Seen It All and Done the Rest (25 page)

FORTY-NINE

T
he next day Aretha came by to tell me that a friend of hers called to say she had heard a rumor about what Greer Woodruff’s people wanted to put over here. A prison. That meant we’d have the cemetery on one side of the street and the living dead on the other. Martin must be spinning in his grave.

FIFTY

I
couldn’t wait to tell Abbie what Aretha’s friend had said about the plans to put a prison right there on our corner.

“That’s a rumor,” she said calmly. “You can’t put a prison right in the middle of a neighborhood like that.”

We were sitting in the kitchen looking through seed catalogues. The garden had gone from strictly sunflowers to a more eclectic mix of sunflowers, collard greens, herbs, and tomatoes. Abbie liked the idea of growing things that were beautiful to look at right beside things that were good to eat, and the idea of Louie cooking a meal with our very own produce made all of our mouths water. I had no idea there were so many different kinds of tomatoes to choose from, but Abbie was considering them all.

“Councilman Rogers didn’t even mention it,” I said. “He was too busy telling me how much respect he had for Ms. Woodruff.”

Abbie looked at me. “You know what we need? A dedication ceremony.”

She wasn’t fully engaging in my rant against the powers that be. I had a lot more to say about the nerve of them, the bad intentions of them, the stupidity of them, but Abbie was smiling happily and looking at a paperback copy of
The Farmers’ Almanac.

“A what?”

“A dedication ceremony. For the garden. I’ll get Aretha to make us a sign. We can unveil it or something, you know. Just to make it a little more dramatic.”

“The garden isn’t even up yet. The house still needs lots of work, inside and out, and the way things are going with the Woodruff crowd, we might be hit with a plague of frogs at any moment.”

“Exactly when you need a dedication. Some kind of sacrament to pull everything together.”

I groaned. “You and Zora are always trying to institute mystic rites of the sea.”

She laughed. “Last time I checked, that corner was landlocked, but I am looking for the next full moon, if that’s what you mean. If I was at the beach, I’d already know when it was due, but up here, I lose track. Too much artificial light.”

“How is a dedication ceremony going to help stop a prison?” I said, feeling peevish and ignored.

She looked surprised. “Is that what we’re doing?”

That had all the earmarks of a trick question, so I hedged a little. “Aren’t we?”

“You said we were fixing up the house so you could sell it and get back to Amsterdam in time to open your season.”

I hate it when people quote my inconsistencies back to me so accurately.

“Oh! And Zora was going with you.”

“That’s still the plan.”

“Then why are you worrying about whether or not somebody wants to build a prison?”

She had me there. “I don’t know,” I said. “It just seems a shame to do all this work and then let them use it that way, but you’re right. It’s not my job to worry about it.”

“But you are.”

I wanted to deny it, but I couldn’t. Working at the house every day, I had begun to think of it as my place again. I had begun to remember all the good times I’d had there and how much it meant to my mother.

Abbie turned a page and then looked at me. “You don’t have to be ashamed of starting to care about this place, Jo. Everybody’s rooted somewhere.”

The idea of being rooted on a little corner of Atlanta, Georgia, had never been my intention. I was a citizen of the world, just passing through on my way back to the life I’d created for myself in a place where nobody ever dumped trash on my lawn and people celebrated my presence with complimentary bottles of expensive champagne. What was it about this house that was starting to pull at my heartstrings in a way I had never intended and didn’t really understand?

“Are you?”

“Of course,” she said, tapping her heart as if it was a place you could go to like Detroit or Chicago. “I’m rooted here.”

FIFTY-ONE

W
hen Victor told me his mother wanted to see me, I was happy to hear it. We hadn’t had enough time to talk the other day, and I knew she had a lot more to tell me. I told him to tell her I’d look forward to it. On the appointed day, he offered to walk me over, but I asked him to stay at the house instead since we were the only two there and somebody was coming over from Georgia Power Company. Betty had sent the message through Victor, but he was not invited and I thought it would be less awkward if he didn’t show up at all, hoping to be invited in.

When I walked up on the porch and rang the bell, I could hear her unlocking several dead bolts and at least one chain. It reminded me of living in New York before I went to Amsterdam. It took people twenty minutes to unlock their apartment doors. Those moments always made me nervous. If the building was so bad you needed that many locks, how safe did I feel cooling my heels in the hallway with both eyes peeled for predators?

Betty’s front windows, including the large picture window, were covered with elaborate white burglar bars that looked more like New Orleans’s famous wrought-iron balconies but not quite so welcoming.

“Come in, come in,” she said when she finally opened the front door, and the burglar door, and stepped aside to let me in. The house was neat as a pin and smelled vaguely of pine-scented cleaner. She ushered me into the living room where a small television in a big cabinet occupied one corner and a matching couch, chair, and love seat were carefully angled for the best view of the screen. A low, glass-topped coffee table had several issues of
Ebony
and
O, The Oprah Magazine
carefully fanned out in the manner of doctor’s waiting rooms. On top of the TV, there was a black-and-white photograph of a much younger Betty and a man in an army uniform standing arm in arm and smiling into the camera with the full confidence bestowed upon them by their youth and beauty. Beside it was a color photograph of a much younger Victor, graduating from college, or maybe high school, and looking appropriately serious.

