The Dying Ground (6 page)

Billy looked my way and raised one eyebrow, slightly.

Cutty, in a wrenching act of kindness, said softly, “You might as well step on out the way, youngblood.”

I looked at the two of them and knew he was right. There was nothing I could do. She was gone. I was already out of the picture. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a few heads drop in respectful acknowledgment of my loss.

G
host town.

The nickname for West Oakland didn’t come without its own truths. On every block there were remnants of the area’s past life as “Harlem West.” Seventh Street still housed the buildings of the Creole Club, the Swing Club, Harvey’s Rex Club, and the world-famous Slim Jenkins’s Place.

Harold “Slim” Jenkins was a Louisiana boy, like my grand-daddy, who opened a club that would become the West Coast anchor for Black entertainment and racially mixed crowds. Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, Dinah Washington, and even Count Basie made stops in West Oakland, but those days were long gone. Once-prosperous Seventh Street was now like every other skid row across the country, the last stop on a train going nowhere. Despite the frayed edges, many old-timers refused to leave their homes and abandon what had saved them from the Jim Crow South. For most of Oakland’s Black population, the
rural South was a not-too-distant memory. They had deep roots in either Louisiana, Arkansas, or Texas.

My family was no exception. In 1940, the effects of the Depression were still being felt when smooth-talking recruiters set up shop in Southern churches, filling the minds, ears, and hearts of dust-covered congregations with dreams of the West Coast and endless California sunshine.

My grandfather still has the recruitment poster he saw displayed in a Baptist church in Bastrop, Louisiana, a clearinghouse for Black labor. The poster trumpeted the benefits of a job at the Kaiser Shipyards in Richmond, California.

After installing baby Rachel with his parents, he hopped the first “liberty train” smoking out of Shreveport. The trains were Southern Pacific railcars chartered for the sole purpose of taking field hands to a new plantation on the Pacific, a waterfront shipyard gearing up for another war.

He disembarked in West Oakland and watched in amazement as Blacks, Mexicans, Italians, Scots, Chinese, and Portuguese moved freely around one another on the sidewalks. He wandered the streets taking in the mom-and-pop shops that advertised “down home” meals, noted the men dressed from head to toe in tailored suits, and the shiny women they carried on their arms.

He stopped long enough to spot a sturdy-looking Black man in coveralls and a Kaiser baseball cap looking intently at a racing form. He tapped him on the shoulder. “Excuse me, sir.” He pointed to the baseball cap. “I’m suppose to report there tomorrow, sunrise.”

The man interrupted his speech, “If it ain’t there then it’s Moore Dry Dock or one of the canneries.” He made a wide gesture to take in bustling Seventh Street. “Somehow or other, every one of these men tied to one a them places.” He extended a hand. “Sherman Johnson.”

Daddy Al took the strong hand in his, and a lifelong friendship was born. The two men would forge a bond that sometimes excluded the wives they adored and fostered a history of secret-keeping.

As I approached the A-frame house of Sherman’s widow, Gloria Johnson, I spotted the two-tone Cadillac Uncle Sherman loved more than his life. Daddy Al had driven it, tears streaming down his face, through the streets of Ghost Town the day Sherman dropped from a heart attack. I often wondered how many of our family secrets went with him.

Sherman had been dead for over five years but Mrs. Johnson refused to get rid of the car that sat dead in the driveway. She even refused Daddy Al’s offers to have it cleaned and tuned for her use. “That ain’t necessary” was all she would say, so the car sat year after year with a desperate plea etched on the glass of the back window: WASH MY ASS!

“Mrs. Johnson, you home?” I stood on the porch knocking on the screen door. I could hear the television buzzing loudly inside but there was no sign of the old woman.

“Caesar? Hey, boy, you in there?” I called into the house. I could see the back end of the ancient hound that lived with Mrs. Johnson. He turned and growled without much enthusiasm.

“Hush up all that noise. You don’t pay rent here.”

