“Do you have any children’s books?” she asked Darryl. “Picture books?”
Darryl pointed to the colorful corner display at the front of the store with the child-sized plastic play table. Bright red. Truly impossible to miss. But because his desk was so prominent across from the door, he was the concierge from the moment customers walked inside — no need to look for themselves. “Picture books up front. Young adult’s near the back. Let me know if you’re looking for something specific.”
“Great!” the woman chirped. She seemed to notice how tightly she was clutching her bag and let it fall limp to her hip. “Just looking for something for my niece for Black History Month. This is a beautiful store.”
“Thank you,” Darryl said, his eyes back on the white security guard. He realized he had never taken the business card, which the guard still held out within his reach. He hated the part of himself that felt more at ease with white witnesses nearby. He even put on a show for them. “And we serve beautiful customers. In a beautiful neighborhood.”
Darryl took the security guard’s card. From Rick’s icy smile, he hadn’t liked waiting.
Darryl hoped they wouldn’t come by the store again. But the knot in his stomach, still stewing, told him they probably would — Rick would, at least. Darryl was pretty sure of that.
That day the security guards came inside was the first time Darryl saw the haint.
A less watchful manager might not have noticed, but that wasn’t Darryl, so he saw right away: two books were face out in Protest & Revolution. Instead of the newly published books by UCLA professors he was trying to promote, the two books facing out were Franz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth and The Autobiography of Malcolm X. He had read both of them in high school, his first and favorites. Truthfully, they usually were facing out — but not today. Except they were. He hadn’t seen a customer in that section in the hour since he’d propped up the other books, so no one else could have done it. And the two books he’d chosen were on the floor. Facedown. As if the two books in their place had popped out on their own and knocked down the upstart competition.
Darryl wasn’t a haint-believing kind of brother, so that’s not where his head went first. He told himself that he must not have noticed one of the customers rearrange his shelf for whatever entitled reason — maybe a “well, actually” commentary on which books deserved to be in the section and which didn’t — and Darryl was muttering about it under his breath for the rest of the day because the fucking nerve. The thing was, the only customers who had been in his store since he arranged those shelves were two white dudes who had gone straight to Biography and then ambled over to the New York Times best sellers, and then the new section at the front where he kept most of his books by white authors, decorated with big enough posters to be seen from the store window: Colson Whitehead, yes, but also the usual suspects: Stephen King, James Patterson, John Grisham, and Gillian Flynn. Whitenip for casual passersby who weren’t drawn to the kente cloth and Essence best sellers that took up most of the window space.
For the first year after the Gardens opened up, newly renovated, three times the price for a one-bedroom, he’d delayed stocking anything except Black and brown authors as usual. But he had to admit that his sales had gone up almost 20 percent since he added the new section. Maybe more, if he were honest. His old customers were moving on and out, and his new customers wanted to treat him like a Barnes & Noble despite the sign clearly marked Sankofa Books & Gifts outside. Even if they didn’t speak any languages from Ghana, where Sankofa meant to go back and retrieve what was lost, they should be able to tell it meant Black.
Darryl had studied enough sales trends to predict that if he had a time machine, he might not recognize Sankofa in five years — assuming it was still here — just like he already didn’t recognize the rest of the street. The books and shelves might still be here, but the spirit of the place could be gone.
Like everything. Like everyone.
Darryl never planned to run a bookstore. He’d noticed how hard Mrs. Richardson was working as he strolled the aisles and vowed that he would never be seduced by a love so fickle. Too many empty seats when the visiting author deserved a stadium. Hardcover books too expensive for customers to afford. He promised himself he would not be swayed by the whine of Coltrane’s sax hypnotizing him from the speaker in the top corner of the east wall. Not by boxes of greeting cards adorned with the blazing colors of Harlem Renaissance artists: Jacob Lawrence. Romare Bearden. Loïs Mailou Jones. Not by hand-painted placards posted to announce the myriad sections, each more glorious than the last: Protest & Revolution and Biographies, of course, but also Science Fiction. Mystery & Thriller. Romance. Comics & Graphic Novels. Each aisle a world unto itself, his mother’s favorite weekend spot, God rest her soul. Lemme take you to school so you’ll see what they won’t teach you, Mama used to say, and they would each disappear into Sankofa as the hours passed outside. Sankofa was the sun on its venerated street in South Central and everything else was in its orbit. Or so Darryl thought.
Sankofa was not only a fortress from erasure, it had been a citadel during the fires. In 1992, when a jury in Los Angeles proclaimed that a Black man’s plight was worth less than a dog’s (since his neighbor had gotten jail time for beating his dog, unlike those cops who beat Rodney King for the world to see), the strip mall across the street had gone up in flames while Mrs. Richardson opened her doors to anyone who needed to sob or rant, or both, behind the safety of her bookshelves. Fruit of Islam guarded the doors, but even if they hadn’t, Darryl’s father and his Uncle Boo — both high school football coaches — would have joined any dozen other men or women to protect Sankofa and its treasures. Smoke rose east, west, north, and south of Sankofa, but not a single page in the bookstore burned.
When Mrs. Richardson offered Darryl a job after school when he was fifteen, it seemed harmless enough. Why not earn his movie and comic book money organizing the boxes, stacking books on shelves, and — after a couple of months of building trust — running the register when Mrs. Richardson had more than one customer, so she could hover and make suggestions? He’d imagined himself becoming a writer, so a bookstore felt like a natural incubator. If he were honest with himself — and honesty was harder to come by now that he was nearly forty — his days working at Sankofa had been some of the happiest of his life.
The problem was, he’d fixed the store, the street, the neighborhood, in time, as if they would always be the way he remembered. But in the Afrofuturism section, Octavia E. Butler had written, “The only lasting truth is Change” in Parable of the Sower for all the world to see, so that fallacious thinking was nobody’s fault but his. Everything changed. The South Central LA he’d grown up in had been different in his grandmother’s time, when it was mostly white. His grandfather used to say that the coyotes and mountain lions and bears that sometimes ventured from the hills were only a reminder that this land had never belonged to humans, period.
The Only Lasting Truth indeed.
Darryl first thought the word ghost the day the boxes tumbled down in the storeroom. The store was empty when he heard the noise, and the cramped storeroom, which housed the bathroom, didn’t have a door to outside. (How many times had the more celebrated authors complained that there was no rear door to sneak into past the crowd?) This was about a week after the wrong book covers had been turned out, which he’d pretty much forgotten, even when the other strange things started happening. Always when he was alone.