The Turnaround (3 page)

“James,” said Raymond, “you seen Rodney’s new stereo yet?”

“Seen it? I was with him when he bought it.”

“He got some big-ass Bozay speakers, man.”

“Call it
Bose
. You sayin it like it’s French or somethin.”

“However you say it, those speakers is bad.”

“They
are
some nice boxes.”

“Man, he played me this record by this new group, EWF?”

“They ain’t all that new. Uncle William got their first two records.”

“They’re new to me,” said Raymond. “Rodney put on this one song, ‘Power’? Starts off with a weird instrument —”

“That’s a kalimba, Ray. An African instrument.”

“After that, the music kicks in hard. Ain’t no words in this song, either. When Rodney turned it up . . . I’m telling you, man, I was
trippin
.”

“You shoulda heard those speakers at the stereo store we went to,” said James. “Down on Connecticut? They got this sound room in the back, all closed up in glass. Call it the World of Audio. The salesman, long-haired white dude, puts Wilson Pickett on the platter. ‘Engine Number Nine,’ the long jam. Got to be the one record he spins when he trying to sell a stereo system to the black folk. Anyway, Rodney, you know he don’t play that. So he says to the dude, ‘Don’t you have any rock records I can hear?’ ”

“Messin with the white dude’s head.”

“Right. So the salesman puts on a Led Zeppelin. That song with all the weird shit in the middle of it, music flyin back and forth between the speakers? One where the singer’s talking about, ‘Gonna give you every inch of my love.’ ”

“Yeah, Led Zeppelin . . . he’s
bad
.”

“It’s a group, stupid. Not just one dude.”

“Why you always tryin to teach me?”

“You shoulda heard it, Ray. Those speakers liked to blow us out the room. I mean, Rodney couldn’t pull his wallet out fast enough. Fifteen minutes later, the stock boy is cramming a couple of Bozay Five-Oh-Ones into Rodney’s trunk.”

“Thought it was Bose.”

James reached out and tapped his brother’s head with affection. “I’m just playin with you, son.”

“I’d like to have me a stereo like that one.”

“Yeah,” said James Monroe. “Rodney got the baddest stereo in Heathrow Heights.”

Heathrow Heights was a small community of about seventy houses and apartments, bordered by railroad tracks to the south, woods to the west, parkland to the north, and a large boulevard and commercial strip to the east. It was an all-black neighborhood, founded by former slaves from southern Maryland on land deeded to them by the government.

By geography, some said by design, Heathrow Heights was both self-enclosed and cut off from the white middle-and upper-class neighborhoods around it. There were several traditionally black communities, most of them larger in area and population, like this one in Montgomery County. None seemed as secluded and segregated as Heathrow. The people who grew up here generally stayed here and passed on their properties, if they had managed to retain ownership of them, to their heirs. The residents were proud of their heritage and generally preferred to stay with their own.

The living conditions were far from utopian, though, and there certainly had been challenges and struggles. The early residents had owned their properties through deeds, but many houses had been sold to land speculators during the Depression. The properties were bought by a group of white businessmen who razed them, then built minimally sound, cheap houses on the lots and became absentee landlords. The majority of these homes had no hot water or indoor bathrooms. Heat was provided by wood-burning kitchen stoves.

Children had attended a one-room schoolhouse, later a two-room, on the grounds of an AME church. Elementary-age kids were educated there until the big change of 1954. Residents shopped at a local market, Nunzio’s, founded by an Italian immigrant and eventually passed on to his son, Salvatore. Consequently, many grew up without much contact with whites.

Most of the roads in Heathrow had remained unpaved by the county until the 1950s. By the ’60s, community activists had petitioned the government to force landlords to make improvements to their properties. Officials did so reluctantly. A women’s association in one of the neighboring white communities had joined Heathrow’s residents in forcing the government’s hand, but by ’72, the neighborhood was blighted still. Ramshackle houses, improperly constructed and “improved,” were in disrepair. Rusting cars sat on cinder blocks in backyards among broken toys and other debris.

