A Taste for More, page 12
“Why are you making Lana get up? Don’t tell me you’re afraid to leave her with me,” Clark said, as he looked in her room.
“I figured you didn’t want to be bothered.”
“Did I ever say that?” he asked. “I knew you had a daughter when I married you. I just want what’s best for her. We don’t agree on everything, but I think we can both agree it’s not in her best interest to get up before daybreak and go sit at the café. Let the child sleep.”
“All right. Thank you,” I said.
“Don’t thank me, like I’m an outsider doing you a favor. Are we a family or not?”
I nodded my head because I was near tears and didn’t want to start crying. Clark went back to bed. I got my purse and went to the kitchen. After about three minutes, I returned to the bedroom and got back in bed. “I thought you were leaving,” Clark said.
“Then you better work quick,” I said, as I unbuttoned my blouse. “But not too quick.”
Clark put a finger under my chin, lifted my face, and kissed me. I put my arms around his neck and held on like he was a life preserver. This was our first argument about Lana. Unfortunately, it wouldn’t be our last.
CHAPTER 18
Some years fold into others and memories are a blur. However, 1967 wasn’t such a year. The year started with frozen pipes that burst and flooded the café basement, and we were closed for three weeks. One night, we were awakened by a loud noise. Turns out the house had extensive gutter damage from the snow and ice. Then Lana and Clark both caught the flu. Then our refrigerator quit working, and the glow of home ownership was fading like the new car smell.
There was one troubling headline after another. The Vietnam War was escalating, with many local young men among the casualties. Clark was anxious because his oldest son had been deployed to the Mekong delta in Vietnam. He wouldn’t discuss it much, and whenever newscasters mentioned the war, he left the room or changed the station. They stripped Muhammad Ali’s title. Women were burning bras, students were sitting in and protesting on college campuses, and riots were erupting in black neighborhoods across the country.
A malaise was in the air, and it trickled down to Fourth Street. However, this mood wasn’t caused by riots, integration, or drugs. It was the interstate freeway. Freeways are supposed to mean progress and growth, but for our neighborhood it meant displacement and disenfranchisement. Those who lived between Fifth and Tenth Street south of North Avenue were in the freeway’s path and forced to move. Their migration pushed black neighborhood boundaries—or I guess we were still Negroes then—further north. But as we moved north, neighborhoods didn’t stay integrated long. White folks moved further north, faster than roaches flee from light. Jobs and services followed them, in a game of leapfrog, hollowing out once vibrant areas like the Fourth Street I encountered when I moved to town.
At the time, we weren’t concerned with these sociological issues. A few business owners complained the freeway would cut Fourth Street off from its customer base. Others accused those in power of creating a reservation for Negroes—I mean, black people. But thanks to the freeway construction workers, the café stayed busy. I didn’t see anything wrong with the freeway. That is, until the freeway’s path ran close to home.
Aunt Lizzie came to the café on a Thursday, so I knew it was either real good or real bad. She and Vanessa never came on Thursdays. They knew Mr. Ben would be there, and I couldn’t give them extra servings or let them play the jukebox for free.
“Callie, where’s Mr. Ben?” she asked as she burst through the door. “I need him to call Ben Jr.”
“What’s the matter, Lizzie?” Mr. Ben asked, peeking his head out of the storage room.
“This letter came today. It says they’re going to take my house.”
“Who is they?” I asked.
“Are you behind in your payments?” Mr. Ben asked.
Aunt Lizzie lived at 886 Twelfth Street, the house she and Uncle Max bought after the fire. Since buying the house, they had replaced the roof, created a rec room in the basement, and installed a fence with a kennel sectioned off for Vanessa’s dog, Goldie. It was supposed to be their forever home.
“Can the government do this?” Aunt Lizzie asked.
“It’s called eminent domain,” Mr. Ben said. “I can call Ben Jr., but it won’t do any good. This was one of Eisenhower’s big projects, and the plan was set years ago.”
