Lonney married Brenda that March, a few weeks before I saw the ad in the Daily News. I think that he wanted to make things work with Brenda, if only to push the whole thing in his father’s face, but the foundation, as my mother would have said, was built on shifting sand. In about a year or so he had separated from her, though he continued to be a good father to the child, a chubby little girl they named after his mother. And some two years after he married, he had joined the army and before long he himself was in a foreign land, though it was a different one from where his father was.
The day before I saw the ad I spent the evening at Lonney and Brenda’s place. They fought, maybe not for the first time as newlyweds, but for the first time in front of me. I felt as if I were watching my own folks arguing, as if the world I knew and depended on was now coming apart. I slept till one the next day, then went down to Mojo’s near North Capitol and Florida Avenue and hung out there for most of the day. Late in the day, someone left a Daily News at a table and over my second beer, with nothing better to do, I read the want ads. Her ad said:
STORE HELPER. Good pay. Good hours.
Good Opportunity for Advancement.
Then she had the store’s location—5th and O streets Northwest. The next morning I forced myself to stay awake after my mother had left, then went off about eight o’clock to see what the place was about. I didn’t want any part of a white boss and I stood outside the store, trying to see just who ran the place. Through the big windows I could see a colored woman of fifty or so in an apron, and she seemed to be working alone. Kids who attended Bundy Elementary School down the street went in and out of the store buying little treats. I walked around the block until about nine, then went in. A little bell over the door tinkled and the first thing I smelled was coal oil from the small pump just inside the door. The woman was now sitting on a tall stool behind the counter, reading the Post, which she had spread out over the glass counter.
She must have known I was there, but even after I was halfway to her, she just wet a finger and turned the page. I was inches from the counter, when she looked up. “Somethin you want?” she said. Oh shit, I thought, she’s one of those bitches. I could feel my balls trying to retreat back up into my body.
“I come about the job in the paper,” I said.
“Well, you pass the first test: At least you know how to read. What else you know how to do? You ever work in a store before? A grocery store like this?”
I gave her my work history, such as it was, and all the while she looked like she wanted to be someplace else. She kept reading and turning those pages. She seemed skeptical that the printing company had let me go without just cause.
“What you been doin since you lost that job?” she said.
“Lookin. I just never found anything I liked.”
That was not the right answer, I could see that right away, but by then I didn’t care. I was ready to start mouthing off like somebody was paying me to do it.
“The job pays thirty a week,” she said finally. “The work is from eight in the mornin till eight in the evenin. Every day but Sunday and maybe a holiday here and there. Depends. You got questions?” But she didn’t wait for me to ask, she just went on blubbering. “I’ll be interviewin everybody else and then make my decision. Affix your name and phone number and if you’re crowned queen of the ball, I’ll let you know, sweetie.” She tossed a pencil across the counter and pointed to the top of a newspaper page where she wanted me to put my telephone number. I wrote down my name and number, and just before I opened the door to leave, I heard her turn the next page.
The next day was Tuesday, and I spent most of that morning and the next few mornings cleaning up what passed for the backyard of Al’s and Penny’s Groceries. I had been surprised when she called me Monday night, too surprised to even tell her to go to hell. Then, after she hung up, I figured I just wouldn’t show up, but on Tuesday morning, way long before dawn, I woke up and couldn’t get back to sleep. And so for a change I was up when my mother rose and I fixed our breakfast. She did days work for some white people in Chevy Chase, and that morning I noticed how fast she ate, “wolfing down” her food, she would have called it.
For the first time in a long while, I stood at the window and watched her skinny legs take her down New York Avenue to hop the first of two D.C. Transits that would take her to Chevy Chase. Maybe it was watching her that sent me off that morning to the store. Or maybe it was that I came back to the table and saw that she hadn’t finished all of her coffee. My mother would have sold me back into slavery for a good cup of coffee, and no one made it to her satisfaction the way she did.
“Good,” the store owner said to me after she parked her lavender Cadillac and was opening the store’s door. “You passed the second test: You know how to show up on time.” It was about 7:30 and I’d been waiting about fifteen minutes.
She took me straight to the backyard, through the store itself, through a smaller room that served mostly as a storage area, to the back door, which took a hell of an effort for us to open. In the yard, two squirrels with something in their hands stood on their hind legs, watching us. No one had probably been in the yard for a coon’s age and the squirrels stood there for the longest time, perhaps surprised to see human beings. When they realized we were for real, they scurried up the apple tree in a corner of the yard. The store owner brought out a rake, shovel, wheelbarrow, everything I needed to do to the yard what no one had done for years. I hadn’t worn any good clothes and I was glad of that. Right off I took my tools and went to the far end of the yard to begin.
“By the way,” she said, standing in the back door, “my name’s Penelope Jenkins. Most people call me Penny. But the help call me Mrs. Jenkins, and you, buddy boy, you the help.”
Beyond the high fence surrounding the yard there were the sounds of schoolchildren getting into their day. Well into the second hour of work, after I knew I was getting dirty and smelly as hell, after the children were all in school, I started throwing stones at the damn squirrels, who, jumping back and forth from tree to fence, seemed to be taunting me. Just like on the cold evening of the green light, I began to feel that I would be doing that shit forever.
The first thick layer of crap in the yard was slimy dead leaves from the autumn before, maybe even years before, and the more I disturbed the leaves the more insects and slugs crawled out from the home they had created and made a run for it under the fence and to other parts of the yard. The more spiteful and stupid bugs crawled up my pants legs. Beneath the layer of leaves there was a good amount of soda bottles, candy wrappers, the kind of shit kids might have thrown over the fence. But I didn’t get to that second layer until Thursday morning, because the yard was quite large, big enough for little kids to play a decent game of kickball. Sometimes, when I heard voices on the other side of the fence, I would pull myself up to the top and look over.
My father always told the story of working one week for an undertaker in Columbia, South Carolina, one of his first jobs. He didn’t like the undertaker and he knew the undertaker didn’t like him. But, and maybe he got this from his old man, my father figured that he would give the undertaker the best goddamn week of work a fourteen-year-old was capable of. And that’s what he did — for seven days he worked as if that business was his own. Then he collected his pay and never went back. The undertaker came by late one evening and at first, thinking my father wasn’t showing up because he was just lazy, the undertaker acted big and bad. Then, after my father told him he wouldn’t be coming back, the undertaker promised a raise, even praised my father’s work, but my father had already been two days at a sawmill.