“Here you go, baby,” Lamar said, handing her one. He was happy to see her.
Kamala thanked him and turned to leave. “Let me go check on these kids, make sure they not tearing up my house.” Kamala had three daughters: ages three, two, and eight months.
“Well, come on down here and let ’em tear up my house. You don’t play cards, do you?”
Kamala gave Lamar a small smile and started up the stairs only to be met by her two-year-old.
Lamar rolled his wheelchair up to the girl. “Lemme see who my little goddaughter’s gonna be. Hey! How you doing?”
The child said something, but her words were woolly and half-formed. She had to repeat herself a few times before Lamar could understand that she was saying “Tummy hurt.”
“You hungry?” Lamar asked. “We need to put some weight on her. You cook yesterday?” It was a pure question, untraced by incrimination.
“Yeah, but all’s I got is a microwave up there,” Kamala answered softly.
Like many inner-city landlords, Sherrena and Quentin tried to limit the number of appliances in their units. If you didn’t include a stove or refrigerator, you didn’t have to fix it when it broke.
“Huh. Okay.” Lamar spun his chair and pushed himself into the pantry. When he rolled out, there was an electric hot plate on his lap. A few days earlier, after he had first met Kamala, Lamar had said that he “ain’t getting too frien’ly” with her and her family. “It ain’t gonna be no thing like, ‘I need a cup of sugar,’?” he had said. “We ain’t doing that….I keep to myself. It works out better.” But there he was, giving Kamala something worth quite a bit more than a cup of sugar.1
“This was my mom’s,” Lamar said. “It cooks its ass off.”
“Ain’t gonna start no fire?” Kamala asked.
“It ain’t start no fire.”
“Okay. I’ll take care of it. I thank you for it.”
“You’re welcome, honey. Y’all come down for dinner tonight.”
Kamala took the hot plate and her daughter up the stairs.
The cards and blunts came out after breakfast. C.J., Patrice’s young brother, came over and watched the game. He wasn’t offered a hit and didn’t ask for one. Luke’s girlfriend showed up, and the two shut the bedroom door behind them. The morning passed slowly as milky smoke and the weed’s sweaty pungency filled the house.
Just as Lamar and the boys were finishing a blunt, its pleasant effects setting in, someone knocked loudly and confidently on the front door. It sounded like a landlord’s knock, or a sheriff’s: four or five hard knuckle taps in quick succession. Everyone stopped talking and looked at one another.
After a moment had passed, Buck called out, “Who is it?”
“It’s Colin, from the church.”
“Shit!” Lamar said, at once relieved and annoyed. The boys muffled their laughter. Eddy threw open a window and everyone began frantically waving their hands through the air, pushing the smoke out, laughing harder. “Okay! Okay!” Lamar whispered, giving the sign to calm down and act normal. Then he had Eddy open the door.
If Colin smelled weed, he didn’t say anything. He was in his late twenties and white, with ungelled hair, good posture, and a wedding band. In one hand, he carried a Bible and a workbook with the title By Grace Alone; in the other, cookies. After everyone had found a seat in the living room, everyone except Luke and his girl, Colin opened his Bible and dove in. He covered the basics. “For God so loved the world…” (John 3:16); “God made him who had no sin to be sin…” (2 Corinthians 5:21). The boys sat quietly, trying to hold on to their high. Then Colin asked them to read some passages. They smiled at one another and read with their fingers tracing the words. Lamar leaned into the scripture verses, nodding meditatively and finishing them by memory.
“For all have sinned—”
“—and fallen short of the glory of God,” Lamar said.
“I been thinking like this, right,” Buck started, reclining on a couch pillow.
“Then say it!” Lamar encouraged with closed eyes.
“I don’t know why people don’t believe in God.”
“You believe in the devil too, right?” Lamar asked.
“I know they is one. But I don’t want to know him,” Buck responded.
“And Earth is hell,” Lamar added.
“Well, not quite hell,” Colin corrected.
Lamar opened his eyes and looked at the boy preacher. A silence hung in the air, and in that silence, adolescent moans and squeaks could be heard coming from Luke’s room. Hearing this, the boys locked their eyes on the floor and focused on suppressing the laughter pushing its way up. After leading a closing prayer and handing Lamar a checklist of things he could pick up from the church—clothes, blankets—Colin left, and the house fell out laughing. When Luke joined the group in the kitchen, the boys erupted again. “We heard you getting it in,” Buck teased, folding sideways from laughing. “The preacher here. You stupid, dude!”
Lamar shook his head and dealt the cards.
—
At the end of the month, Quentin parked outside of Arleen’s apartment on Thirteenth Street and honked the horn. He wasn’t there for Arleen this time; he was there for Chris, Trisha’s new boyfriend. “Man, I’m hungover as shit,” Chris said as he got into the truck. “My lady got me a six-pack of Heineken and a motherfuckin’ fifth of Amsterdam.”
Quentin put the truck in drive. His hair was parted in the middle and tied twice in the back, forming a pair of small afro puffs. Chris, who was in his late thirties, wore a large winter coat and covered his bald head with a knit cap. When Chris moved in with Trisha, after being released from prison, he called Quentin and said he was looking for work. Quentin was Chris’s only source of income.
The Suburban pulled up next to an apartment and Chris jumped out to get Tiny, another worker. A few minutes later, he came back alone. “Man, dude said he don’t feel like coming.”
Quentin shrugged. “Dude playing games, man.”
When Quentin called Sherrena to tell her that Tiny didn’t want work, she replied, “We’ll just slide someone else into his spot.” Workers could be found and replaced just like that. There was Sherrena’s brother, who had a crack habit, or Quentin’s uncle, Verne, a gummy-faced alcoholic happy to log hours for beer money. Tenants often asked for work; even Ricky One Leg had been calling. Plus, Sherrena had on call a crew of hypes—“jackleg crackheads,” she called them—willing to “work for peanuts.” In a pinch, Quentin sometimes recruited men right off the street. It wasn’t hard to do with so many men in the inner city out of work. Sherrena and Quentin provided tools, materials, and transportation. They paid workers by the task or the day. The amounts typically ranged from $6 to $10 an hour, depending on the job. “These people,” Sherrena once said, “no matter how much money it is, it’s money. And they will work, and they will work for low prices.”
Reported high rates of joblessness among black men with little education obscured the fact that many of these men did regularly work, if not in the formal labor market. Some hustling in the underground economy plied the illicit trades, but the biggest drug kingpin in the city would have been envious of the massive cash-paid labor force urban landlords had at their disposal.2
Quentin dropped Chris off at a newly acquired property he and Sherrena were planning on renting to a woman with a housing voucher. Quentin told Chris to steady the staircase railing and fix a door in anticipation of the Section 8 home inspection. “You know how rent assistance is,” Quentin told Chris. “Everything gotta be perfect….They be coming with some ugly lists.