The Corner (70 page)

Now, sitting in the fading light on the rec center steps, watching the just-might-be-stickup-boys watching the house across the street, Ella Thompson feels as if her son’s departure has truly liberated her. Whatever else these streets manage to do, whatever else they produce in the way of human disaster, they can no longer lay claim to any more of her children. Anything less than that could be, as a matter of proportion, easily suffered. Today, it’s the men in the car on Mount Street, bringing the game to the very edge of Ella’s sanctuary. Last week, it was the Death Row crew setting up shop in the alley on the other side of Mount, the tester lines forming every morning in full view of the children. Last month, it was Dinky, racing around Lexington Street in a stolen Buick, trying to hide his face with one hand and control the car with other, looking away furtively as Ella stared him down from the sidewalk. Or R.C. on the day after that, standing among the touts and slingers at Mount and Fayette, leaning into the windows of passing cars, serving up vials. Two weeks from now, it will be DeAndre, showing up drunk at the Halloween dance, glowering at the younger girls, then throwing candy corn at Tae and Manny Man, until he gets bored and leaves.

At all points, the corner continued to encroach on her small domain, claiming the sixteen-and seventeen-year-old boys she had nurtured at the rec center. She was losing them, one after the next. Boo was slinging down on Ramsay Street. Brian was back home from Hickey School, selling his uncle’s coke two blocks away. R. C. was working a package on Mount Street; Tae, Dinky, Manny Man, and Brooks were down at Gilmor and McHenry most every night. And the girls? Tyreeka was pregnant at fourteen. Tosha’s mother was ordering her inside every night to keep her away from the boys. Neacey was now hanging with some of the younger Monroe Street dealers; Ella had seen her up on the corners flirting, working hard for attention.

She is losing them—or so it seemed from the concrete steps of the Martin Luther King Jr. Recreation Center. From there, the view was all cruelty and waste and misadventure.

“Yo, Miss Ella,” says Little Stevie, walking over from the fence. “Them
stickup boys must be gettin’ tired from the wait. I’m gonna go up and ask ’em who they waitin’ on.”

“No you ain’t,” says T.J. “You way more scared than that.”

Stevie Boyd sneers at T.J., who raps him on the top of his head. Stevie swings out with a late, errant roundhouse.

“Stevie,” says Ella, “you do not know that they are stickup boys. You don’t know what those men are about.”

“Why they just sitting there then?” asks Daymo.

Ella rolls her eyes. “Just leave them be.”

Stevie picks up the football, waits until T.J. isn’t looking, then fires a bullet at the older boy, hitting him in the shoulder. T.J. chases him around the blacktop, catching him and gripping him in the tightest of headlocks.

“C’mon,” says Daymo, bored again. “Let’s play.”

They choose up sides and run yet another game on the cracked and glass-strewn blacktop. The game’s highlight comes when Daymo picks off a pass and takes it all the way to the other end of the asphalt for what proves to be the last touchdown.

Ella gets up from her perch, calls her troops inside, and begins handing out a choice of snacks: potato chips, pork-rind wafers, or those orange crackers with the peanut butter in the middle. T. J. tries his usual trick of holding both his hands out in the grasping throng of children, trying for an extra snack.

“T.J.,” says Ella, glaring. “Grow up.”

He mugs at her.

“Then you don’t get any,” she tells him.

He picks the pork rinds.

Three years from now, these younger ones will be lost as well—most of them anyway. Even Ella Thompson, with her ceaseless capacity for hope, can gauge and measure the unremitting probabilities.

Yet with Kiti now gone, what can the probabilities do to her? Ella herself was secure enough in her Fayette Street apartment. No one bothered her there once she shut and locked her door. No one went out of their way to trouble her personally when she walked the street. Her gray Olds was parked at the bottom of the block all night, every night, and she noted with some pride that it had never been misused.

