Jay looks at Kwame’s hand on his shoulder. “Don’t touch me, Lloyd.”
He practically jogs to his car, hot to get out of there.
There’s no way out of this thing, he knows. His father-in-law made him promise. And Jay, for the most part, is a man of his word. He has no idea how he’s going to get to the mayor. What’s he supposed to do, call her up after more than a decade? Just show up at city hall? He reaches into his pocket for his cigarettes, and the newspaper clipping slides out, fluttering briefly before sinking softly in the humid air, landing at Jay’s feet. He stares at the scrap of paper, the facts of a murder laid out before him in black and white.
A moment later, he climbs into his car. Clutching the newspa per clipping in the palm of his hand, he kicks the engine in gear. Highway 59 to I-45 is the quickest route home, but Jay drives past the nearest on-ramp. He tells himself he’s taking the long way home. But deep down, he knows. He’s heading for the water.
Chapter 4
Jay left home when he was fifteen. He took his summer earn ings from working in his mother’s shop in Nigton, up in Trin ity County, and left. He was headed to Nacogdoches. That was his plan. But at the bus station he met a pretty girl who was headed south, toward the Gulf, and he changed his mind on the spot. He bought a ticket to Houston instead. If he was gon’ do this, he was gon’ do it big. He arrived in the city at dawn. He didn’t know a thing about where he was, didn’t know a soul. He spent half a day talking to a janitor at the bus station, ask ing about a place to stay. He ended up in Fifth Ward because it was black and therefore safe. He found a room on the first floor of Miss Mitchell’s boardinghouse, where it was clean and there was always fresh coffee. His upstairs neighbor was a transves tite burlesque dancer whose stage name was Effie Dropbottom. They sat up most nights, when Effie wasn’t performing, smoking cigarettes and playing records. Wilson Pickett and Ray Charles and any Motown. Or they listened to the
He found a job at a bakery, cleaning ovens and sweeping up after hours. He scratched out a living and called home when he was ready. It was his sister he wanted to see about. He felt awful for leaving her behind. It was a cowardly thing to do, he knew. But he couldn’t protect her from his mother’s third husband— the nasty, sidelong glances and midnight gropes—and that fact alone had been more painful to a young boy trying to be a man than any guilt about leaving. They talked a couple of times, he and his sister. He sent her a postcard once. It was a picture of the Astrodome, the words “8th Wonder of the World!” scrawled in silver glitter across the top. Sometime after that, he heard she went to stay with her father, his mother’s second husband, up around Dallas.
Jay never finished high school. But when the University of Houston was making noise about integrating, trying to head off at the pass any radical violence or government injunction, he went down to the admissions office without an appointment. He scored near 100 percent on the entrance exam, and they let him in without a diploma. He moved into a segregated dorm a couple of miles off campus and said good-bye to Fifth Ward for a long, long time.
Driving through the neighborhood now, Jay stares out of his car window, thinking how much Fifth Ward has changed. Down Lockwood Drive, fine-dining restaurants and clothing shops have been replaced by liquor stores and Laundromats with single women inside, folding clothes alone. There are boardedup buildings on nearly every corner and empty fields thick with weeds and flattened soda cans, shards of broken glass, trash and used furniture. Even the sidewalk in front of the Freedman’s National Bank, the first black-owned bank in the state, has dead grass coming up through cracks in the cement. Jay remembers the neighborhood differently, remembers when it was a point of pride for black folks to say they lived near Lockwood Drive or had a little place on Lyons Avenue or went to Phillis Wheatley High School. He knows plenty of doctors and lawyers who came out of Wheatley. Fifth Ward was a place where black people thrived. People made a little bit of money, made a nice life for themselves. The neighborhood wasn’t much, wasn’t fancy or rich, but it was theirs.
And then, of course, came integration.
Black people suddenly had a choice, in theory at least, and the ones with any money almost always chose to leave Fifth Ward behind. Just because they could. Because wasn’t that, after all, the very thing they had been fighting for?
Jay lights another cigarette and makes a right turn onto Clinton.
The newspaper said it was the 400 block.
He wants to see it for himself.
If only to put this whole thing out of his mind.
He drives parallel to the bayou, along Clinton, a narrow twolane road, heading west. There are warehouses on the south side of the street, tall trees and brush behind them, and then the bayou, which Jay knows is there, but can’t see in the darkness. There are no streetlights or even city signs on this stretch of road. Jay flips on his brights, taking a curve in the road, his head lights swooping past the warehouses, dark and deserted at this hour, past grain silos and steel machinery and yards of chain-link fence. A few feet ahead, there’s a sudden turnoff in the road, a path of dirt and gravel to the left that winds around to the back of a warehouse . . . and toward the water. Jay takes the left turn, slow and easy. He drives cautiously, maybe ten, fifteen miles an hour, tossing his cigarette through the crack in his car window. Dirt and gravel kick up a fine dust that swirls in the hazy white light of his high beams.
Around back of the warehouse, there’s a locked gate.
Behind it, Jay sees the silhouette of small hills, mounds of broken concrete and quartz, finely crushed, like tiny sand dunes. A sign on the fence reads quartz industrial, inc. Jay remem bers the name from the newspaper.
In front of him, the dirt road ends abruptly.
Jay slams on his brakes, almost running into a thin film of yel low police tape. It’s blocking off a large, burnt-up patch of grass, probably twenty-five yards wide. Jay shuts off the engine to his car, but leaves his headlights on, shining them past the field of dirt and grass to the hawthorn trees and bunches of scrub oak and Spanish moss on the other side. He still can’t see the bayou from here. If he didn’t know better, he would laugh if somebody told him there’s water on the other side of those trees, running right through the middle of the city.
Part of the crime scene tape has come loose and is trailing in the dirt. It seems the cops have already come and gone, their business done, which makes Jay feel better about getting out of his car. He notices the white spray paint right away. Four
It’s when he turns to leave, toward his car and the street, look ing back the way he came, that he sees something in the distance, high above the trees.
The lights of the Freedman’s National Bank clock:
