From “Street
Life”
After the Mountains have Moved
They broke in
again last night, wedging open the upstairs bathroom window with a crowbar or
pipe. The last time they came through the garage while we were away, the parade
of oily feet still visible on the livingroom rug. But this time, they had
wandered through the upstairs when we were sleeping. They could have murdered
us any time-- a fact that registered on each of our faces as the police went
over the details.
"I want to
move," Clara whispered to me, her hoarse voice full of terror and rage.
"I know,"
I said, having gone through the same conflict after the last crime. This time,
however, I felt violated, too. Not because they'd stolen my valuable stamp
collection-- it having come down to me from my father and from his father
before him-- but rather as a last straw of things that had been going on for
months, maybe years.
The police
detective coughed politely. "That's about it," he said. "I'll
file everything downtown. You can get copies for your insurance next
week."
There was
coolness in the detective's voice, not hostility, but distance, his sideward
glances taking in the subtle luxury that a professor's salary had allowed me
over the years, wall to wall carpetting, a colored TV. Things that anywhere
else might not have seemed so luxurious. But here...
"Look, Mr.
Hansen," the detective said. "Do you want some advice."
I had the feeling
he was going to give it to me whether I wanted it or not, but I nodded, as did
my wife.
"You people
are crazy for staying down here. This isn't the kind of neighborhood where you
can have nice things and keep them long. You know what I mean?"
"Which means
we probably won't see any of our stuff back?" Clara asked.
"You're
lucky they didn't kill you," the cop said. "They rob black families
down here. They kill whites."
The anger bubbled
up slowly from some deep recess thirty years unused, as if I was staring down
the racist nose of a Southern Sheriff. But I nodded again and politely showed
him the door, slamming and locking it before cursing outloud.
"Did you
hear that, Clara?" I said indignantly. "He has nerve telling us that
these days!"
"But he's
right, dear," Clara said. "There are stories in the paper all the
time about people getting killed."
"Other
people," I said with an impatient wave of my hand. "People who stick
their noses where they don't belong. Like Tom who wanders around down by River
Street talking to junkies. I'm a teacher, remember, not an activist any
more."
"Maybe we
should call Tom," Clara said, her face thick with early wrinkles.
"Maybe he could find out something..."
"No," I
said. "Let's not dwell on this. The stamps are gone as well as the other
things. Let's forget them."
***********
But it didn't end
there as I knew it wouldn't. Something fundamental had changed with this second
burglary and the house seemed unsafe, even with us fully awake and the locks
all secure. It was as if a wind could blow through the walls any time it
wished, taking us with it.
Over supper
several days later, I could take the dark looks no longer, from Clara or our
two children.
"All right,
all right. I'll see what I can do," I told them. From Clara, I'd expected
the look of relief, but the children looked up hopefully, bright eyes intensely
relieved.
Of course, they
were going to junior high school next year. Many dark stories had reached me
through my classes about white children surviving the city's secondary school
system. I hadn't believed them until then.
"I'll go to
the bank in the morning," I said. But I knew things weren't good and the
house in which we presently lived wouldn't bring us much if we could sell it.
Buying another might well be impossible.
**********
"I'm sorry,
Professor," Mr.Cummings said. "But you still owe too much on the
other house. We can't float two loans. Once you sell the old house, I'm sure we
can accomodate you."
But there was a
negative note in his voice, something that said even that might not allow us
enough to move. I made decent money, but not enough by today's standards and
with the crisis the banks were in, loans were tight. I was lucky to have what I
had through veterans benifits.
"We could
talk to the state for you," the banker said with a dubvious note to his
voice. "You teach at the college. It wouldn't be hard to register you as
black on the application."
"Black?" I said, the tone in
indignity straightening the man's shoulders.
"It's the
only way you'll get help through the government these days, I'm afraid. But if
your set against it, we can try anyway."
***********
The sting of the
banker's words were still fresh when I came out to my car and found its hood
up, battery and radio gone, the windshield shattered on one side as if in
vengence for something. No other reason would explain the act.
Of course the car
would have to be towed, and anger came, that enraged anger I'd felt the first
time discovering the oils stains on the rug of my house, rage that came to the
rape victim hours after the attack when it was too late to strike back at the
attacker. I wanted to find the first black face and scream at it. An
unreasonable act considering the lack of certain knowledge that it was a black
that had done this or the other crimes. I felt properly shamed, then hiked down
to Main street to look for a phone.
