Her anxiety was a living thing, thrumming in the air between us, traveling through the recycled air of the Altima. She fiddled with the nearer stem of her sunglasses, sort of snapping it along the side of her head. A kid rolled slowly past the car on a skateboard, balancing a bucket on his head, while another kid taunted him not to drop it—“Careful, boy…careful, now…nice and easy”—then brayed laughter. There was a woman pushing a stroller, somehow keeping it in motion though she was on the phone and smoking a cigarette; the two-or three-year-old in the stroller was playing happily with a closed bottle of soda. A knot of tough boys sat on a stoop, smoking and staring hard at the street—the real thing, what my friends in Mapleton–Fall Creek had been aspiring to. As we watched, a man approached at a shuffle, opened a shoe box to them, offering whatever was in it for sale, and they shooed him away like they were kings.
A big nasty dog, tall as a wolf, wandered zigzag from side to side, trailing its leash.
“You can’t believe it,” Martha said darkly. “You can’t even fucking believe it.”
“Watch your mouth, Mama.”
“Sorry, bear.” She reached into the backseat and patted her boy on the knee, but Lionel was off on his own trip, staring out the window, tapping his nose with his finger, like a kid concentrating on a math problem.
I didn’t feel it anymore. I had long since stopped feeling it, that feeling you get coming into Freedman Town the first time, the surreal astonishment that such a place can exist. A not inconsiderable swath of a major city, in a wealthy industrialized country, in the twenty-first century, in such a grevious state of disrepair. An invisible city, floating like a dead island, in the wide water of civilization.
A police cruiser made its slow way along the avenue, windows rolled up and tinted. The siren was off but the light was on, slowly flashing red and blue, red and blue. Not going to any particular emergency, just rolling through. Someone had spray-painted on the hood THE POLICE IS THE PATROL.
“You know what?” said Martha. “Forget it.”
“Forget what?”
“Just—let’s forget it. I don’t want to…” She looked back at Lionel, who was staring back at her. He had on his uneasy kid face, trying to read his mom, trying to figure out how serious this situation was.
The cop car had sharked past, turned right, and disappeared.
“All right,” I said, thinking, and started the car. “Sure.”
A knock at the driver’s-side window, three knocks, bang bang bang. A massive midsection was filling up the window, blocking out the daylight. Outside Martha’s window was another man, as big as the one on my side, who was now gesturing for me to roll down the window.
I didn’t have my gun. I couldn’t have brought it to my doctor’s appointment. I could see it, imagine the size of it, in the room safe at the Capital City Crossroads. I buzzed down the window and squinted out. A gigantic black man in a golf visor, a leather jacket over a tight T-shirt, his face acne-pitted and moon large. He leaned into the car and talked across me, addressing Martha.
“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.