The Women of Brewster Place (25 page)

“Now, don’t fret yourself, child.” Mattie seemed to be rearranging the ribs on the grill in slow motion. “See, you’re a city girl. Where I come from we know clouds don’t always mean rain—ain’t it so, Etta?”

“Sure is. Many a day I was working in my daddy’s fields and would spot a cloud and pray for it to send some rain so I could rest. And nine times out of ten I prayed in vain.”

They both turned toward Kiswana and smiled. It seemed to take an eternity for her to shake her head at them, and she numbly appealed to the young woman in the trench coat who was standing beside them.

“It’s going to rain.” The tears were streaking Kiswana’s face.

“I know,” Ciel whispered, and she pulled her coat tightly around her and looked slowly up and down the street at the wilting crepe paper hanging from broken stoop railings and the loosened balloons climbing up the building fronts past rotting windowsills and corroded fire escapes. When her eyes had come full circle to the sagging brick wall, she shuddered, “Oh, God, I know.”

The first light misting of the wind hit Kiswana on her arms as Cora Lee melted in front of them.

“Sonya! Anybody seen Sonya?”

The little girl was crouching in front of the wall, scraping at the base with a smudged Popsicle stick. Cora’s swollen body flowed toward the child.

“I been looking all over for you—put that down! I ain’t got enough worries without you playing with filth in the streets.” She bent over to snatch up the child and spank her hand.

A heavy drop of water hit Kiswana’s face like a cold wad of spit.

Cora pulled Sonya’s hand away from the wall and uncovered a dark stain on the edge of the brick that the child had been scraping. The stain began to widen and deepen.

“Blood—there’s still blood on this wall,” Cora whispered, and dropped to her knees. She took the Popsicle stick and started digging around the loose mortar near the brick. “It ain’t right; it just ain’t right. It shouldn’t still be here.” The fragile stick splintered so she used her fingernails, the gravelly cement lacerating her knuckles. “Blood ain’t got no right still being here.”

As she yanked the brick out, the boy who had been playing the stereo ran past her with one of his speakers in his arms; two more men hurried behind, carrying the other sections. Another man grabbed Sonya up and took her under the eaves of the building. All of the men and children now stood huddled in the doorways. Cora ran to Mattie’s table and held out the brick.

“Oh, Miss Mattie—look! There’s still blood on that wall!”

“Oh, God,” Mattie said as she watched the rain splattering
on the hot charcoal, sending steam up through the iron grill. She saw it drumming down on their backs and shoulders, blowing into their faces and up their nostrils, soaking the paper tablecloths, and turning cakes and pies into a sodden mass of crumbs and fruit.

“Get that thing out of here!” She grabbed the brick and gave it to Etta, who took it over to the next table. And it was passed by the women from hand to hand, table to table, until the brick flew out of Brewster Place and went spinning out onto the avenue.

Mattie grabbed Cora by the arm. “Come on, let’s make sure that’s the only one.”

They ran back to the wall and started prying at another stained brick, Mattie digging into the crumbling mortar with her barbecue fork. She finally got it out and threw it behind her. Etta picked it up and began passing it down the street.

“This one’s got it, too!” Cora started tearing at another brick.

“We gonna need some help here,” Mattie called out. “It’s spreading all over!”

Women flung themselves against the wall, chipping away at it with knives, plastic forks, spiked shoe heels, and even bare hands; the water pouring under their chins, plastering their blouses and dresses against their breasts and into the cracks of their hips. The bricks piled up behind them and were snatched and relayed out of Brewster Place past overturned tables, scattered coins, and crushed wads of dollar bills. They came back with chairs and barbecue grills and smashed them into the wall. The “Today Brewster—Tomorrow America” banner had been beaten into long strands of red and gold that clung to the wet arms and faces of the women.

Ciel’s coat had blown open, and muddy clay streaked the front of her blouse. She tried to pass a brick to Kiswana, who looked as if she had stepped into a nightmare.

“There’s no blood on those bricks!” Kiswana grabbed Ciel by the arm. “You know there’s no blood—it’s raining. It’s just raining!”

Ciel pressed the brick into Kiswana’s hand and forced her fingers to curl around it. “Does it matter? Does it really matter?”

Kiswana looked down at the wet stone and her rain-soaked braids leaked onto the surface, spreading the dark stain. She wept and ran to throw the brick spotted with her blood out into the avenue.

Cars were screeching and sliding around the flying bricks that came out of Brewster. The side window of a station wagon exploded into a webbed mass of glass and it skidded into the back of a black Datsun, pushing it off the street into a telephone pole.