Watching the children grab at her snacks and wriggle into their coats, she actually feels secure enough and necessary enough to conjure some argument to the probabilities. True, the future for these children might
already be written: The corner, and precious little else, is there for them. Yet within that certainty, Ella could still win something for those who wander in and out of her center, something that might survive the corner game and still be there, latent but ready, when some of these children, a handful perhaps, emerge from addiction or prison or both. Even among the hardest and coldest of her charges—DeAndre and R.C., Dinky and Tae—she could see the outline of a social compact, a core value that on some level obliges gangsters-to-be to acknowledge that there were some people in this world who keep their promises, who care about what you do and who you become. When so many of them were ready to believe—often with every justification—that the world had no use for them, Ella had insisted on welcoming them. She saw things precious in all of them, something worth her time and love.

Even among those lost to the streets, Ella’s gift amounted to a small kernel of self-worth, a little bit of soul that might matter at some future moment when the worst deeds are being contemplated. Just then, the thought of Ella and the rec might come upon them, arguing against the worst excess and brutality and indifference. So that when R.C. and Manny are on Mount Street touting, it might be Ella’s work that stops them from waving vials in the faces of children and older people. And when DeAndre is out hunting with Shamrock and Kwame, a youthful stickup crew looking to rob slingers in some other neighborhood, it might be what Ella taught at the rec center that prevents DeAndre from compressing the trigger of his four-four.

On Fayette Street, you had to put hope in the margins. That’s what she did last week, when she spotted Dinky behind the wheel of someone else’s automobile. Caught by someone who mattered in his life, someone who never ceased to believe in him, DeAndre’s cousin found that Ella’s reproach hurt the most. A few days after the joyride, on these same rec center steps, Dinky had actually come to her with an apology and an assurance that he had returned the car to the proximate place where he stole it. Then the sixteen-year-old listened with respectful patience to the inevitable lecture.

“You right,” he told her. “You always right, Miss Ella.”

Ella Thompson’s love would produce no miracles. But on Fayette Street, she had done about as much as any person could.

Tonight, when she finishes dispensing snacks, she pokes her head out of the recreation center doors and sees, to her pleasure and relief, that the Buick is no longer on Mount Street. No stickup. No shooting. No problem.

“They’re gone,” she tells the younger boys. “It must not have been what you all thought.”

Daymo leaves the rec and jogs to the fence. He peers through chain-link, looking up and down the block.

“Man, they rolled out.”

“Maybe they comin’ back,” says Stevie, hopeful.

“They shoulda waited,” says T. J., “Mike and his boys gonna be comin’ past any time now and they ain’t gonna be here for it.”

The trio waits on the vacant lot for a time, looking both ways on Mount. Down at Fayette Street, a tout for the Death Row crew is calling the product name over and over.

“They long gone,” says T. J., disappointed.

“Me too,” says Daymo, putting up his hood and walking.

“Wait up,” says Stevie.

Ella watches them go, turning off the rec lights only when the last of her charges has cleared the playground.

A few days later, she’s at it again with the proud and few of the neighborhood association, up at Fayette and Monroe to take back that corner for one crisp autumn day. Some of Franklin Square’s remaining citizens are perched on the northside corners, fifteen or twenty strong, carrying posters emblazoned with drug-free-community and honk-if-you-are-against-drugs messages. They’re out there making all kinds of noise, shouting slogans to the rhythm of a bass drum borrowed for the occasion from the local drum-and-majorette corps. The mayor shows up, too, alighting on the corner from his city limo with a full entourage. For a time, he holds one of the placards, stepping into the street at every red light, urging the idling motorists to hit their horns for the cause.

The rally goes on for much of the morning and afternoon. By day’s end, most of the corner players on Monroe Street have to acknowledge the heart of their neighbors, their ex-friends and relatives who stand out there in the chill air, demanding something more. A few actually respond. Smitty, for one, crosses Monroe Street and joins the rally, carrying a down-with-drugs poster through the southbound lanes and cheering those drivers who sound support. The rest do what they always do when confronted by such events: They take the day’s transactions around the corner to Lexington and Fulton, or down to the other end of Vine Street.

That afternoon, before giving back the corner, Ella takes care to glean as much joy as possible from the effort. She has no illusions: She has
lived in this place too long to mistake the rally for some kind of solution. Yet she walks home delighted with the day for its own sake.