The freeway’s path ran through the center of the black neighborhood. It was as though someone had taken a marker and drawn a line on a map through these areas. We now know someone did draw these lines through so-called “less desirable” areas. City leaders called it “urban renewal.” The same thing was happening everywhere . . . from Tulsa to Newark to Minneapolis to Los Angeles. But like Mr. Ben said, the plan was set years earlier. We just weren’t invited to the planning.
Fourth Street wasn’t in the new freeway’s path, but the surrounding neighborhoods were. Our customer base, property values—and most importantly, our spirits—were adversely impacted. Dr. Brown, Woolworth’s, the post office, and the Texaco station moved. Even Mt. Zion Baptist Church, the largest black church in town, was torn down and had to move.
Then, with little notice, the president of Modern Metals announced the factory was closing and after working there ten years, Uncle Max was laid off. Modern was joining the parade of jobs heading out of town.
Aunt Lizzie and Uncle Max received two thousand dollars for their house and were given four months to move. They had paid three hundred dollars down on a five-thousand-dollar contract for deed, and took over the payments on the Twelfth Street house. However, the mortgage remained in the seller’s name, so they didn’t have a payment history and couldn’t get financing for a new house.
Since they couldn’t get financing, they settled for a rental over on Twenty-third Street. It was a two-bedroom upstairs unit, and they could use the garage and the basement. But no children or pets were allowed. Vanessa was on the waiting list for an apartment in Imperial Village, so Aunt Lizzie announced since I had a big new house, Vanessa, her three kids, and their dog, Goldie, were moving in with me. I could’ve refused, but they had opened their home to me when I came to town, and I was expected to do the same.
Vanessa and I had lived together before, so we already knew our housekeeping styles were different. When I lived with Aunt Lizzie, it was liberating not to have to clean the refrigerator every week and mop daily. She left clean dishes in the dish drainer rack overnight, something unheard of in my mother’s house. They sometimes ate on TV trays in the living room, another no-no in my mother’s house. And Mama didn’t believe in sitting on the bed in your outside clothes. Aunt Lizzie’s rules were more relaxed and I was told to “make myself at home,” but I still did most things my mother taught me.
To my chagrin, that worked in reverse. Vanessa made herself at home and brought her no-dishwashing, crumb-leaving self to my house. And no matter how many times I explained the “good” towels in the bathroom and the couch throw pillows were for decoration, her children kept using them. Even Goldie disobeyed rules and kept digging up my tomatoes and petunias.
Vanessa and Junior slept in the third bedroom, with Kendrick on the living room couch, and Harleen shared Lana’s room. However, Vanessa didn’t mention that Kendrick still had night “accidents.” We moved the dining room table against the wall and squeezed a twin bed in there for him. We were cozy, but didn’t mind being inconvenienced for a few months.
Lana initially liked having kids around to play with. They played school (she was always the teacher), had Hula-Hoop contests, and skated up and down the block. But the novelty soon wore off and she and her cousins argued as much as they played. She complained when Junior tangled up her Slinky, and when she stepped in Goldie’s dog poop in the yard, you would’ve thought the world was coming to an end. Harleen combed the hair out of Lana’s dolls, used up the Easy-Bake Oven cake mixes and left half colored pages in Lana’s coloring books—all major offenses. “But it’s mine,” she would say when I told her to let her cousins play with a toy she had long since forgotten. Usually the toy ended up broken, escalating Lana’s resentment.
“Why is she in my room?” Lana whined. “When are they going home? They drink up all the Kool-Aid and that stupid dog chewed up Bubba Bear.”
“You must share,” I told her repeatedly. “Family helps each other.”
“How is letting her tear up my stuff helping family?”