I wasn’t sure if she meant me or Caesar so I lowered my voice. “Mrs. Johnson, it’s me, Maceo. Albert’s grandson. I’m at the front door.”

She appeared then, wizened and brown like a coconut with her hair pulled atop her head in a silver-and-white bun. The three-bedroom house she called home was one of several properties owned by my grandparents. Daddy Al had a total of fifteen rentals throughout Oakland and two in Berkeley. Most of his tenants were older people, friends from Louisiana and
Arkansas or co-workers from his days as foreman at the Del Monte Cannery after he left Kaiser.

Mrs. Johnson lived in the house for a mere forty dollars a month, a price she insisted was too low and Daddy Al thought was way too high. Mrs. Johnson and Daddy Al had a ritual about the rent that they performed without fail. Every month on the first Daddy Al would arrive to collect Mrs. Johnson’s rent. She’d invite him inside to chat a little while about Gra’mère, the aunties, my slow progress through school, and my grandfather’s furniture-building hobby.

After their catch-up talk she’d give him a bag of her garden vegetables to take home to Gra’mère. Then she’d let him get as far as the door before she’d say, “Don’t forget that envelope on the table.”

And there it would be, a sealed envelope with two crisp twenty-dollar bills inside and
Albert Redfield
scrawled across the front. Daddy Al would pick up the money, slide it into his coat pocket, and head straight to the bank, where he’d deposit it back into her account.

The house had been her home for over forty years and now she lived there alone, except for Caesar. At one time her oldest son, Numiel, and his wife, Donna, rented the basement apartment, but they’d long since moved back to Louisiana so that Numiel could work as the caretaker of Red Fields, the Redfield family home in northern Louisiana.

“I have the TV up loud so I can hear it out in the garden. I don’t like to miss Bob Barker if I can help it.” She opened the screen door and motioned me inside the house. “Hot enough for you?”

Caesar sniffed around my feet, and I bent down to pet him. He was about as old as Mrs. Johnson but he hadn’t held up as good. His coat was tatty in places and his back legs barely held him upright.

Mrs. Johnson’s kitchen was decorated in a green-and-yellow scheme to pay homage to the A’s. A woman after my own heart. Her refrigerator was covered with A’s memorabilia, season tickets, and programs.

“What you think my boys gonna do to them Giants, Maceo?”

“Put ’em to bed.”

She smiled. “That’s what I’m talking about. Yes, indeed.”

I followed Mrs. Johnson out to the vegetable and flower garden she’d made famous throughout the Bay Area. She did a brisk day-to-day business with the commuters from the West Oakland BART station. Her little stand, where she sold bagged vegetables and bunches of flowers, was a fixture at the edge of the lot.

On Sundays she opened her backyard and basement to weekend shoppers, which was the reason I was there. On more than one occasion Flea helped at her sales booth.

I took a seat on the bottom step and watched her move through the garden.

“Did you taste the okra I sent to your grandmother?”

I waited until the BART train passed before answering. “She used it in her gumbo last weekend.”

“How’d it taste?”

“It made the gumbo better.”

“Hmph.” She kept moving. “I tasted a little of that gumbo. If you ask me, Antonia uses too many spices.” She tossed a bruised tomato into a wooden barrel. “I mash them bruised ones up and put them back in the soil.”

“Is that right?”

“That’s what makes my product fresher. I have customers coming all the way from Orinda and Marin now. Rich white ladies in big cars always trying to give me they old clothes. I tell ’em, just pay me my money. I didn’t ask you for all that.”

I picked up an old copy of
The Oakland Tribune
discarded on the stairs. The headline consisted of a number: 146. Since the first murder of 1989 the
Tribune
had kept a gruesome tally, its sensationalized headlines heralding Oakland’s escalating murder rate.

“Mrs. Johnson, has Felicia been here to see you?”

She disappeared behind a tree, and something in her pause let me know she’d seen my friend.

“She usually helps me out on Sunday afternoons. Last week she and that boy of hers came by here and took me to a picture show. Something silly with that Eddie Murphy boy in it.” She chuckled to herself.

