On Tuesday, the blinds over the picture window unfurled even though no one touched the pull string. The right half fell until it nearly touched the floor, but the left half got caught midway up, a leering eye. That was a first. Then the Barack Obama book cover he’d hung on the wall was on the floor when he opened the store Wednesday morning, the plastic frame cracked, Obama’s face grinning sideways at him. By then, it was three strange occurrences in as many days, and he’d begun to wonder if someone was sabotaging him on purpose. Low-key.
Then the storeroom. Darryl had part-time helpers who came in after school like he had — although, frankly, they lacked both drive and pride in their work — so Darryl checked the stability of every box himself even if he didn’t stack them. Hardcovers could get bent up in the box, and returning was a hassle, so he ran a tight storeroom. When he heard the crash, he thought a vagrant had snuck in to find a quiet place to sleep... and instead, he found all six boxes from the top of the wire shelf on the east wall tumbled down to the concrete, one of them bashed open and spilling Stephen King paperbacks.
“Hey! Who’s back here?” he called out with extra bass in his voice, picking up his broom, because, again, he wasn’t a “ghosty” kind of brother and the only hauntings he’d heard about were in old houses. Grudgingly, he remembered the security guards’ visit and talk of a local mugger, so he thought maybe his store was a target: he couldn’t guess the angle of knocking down boxes in the storeroom, but it could be a ploy to get him away from the register. He tried to keep one eye on his desk through the doorway, but the storeroom had a lot of narrow aisles to cover, so eventually his desk was no longer in sight as he peeked around corners.
No one. The storeroom was empty. He was about to try to figure out what else could have made the boxes fall when the bathroom door slammed itself shut. The slam was a loud CRACK like a gunshot that made him jump inside his clothes. The doorknob rattled like it might fall off, then abruptly fell still.
“Hey!” Darryl called with far less bass this time, more like a petulant child. “Get your ass out here and get the hell out of my store!”
The door didn’t move. The doorknob didn’t so much as tremble.
Darryl never kept a gun in his store. He had his dad’s old Glock at home, a memento more than protection, but it wasn’t with him now. The notion of an armed bookseller didn’t sit well with him, felt like an oxymoron, so all he had in his trembling hand was a broom handle as he approached the bathroom door. “Come on. No one’s gonna hurt you!” he said, trying to sound folksy and empathetic. Sometimes desperate people only wanted five dollars, or a sandwich. “You need somethin’ I can get you, brother?” (Sexist to assume it was a man, he knew, but whoever it was would have to be pretty tall to reach those boxes on the top shelf. And strong enough to pull them down.)
Stillness and silence.
Darryl knew that most store owners would call the police, but not on his damn watch. And he wouldn’t call those security guards either. He used the hashtag #abolitionnow on his Twitter, so this was how a world without policing would look like. People would need to deal with their own damn problems instead of expecting somebody to come help them.
“All right, then. One... two...”
He didn’t wait for three. He turned the knob and kicked the door open so hard that he tore a foot-sized hole in the wood, which apparently was hollow inside. Shit.
No one was in the bathroom, which was only as big as a broom closet, with no windows, so its emptiness sat in plain view. One gray-white toilet, water low as usual. A sink with a rust trail in the basin from the faucet left dripping over the years. The mirror with a triangle-sized crack in one corner. An old Devil in a Blue Dress movie poster featuring Denzel. Empty.
“What...” Darryl said aloud to his reflection in the mirror, “...the fuck?”
That was the first time the word came to his mind: I’ve got a damn ghost. His grandfather would have called it a haint or a spook. Whatever the word for it, his experiences in the past couple of days finally made sense.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” he said.
And just maybe, he thought, he was.
The Spirituality section gave him clues but no real answers. Yet he’d pieced together enough from ghost stories and horror movies to figure out that any haint going to the trouble of being noticed by human eyes must have a message. But what? And, more importantly, whose message?
He thought first of Mrs. Richardson’s husband, Calvin, who had died of a heart attack behind this very desk back in 2005, but why would he bother coming back after all these years? (All he’d talked about was getting away from the burdens of Sankofa, so it was hard to imagine him returning now.) Same for Calvin Jr., who had never shown much interest in the store before he OD’d on painkillers in 2010. Documentary filmmaker St. Clair Bourne had spent hours at a time visiting Sankofa before he died after brain surgery in 2007, but wouldn’t he be more likely to haunt a movie theater, his beloved medium? Muhammad Ali had done a signing and called the store “the greatest” years ago, though believing it was Ali’s ghost was plain wishful thinking. Like, damn, Ali could haunt anywhere in the world. Same with so many of the others: Prince had surprised him one day and bought a couple hundred dollars’ worth of music biographies, but wouldn’t Prince haunt a recording studio instead? Or, better yet, a keyboard? Could it be E. Lynn Harris, gone so soon in 2009? Or Eric Jerome Dickey, who’d broken his readers’ hearts when he passed away in 2021?
And sister Octavia. Octavia E. Butler had done a book signing for Fledgling only months before she died, on Halloween night, no less. He’d almost sprung for an overflow space but decided to let the customers sit close to each other for the experience. They’d been shoulder to shoulder, beyond standing room only. Some had sat on the floor. Every time Octavia had spoken with her deep, wise timbre, the room had been so silent it might as well be empty. Her books could be grim, yet she’d smiled all through that night. Octavia might be haunting the store, he thought, so he put an asterisk by her name. She just might.
But how many other customers had died since Darryl started working here when he was fifteen, their hair graying, walk slowing, persistent coughs shaking stooping shoulders, breaths wheezing under the weight of cigarettes, heart conditions, and diabetes? Three dozen, easily. And those were just the ones whose names he remembered, whose faces had graced the aisles with laughter and smiles and “What you got for me today?” That wasn’t counting the ones who had just moved away, and that was a kind of death too, so why not?
The more Darryl tried to think of whose ghost might be haunting Sankofa, the more he realized it was a long-ass list. His parents were gone, killed by a drunk driver on Crenshaw when he was thirty. His mother might be the haunting type, but she would never intentionally knock over boxes of books; that was sacrilege. And why nearly twenty years later? His Aunt Lucy and Uncle Boo. His cousin Ray. Dead, all of them. They were ghosts haunting him even when they didn’t make themselves known. But would they follow him to Sankofa?
All he knew was that this haunting felt deeply personal. The haint knew him, and well. The Autobiography of Malcolm X was a good guess, but Fanon too? When he’d read them the same year, back to back? No way that was random. Only his father knew that — maybe. But his father would never have knocked down the Obama poster, not enough to hurt it. They’d had long arguments over what Obama was and wasn’t doing for Black people, and his father had been Obama to the bone. If anything, Dad would have sat the poster in Darryl’s office chair.