But within a few hours they’d be playing as though nothing had happened, as Vanessa and I had done. I gave Lana the responsible adult response, but I was also ready for them to move. Their two-month sojourn had turned into four months, and our spacious 1600-square-foot house now felt crowded with seven people and a dog calling it home. Our utilities doubled, the bathroom was always occupied, our phone stayed tied up, and Goldie’s fur shed over everything. Vanessa inched closer to my last nerve as the weeks passed.
In addition to Vanessa, her kids and Goldie, Joel, her latest boyfriend was always around. He belonged to the Commandos, Milwaukee’s version of the Black Panthers. Vanessa now kept her hair cornrowed and wore dashikis. He was always marching for some cause. Clark didn’t care for him and said anyone wearing sunglasses inside was up to no good. I didn’t appreciate Vanessa and Joel keeping my phone line tied up, but if he could get her to forget Harper, he was okay with me.
And there was a benefit: I didn’t have to rush home to get Lana. Vanessa made sure Lana changed from her school clothes and finished her homework before dinner. I no longer had to worry about Lana being a latchkey kid, but there was new drama.
One evening I drove up to a crowd standing in my yard. Vanessa was consoling a crying Harleen, and both sets of neighbors were outside, looking serious. I took a deep breath, then walked over to Vanessa, who explained that Goldie was missing. No one knew how she got out of the yard. When the kids got in from school, she was gone. Lana and Kendrick were walking the neighborhood, looking for her. When the streetlights came on and they hadn’t returned, Vanessa and I were going to ride through the neighborhood to search for them. Just as I was pulling out of the driveway, they came around the corner. Kendrick was crying and carrying Goldie in his arms. They found her several blocks away. She’d been hit by a car and someone had pulled over and put her on the curb. Harleen cried herself to sleep for several days and Kendrick barely talked. I’d never had a pet, but it did feel like someone had died.
A few weeks later, I arrived home to find a police car in my driveway, Joel in handcuffs, and Vanessa shouting like a drill sergeant.
“What’s the problem?” I asked when I exited the car.
“Here’s the owner,” Vanessa said, waving her hand toward me. “Please tell these honkies I live here.”
“Are you the owner of this house?” the officer asked me.
“Yes. What is the problem?”
“We had a call about suspicious individuals.”
“Don’t you mean black people?” Vanessa asked. “Lana and I both forgot our keys, so we climbed in through the bedroom window.”
“It’s a misunderstanding, officer,” I said.
“I tried to tell them that,” Vanessa said. “He patted us down like we were murderers. I believe he just wanted to feel my legs.”
“Do you have identification?” the officer asked me.
As I was looking through my purse for my wallet, my neighbor drove up and said, “Hey, Margo. Is everything okay?”
“Just a misunderstanding,” I said.
She waved and went in her house. Then the officer walked back to his car, saying, “Ladies, I’ll be leaving now. But your friend must come with me.”
Turns out, Joel had two joints in his pocket and was arrested. I didn’t know who I was madder at—the police, Vanessa, or Joel. I stood in the yard with a plastic smile, but once the police car was out of sight, I spun around and said, “What were you thinking? You were antagonizing the police on purpose.”
“Them pigs started it.”
“The police are supposed to respond to a call about a stranger climbing through a neighbor’s window. I don’t appreciate them asking me for identification, like they didn’t believe me, but it’s over now,” I said. “Where’s Lana?”
“When the Commando meeting ended, she wanted to—”
“You took her to a Commando meeting?”
“It was the last planning meeting before the march this weekend. Neither you nor Clark were here, and I didn’t want to leave her here alone.”
“You should have waited until one of us returned or called me at the café.” I saw my neighbor across the street pulling back her curtains. “This is so ghetto. Let’s go inside.”
“You afraid what your neighbors will think? I could care less. Let them look,” Vanessa said and stuck out her tongue.
I shook my head and went inside.
“Like I was saying, my kids were going. I didn’t think you’d mind,” Vanessa said, as she plopped on the couch.
“That’s the problem. You don’t think.”