Three vandalized
phones later, I found one working-- though when Tom's voice came onto the other
end, I could barely hear him.
"It's me,
Tom. I'm stuck downtown. Could you give me a ride?"
"Certainly," Tom said and quickly
took the details.
Road Service was
a different matter. It took every every threat I could imagine to get the man
to send a truck.
"Well, I'll
send one," the man said. "But you'd better be right there by the car.
I don't want anything happening to my driver."
***********
"We're
leaving town, Tom," I said, once the truck had come for my car and we were
safely driving to the so-called "good" part of town.
Tom looked over.
He was older than I was by a few years, but looked a decade older, her curly
black hair now fringed with grey near the ears. Sun and worry had wrinkled his
brow, folding it over his eyes into a perpetual squint. But the eyes themselves
were the same grey and lively eyes I'd travelled with on buses in the south,
gone to jail with, beaten beside-- watching the final glory after the 1964
Equal Rights Amendment passed in Washington.
"Just
because someone broke into your car?" he said, his voice crisp like a
lawyers.
"Yes,"
I said, feeling it all coming down on me again. I hadn't been certain before
the break in on the car, going to the bank as a matter of passifying Clara. But
now it was clear the world was changing here, for me, my kids, my wife and
anyone else with white skin-- even Tom. "I don't spend my life being
afraid."
"You could
try changing it," Tom said.
"I have
tried! I teach in the local college, don't I?"
But the words
were hollow and we both knew it. I had settled into a faculty seat with the
idea that my activist days were over, thinking I could just as easily change
the world from behind a book. Yet, it was an isolated platform, one that really
didn't see the city at all. I was five minutes from the interstate on-ramp and
five minutes driving to the college. What I saw along the route was hardly
representative, just rows of houses in a neighborhood marked on the ballot
lists as "white."
"Look,
there's no use arguing with me about it, Tom," I said. "I've made up
my mind. My wife and kids are too important to risk them on some idiological
stand."
"I wasn't
arguing with you, Phil," Tom said, his voice squeeky, the way it got when
he was angry.
***********
The phone call to
Clara's father was another matter altogether. Over the years the resentment had
brewed into something close to hate, he, a county business and development
magnet living in a luxury estate in Wayne, as conservative as the town was
green, and thick with ill opinions about my Liberal leanings.
The coolness was
in his voice when he acknowledged my existance on the phone.
"Yes?"
he said, perhaps thinking there was some unavoidable social engagement his
secretary had forgotten to warn him about.
"We're
planning to move out of Paterson," I said, as light-heartedly as I could,
trying to make it sound something less than outright surrender. And, I expected
him to take full advantage of the defeat, treating me to a verbal barage of I
told you so's.
But a moment of
silence came and then a long, almost satisfied sigh. "Why don't you and
Clara bring the kids up here for dinner tonight," he said, then hung up
when I agreed.
***********
It is not a long
journey from Paterson to Wayne, just a short climb up a steep hill from the
Great Falls. But the change is stark, from the extreme worst part of Paterson
slums to the drawn out lawns of great estates, the Watcung mountains like a
great gate somehow knowing who to admit and who not to. Wayne's police sit slyly
in the cracks and side streets off the winding road, guarding each pass,
staring at the color of the drivers as their cars huffed and puffed at the end
of their climb.
They looked at me
as I drove the rented hunk of junk up the final incline, leaving a trail of
smoke behind that might have been the remains of my pride.
"I don't
understand what made you call Daddy," Clara said, looking at me strangely,
but obviously pleased. She'd been trying to bridge the gap between us for
years, not quite able to understand the differences which seperated us in the
first place.
"He was the
only one I could think of that might help," I said. "He's offered
before."
Though those
offers were always edged with the trappings of a bribe, something like the
sales pitch of Satan, looking for my soul along with my signiture.
Once into the
green-lawned world, I saw the faces of my children in the back seat, their
mouths set grimly like vistors to dreamland, eyeing younger children that
rolled in the leaves on the wide lawns. It was the stuff of television. It was
stuff they had missed when younger, locked in the grasp of a city where things
outdoors always came with a risk.
"Would you
like to live out here with you grandfather?" Clara asked them.
"Could
we?"
Clara looked at
me, her eyes hard, saying: "If you disappoint them now, Phillip, I'll
never forgive you."
"We'll
see," I said.