Theresa came out of her building with a suitcase in her hand.

“Over here!” A cab pulled up and she opened the back door. “I have another bag in the house—I couldn’t carry it with the umbrella. Wait a minute.”

“Lady, are you crazy? There’s a riot on this street!” And the driver sped off, a brick just missing his hubcap.

“Son-of-a-bitch!” she called behind the cab. “You still have my suitcase in that car!”

She turned and looked down the street. The women had started dragging furniture out of their apartments, shattering it against the wall.

“Dumb bastard, they’re only having a lousy block party. And they didn’t invite me.”

Cora Lee came panting up with a handful of bricks, her stomach heaving and almost visible under her soaked dress.

“Here, please, take these. I’m so tired.”

Theresa turned her back on her.

“Please. Please.” Cora held out the stained bricks.

“Don’t say that!” Theresa screamed. “Don’t ever say that!” She grabbed the bricks from Cora and threw one into the
avenue, and it burst into a cloud of green smoke.

“Now, you go back up there and bring me some more, but don’t ever say that again—to anyone!”

The blunt-edged whoop of the police sirens could be heard ramming through the traffic on its way to Brewster Place. Theresa flung her umbrella away so she could have both hands free to help the other women who were now bringing her bricks. Suddenly, the rain exploded around their feet in a fresh downpour, and the cold waters beat on the top of their heads—almost in perfect unison with the beating of their hearts.

Mattie turned over in bed, the perspiration running down her chest, gluing her nightgown to her arms and back. She brought her hand up to her sweating forehead and wondered why it was so hot in the room.

Forcing her eyes to open, she saw that the sun had finally come out, but her electric heater was still set on high.

“Lord, be praised. I ain’t gonna need this today.” She turned the heater off and went to her front-room window and pulled up the shades.

After a week of continuous rain Brewster Place was now bathed in a deluge of sunlight. People were already out in the street setting up. Long crinkled strands of crepe paper were being unrolled and balloons were being tied to the stoop railings. Kiswana was taping her banner up on the wall and the gold lettering glowed so brightly in the sun, it was almost painful to look at.

“It’s just like a miracle,” Mattie opened her window, “to think it stopped raining today of all days.”

The sun was shining on everything: Kiswana’s gold earrings, the broken glass out on the avenue, the municipal buildings downtown—even on the stormy clouds that had formed on the horizon and were silently moving toward Brewster Place.

Etta came out on the stoop and looked up at Mattie in the window.

“Woman, you still in bed? Don’t you know what day it is? We’re gonna have a party.”

No one cries when a street dies. There’s no line of mourners to walk behind the coffin wheeled on the axis of the earth and lidded by the sky. No organ-piped dirges, no whispered prayers, no eulogy. No one is there when a street dies. It isn’t dead when the last door is locked, and the last pair of footsteps echo up the sidewalk, reluctant to turn the corner and melt into another reality. It dies when the odors of hope, despair, lust, and caring are wiped out by the seasonal winds; when dust has settled into the cracks and scars, leveling their depths and discolorations—their reasons for being; when the spirit is trapped and fading in someone’s memory. So when Brewster dies, it will die alone
.

It watched its last generation of children torn away from it by court orders and eviction notices, and it had become too tired and sick to help them. Those who had spawned Brewster Place, countless twilights ago, now mandated that it was to be condemned. With no heat or electricity, the water pipes froze in the winter, and arthritic cold would not leave the buildings until well into the spring. Hallways were blind holes, and plaster crumbled into snaggled gaps. Vermin bred in uncollected garbage and spread through the walls. Brewster had given what it could—all it could—to its “Afric” children, and there was just no more. So it had to watch, dying but not dead, as they packed up the remnants of their dreams and left—some to the arms of a world that they would have to pry open to take them, most to inherit another aging street and the privilege of clinging to its decay
.

And Brewster Place is abandoned, the living smells worn thin by seasons of winds, the grime and dirt blanketing it in an anonymous shroud. Only waiting for death, which is a second behind the expiration of its spirit in the minds of its children. But the colored daughters of Brewster, spread over the canvas of time, still wake up with their dreams misted on the edge of a yawn. They get up and pin those dreams to wet laundry hung out to dry, they’re mixed with a pinch of salt and thrown into pots of soup, and they’re diapered around babies. They ebb and flow, ebb and flow, but never disappear. So Brewster Place still waits to die
.