eyes scanning the figures.

“That includes everything.”

“And if we do all this, do you think we’ll be able to sell it?”

“We’ll be able to put it on the market,” I said, “but Aretha said we might still have a problem finding a buyer.”

“Why?”

“Because people don’t just buy a house. They buy a neighborhood.”

“So we have to fix up the whole neighborhood?”

“No, but we have to be realistic. There’s no guarantee that we’ll find a buyer. We may end up right back at Greer Woodruff’s office, hat in hand, asking if her offer’s still good.” Of course, that wasn’t going to happen. Not the hat-in-hand part, anyway.

Zora thought about that for a minute, her eyes still studying my scribblings. Then she pushed the figures aside and looked at me. “I think we have to do it, Mafeenie. The bigger our nest egg, the freer we’ll be. We have to consider this an investment.”

Although I would usually argue that finances aren’t the key to freedom, in this context, she had a point.

“I’ve got almost two thousand dollars in my savings account,” she said. “We can use all of that.”

My first reaction was to say:
Don’t worry, honey. Hold on to your money. Mafeenie will take care of it,
but if we were going to be free women together, I had to stop thinking of her as a baby girl and realize she was a partner in all this. It was her future we were talking about, too. She should be allowed to invest in it. Besides, if things didn’t work out, I could always replace her money later when I got back on my feet.

“I’ll figure out how to piece together the rest,” I said. “And we can save some more if we can both work crew. Aretha’s going to help too as soon as she gets through with a project she’s doing in West End.”

“The door project?”

“That’s the one. She said she accepted a lot of work based on having some help, but her assistant’s reserve unit got called to Iraq.”

“I know her. That’s Alisa, the girl who was staying here before me.”

“She’s a painter?” The idea of a young artist fighting her way through the streets of Fallujah suddenly made me feel sad.

“She’s a housepainter. Aretha’s the artist, but the door project is different.”

“She said we’re on the list,” I said. “What is it exactly?”

Zora smiled and closed up her laptop with a muffled click. “When Aretha first started working with Blue Hamilton, she painted a lot of the doors on his properties blue. It was a North African thing she had read about to ward off evil spirits, but people thought it meant they were down with Blue, so everybody wanted one.”

I remembered seeing a lot of blue doors in the neighborhood. Turquoise, really, a nice splash of tropical color even on a cold gray day. “Did it keep away evil spirits?”

“It did a good enough job so that when the doors started fading, or got scuffed up, people wanted her to repaint them. The more she did, the more people wanted her to do. They even ran a picture of her in
Dig It!
painting the door of the twenty-four-hour salon up on Abernathy. The day after that, they got so many calls Aretha could have spent the next two years just doing doors. How many more does she have to do?”

“She said about another two weeks’ work.”

Zora reached for another slice of pizza and grinned at me. “Then I guess I didn’t become unemployed a moment too soon.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’ll be Aretha’s crew so she can finish the doors and she’ll be our crew to fix up the house.”

I was a big fan of exactly that kind of bartering. Saved money and kept everybody connected.

“Fair enough,” I said, pinching a mushroom off the pizza, but resisting another slice. “That way you’ll get to our place much faster.”

“You’re not scared of the evil eye, are you, Mafeenie?”

“I’m not scared of anything,” I said, “but why take a chance?”