“I also know a woman named Iris Milford who says she knew you nearly twenty years ago, and, at least at that time, you could leap tall buildings at a single bound.”
“Iris exaggerates a little,” I said becomingly. “When I knew her she was a student. How is she?”
“She has stayed in the community,” Erin Macklin said. “She has made a difference.”
“She seemed like she might,” I said.
“You and another man are attempting to deal with the Hobart Street Raiders,” she said.
“Actually,” I said, “we are dealing with them.”
“And Susan told me that you would like to know what I know about the gangs.”
“Yes,” I said. “But first I’d probably like to know a little about you.”
“I was about to say the same thing,” Erin Macklin said. “You first.”
“I used to be a fighter. I used to be a cop. Now I am a private detective,” I said. “I read a lot. I love Susan.”
I paused for a moment thinking about it.
“The list,” I said, “is probably in reverse order.”
“A romantic,” she said. “You don’t look it.” I nodded.
“The man you are working with?”
“My friend,” I said.
“Nothing more?”
“Lots more, but most of it I don’t know.”
“He’s black,” she said.
“Yes.”
We were quiet while she looked at me. There was no challenge in the look, and the silence seemed to embarrass neither of us.
“I used to be a nun,” she said. “Now I am a teacher at the Marcus Garvey Middle School on Cardinal Road. I teach a course titled the History of Contemporary America. When I began we had no books, no paper, no pencils, no chalk for the blackboard, no maps. This made for innovation. I started by telling them stories, and then by getting them to talk about the things that they had to talk about. And when what they said didn’t shock me, and I didn’t dash for the dean of discipline, they told me more about the things they knew. The course is now a kind of seminar on life for fourteen-year-old black children in the ghetto.”
“Any books yet?”
“Yes. I bought them books,” she said. “But they won’t read them much. Hard to find books that have anything to do with them.”
“The March of Democracy is not persuasive,” I said.
She almost smiled.
“No,” she said. “It is not persuasive.”
She paused again, without discomfort, and looked at me some more. Her eyes were very calm and her gaze was steady.
“I used to work in day care, and we’d try to test some of the kids when they came in. The test required them, among other things, to draw with crayons. When we gave them to the kids they didn’t know what the crayons were. Several tried to eat them.”
“The test was constructed for white kids,” I said.
“The test was constructed for middle-class kids,” she said. “The basal reader family.”
“Mom, Dad, Dick, and Jane,” I said.
“And Spot,” she said. “And the green tree.”
“You and God have a lovers’ quarrel?” I said. Again she almost smiled.
“Gracious,” she said. “A literate private eye.”
“Anything’s possible,” I said.
“No. I had no quarrel with God. He just began to seem irrelevant. I could find no sign of Him in these kids’ lives. And the kids’ lives became more important to me than He did.”
“The ways of the Lord,” I said, “are often dark, but never pleasant.”
“Adler?”
“Theodor Reik, I think.”
She nodded.
“It also became apparent to me that they needed more than I could give them in class. So I stayed after school for them and then I began going out into the streets for them. Now I’m there after school until I get too sleepy, four or five days a week. I came from there now.”
“Dangerous?” I said.
