If Jori worried about finding a home, he never showed it.
Jafaris cried when they left the shelter, holding on to the remote-control car and stuffed Elmo a social worker had given him as parting gifts. “I can’t look,” he said as the car pulled away. Arleen rubbed her boy’s head and told him he should be happy leaving the shelter. Jafaris didn’t understand why. It was quiet and warm, and there were toys there.
Their new apartment building was at the busy intersection of Teutonia and Silver Spring, in a more industrial part of the North Side. Arleen climbed the steps to the third-floor apartment while Jori and Jafaris took a giggling ride in the creaking elevator. Inside, the walls were freshly painted, and the gray carpet was thick and clean. There was an air-conditioning unit and fixtures on every light. There was a small kitchen with light wood cupboards, each one of which had a handle. The hot water worked. Arleen took her time inspecting the place but couldn’t find anything wrong. She opened a window and looked out over the cars driving by and Auer Steel & Heating’s distribution center across the street. She felt “good but tired.”
Once all the trash bags of clothes and boxes of canned food were moved in, Arleen sat on the floor. She found a soft bag and leaned back on it. She felt at peace, at home. It had been two months since her eviction hearing with Sherrena. Jori sat down beside Arleen and pitched his head into her shoulder. Jafaris followed, lying on Arleen’s legs and resting his head on her belly. They stayed like that for a long time.
—
After a few quiet days, Arleen learned that Terrance—everyone just called him “T”—was dead. T was one of the only people Arleen still kept in touch with on Larry’s side of the family. His cousin P.A., whom Arleen also loved, had shot him. During an argument, T had hit P.A. over the head with an ax handle, and P.A. went to get a gun. Before he returned, he called T’s mother, saying that he was going to kill her son. Then he did.
T’s death interrupted Arleen’s life in the usual way. She wept for him and reminisced with old friends and arranged for Jafaris to stay over at his old foster mother’s home during the funeral. He was too young to go, Arleen thought. Some people were talking about going to Ponderosa Steakhouse after the funeral. Those who couldn’t afford it donated plasma so they could have a place at the table.
When Arleen and Jori visited T’s street memorial near Fond Du Lac Avenue, on the Northwest Side, she straightened the flowers and stuffed animals. It was a handsome memorial, adorned with a large cream ribbon, poems, silk roses, and several bouquets of white and yellow daisies, carnations, and alstroemeria. Arleen walked to T’s house and stood on the steps, walked back to the memorial, then walked to the steps again.
“Time is going fast, ain’t it?” Jori said. “I bet when we get down to the funeral, time will be going slow.”
On the morning of the funeral, Arleen put on dark jeans, a Rocawear T-shirt, and a blue hoodie. As she and Jori descended the stairs on their way out, they met Pana on his way up.
“I need to talk with you,” he said. “About two nights ago.”
Arleen’s mind raced. That was when she had called 911 because Jafaris was having an asthma attack.
“This is a nuisance building,” Pana said. “We can’t have police coming up in here.”
“Just the fire department and ambulance came,” Arleen said. “Police don’t come for an asthma attack.”
Still, that wasn’t the only issue. A neighbor had complained that one of Arleen’s friends had knocked on his door and asked for weed. (Trisha. She was babysitting the boys at the time.) And Jafaris had been caught dropping something out their third-story window. “If things don’t get better, we are going to ask you to go.”
Outside, on her way to New Pitts Mortuary, Arleen shook her head. “If it ain’t one thing it’s another,” she said. Besides trying to stay in Pana’s good graces, Arleen was having a problem with her food stamps. She had submitted the necessary change-of-address form, but there was some holdup. Then there was the problem of getting everything out of storage. She needed to find a way to move her things fast or, come the first of the month, she would fall behind on payments—either that or fall behind in rent. And now T was gone and, in a way, so was P.A. Poverty could pile on; living it often meant steering through gnarled thickets of interconnected misfortunes and trying not to go crazy. There were moments of calm, but life on balance was facing one crisis after another.1 At least Arleen had a home, a floor of her own to sleep on.
Arleen hesitated in front of the door at Pitts. Built in the 1930s, the funeral home on West Capitol Drive was a North Side institution. Fashioned in the French Revival style, the Lannon stone building was adorned with an octagonal stair tower; thin, elegant windows; a deep-maroon entrance canopy stretching across the sidewalk; and steep roof lines, with a towering chimney. Jori drew up next to his mother, and they walked in together. The sanctuary was packed. Teenagers and children huddled together wearing personalized shirts with T’s face or the face of someone else who had been cut down young. Grandmothers and grandfathers were there in cream and brown suits with matching felt hats. Big C, T’s brother, was up front in a crisp blue T-shirt with matching bandanna and sunglasses. Uncle Link showed up with a half-finished cigarette behind his ear. A towering man walked down the aisle slowly as his wife leaned her face on his back and wept. Arleen took a seat at the rear, reflecting her status in the family.
T looked good, dressed in a long-sleeved black T-shirt and a new Oakland Raiders cap. He had almost made forty. The preacher looked down on him. “It seems like every time I come over here, I see someone who looks like me, lying in a casket, gone too young,” he said, shaking his head above a fat Windsor knot. Then he boomed, raspy and impassioned, “What has happened to the love amongst us? What has happened to the concern?…Can’t nobody help us but us!”
“Go on!”
“Tha’s right.”
“That was my baby!”
After it was over, Arleen joined Uncle Link and a few others outside. Someone handed her a can of Olde English malt liquor, and she poured it out for T, making pretty amber circles in the snow. At the repast, the family ate fried chicken on bread, greens, and mac and cheese in the basement of the Wisconsin African American Women’s Center, on Thirtieth and Vliet. Through it all, Arleen was embraced and kissed and welcomed. She felt held by her people. They weren’t much help if you needed a place to stay or money to keep the heat on, but they knew how to throw a funeral.
—