To liberals, it made for dinner conversation, the stuff of slow head shakes and momentary concern between the serving of the roast beef and the pour of the second glass of cabernet. To some of the middle- and working-class white teenagers of the surrounding area, who learned insecurity from their fathers, Heathrow Heights was the subject of ridicule, slurs, and pranks. They called it “Negro Heights.” To James and Raymond Monroe, and to their mother, a part-time domestic, and their father, a D.C. Transit bus mechanic, Heathrow was home. Of them, only James had dreams of moving out and on.

James and Raymond came up on a couple of young men, Larry Wilson and Charles Baker, sitting on the curb in front of Nunzio’s. Both were shirtless in the summer heat. Larry was smoking a Salem, drawing on it so hard and rapidly that its paper had creased. Both of them were drinking Carling Black Label beer from cans. A brown bag sat between them.

Baker had a wild head of hair that was matted in spots. He looked over Raymond with hazel eyes prematurely drained of life. Baker’s face had been scarred by a young man with a box cutter who had casually questioned his manhood. Several people had gathered to witness the fight, the subject of rumors for days. Charles, bleeding profusely from the slice but visibly unfazed, had downed his opponent, kicked aside his weapon, and broken his arm by snapping it over his knee. The crowd had parted as a laughing, wounded Charles Baker had walked away, the boy on the ground convulsing in shock.

“Y’all been ballin?” said Larry.

“Down at the hoop,” said James. It was the only one in the neighborhood, and he didn’t have to elaborate.

“Who won?” said Larry.

“I did,” said Raymond. “I took him to the hole like Clyde.”

“You let him win?” said Larry, with a nod to James.

“He won square,” said James.

Larry hotboxed his cigarette down to the filter and pitched it out into the street.

“What you all gonna do today?” said Raymond.

“Drink this brew before it gets too hot,” said Charles. “Ain’t nothin else
to
do.”

Of them, only James had a job, a twenty-hour-a-week thing. He pumped gas at the Esso up on the boulevard and was hoping to move up from there. He planned to take a mechanics class. His father, who occasionally let him work on the family’s Impala, changing the belts, replacing the water pump, and the like, said he had skills. James was hoping to hook Raymond up with an entry-level position at the station when he turned sixteen.

“You hear Rodney’s new system?” said Raymond, looking at Charles and not Larry. Raymond, being young, admired Charles for his violent rep and courted his favor.

“Heard
of
it,” said Charles. “Hard not to hear of it, the way Rodney be braggin on it.”

“He got a right to brag,” said James. “Rod earned that money; he can spend it how he wants to.”

“He ain’t got to boast on it all the livelong day,” said Larry.

“Actin superior,” said Charles.

“Man’s got a job,” said James, defending his friend Rodney and making a point to his kid brother. “No reason to cut on him for that.”

“You sayin I can’t hold a job?” said Charles.

“I ain’t never known you to hold one,” said James.

“Fuck all a y’all,” said Charles, looking past them and addressing the world. He drank from his can of beer.

“Yeah, okay,” said James tiredly. “Let’s go, Ray.”

James tugged on Raymond’s belt. They walked up the steps to Nunzio’s market. On the wooden porch fronting the store, they stopped to say hello to a Heathrow elder who was retrieving her small terrier mix from where she had tied his leash to a crossbeam, used often as a hitching post.

“Hello, Miss Anna,” said James.

“James,” she said. “Raymond.”

They entered the store and went to a refrigerated bin, where James found some Budding pressed luncheon meat that sold for sixty-nine cents. He grabbed two packages, beef and ham. Raymond got himself a bag of Wise potato chips and two bottles of Nehi, grape for him and orange for James. They stood on the porch and ate the meat straight out of the package. They shared the chips and drank their sweet sodas as they looked down at the street, where Larry and Charles now stood, having risen off the curb but still inert.

“What you gonna do now?” said Raymond.

“Go home and get ready for work. I got my shift at the station this afternoon.”

“Rodney home, right?”

“Should be. He’s off today.”

“I’m ’a see if Charles and Larry wanna go over to Rodney’s and check out his stereo. They ain’t seen it yet. Maybe if Charles get to know Rodney, he won’t be so, I don’t know . . .”

“Charles gonna be what he is no matter who he gets to know,” said James. “I don’t want you runnin with him.”

“Better than bein out here alone.”

“I’m here.”

“Not all the time.”

Raymond had been stressing about recent incidents in the neighborhood, cars of white boys driving through, yelling “nigger” out their open windows, leaving rubber on the street and then speeding back up to the boulevard. It had happened more often in the past year. In one way or another, it had been going on for generations. Their mother had been the recipient of such a taunt a few weeks earlier, and the thought of someone calling their mother that name had cut James and Raymond to the heart. The only white people with reason to be in this neighborhood were meter men, mailmen, Bible and encyclopedia salesmen, police, bondsmen, or process servers. When it was drunken white boys coming through in their jacked-up vehicles, you knew what they were about. Always driving in quietly and turning around at the dead end, then speeding up around the market, where folks tended to hang in groups. Yelling that stuff and driving away fast.
Cowards,
thought James, ’cause they never did get out their cars.

James handed Raymond the bag of chips. “Do what you want. Just remember: Charles and Larry, they ain’t headed no place good. You and me, we weren’t raised that way.”

“I hear you, James.”

“Go on, then. Mind the time, too.”

James stayed on the porch of Nunzio’s as Raymond went down to where Larry and Charles still stood, the bag of Carlings under Charles’s arm. They talked for a little bit, Charles nodding as Larry lit another smoke. Then the three of them walked slowly down the block, turning right at the next intersection.

James kept his eyes on his brother. When he could see him no longer, he dropped the empty soda can in a bin and headed home.

RODNEY DRAPER stayed with his mother in their old house on the other east–west-running street of Heathrow Heights. This street, too, dead-ended down by the woods.

Rodney lived in the basement of the house, which was small and boxy, with asbestos siding. The basement took in water when it rained and got damp at the threat of rain. It always smelled of mold. He had a double bed and a particleboard chest of drawers and an exposed toilet that he and his uncle, a handyman and odd-jobber, had plumbed in themselves back by the hot-water heater. His mother and sister lived upstairs. Rodney’s setup was not luxurious, but his mother did not charge him rent the way many parents did when their children turned eighteen.

Rodney, nineteen, had a thin nose with a small hump in the bridge. He was skinny, bucktoothed, and had knobby wrists and large feet. His nickname was the Rooster. He worked at Record City, on the 700 block of 13th Street. He loved music and thought he could combine his passion with work. He spent most of his earnings on albums, receiving a small employee discount. The new stereo had been bought “on time,” a revolving-credit thing, a small-print contract he would be paying off for years.

Rodney was showing off his stereo to Larry, Charles, and Raymond. Larry and Charles were sitting on the edge of his bed, drinking beer, watching without apparent interest as Rodney pointed to the components the way the white, long-haired salesman had done, presenting them piece by piece.

“BSR turntable,” said Rodney, “belt drive. Got the Shure magnetic cartridge on the tone arm. Marantz receiver, two hundred watts, driving these bad boys right here, the Bose Five-Oh-Ones.”

“Bama, we don’t give a fuck about all that,” said Larry. “Put on some music.”

“All that gobbledy-goop don’t mean a motherfuckin thing,” said Charles, “if it don’t sound good.”

“Tryin to educate you, is all,” said Rodney. “You drink a fine wine, don’t you want to read the label?”

“Black Label,” said Larry, holding up his can, grinning stupidly at Charles. “That’s all I got to know.”

“Stereo looks real nice, Rodney,” said Raymond with a smile. “Let’s hear how it sounds.”

He put
America Eats Its Young,
the new double album from Funkadelic, on the platter and dropped the needle on track 3, “Everybody Is Going to Make It This Time.” It was a number that started off slowly and built to a kind of gospel-like fervor, and it got Larry and Charles to bobbing their heads. Larry studied the album cover, which was a takeoff on a dollar bill, with a zombied-out Statue of Liberty, her mouth a bloody mess, cannibalizing babies.

“This shit is wild,” said Larry.

“Paul Weldon drew that cover,” said Rodney.

“Who?” said Larry.

“He’s an artist. Black artists making their mark in this country, and not just on record covers. We had a woman living here in the nineteen twenties whose work got showed at a gallery downtown.”

“Man,
fuck
a history lesson, all right?”

“I’m sayin, we got a rich past in this neighborhood.”

“We don’t care about that,” said Charles. “Just turn the music up.”