Underground Airlines(44)

“You Wanda?”

“Yes,” she said. She darted a glance at me—phony name—and said, “Do you work with Mrs. Walker?”

“Sure do,” said the mountain of a man, his voice a heavy rumble. “She’s my mama.”

“Oh. Okay. Well, listen, will you just tell her I’m really sorry, but I actually was thinking forget it? I changed my mind. Okay?”

The dude in the golf visor looked amused. “Sure. Okay.”

“So you’ll tell her?”

“You can tell her.” He yanked open my door, and the other big man, the same size and dressed identically to the first, opened Martha’s. “C’mon, now,” said the new one. The new giant’s voice, not surprisingly, was the same distant-thunder bass. He had two chipped front teeth, the new brother—that was the only difference between them.

Martha nodded rapidly, sure, no problem, and licked her lips. “Hey, Jim?” she said, and put her hand on my knee. “Do you actually think you can stay here and keep an eye—”

“Uh-uh,” said big man number 1. “Everybody comin’. Everybody out the car.” He tugged open the back door and pointed at Lionel. “You, too, little man.”



My manager way back in Chicago, at that Townes store where I worked, was a good-hearted black man named Derrick, and sometimes he would give me a ride home. Every time he drove me, we would be going south on Lake Shore and they’d come into view, the jumbled ugly towers of Freedman Town, and Derrick would shake his head and say, “I wish I understood. I wish I understood why they can’t tear them places down. There has got to be something better we could do for those folks. Don’t you think?”

“Of course” is what I said to Derrick, and I meant it.

Now I see things differently. It took me some time, but I know the secret now. Freedman Town serves a good purpose—not for the people who live there, Lord knows; people stuck there by poverty, by prejudice, by laws that keep them from moving or working. Freedman Town’s purpose is for the rest of the world. The world that sits, like Martha, with dark glasses on, staring from a distance, scared but safe. Create a pen like that, give people no choice but to live like animals, and then people get to point at them and say Will you look at those animals? That’s what kind of people those people are. And that idea drifts up and out of Freedman Town like chimney smoke, black gets to mean poor and poor to mean dangerous and all the words get murked together and become one dark idea, a cloud of smoke, the smokestack fumes drifting like filthy air across the rest of the nation.



We proceeded in a slow parade, one of Mrs. Walker’s big boys in the front and the other in the back, the two of them escorting our strange family, herding us down the wide, rutted street, past graffitied doorways, past broken-down cars and plywood shanties, fire pits with smoke tendrils crawling up, raggedy hammocks strung between trees.

To look at him, Lionel gave no signs of being frightened—he bounced on the balls of his feet, looking every way at once. But about halfway down the block he grabbed my hand, and I held his, awkwardly at first, feeling his tiny fingers moving like curious animals inside my closed fist.





19.



“Now, tell me how I know you again, baby?”

“You don’t,” said Martha. “Not really. My friend Anika, she knows your grandson Wayne.”

“Wayne in Gary?”

“No, ma’am. Wayne down in New Albany.”

The woman seated regally at the end of the long dining room table snorted and held up a wagging finger. “Grandson? Please, baby. That boy Wayne ain’t no kin to me. Godson. He my godson.” She took a long drag of her skinny cigarette and ashed it out in the juice cup at her elbow. “He still down there?”

“He’s in Louisville now, I think.”

“Well, you keep well clear of him. He dumb. Dumb and small-minded, too. There’s a difference, but he both. Stay clear.”

“Okay, ma’am. I will. I’ll do that.”

“Stop calling me ma’am, baby,” said the old lady. “Everybody call me Mama.”

“Okay, then.”

Martha smiled, barely, her face and her body rigid. She didn’t call the woman Mama. She wasn’t comfortable with that—she didn’t seem comfortable with any of this. Her sunglasses were folded neatly beside her at the table, like she was playing cards and this is what she was ready to bet with, if she had to. The room was small and stuffed with greenery, potted plants and vases full of flowers, all miraculously thriving in the low-hanging choke of smoke from Mama’s contraband Camels and the dope being enjoyed by her sons, who’d walked us up.

Mama Walker was middle-aged, but no telling how middle: somewhere north of forty-five and south of sixty. She’d been beautiful once and was beautiful now, in a way, an older lady’s leathery beauty. She was dark-skinned, and her face was lined, especially at the edges of her mouth. Her eyes were alert and alive, glittering with awareness, darting every which way at once. Noticing everything.

“Them two are my babies,” she said suddenly, swiveling to me, pointing with her smoke hand at the pair of men. “Twins. Believe that?”

I looked at them, and Mama’s babies nodded in unison from the love seat, two giants side by side, a couple of defensive linemen five years out of the game, old musculature hidden deep within layers of fat. In the apartment’s back room were a bunch of other kids, much younger, arrayed on and around a heavy sofa. Lionel, at Mama Walker’s encouragement, had fitted himself down among them, become instantly absorbed in whatever cartoon garbage was playing on the plasma screen across from Mama’s sofa.