The sound was turned down on the television, but I saw the Fox News commentator giving the latest grisly details of some poor woman whose only claim to fame was as the victim of a man she thought could love her. Betty took a seat on the couch. She had already laid out a tray with a pot of coffee, two cups, and half a pound cake. I turned my back on the mug shot of the accused ex and smiled at Betty.

“Thank you for inviting me to stop by,” I said. “It was good to meet you the other day, even if it wasn’t such a good time to talk.”

“It was all right,” she said. “Sonny was just talking like a lawyer.”

Sonny.

“Would you like some coffee?”

“Thank you,” I said. “I’d love some.”

She poured two cups and handed me one.

“He’s been a big help as part of our crew,” I said.

“Well, that’s good to hear,” she said, pouring a little splash of cream in her coffee from a small silver pitcher. “He’s a good boy, but it’s time for him to be a good man. You’ve heard of tough love?”

I nodded.

“Well, that’s what I’m giving him,” she said. “It’ll make him stronger or it’ll kill him. Either way, we’ll know what we’re dealing with.”

There was no denying that, so I just smiled and sipped my coffee.

“I saw you the first day you came over here,” she said.

“You did?” I wondered if she had binoculars. Maybe while Victor was keeping an eye on her, she was keeping an eye on him, too.

“Of course,” she said. “You were driving down the street so slow, looking at everything so hard, I wanted to make sure you weren’t planning something. It used to just be the boys, but now it’s the girls, too, and you can’t be too careful.”

The idea that anybody would mistake me for a dangerous juvenile would have been funny to me, except that she was serious. It struck me as a terrible way to have to live, hiding in your own house, peering out between the bars to see who might be casing the joint. It sounded like being in jail.

“I was just trying to get a feel for the neighborhood,” I said. “It didn’t look like this last time I lived here.”

She put her cup down and looked at me. “How long do you think it takes? People’s kids grow up, they move away, sometimes they die. Things change a little at a time, then one day you wake up and you’re living in a different place. You’re living someplace where people will steal everything that isn’t nailed down, and sometimes that doesn’t help either. A place where you can’t even go out and work in your garden for worrying about these knuckleheads bopping you in the head for the money you got in your pocket.”

“That’s terrible,” I said. “What about the police?”

She snorted a little. “They ain’t no better. You didn’t hear how they shot a woman ninety years old because they said she was dealing crack out of her house?”

“The police shot her?”

Betty nodded. “When it started getting real bad around here, I went over to West End and met with Bea Grimes at the Growers Association to see if we could become members so maybe their group could address some of our security problems, but Bea said they don’t do anything outside of West End.” Betty frowned and pursed her lips at the absurdity of the answer. “I said I understand Blue Hamilton can’t be everywhere, but we still have a right to live, don’t we? We still have a right to grow some collard greens.”

That sounded like the chorus of a postmillennium urban American freedom song:
Ain’t we got a right to grow some greens?
So far, she was describing the perils of living in almost any inner-city community, but what did this have to do with Greer Woodruff?

“Who do you think is responsible for the things that have been happening?” I said, hoping she would identify the enemy.

“I don’t
think.
I
know
it’s that Woodruff woman.”

“How do you know?” I thought so, too, but I needed more than a feeling.

“Because once she got involved in it, things changed. We always had the break-ins and the robberies, but nobody was messing with your house. Nobody was dumping garbage on the grass or spraying nasty pictures on your front walk or sending the fire inspector out to tell you how dangerous your place is if you don’t spend all the money you’ve got to redo everything.”

The association between Greer and Councilman Rogers was becoming clearer by the minute. Betty was getting more agitated the longer she thought about it. She put her cup down.

“Crackheads crawling in the window are one thing. That’s when you get burglar bars. But this stuff, this city stuff, all that is because we won’t give her our houses so she can tear them down and sell this land to whoever wants it, just like we never lived here and raised our families and did the best we could with the blessings we were given.”

She was leaning forward now, trying to share her feelings and keep control of them at the same time.

“She can’t make you sell your houses if you don’t want to,” I said. “What she’s offering isn’t even close to what they’re worth.”

“They aren’t worth anything now,” Betty said. “Not with things around here like they are. People are scared if we don’t take what she’s offering, we won’t be able to get anything better.”

I put my cup down, too. “I think we can do a lot better.”

She looked at me with a ghost of a smile. “So do I.”

“Then let’s work together,” I said. “How many neighbors do you have who want to stay?”

“Three are strong,” she said. “Daisy’s a little shaky since she got broken into a couple of weeks ago, but I think if she sees we got something going, she’ll come around.”

“So that’s four houses down here and mine makes five,” I said. “If we all agree we’re not selling, Greer Woodruff will get tired of trying to intimidate people and go find some land to steal that nobody’s living on.”

“That’s what I keep telling everybody, but they act like I’m just talking crazy.”

“Crazy or not,” I said, “I just think if you let them run you out of one place, they’ll run you out of another.”

“Exactly,” she said, refilling our cups. “And in spite of everything? I still like it here. This is home.”

“Me too,” I said, surprised by how much I really meant it. “Me too.”