**********
Clara's father
greeted us with a stiff wave of hand and his usual determined strut down the
front steps to the circular drive. He was a large man with a top of grey that
was meaningless, slowing none of the energies alive in his eyes. He was almost
smiling when he opened the door-- yes he himself and not his doorman--
something which told me immediately I was making a mistake.
"A new car,
Phillip?" he asked.
"A rented
car, Mr. Olsen," I said, slamming the driver side door a little too hard,
handing the keys to the doorman who drove it off to be parked.
"Yours being
repaired?"
"You could
say that. Shall we go in?"
**********
The eyes were an
inquesition, staring at me the whole time through dinner, making me wish for
the after dinner man talk that would end the torture.
He led me to his
den and offered me a cigar. I surprised him by accepting one-- the first time
since my marriage.
"So?"
he said, leaning back in his chair, the smell of leather as thick as the smoke
in the room.
I explained the
situation and he eyed me for a long time in silence, peering at me over the
tips of his fingers-- his hands pressed together in a chruch steeple under his
nose.
"I can do
better than lend you money," he said after a time. "I have a buyer
for your house-- No, don't ask me who. But I have someone. There is only one
catch."
I took a deep
breath. "Which is?"
"You
relocate here in Wayne."
It seemed like
such a small request, a minor detail that might easily have been passed off as
concern for the welfare of his grandchildren, and the need to seem them
somewhat regularly. But there were darker designs behind those eyes and he knew
I knew about them. Details of the surrender. By accepting his location, he kept
me from picking some other less depraved region of city where I might maintain
my Liberal values. Here in Wayne, I would be surrounded by his kind, joining
the anti-ethnic coolition of disgusied bigots that mowed their lawns with the
deep satisfaction of knowing no black or hispanic would ever set foot on it,
even by accident.
"All
right," I said, and sucked slowly and guitily upon my cigar, eyeing the
victorious grin of Clara's father through the smoke.
***********
It was a longer
drive back to the city, despite the downward incline, the insanity of slow
deterioration that I'd not noticed in detail before, the sagging disgust of
century old buildings never meant to stand longer than a decade, windows thick
with drying laundry and wandering, dare-devil kids. It was like passing through
a world in which every building contained a circus, but one in which the
animals had taken charge, Orwell's predictions hardly capable of reflecting the
reality. It scared me more than the break it did. It lacked any sense of hope.
***********
Tom was waiting
on the front stoop of the house, dressed in his usual dark clothing. It made
him look priestly, though his nervousness seemed habitual, having grown out of
the beatings of police in the south. He started up with the approach of our
headlights and grinned only when I appeared.
"Phil, I
have good news for you," he said, coming towards me with his large hand
extended. "I've found a buyer for your house, and another house you might
be interested in buying on the hill."
The hill, of
course, was one of the last few liveable neighborhoods left in Paterson, near
enough to Wayne and Haledon to be attractive, yet still in decline, a
neighborhood maybe twenty years or less from extinction.
"I really
appreciate all you've gone through, Tom," I said. "But we've already
made arrangements with Clara's father. He has someone to buy our house."
"Him!"
Tom moaned. "You're selling your house to one of his cronies."
"Thomas,"
I whispered, Clara just then climbing from the car. "Don't start with any
of your politically correct trash with me. We've made up our minds."
"To leave
town," Tom said, shaking his head. "To sell this fine old house to
some developer, who'll take it off the market so he can jack up the prices on
the rest of his houses. How could you do this, Phil? I mean after all we've
been through..."
"Tom,"
I said. "Either you quit all this or leave. I'm not in the mood to argue
with you."
"But your
leaving amounts to nothing more than segregation," Tom said, turning me
with a start from the door. I glared at him, my rightous indignity broadcasting
from every pore.
"Are you
calling me a racist?"
"I'm saying
that you're throwing the civil rights movement out on its ear," Tom said.
"If every white in every city did what you're doing now, we'd be back to
Selma, Alabama, 1955 in no time."
"And maybe
the south had the right idea all along," I said. "Maybe they saw all
this coming and knew they had to control their blacks or wind up with things
like this."
I was shouting.
My voice carried into the street, echoing slightly off the storefronts and
apartment buildings, raising faces of people on the corner.
"Do you hear
what you're saying?" Tom asked, his voice strained and his eyes full of
disbelief.
"Yes,"
I said. "And I mean it, too. I'm sick of living in other people's shit. I
want to be the man with the big lawn and the lazy chairs and
respectability."
"Respectability?" Tom spat.
"That's not...."
"Go away and
keep your speeches to yourself," I said and slammed the door in his face.