Martha still wasn’t telling me where we were going; we were just going. I turned right on 16th Street. I stopped for a red at North Capitol.
“And I’ve been advised—God, Jesus, that sounds so fancy.” Martha made a fancy voice, uptown lawyer, mock snooty. “I have been advised not to go by myself. You know, as a…” She looked over at me. The light turned green. “As a girl.”
She didn’t say as a white girl, but there it was with us in the car anyway. I nodded.
“But—so…you just…you’re a helper. You’re obviously one of the good guys. So I thought…”
I said nothing, and my silence I knew she would attribute to shyness or modesty when in fact I was muzzled by the horror of it, the dark, grieving irony of the idea that I would be a good person—that I would obviously be such a person. I blinked back to life and turned left on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Street. I had an idea already of where we were going. I could feel it coming. Michael came into the last chorus, soared right up into it like a little angel.
“I am not going to even offer to pay you. I have, like, zero dollars. But I could owe you. I’ll pay you—maybe even later today. Maybe even after the meeting.” She took a breath. She looked at me, plucky and anxious, over the rims of the cat’s eyes. “So what do you think?”
The only logical answer was no. I was hot on my case. I was within sight of the finish line. I had Bridge breathing down my neck, I had old ghosts making howling circles in my mind.
“So?” I asked. “Where to?”
She had it on a piece of paper. She dug it out from the pocket of her jeans. She had the address on the silver foil of a gum wrapper. “Here. Uh. Tenth and Belmont.”
I nodded. Yeah. I was already on my way. “Freedman Town.”
I knew what it was like to get a person to do something and they’re not sure why. To coerce. Give over some information; help you find an address. I did it all the days of my life. I didn’t know what I was stumbling into here, doing some kind of downtown deal or maybe bringing money to some rough boys so they’d teach a lesson to an ex-boyfriend. None of that seemed likely, just from my read on this girl, but people have layers in them. People go down deep. They go all the way down.
We got to the bridge to Freedman Town, a shabby two-lane span running over the slow brown churn of the White River. I was glad to be running Martha Flowers’s mysterious errand. All we do all day long is deal with our own problems, handle our shit some way or other. It felt nice, for a little while, to be dealing with someone else’s shit instead of my own.
“Wow,” said Martha. “God.”
I drove carefully through the streets down here—you had to. Potholes wide as craters, rocks and bottles in the street. The blasted apocalyptic acreage of Freedman Town.
Lionel craned up in his booster seat and peered with wonder out the windows.
I’d been here before. Not to this Freedman Town, but to plenty of others. I’ve been all over the North, and every northern city has a Freedman Town. New York City’s got a few, and Chicago’s got more than a few. Baltimore, Washington. The manumitted have got to go somewhere, and the world doesn’t give them a lot of options. The details are different—some of ’em are built on a high-rise model, bent towers clustered around courtyards, crammed to the gills with the poorest of the poor, living hard, the forgotten children of forgotten children. Some are like this one, blocks and blocks of small ramshackle homes, no sidewalks along narrow roads with the concrete worn and blasted through, the yards between the houses as weed-choked as vacant lots. Ivy growing in wild overlapping networks, engulfing the lower stories and sending menacing tendrils into upstairs windows. Gutters dangling or cracked, porches falling.
Martha, I could tell, had not been here before. Martha had never seen anything like it.
“Here,” said Martha. “Will you just—can we just stop here?”
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah.” She gnawed at her pinkie. We were a block, still, from the address she had given me. “Just give me one sec, I think.”