“Have you seen her since?”

The thud of rotten tomatoes hitting the bottom of the barrel filled the air.

“Mrs. Johnson?”

“You remember my husband Sherman, Maceo?”

I was caught off guard by the question. “Of course I remember Uncle Sherman.”

“He was a good man, my Sherman. He wasn’t the kind of man you got in trouble behind. He wasn’t handsome enough for that.” She paused. “But Felicia’s boy he was handsome. Strong. Just the kind of man I went backwards around corners to avoid.

“You know your grandmother’s sister got herself in trouble behind some man, too. Back in the forties when we first came out here. Celestine.” She shook her head. “She was fast, but she didn’t deserve what she got.”

The murder of my great-aunt, Celestine Bouchaund, Gra’mère’s sister, still sat on the police books as unsolved. Her death was rarely talked about in our family, but every couple of years the press would resurrect the story. Her murder was to Oakland what the Black Dahlia murder was to Los Angeles,
and it plagued Gra’mère like a salted wound. Except for the odd times it made the paper, no one ever mentioned Celestine aloud.

The one time I’d asked Daddy Al about it he’d placed his finger across his lips to silence me. Then he’d whispered, “Black justice, Southern style.” I took it to mean that, like most unsolved crimes in the Black community, the people closest to the victim knew the perpetrator and had handled the payback themselves. Quiet. Swift. No police.

“Pretty and slick were two things I never trusted in a man, but Celestine got her head turned just like Felicia did. I’m not saying her fella was all bad, but most people ain’t got lives long enough for the life he wanted to lead.

“When Billy first started coming around here with Felicia, he didn’t think I remembered him from when y’all was little, but even my boy, Numiel, knew him. I remembered him well. The four a y’all spent that summer together at Red Fields in Claiborne Parish.”

My mind had avoided images of that summer since Holly walked into Cutty’s. The last year the three of us could still be considered a trio, Daddy Al caught wind of the troubles that could pull us away from ourselves and each other. Too many of his friends had lost their boys to the streets, nothing new, but it looked more treacherous each year.

Daddy Al and his cronies still lived as if they’d never left Louisiana, as if an entire city hadn’t grown up around them and choked the weeds of their country mores and traditions. The remedies they offered against modern temptations did not take root against the urban ills of their new environment, but their preference for “back home,” a home many of them had left behind nearly fifty years before, still took precedent.

Before I could stifle images of Daddy Al’s solution to our budding manhood, a picture of Billy and Holly hitting my fastballs into the sweet-potato fields nearly strangled me into tears.

I stood up and shook my body the way I did on the field after a missed play or a nagging injury. “Have you seen her, Mrs. Johnson?”

“Why you asking all these questions, Maceo?”

“’cause I need to know she’s okay.”

Her face clouded in anger. “She ain’t okay. She saw that boy’s brains get blown out.”

“So you’ve spoken to her?”

“Lord Jesus. Get on out of here, boy, before I have to hurt you. I promised that girl I wouldn’t talk about nothing with nobody, hear me? Nobody.”

“Felicia is my friend.”

“Then respect her wishes. She’ll be alright after a while, and that’s all I’m going to say.”

“I understand. I’m sorry I bothered you.”

“You ain’t bothered me. I’d tell you if you did.”

I stood up. “Do you need me to do anything before I go?”

“Can you move those bags of soil over there? Back them up against the fence until I can get to ’em.”

I moved the bags and waited for the inevitable. “Oh,” she said, “and take Caesar around the corner for me.”

I smiled to myself, knowing that Caesar wouldn’t make it past two houses before I’d have to carry him. Outside I moved at his pace, which meant one step every twenty breaths. Finally, the two of us just stood and watched the cars exit and enter the BART station.

“Come on, Caesar.” I picked him up and walked back to the house. Mrs. Johnson met us on the porch.

“He suckers you every time.”

I placed Caesar near the front door and moved away. In an uncharacteristic move Mrs. Johnson came forward and squeezed my hand.