“Who appointed you Queen High and Mighty? I can think enough to know not to be busting my behind for no white man. You need to be marching with us. You’re just a cook—making money for Mr. Ben. If it weren’t for you, most customers wouldn’t even patronize that run-down café anymore. You have the apron; all you need is an Aunt Jemima head wrap. And I didn’t know my rent included babysitting duties.”
“What rent?”
“I give you my food stamps. You want rent too?”
“I want you to respect me and my house. Lana is a child,” I said.
“That girl isn’t as naive as you think. Just hang loose. There were lots of kids there.”
“Not my kid, and not without me knowing about it. Don’t they have guns there?”
“They say that stuff on TV to scare people. Everything was fine,” Vanessa said. “She was helping paint signs for the march this Saturday. Lana is very artistic, by the way. No wonder she’s so protective of her crayons.”
“This could’ve been serious. You had her in a car with drugs, and you’re talking about crayons.”
“When did you become so bougie? You act like Joel had kilos of heroin. Thank goodness my housing voucher finally came through. We’ll be moving the first of the month.”
“That’s great news,” I said. “It took them long enough.”
“We moved to a shorter waiting list since we no longer have Goldie. And speaking of Goldie, Harleen said Lana let the dog out on purpose. I never saw such a selfish kid. She didn’t even want to share with a dog. I miss Goldie, but I’ll be glad to move.”
Not as glad as I will, I thought, but I didn’t even respond to her ludicrous accusation. Imperial Village was a public housing development built during the Depression, first to house white working families and was now low-income housing for blacks. Vanessa had always had a job or two, but with three children, she qualified for low-income housing and had registered for on-site GED classes.
Vanessa was a beneficiary of President Johnson’s War on Poverty. Housing subsidies, food stamps, and education grants were implemented to help alleviate poverty and economic inequities. But what the subsidies couldn’t alleviate was the growing mood of despair and desperation.
The Commandos led protests against racial profiling, excessive police force, and harassment. The police arrested young black men for minor infractions like jaywalking and those encounters often escalated. Open housing was a hot-button issue, as the city council repeatedly failed to pass laws prohibiting restrictive covenants and other discriminatory practices. Even the weather was instigating unrest, with unusually high temperatures adding kindling to smoldering discontent.
Between the war, job loss, police mistrust, and urban renewal and displacement, people were on edge. Aretha was telling us to demand respect. The Impressions were telling us “We’re a Winner,” and we may have to leave here “to show the world we have no fear.” These young folks weren’t like we were. I wasn’t much older than many protestors, but I seemed to be from another generation. Most black people my age had moved to Milwaukee from the South. We knew things here were unfair. We also knew they could be worse. But these young people expected more. I’m not condoning what happened next, but I understood.
CHAPTER 19
I loved my cousin, but we were glad to have our house back. Even Lana commented that she was glad she didn’t have to watch out for dog poop in the yard anymore. I steam cleaned the carpet and bought new living room throw pillows. And Clark surprised Lana with a canopy bed. She had been wanting one, but he said they cost too much. Lana and I had gone to a mother-daughter tea at Aunt Lizzie’s church. When we returned, the new bedroom set was in her room, and the twin beds were in the third bedroom. He’d hauled Kendrick’s pee-stained mattress away.
“Thank you so much,” Lana gushed. “It looks just like a princess bed.”
“You’re welcome. Your mama can thank me later,” he said with a wink.
Lana stayed in her room the rest of the day and we spent a quiet evening with no television or children fighting. “If I’d known I would get such good loving, I would’ve gotten her a bed a long time ago,” Clark teased, after our third round of lovemaking. I slept so well, I overslept. Even though Saturday mornings were usually slow at the café, I didn’t like to be late. I had to stop and get gas, and when the attendant finished filling the car, he said, “Thank you and be safe. I’m not trying to scare you, but you know most places are closed today. I see you have on white. I suppose hospitals never close.”
