“But I want to look like Ariyeh!”
Even then, I was tugging against her conception of me.
On my way to the bathroom, I pass the old Crosley and stop to inspect the records. Louis Armstrong. Leadbelly’s “Pigmeat.” I laugh, remembering how fine the blues made me feel as a girl — all tingly, and happy/sad — despite Mama’s disapproval of the music. My uncle’s real name is Ledbetter, tagged after Huddie Ledbetter, Leadbelly’s given name. I couldn’t say the word as a child. It came out “Bitter” and stuck to him.
Down the hall, in the corner bedroom I shared with Ariyeh, Uncle’s Needle Men stories whisper in my memory. The Needle Men were medical students from the Charity Hospital who roamed the streets in summer looking for bodies to practice on, “since stiffs get scarce that time of year.” Uncle explained, “All they got to do is brush by you, and bingo, you been pricked. Some kinda sleeping poison. They whisk you away to a room ‘neath the earth where they can cut on you.”
I sit on the old bed, now, recalling hot breezes through the window screens filling drapes while Ariyeh and I tried to sleep. Each sound outside — boys hurling stones at streetlamps, dogs pawing through wet newspapers, winos stumbling through weeds — became an abduction or a murder in our minds. We imagined crouched figures in green medical smocks, needles gleaming in moonlight, approaching our house. West of us, about a mile, the Southern Pacific made its midnight run; its metallic clanging was a lonely man curling his sour-egg breath through a clarinet. All over the neighborhood, children were vanishing, pricked with poison or sliced by the soft precision of a blade: in alleys and behind the markets, beside the barbershop and fireworks stands, which only opened on New Year’s, Juneteenth, and July Fourth, and so were more sacred than church. Ariyeh’s damp palm clung to mine; my nose, next to her popcorn-curly hair, opened wide with the pleasure of her sage and peppermint smell.
Nights, I remember, Mama quilted in her room down the halclass="underline" just a pencil line of lamplight beneath her bedroom door, a scrap of tune, a hiss of thread. Since she was so distant, I depended on Ariyeh to protect me, though I knew she was just as scared as I was. We stared at our open window. Later, when the air had gotten cold in the room, she sometimes jarred me awake, tussling with dreams. If her hand had slipped out of mine, I’d find it again and squeeze until she calmed, sighing back into the mattress.
Now Uncle uses this bedroom for storage. Boxes clutter the floor and the bed, some of them mildewed and webby. I rise slowly, hearing the box springs’ catlike creak. Ariyeh and I used to giggle about it in the mornings.
I freshen up now, brush my teeth. The bathroom mirror is old, coppery, and streaked; it dusts my face darker than it really is, makes me feel squirmier here than I already did. An imposter. A mistake.
So: I have the day to myself, to see how well I recall the old neighborhood, to see what I can find of Cletus Hayes, to see how much trouble I can get into asking questions about secrets Mama told me never to unearth.
My Taurus still smells of tacos, bought in Huntsville yesterday on my way down from Dallas. I kick the empty food bag under the seat and roll down my window. The streets here are narrow, old, faded bricks knuckling through cracks in the asphalt. More weed lots than I’d remembered: houses gone, rotted, bulldozed, scraped away for progress. I imagine the land here has doubled or tripled its value over the years — like a bully, downtown Houston has crept a few miles closer, gobbling up space, since I scoured these alleys as a girl looking for horned toads. Tall, glassy, air-conditioned bank buildings, mortgage firms, investment companies cast fat shadows over dilapidated row houses worth nothing compared with the rich red dirt they’re cluttering up, over heaps of wheezing washers, busted plumbing, sundered families worth even less on paper than the materials their rickety homes are rigged with.
I glimpsed Tomorrow in the news this morning, the Business section, open by chance, stained with egg yolk and orange juice, on Bitter’s kitchen table: If we could clear out two dozen houses on lots along West Gray Street, within a year we could open a strip mall that, guaranteed, would turn a healthy profit by its second biennium.
I’m amazed, then, it’s not already snowing eviction notices here, onto all the broken-glass-and-gravel lawns.
A Chicano boy bangs a stick against a mossy fire hydrant. A dog in a dirt yard licks a little girl and she licks him right back. Five or six teenage boys, like a cluster of heat-addled flies, lounge around a rusty, wheelless Cadillac, propped on cinder blocks, sharing joints and big blue cans of malt liquor. Now I am nostalgic for my childhood.
Shit man you got that you fucking got that, they say. They say, That’s all-reet ‘bout that ol’ shit man. Slapping hands. Yeah you got that slick I reckon you got that shit stone cold.
They stop and watch me in my new purple car, and I imagine them thinking: White bitch. What her fucking business here?
Look again, I want to shout.
Instead, I give it the gas.
Of course, it wasn’t in Freedmen’s Town — “Niggertown,” even we used to call it — where Cletus Hayes sealed his fate. I check a city map. Reinerman Street, Washington Road. Lillian. Rose. San Felipe. The heart of the riot. All west of here.
In the summer of 1917, Reinerman Street was in a nice white part of town by Camp Logan, a U.S. Army base. The camp had just made room for the Twenty-fourth Infantry, Third Battalion, an all-black unit exhausted from chasing, in vain, Pancho Villa through northern Mexico. The black soldiers were posted on a woody lot, surrounded by a barbed wire fence, about three miles from Logan and the white soldiers there. They were charged with protecting army property. A drainage ditch separated the regiment from Reinerman Street; a Southern Pacific Railroad track isolated it from even more expensive neighborhoods.
Few history books dwell on the movements of black military units, most of which were formed just after the Civil War; from monographs I first studied in school, I’ve learned that the army preferred to station black troops away from heavy population centers, stateside — far from white folks in the cities. But the Twenty-fourth, despite its failure with Villa, had shown uncommon valor and courage in the field. Prior to their Mexican engagement, the troops had fought bravely in the Philippines. Posted to San Francisco in 1915, the forces’ provost guards so impressed the police chief, he tried to hire several of them. These were “good boys,” so no one expected trouble when they arrived in Houston, an unusually courteous place as Southern communities went.
That summer in the Bayou City, as elsewhere, scores of white families were anguished at seeing their sons conscripted into the service and shipped to the widening war in Europe. The sight of any soldier must have rattled them. Local politics were rawer than usual then — patriotic fervor stirred the soup on every level — while the days lengthened, grew steamier, more humid, lifting indolence and anger closer to the surface of everyone’s life.
Now, I park my car near a bike path winding into a neat, managed oak grove. Nearly eighty years after the events I’ve returned here hoping to plumb, this part of town is still nice and white. Paved. Well-trimmed. The streets have been swept and a sweet smell of late-season honeysuckle zizzles the air. Couples picnic in the grass. A toddler chases a pigeon. I push through brambles, deeper into shade.
No traces remain of Camp Logan. Following the First World War, the base served as a convalescent center, then it was dismantled. In the twenties, a wealthy, English-born music teacher gave millions to the city to turn the vacant land into a memorial for soldiers who’d paid the ultimate price. She had lived for a time near the base, rented rooms to soldiers’ wives, played golf with them on the camp course, and had come to love the woodlands there (I imagine her as the type of person my mama always wanted to be, refined, respected, dignified, and quietly remote).