“I’m saying it’s only one day, but it gets you to thinking how great it can be,” she tells Myrtle Summers on the walk back down the block. “Those corners, I mean, it just reminds you how wonderful it would be without all of that.”

That night, she makes a point of sitting out on her steps for two hours, drinking hot chocolate and listening to the radio. Touts and runners on Fulton show a small measure of respect.

They move halfway down the block.

More than anything, Fran Boyd loves the victory lap.

She loves the look on people’s faces, the quiet acknowledgment of her new status. She loves the special feeling that comes from being apart and above the usual along Fayette Street. It is, she feels, her due for having come this far.

On a brisk October day, six weeks after emerging from detox and about a fortnight after moving to the house on Boyd Street, Fran is coming through Vine Street on some errand and is blessed with a truly righteous moment, a street corner epiphany that would give any ex-addict her share of pride.

The action is deep at Vine and Monroe, but Fran cuts past the clutter of touts, shaking her head thank-you-no at this product and that, feeling strong and above it all.

And there, coming up Monroe from the other direction, is George Epps, smiling at her and wishing her well. Blue has been clean for a couple months now; he only comes past these corners on his way to Ella’s rec center, where, once again, he’s picked up his art class.

“Hey, girl.”

“Hey yo’self.”

“You look real good.”

“You too.”

They embrace, two old soldiers in a moment of easy peace, while all around them, the touts continue to bark brand-names and the runners go to the ground stashes.

“You down at the rec now?” Fran asks.

“Yeah, giving a little something back.”

Fran nods, chats a while longer, then looks around.

“Same ol’ thing,” muses Blue.

“Always,” says Fran.

They’re about to part ways when one of the New York Boys slips off the liquor store wall to tell Blue about the Jumbo Sixes: “They right as rain.”

“Naw,” Blue tells him quietly. “I’m not doin’ that anymore.”

“Yeah?” asks the New Yorker, surprised.

“Right as rain.”

“Good for you, man.”

“Yeah.”

Blue turns away, smiling just a bit. But Fran is beside herself with glee at the moment.

“It feels good,” she tells Blue.

“Yeah,” he said. “I guess it does.”

“You come through here and tell them no like that. I know that feels good.”

But for Blue, there is that element of humility at work. He’s still going to the meetings, still struggling with the very idea of his new self, still talking about the grace of God and living life in single-day installments. For him, the tout and his news about the black tops was simply another hurdle in a long steeplechase.

Fran says good-bye and watches Blue move on. She stays on the corner for a good while, exulting.

Even so, much of the victory lap is decidedly over. By now, she’s been seen and praised and marveled over by most everyone she knows. When Fran walks down the street these days, she’s ordinary scenery. The corner is the same; it has simply turned away from her and gone about its business elsewhere. A quick compliment, a few good wishes and the world she knew and all those in it are finished with the ovation.

The new world seems to her less than welcoming, though in fairness, allowances have been made for a woman trying to find her way. One after another, her outstanding court cases for shoplifting have been bartered down to unsupervised or mostly unsupervised probation. Fran played the district court judges well, telling them about her successful recovery, her new house, her willingness to put her life back together now that she is done with the drugs.

And not only is she getting by on bad credit, renting the Boyd Street rowhouse from an old friend, but when money got short at the end of September, friends and relatives had come up with ten or twenty dollars or a bag of groceries, offering such help in the belief that the cash would
not go to glassine bags and vials. Likewise, the U.S. government had kicked in her $1,400 Pell Grant, allowing her to keep at her college classes.

All of which is enough to keep running in place. Now, for the next step, she needs to pass her classes. Or find a job. Or get some of those things—a new TV, a winter coat for DeRodd, new Nikes for Dre—that show material progress.

And all of that, unlike the victory lap, involves struggle.

For starters, college isn’t what she thought it would be. Algebra is proving to be hellishly difficult for someone whose formal education had concluded a couple decades back. It’s so difficult in fact that a month into the semester, she’s no longer able to keep up with the classwork. English is easier, but even so, she can’t find it in herself to do the reading. Night after night, Fran leaves her schoolbooks on the dresser, wasting the evening hours on sitcoms and late-night movies.